Femme Fatale and other stories

on.
    “Are you scared?” my shrink asked me in February.
    “Very,” I said. He told me to search the house for a gun the next time I was left alone, but I was almost never left alone. Finally my husband went to the grocery store, but I didn’t find a gun. I was almost disappointed. I wanted hard evidence of the fear I felt, I wanted to be rational. I did discover that my husband was stockpiling the tranquilizers from his doctor. He had claimed to have trouble sleeping since I admitted I thought about leaving. Why? I wanted to ask. Are you watching me all night? Do you think I’d slip out then? How little he knew me if he thought I’d leave that way. I imagined him killing me as I slept, then killing himself. I began to have trouble sleeping, too, and it was my turn to get a prescription, my turn to stockpile.
    But how would he do it, my skeptical sister asked. “He can barely summon up the energy to change a lightbulb, he’s not organized enough to buy a gun. I hate to say it, but he would be lost without you.”
    Her words hung there, making us both glum.
    “I’m not saying you should stay,” she added. “Only that you shouldn’t be scared of him.”
    “But you’re saying what he said, more or less. If I leave, I have to be prepared to face the consequences.”
    “Are you?”
    “Almost.”
    I had no reason to stay, but I had no reason to leave. Until, it seemed to me, he said what he said, revealed how far he would go to keep me. I believed in my marriage vows, if not in the God to which I had made them. My husband didn’t hit me, he didn’t cheat on me. I knew no other reason to leave a spouse. Oh, yes, he was lazy, and he liked to tie one on now and then, upending the bourbon bottle in his mouth to celebrate this or that. Or, more frequently now, to brood. But I couldn’t fault him for that. I couldn’t really fault him for anything, except for the fact that he was willing to ignore my misery as long as I stayed. He was prepared to make that deal, to do whatever he could to keep me there.
    I thought there were rules for leaving, a protocol. I thought there would be a good time or a right time. I realized there would never be a good time.
    “What can you get out of the house without him being suspicious?” my shrink asked me in early March.
    “Myself,” I said. “Maybe a laptop.”
    “You can’t take a few things out, over several days?”
    “No,” I said. “He’d notice.” And it was only when I said it that I realized it was true: he was keeping an inventory. He was going through my closet while I was at work, checking my underwear drawer, looking under my side of the bed. He was spying on me as surely as I had spied on him when I went looking for the gun he never bought. All those things—the CDs, the books, the shoes, the clothes, the Volvo—were meant to weigh me down, to keep me in place. That’s why he had allowed me to have them. He was piling bricks, one by one, in front of the exit, burying me alive.
    “Then it will have to be just you and your toothbrush,” my shrink said. “Call from your sister’s house after work and tell him you’re not coming back.”
    I came home from that session planning to do just that. But my husband knew me too well. He could see it in my face, in my eyes. He backed me into a corner in our bedroom that night, demanding to know why I was unhappy, how I could turn on him. Forever and ever, I had said, I who valued words and vows above all else. How could I think of leaving? He did not touch me. He didn’t have to touch me to scare me. He demanded every secret, every fear, every moment of doubt I had ever experienced—about us, about myself. I sat in the corner, knees to my chest, shaking with sobs. I began to think I would have to make up confessions to satsify him, that I would have to pretend to sins and lapses I had never experienced. He stood above me, yelling. Somewhere in the house, our dog whimpered. I would have to leave him, too. Leave our dog, leave the car, leave the clothes, leave the CDs and books, lose the opera, and
La Bohème
was next. Of course, it would have to be
La Bohème.
It was always
La Bohème.
The fact is, I’d even have to lose my toothbrush. He was watching me that closely now. I’d be lucky to get out of the house with my own skin.
    I did the only thing I knew to do: I capitulated. I asked for his forgiveness. I brought him the bourbon bottle and he poured me a glass of my favorite wine, a Chardonnay he