The Wedding Night

“I’m going to tell you a ghost story,” she says.

She sits on the edge of the chair by the open window, her body loose and comfortable in its nudity, lamplight turning the sweat on her collarbone to drops of honey. On the floor by her feet lies her wedding gown, a crumpled pile of ivory froth.

“I like ghost stories,” he says, reaching down to tug the sheet over his hips. “Is it the one where the motorist tries to return a pair of gloves left in his car by a hitchhiker, only to be told by her mother that the girl has been dead for forty years?”

She shakes her head, her dark hair stirring gently in the breeze. It is bobbed now, which is fashionable, but he finds himself missing its former length, the heavy fall of curls she wore during the early days of their courtship. “Not that one,” she replies.

“How about the one where the child falls from a railway platform and is sliced in two by an oncoming train, and spends the afterlife crawling about looking for its lost legs?” He shifts a little in his spot on the bed. The decadent softness of the hotel mattress gives him an acute pang of anxiety. His own bed, in which she has never slept, is far less comfortable. Has he set her up for disappointment? When their honeymoon is over and they have begun to make a home together, will she long for the bed in which she first tasted the salt of his skin?

She pulls her purse up from the floor, digging around in it for her cigarette case. The case is made of gold, her name engraved on its front with extravagant whorls and curlicues; he gave it to her on the night of their engagement, along with the ring on her left hand. The first thing he had noticed about her when they met was the precise, delicate way she had of holding a cigarette. He admires her now as she extracts one and strikes a match. Its glowing cherry reminds him of the rosy blush of her nipples (and what a surprise they had been to him, their colour a startling counterpoint to the whiteness of her breast). “Not that one either,” she says, exhaling a bluish plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “But go on. You have one more guess.”

He hums, thoughtful, one foot sweeping idly back and forth against the sheets. “In my mother’s hometown,” he said, “there was a bridge that crossed a river. She said that if you walked on that bridge under a full moon, you could hear a baby crying from the water beneath it. Apparently, a girl got herself in trouble there years ago, and the shame had been too much for her to bear. When her child was born she threw it over the side of the bridge to drown.”

One eyebrow raises. “Got herself in trouble, did she?” she repeats, all innocence. “No other parties involved?”

“Well, presumably there was at least one. Mother never really went into detail there.” A luxurious stretch makes the muscles in his back burn and tingle pleasantly. “I suppose that’s not it though, is it? The story, I mean.”

“No,” she says, and takes another deep drag on her cigarette. “It isn’t.”

The two of them are silent for a moment then, his eyes on her body, her eyes on something else. He admires the easy way she wears her own skin, the casual nonchalance of her splayed pose on the velvet chair.

“The story,” she continues, rather abruptly, “is about a man and a woman. They had just gotten married—”

“Like us,” he says.

“Like us,” she agrees, smiling slightly. “Though not like us in other ways. He was older than she by almost twenty years, for one thing. But he was handsome, and wealthy, and possessed of a charming air that turned her head completely, and so her parents, who had always indulged her, gave their blessing. Their wedding was a grand affair. There was . . . oh, music, I suppose, beautiful music, and dancing late into the night, and bottle after bottle of sweet, strange wine. All that. The guests toasted to the couple’s happiness, to his vigor, to her beauty, and at the end of the night they departed for the marriage-bed, hand in hand.”

A shiver of pleasure skitters down his spine as he recalls their arrival at the hotel hours earlier: the speed with which they raced to their room from the elevator, the hasty unbuttoning of her dress, how hungrily she bore him down to the mattress, her mouth hot upon his throat.

“At the beginning of the night, the bride was happy,” she says, tapping a teetering cone of ash into the tray on the windowsill. “How could she not be, when the evening had been so wonderful, and the guests had been so flattering, and the match was so very, very good? But as the evening wore on and the hour in which she and her beloved would finally be alone together approached, she found herself becoming fretful and apprehensive, starting at shadows, flinching at every sound. By the time they bid goodnight to the last of their guests and made their way to the carriage out front, she was just about ready to rip the skin from her body and dance about in her bones. You see, this girl was innocent to a fault. She had no idea what men and women do together; no one had ever seen fit to tell her, and she had never felt that it was proper for her to ask.”

