Chapter 5

During the whole Ethan Saltz affair, once I'd realized what he really was, I kept going back in my mind to that night at the Hideout, when he'd been brought up to our table and introduced to our small group of library science grad students. I remembered his eyes scanning the group, then landing on Martha and lingering there. When he'd returned with drinks it was as though we all cleared a space for him exactly where he wanted to sit, right next to Martha.

At the time I wondered why he'd picked her so suddenly and decisively. And I also wondered why he hadn't picked me. That sounds vain, I know, and I had no interest in the Ethan Saltzes of the world, or any men, for that matter. But I did know that I was attractive, in the same way that a rabbit knows it looks appetizing to a fox. I'd grown up in a house that served as a revolving guest retreat for drunken artists and writers my whole life. I'd been stared at long before I'd ever hit puberty. But that wasn't the reason I had sworn off both men and love. Eric Washburn was the reason. I'd fallen in love with him and he'd betrayed me. Familiar story, I know, but it had taught me not just what men would do to women, but also what I would do to the men who betrayed me. That was a part of me I didn't particularly want to meet again.

I was happy that I didn't need to fend off Ethan Saltz on the night we all met him, but I was also a little worried, even at the time, that he'd focused all his attention on Martha. I didn't believe in love curses, but I definitely believed in asshole guys, and Martha had just attracted one. It occurred to me at the time that he was separating her from our herd not because he was attracted but because he sensed weakness in her.

The night ended with all of us going our separate ways outside the bar, our goodbyes plucked away by a frigid winter wind. None of us were surprised that Ethan Saltz happened to be going in Martha's direction.

On the following Monday, each of us drinking our tea in the student union, I asked Martha what had happened. "Not details," I said. "Just the big picture."

She thought for a moment, then said: "I have a boyfriend, I guess."

"What about the love curse?"

She'd laughed, although her eyes looked sad to me. "Oh, that hasn't gone anywhere. I already know that Ethan is going to break my heart, but I guess I don't care. He's so beautiful, isn't he?"

"He is beautiful," I said.

After that conversation Martha disappeared for a while, deep into her burgeoning love affair. All of us in our small program disappeared a little, as well. It was a cold winter for Maryland, and the second semester course load was much harder than it had been in the fall. We saw each other in classes, but there was less socializing. On the rare occasion that Cecily hosted a party, or we all got together at the Hideout, Martha would either not come, or she would show up for one drink with Ethan, clinging to his arm like a castaway clinging to a piece of raft. When Ethan spoke, usually telling some amusing anecdote about the undergrad writing class he was teaching, Martha stared at him with an intensity that made us all uncomfortable. On paper, Ethan was a catch, and it wasn't just his looks; he was smart and witty, and a surprisingly good listener. When someone else was talking, he would fix those blue eyes on them as though it were the best story he'd ever heard. It was a trick, of course, the ability to do that. I recognized it, but I only recognized it as a seducer's trick. At the time, I thought that Ethan was some kind of serial monogamist, a man who traveled frequently and who quickly found a willing sex partner wherever he ended up. I was sure that there was a long line of bereaved young women in his wake, but there was no real crime in that.

But sometime in March, just as Maryland began to thaw, I saw something different in Martha. She was thinner, if that was even possible, her skin not just pale, but somehow chalky, as though if you touched her the pasty color would come off on your fingers. She seemed beat down, and one of our professors confided in me that she was in danger of flunking out.

I knew that there could be multiple reasons for why she might have changed, but somehow I thought it had to do with Ethan. I considered confronting her, but I knew that she would deny there was anything amiss. I told myself to leave it alone.

And I would have, I think, had I not driven up along the Chesapeake on one particularly nice Saturday in early April. I'd stopped at a crab place, then decided that I didn't want to wait in the long line that snaked out of the door. I got back into my car and was getting ready to pull out of the parking lot when I saw Martha and Ethan leaving the restaurant and making their way to Ethan's Jeep. There was something unnerving about seeing them from afar. Martha walked a step behind him, her eyes on his back, and then she waited at the passenger-side door until Ethan gave her the go-ahead to get in—at least that was what it looked like from where I watched. I stayed in my car, engine running, and watched them pull out onto the road and head south. I followed them, expecting them to return to Birkbeck, but instead they headed inland, ending up in a town called Port Tobacco, where they parked in front of a divy-looking bar called the Three-Legged Dog. The sun was beginning to set as they entered the bar.

Since I hadn't eaten, I drove for a while and found a burger joint that had either been designed to look like a 1950s diner or was a place that was genuinely unchanged for the last sixty years. By the time I had finished the dried-out burger I had decided to take a look in the Three-Legged Dog. I don't know why, exactly, but I wanted to see them in the wild; Ethan Saltz was slowly, and maybe intentionally, changing Martha Ratliff, and I wanted to know more. If they saw me right away, then I could have a drink with them and depart, but maybe I could find a spot to keep an eye on them.

