Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

I should have trusted him more. I should have been honest from the beginning, expressed my feelings, told him everything. (But if he’d known what I was really like, would he still have loved me?) The trouble was that I wanted to maintain his illusions for him intact, and it was easy to do, all it needed was a little restraint: I simply never told him anything important.

I had tried to at the beginning. When we were still dating, not yet married. When we were still taking on vacations separately, when we still had separate friends. I remember coming back from vacation that first year of togetherness, telling him everything about Romania, and Italy, and France. Sunbathing naked in Vama Veche, seeing the Traviata in the arenas of Verona, driving down to Sormiou at dawn to have dinner by the sea … He said: your life always sounds amazing. You go to extraordinary places; you have extraordinary friends. Take this lady walking her baby: you just couldn’t have a normal life like her. And like me.

But I could. And I wanted to. And I did. Later that day I took him in my mouth and looked him in the eyes all along. When he came, I said: you are the one I want. Not Romania, not Italy, not France. You. The normal you. I wanted to sound soothening and feminine and romantic and tender and in love. Now I think I probably sounded desperate.

The first time we made love – it was in a park, close to the bar in which we had had our first drink earlier on – I had said: I will follow you anywhere like a puppy. And he had said: Don’t say that, don’t you have any self-esteem? I didn’t. And he knew it.

I had asked him to marry me. He wasn’t keen on it but I reached out to his Catholic upbringing: I told him I didn’t want to live in sin anymore. He loved God – or the right-wing values of respectability that came with it – and he said yes. Also, he wanted to be a father more than he didn’t want to be a husband.

My sweetest revanche: not giving him a son.

I got my IUD without telling him about it when I stopped the pill. When he got impatient, I told him I went through fertility tests which were without appeal: I could not have children. He was devastated. I thought he would leave me – by then I was exhausted, depressed, and hopeless, isolated from the world, looking for a way out – but he didn’t. We were united in front of God, and nothing could break that. Not his infidelities, not his degrading me all the time, not his disgust for me. He told me he would kill me if I left him. He would find me and kill me, then kill himself. Why? I would ask. You don’t love me. You never did. You forced me into your life, bitch, now I’m here to stay. You thought you were too good for me. Where are all your extraordinary friends now? No more fancy vacations, nobody calls you now that they all saw your true nature. They know now. Just like me. They know you’re not funny, not smart, not nice. They know and they choose to leave you. But I can’t do that. I’m stuck with you.

At least he would not hit me. He would only attract me into his stupid games like Would you rather have an excellent lover who is mean to you or a gentle man who never makes you come? (At this time, we were already no longer sleeping together.) I would answer a gentle man and an excellent lover, and he would get mad and yell You’re not playing by the rules, you bitch! We can never have a little fun together; you always ruin everything. I would try to take him in my arms and hold him and kiss him and tell him how much I loved him, and this would calm him down for a while, but then he’d leave in the middle of the night telling me it was only my fault. He tried his best being a good husband, but I always blew it. A couple of hours on Tinder on his mobile phone ignoring me and he’d find a quick fix for the night: he was the most handsome man I had ever seen.