“Shame her mother didn’t tell her,” he says. “Aren’t mothers supposed to tell their daughters these things?”

She shrugs, and he watches the gesture go through her body, admiring the shift of taut muscle under soft skin. “It depends on the mother,” she says. “Hers didn’t. Perhaps she thought it would be more fun as a surprise.”

A disquieting thought occurs to him. “Say,” he says, sitting up in bed. “Did you know—”

She raises a hand, cutting him off. “Don’t worry, darling,” she says, her voice terribly fond. “Nothing happened tonight that I didn’t know was going to happen.”

That puts him at his ease, although he finds himself wondering about her knowing glance, the gleam in her eye. He recalls again the way she pressed him into the bed, the steadiness of her hands upon him. Had her knowledge been merely theoretical? Of the two of them, was he the only one who brought himself whole and untouched to the experience?

“They arrived at the groom’s house—which, of course, was now her house as well—a little before midnight. It was a grand, gloomy sort of house, dark and full of echoes; and the sound of the door as it closed behind her made her shiver, although she would not have been able to tell you why. On a table in the foyer stood a single candle, which he lit and passed to her. His hand, seen by candlelight, suddenly seemed very large.

“‘Take this upstairs,’ he told her. I said before that he had a charming air about him, and he did; but in that moment his voice took on a brusque and businesslike edge, one that did nothing to set our heroine’s mind at ease. ‘My bedroom is the last door on the left. Wait for me there, and do not let the candle go out.’ And with that he disappeared, leaving her to climb the stairs alone.”

“Not a very solicitous fellow,” he observes, hoping to make her laugh. She is not an easy woman to amuse, and he has spent much of their courtship trying to amuse her. It does not work; she does not even smile.

“The bride found his chamber easily,” she says, “although the walk up the stairs disturbed her. She thought that she heard whispers in the shadows, saw strange things writhing out of the corner of her eye, felt the chill of a winter wind playing on her skin. Alone and unnerved, she was relieved to close the bedroom door against such fancies.

“So far as she could tell by the light of the candle, there were only two things in that room. One was the bed on which she sat, a grand monster with four colossal posts and suffocating brocade curtains. The other—and this made the breath catch in her throat—was a wardrobe.”

His eyes drift over to the wardrobe in the corner of their hotel room, blond wood with a mirrored panel in the front. One of its doors is slightly ajar.

“A wardrobe is no very frightening thing for most people,” she says, and her eyes follow his, lingering on his reflection in the mirror. He can just see himself from his place on the bed, all mussed hair and bony shoulders, and flinches away from the sight. He looks like a boy, still, not a man. “But as a child, this particular bride had often been at the mercy of her older brother, a clever young demon whose chief pleasure had been her torment. He spent his days devising interesting new cruelties for her to endure, new indignities for her to suffer. We all have our little moments of genius; all his, it seemed, were used to hurt her.”

Her eyes trace the smoke of her cigarette, following its languorous ascent to the ceiling. He follows it, too, wondering what she sees in the slow rise of its lazy curls.

“When she was four years old,” she says, her voice measured and quiet, “he had taken her into one of the spare rooms on the topmost floor of their parents’ house and convinced her to climb into the wardrobe there. He told her that if she went inside she would see all kinds of beautiful things, castles and mermaids and mountains of gold, due to some magic in the wood. And because she was a trusting child—and, perhaps, a rather stupid one—she believed him and obeyed. As soon as she had done so, her brother pulled a loop of twine from his pocket and tied the handles of the wardrobe doors together as tightly as he could, so that they could not be opened from the inside, and left her there. She heard him whistling as he went, the sound growing fainter and fainter with each step he took.”

The cigarette has burned itself down to the filter. She makes a face and stubs it out, crushing it against the windowsill.

“How long did he leave her there?” he asks. He has met her brothers, all three of them: tall, boisterous young men with broad chests and loud voices, always joking and slapping each other on the back. When they are in a room together, they tend to drain it of air, leaving everyone else gasping in their wake like landed fish.

“Hours,” is her reply. “Remember, she was very small, so her voice was not loud; and he had deliberately chosen the room farthest from the ones used by the family. No one could hear her screaming, and eventually her throat was too bloody and raw for her to continue. All she could do was sit in the dark and wait to be rescued.