I parked a couple of blocks down from Ethan's Jeep, donned a winter wool cap, pushing my hair up under it, and walked to the bar carrying my copy of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. I pushed through the pneumatic front door of the bar and spotted an empty two-person booth to my right and went directly there. I took off my jacket but left my hat on. A waitress came by and I ordered a gin and tonic. After it had arrived, I finally looked around the place. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside, with both booths and tables, and was anchored by a large oval bar at the center of the room. Toward the back was a pool table and a jukebox, currently churning out a country song about drinking tequila. Ethan and Martha were on the far side of the bar, sitting shoulder to shoulder, and I could just make them out over the array of bottles and the fast-moving bartenders, three women all wearing the same pink T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the bar. It was possible that either Ethan or Martha would look up and see me across the blue cigarette smoke of the room in my cramped booth, but I doubted it. I decided to stay put and observe.

I was there for three hours, nursed three drinks, discouraged four men (one of whom claimed to be an Angela Carter fan), and watched as Ethan and Martha played some sort of game, the rules of which I couldn't quite figure out.

From what I could tell, they would each have a drink at the bar—his looked like a whiskey and soda, and hers was a glass of white wine—then one or the other would wander away, only to come back with a third party. If Martha was the one to go patrol the teeming bar, then she usually came back with a man, but once she came back with a woman. Introductions were made, and at some point it seemed as though Ethan would say something that would cause the person to leave.

When Ethan left the bar, he'd come back very fast, always with a woman, and he'd make a big deal out of introducing her to Martha. Once I saw him pointing out the features of a particularly drunk participant, as though he were trying to sell her to the highest bidder. He was laughing. I kept worrying that he'd come over to the other side of the bar, where I was sitting, but he never did. There seemed to be a natural split that took place in the Three-Legged Dog that put the quiet couples and the loners on the right side of the bar, while the left side had turned into a freewheeling Saturday night party, soundtracked with classic country sing-alongs.

I decided that I'd seen enough, and also that I was lucky I hadn't been noticed. As I was looking for my waitress to pay my bill, I watched Martha and Ethan talking to a girl who wasn't possibly drinking age. She had long black hair and wore a cropped top and low-rise jeans. She was staring at Ethan as though she'd met a movie star. Before I paid my bill, the three of them left together.

I returned to my house on the salt marsh and thought about what I had seen. It was apparent that Ethan and Martha liked to go out to bars and find someone to have a threesome with. And if that was how they spent Saturday nights it was certainly no business of mine. But something about Martha's complacency in the situation, and Ethan's casual glee, made me wonder if what was happening was less than consensual.

The next time I saw Martha was in the Archival Appraisal class that we were taking together. Afterward, we walked across campus together.

"I saw you the other night," I said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Saturday night. I drove down to Port Tobacco and had a quick drink at a bar there. I saw you with Ethan."

We were walking side by side and I glanced at her and saw the look of alarm and fear on her face. "You should have said hi," she said, her voice fairly normal.

"Honestly, I was just in there for a quick drink, and you two were obviously on a date and I thought it might have been awkward. It's silly, though, I should have said hello."

A Frisbee floated past, nearly clipping me on the shoulder, and the guy who caught it yelled out an apology. "Things good with Ethan?" I said, trying to make the words sound as casual as possible.

"Um... good?" she paused, and then said, "Things are very interesting with Ethan."

"Okay," I said.

We walked in silence for a moment, birdsong in the air, and I willed myself to wait her out.

"He's sexually adventurous and I'm not, and that's not a bad thing. I mean, it's fun. He's fun."

We reached the student union, and instead of going in I steered Martha to a wooden bench that faced the main quad of the campus. We both sat. She began to speak, almost manically, as though she'd been dying to share with anybody the details of her relationship.

"I know that he's going to Vermont for the summer for some writing retreat and that that will be the end of our relationship. It's probably for the best. I mean, I never thought for a moment that I would wind up married to someone like Ethan Saltz. I just keep telling myself that being with him is an experience. I mean, he's into threesomes, and we've done that and it's okay, and he's very into weird role-play stuff, and some of that has been a little scary, so I told him that maybe I'd passed my comfort line, or whatever you want to call it."

"What did he say?"

"Oh, he laughed. He laughs at everything. And then he said the thing that's really been bothering me. He called me a project. He said, and I'm pretty sure these are the exact words: ‘You're my project, Martha. That's why I picked you, you know, to see how far I could get you to go.' "

"Ugh," I said.

"I think he was just kidding, honestly. But, yeah, it's icky."

"Has he hurt you?"