“This wardrobe looked nothing like the one in her parents’ spare room. It was bigger, for one, and older, and its doors were beautifully carved. From her place on the bed, she could not quite make out what the carvings were. When she held the candle this way, they seemed to be flowers; when she moved it a bit this way, or that, they could have been animals, or people. She tried to keep her hand from trembling, for that made the flame of her candle tremble too, and when the light danced it looked as though the designs on the wardrobe did the same. She watched them from the edge of that great bed, its satin coverlet cold against her skin, and waited for her husband.”

The word “husband” hits a strange note within him. When he woke up this morning, wine-sore and sour with nerves, he was only a man about to be married. Now he, like the fellow in the story, is a husband. It seems a different sort of creature altogether, a fabulous beast, almost as mythical as a wife.

“When you are alone in the dark,” she says, “you become attuned to the world around you. Your fingers become more sensitive, your nose more acute, your ears more discerning of strange sounds. And so it was that the bride found herself feeling the temperature of the air slowly dwindle until her breath turned to frost. She smelled a strange, sharp odor, like that of a tree struck by lightning. And she heard a noise that turned her bones to water and made her trembling hands tremble all the more: the quiet, relentless creak of a door.”

“Her husband,” he says, “finally come to do his manly duty.”

She frowns. He has seen her frown dozens of times before, at dull parties and crossword puzzles and men chatting in the cinema. He has always found it charming: the lowering of her brows, the grim flattening of her mouth, her lovely face shifting into something puckered and gnomic. This is the first time that she has frowned at him specifically.

“She thought so at first,” she says. “But it was the door of the wardrobe, of course, opening on its own. Slowly, so slowly that when she looked at it she could almost convince herself it wasn’t happening. But the shadows were changing, even when she held one hand with the other so that the candleflame was still; the crack where one door met the other was slowly widening. From inside came noises, whispers, strange mutterings that the shadows seemed to warp and replicate until the whole room was nothing but a maelstrom of uncanny sounds.”

“I hope she ran,” he says. “I hate it when people in stories have the chance to run and don’t take it. It’s as though they want to die.”

He means nothing by it. He rarely means anything by anything he says. But she recoils as though he’s slapped her, her body suddenly stiff and upright in the overstuffed chair. For a moment her slim fingers dig deep into the cloth on the arms, working into the velvet so savagely he thinks she might be imagining his face there beneath them, his skin under her nails.

“No one,” she says, her voice curiously thick and strangled, “wants to die.”

Without waiting for him to respond, she springs up and stalks off towards the bathroom, trampling the wedding dress beneath her feet as she goes. The door slams. He hears the muffled clatter of things being violently shoved about on the counter, and then the sudden thunder of water filling the tub.

He sits dumbfounded against the padded headboard, staring at the chair that she has so recently occupied. A bath, then. Should he go and join her? Would that mitigate whatever offense he has committed, or make it worse? And what, after all, did he say that was so terribly wrong?

He pulls himself up and out of bed, leaving the sheet behind him. A part of him balks at the sudden exposure, but he ignores it and walks to the window, gazing out at the street below. Their suite is on the fourth floor, high enough that the cars passing in the darkness are perfect in miniature. He presses a finger to the glass and imagines reaching down to pluck one off the street, slipping it into his pocket and carrying it around with him on their honeymoon. The breeze blowing in cools the sweat still drying on his skin, making his teeth chatter.

The honeymoon had been her idea. He had liked the idea of jumping right into the business of being married, of living in the same house and rubbing up against each other until all their odd, uncomfortable corners were rubbed smooth and they could fit together properly. But she had wanted a honeymoon, a trip to some suitably foreign place to ease them into the rather foreign idea that he was now her husband, and she his wife.

“After all,” she argued, “it’s all going to be strange at first anyway. Wouldn’t it be better for it to be strange in a place where everything else—the language, the food, the climate—is strange as well?”

That reasoning made little sense to him, but his father told him that women were capricious beasts, susceptible to fancy, and so he had agreed. They are due to catch a train from the hotel tomorrow morning, and then a steamer across the Atlantic. In a week’s time they will be drinking wine on a beach in Mykonos, white sand beneath them and blue sky above.

Now he thinks he may have made the wrong choice. How much surer of himself would he be, how much less likely to offend, if the two of them were tucked neatly away in his little apartment downtown, breathing in familiar air?

He listens to the sound of her splashing in the bathwater, imagines soapy little wavelets crashing over her body. In his mind’s eye her round thighs gleam wetly, bobbing in and out of sight; a flush rises from her chest to her cheeks as sweat beads at her hairline. It is exactly how she looked an hour or two ago, when he had first uncovered her. (And was he the first? Absurd, how his mind continues to worry at that question. But they bled, didn’t they, the first time? She hadn’t.) He pictures her rising from the tub like Aphrodite, clear water cascading down the length of her torso so that for a moment she looks as though she has been perfectly preserved in ice.

It is a pretty image, but when she emerges from the bathroom she is wrapped in a pink nightgown, her easy, exotic nudity carefully hidden away. Her face is cool and calm. In one hand she is brandishing a hairbrush.

“That tub was awfully dirty,” she says, perching lightly on the edge of the bed. She smells of lavender bath salts. “We’ll have to say something to the management before we go.” She beckons him toward her with the brush, its silver back winking at him. “Come here.”

All too aware of the absurdities of his naked body, he moves to sit cross-legged before her on the bed. With one hand she cups his face, her hands gentle and cool; with the other she begins to brush his hair, the soft bristles tickling his scalp. This close, with all her makeup washed away from the bath, he can see details he never could before: the freckle on the edge of her lip, the pockmark in her stubborn chin, the bruise-brown skin at the inside corner of her eyes.

“Are you still sore at me?” he asks.

She shakes her head and continues to groom him, fingers spread firmly against his jaw. One moves a little, making a scraping sound against the hair that has already begun to grow back after his morning shave.

“Just like my father,” he says, a little ruefully. What a strange thing a man must be to a woman, how foreign and coarse! “I can’t keep the beard away for more than an hour or two.”

“You could grow it out,” she suggests. “It’d be awfully bohemian.” A hand replaces the brush, her fingers running through the short length of his hair. He closes his eyes to feel it better, liking the scrape of her nails against his scalp and the sparks they ignite in the base of his spine. The black behind his eyes reminds him, and he opens his eyes again to look at her.

“So what happened next?” he asks. “After the door began to open?”

She does not answer right away but continues to pull her fingers through his hair with a gentle, constant rhythm. The sensation lulls him; he finds his eyelids stuttering closed and has to force them to remain open.

“It’s getting late,” she says, and hops off the bed to close the window, grunting with effort as the sash sticks. She lingers there for a moment, gazing down at the glitter of the city in the night. One pale fingertip traces a shape he can’t quite see against the glass. “Really, we ought to go to sleep.”

“I’ll gladly go to sleep,” he replies, “once you finish. You promised me a ghost story.”

Nodding, she turns away from the window. Her eyes flick from one corner of the room to the next. They rest briefly on the door of the wardrobe, still slightly ajar, but she does not move to close it. With a little involuntary twitch, she pivots and turns off the light. Through the window there is only the faintest glow to outline her in the dark, her edges lit by distant neon. As she approaches the bed, he is suddenly struck by the thought that she could be anyone—that the thing coming closer and closer toward him is not his wife at all, but something unholy and strange, a fabulous beast. But when she lies down next to him, he recognizes her scent beneath the lavender, and the warmth of her body, and the steady lilt of her voice.

“The bride did not run,” she says. “Fear had frozen her so completely that she found herself unable to move. She watched the door open and tried not to remember her four-year-old self, shut tight in the bottom of a wardrobe for hours, tasting blood. She tried not to think of how it had felt when her brother finally opened the door to let her out, or the bitter realization that he could have left her there for longer, if he’d wished. She could have died there, alone in the dark. It was up to him.”

He reaches out to touch her, placing a hand upon her chest. The pulse beats strongly within it, a rushing torrent of hot salt.