She hesitated long enough for me to know that he had, then she said, "Nothing extreme. But... okay, now I'm actually going to tell you this..." She took a deep breath. "So, on Saturday night when you saw us at that bar, we were there to pick up someone to have a threesome with, which we'd done before. And we did end up going home with this kind of fucked-up local girl. I'm saying fucked-up because she was really drunk, and things got very strange very fast, and... I won't go into details, but Ethan was trying to get me to hurt her."

Martha pressed the heel of one hand to an eye, and I put my hand on her back and left it there. After a while I said, "You have to leave him, you know. That's why you told me about it."

"I know," she said.

We formed a plan that evening, the two of us sitting on her single bed in her tiny concrete-block dormitory room. She'd decorated the room with framed New Yorker covers, most of them depicting a cat, although one of the covers, a watercolor of the New York skyline, was an issue I recognized from 1986, one that contained a story written by my father called "The Final Days of Martin Tobey."

"Ethan won't mind," Martha said. "I mean, he won't mind emotionally, or whatever. But he really does see me as a project, and I'm not sure that he's finished with it... with me."

We rehearsed some breakup lines together, and Martha made a plan to meet Ethan the following night at the Hideout. The plan was that I'd walk in around ten thirty. We established some easy signals. For example, if Martha took a sip of her drink after I walked over and said hello, then it meant that I shouldn't stick around. If she pushed her hair back behind an ear, that meant I should join them. That way, if it turned ugly, I'd be there as support.

The next night I walked into the Hideout at ten fifteen, and immediately spotted Martha and Ethan at one of the back booths. I went to the bar and got a club soda with lime, tilting my stool so that I could keep an eye on them. From where I was sitting, I could see the back of Ethan's head, his golden hair, and I could see Martha, her face anxious, explaining herself. When there was a lull in the conversation, I slid off my stool and walked over to them.

"Oh hey," I said.

Martha tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear as Ethan looked up at me and said, "Hey, Lily."

"Join us," Martha said, sliding out of the booth. "I've just got to run to the bathroom."

I slid onto the wooden seat of the booth vacated by Martha and looked at Ethan across the narrow table. He seemed amused. "How are you?" I said.

"It was like watching a puppet," he said, still smiling. "Martha's lips were moving, but your words were coming out of them."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Whatever. It's no big deal to me." He was leaning on the table and I could smell him. Masculine soap, the way he always smelled.

"I still don't know what you're talking about."

"You do, actually, but I'll play along. Martha just broke up with me, and since you're here to shepherd her home safely I'll say this to you: If I wanted to get her back it would be the easiest thing in the world. But, honestly, I just don't care enough to go through the effort. Also, since you're here now, I realize you're probably just pissed off at me because I wasn't attracted to you, but you would have been too easy. You're already a monster, Lily. It takes one to spot one."

"Hey, Ethan," I said, lowering my voice. "I am a monster. Remember that, okay?"

Martha was coming back to the booth, a little unsteady on her feet, either from too many drinks or from the stress of telling Ethan it was over. I stood up quickly and said, "Martha, I don't feel too good. I hate to do this to you, but could you walk me home?"

"Of course," she said, and after getting her coat we left together, Ethan laughing in his booth.

Martha came back with me to my rented room. We had to pass Ethel Watkins, my landlady, who liked to sit in the front room watching reruns of sitcoms on her old flickering television set. I thought she'd make a comment about my visitor, but she just glared at us both as we headed upstairs. Martha spent the night. She was full of adrenaline, telling me again and again exactly how the conversation had gone, then explaining how she really was going to give up men going forward. She fell asleep in her clothes on top of the covers and I curled up next to her.

That following week we were inseparable, Martha alternately giddy and bereaved because of the end of her relationship with Ethan, while I was wary of a counterattack. But it didn't come. I only saw Ethan once, crossing the quad in a rugby shirt and cargo shorts. Our eyes briefly met, but there was no expression on his face.

Sometimes I wonder if Martha and I would have stayed friends after graduate school, or if I blew it by what I'd said to her on the final night before our summer break began.

"What are your plans?" she'd asked. We were sitting on the front porch of Ethel's house, drinking wine and trying to ignore the blackflies.

"I'll probably spend time with my mom, do some reading. And I might go up to Vermont and kill Ethan Saltz."

She'd laughed her toothy laugh, and said, "Yes, make the world a better place."

I should have left it there, but I was young then, and maybe I thought that Martha could handle hearing about my transgressions. "I'm serious," I said. "I'm a firm believer in ridding the world of people like Ethan Saltz. It wouldn't be hard to get away with it."

A look of genuine shock crossed Martha's face as she realized that I really was serious.

"Or not," I said, and laughed.

That summer I kept the rented room and bounced back and forth between Maryland and Monk's House in Connecticut. I spent August in London with my father. I didn't visit Vermont and I didn't kill Ethan Saltz. Martha and I stayed friendly for the next year of school, but, honestly, it was never the same, and I wasn't surprised that Martha and I lost touch after school. All of which made me curious as to why she was contacting me now.