“All the while the voices still came from inside the wardrobe, rising and falling like the sea in a storm; and soon enough she could discern words within the noise, growing louder and louder as the wardrobe door opened further. They were women’s voices, all of them, and they spoke of all the ways they had been killed: pulled off the side of the road by vicious men in automobiles, pushed in front of rushing trains, plucked from their mothers’ arms and thrown into swollen rivers. The voices rose around her in a cloud, until the wardrobe door was wide and yawning, like a mouth, and finally the bride’s legs, tired of waiting for her permission to move, took action. Up she leapt from the grand bed, and out of the door she fled, leaving her candle behind her; and she raced down the hall, screaming as loudly as she could to drown out that hideous noise.”

With that she falls silent. The thumping of her heart beneath his hand keeps time for them. After a moment she draws in a deep and shuddering breath.

“As she ran down the stairs,” she said, “half falling in her terror, she crashed directly into her new husband, who was finally on his way upstairs to claim his young bride. He was not best pleased to find her in such a state of disarray, and even less pleased to hear her crying about voices in wardrobes.

“‘What nonsense is this?’ he exclaimed once she finally spat out the bones of her story. ‘Are you such a little fool that you believe in ghouls and monsters?’ And he dragged her, protesting, back to the bedroom, where the candle still burned upon the bed. He picked it up, muttering about silly women setting the place on fire, and brought it over to the wardrobe, the door of which was now wide open.

“‘There, you see!’ he said, gesturing. And, indeed, there was nothing inside of it but coats and suit jackets and neat rows of polished leather shoes. ‘What a lot of fuss over nothing! Ghosts, indeed!’

“And, grumbling furiously, he stripped off his clothes and climbed into bed, leaving the wardrobe doors flung open.”

A question occurs to him then, and he opens his mouth to ask it; but then he looks at the still white oval of her face in the dark, the black and fathomless pits of her eyes, and slowly closes it again, waiting for her to finish.

“The bride felt incredibly foolish,” she said. “Although moments before she would have sworn with her hand on the Bible that she had heard those voices, her husband’s certainty was so strong it unmoored her own. Perhaps, she thought, the voices had been something else. The wind in the eaves, or mice in the walls, or some trick played on her by her own traitorous ears.

“Meek as a lamb, she got into bed beside her husband, submitting to his rather awkward ministrations without complaint; but after a few moments of hopeless fumbling the groom gave up, unable to overcome his annoyance. Rolling over onto his side, he bid his wife a curt good night and fell asleep almost instantly, dreaming small, resentful dreams.

“But the bride stayed awake, that night and all the nights that followed, her eyes fixed on the open doors of the wardrobe, waiting to hear those voices once again.”

She reaches out to him, pulling him close. Her head fits perfectly beneath his chin. He feels her breath upon his bare chest, little puffs of steam that disappear almost as soon as they meet his skin.

“Did she ever hear them again?” he asks, for lack of anything else to say. He knows that she has just told him something, in her strange, sideways fashion. He even knows that it is something important, for he can still feel her juddering pulse throughout her body, coming too hard and too fast for a mere ghost story. But, try as he might, he cannot understand what he has been told.

“That’s not part of the story,” she replies, and lifts her face to deposit a kiss like a dismissal on the tip of his nose. “And now, my darling, it really is time for us to sleep. Our train leaves at eight tomorrow, remember.”

With that she turns in his arms, fitting her legs and back tight against him so that they lie like spoons in a drawer. At once her breath becomes smooth and even, as though she has already fallen asleep. But her body is tense and rigid, and he can feel the wakefulness in her like a cat lashing its tail. Softly he calls her name; she does not respond.

She knows that he knows she is not asleep, he realizes, and she does not care. She knows him well enough to know that he will not press the issue, even if he knows she is pretending. Perhaps this is what a marriage is: two people so intimate that they know when to lie to one another. Moving as though he believes she is really asleep, he presses a careful kiss to the top of her head.

In the morning, he will ask her about the story, what it meant. They will drink coffee together in the bed, linger too long over their breakfast, race to the train station with only moments to spare. They will whisper secrets as they board their steamer ship, hold each other in their narrow bunk all the way to Greece. She will tell him the story, again and again, until he finally understands what she is trying to say to him.

This he tells himself over and over until he falls asleep, one eye on the open door of the wardrobe.