The Humbling Read Free Page B

anyone in the world have to worry about that? I'd left my daughter playing out
back in the yard and our little boy upstairs sleeping in his crib and my rich and powerful second husband watching a golf tournament on TV. I turned around and came home because when I got to the supermarket I realized I'd forgotten my wallet. The little one was still sleeping. And in the living room the golf game was still going, but my eight-year-old daughter, my little Alison, was sitting up on the sofa without her underpants and my rich and powerful second husband was kneeling on the floor, his head between her plump little legs."
    "What was he doing there?"
    "What men do there."
    Axler watched her cry and said nothing.
    "You've seen my artwork," she finally told him. "The sun shining down on a pretty house and the garden all in bloom. You know me.
Everybody
knows me. I think the best of everything. I prefer it that way and so does everyone around me. He got up off his knees, completely unruffled, and told me that she had been complaining about an itch and she wouldn't stop scratching herself, and so, before she did herself any harm, he had taken a look to be sure she was all right. And she was, he assured me. He could see nothing, not a blemish, not a sore, not a rash ... She was fine. 'Good,' I said. 'I came back for my wallet.' And instead of getting his hunting rifle from the basement and pumping him full of bullets, I found my wallet in the kitchen, said 'Bye again, everyone,' and went off to the store as if what I had witnessed was a commonplace occurrence. In a daze, dumbfounded, I filled two shopping carts. I would have filled two more, four more, six more if the store manager hadn't seen me blubbering away and come over to ask if I was all right. He drove me home in his car. I left our car in the lot there and was driven home. I couldn't negotiate the stairs. I had to be carried up to bed. There I lay for four days, unable to speak or eat, barely able to drag myself to the bathroom. The story was that I'd come down with a fever and been ordered to bed. My rich and powerful second husband could not have been more solicitous. My little darling Alison sweetly brought me a vase of cut flowers from my garden. I could not ask her, I could not bring myself to say, 'Who removed your underpants? What do you want to tell me? If you really had some kind of itch, you would have waited, wouldn't you, until I came home from shopping to show me? But, dear, if you didn't have an itch ... dear, if there's something you're not telling me because you're afraid to...?' But I was the one who was afraid. I could not do it. By the fourth day I had convinced myself that I had imagined everything, and two weeks later, when Alison was at school and he was at work and the little one was taking his nap, I got out the wine and the Valium and the plastic garbage bag. But I couldn't stand suffocating. I panicked. I took the pills and the wine but then I remember not getting any air and hurrying to rip the bag off. And I don't know what I regret more horribly—having tried to do it or having failed to do it. All I want to do is shoot him. Only now he's alone with them and I'm here. He's all alone with my sweet little girl! It can't be! I called my sister and asked her to stay at the house with them, but he wouldn't let her sleep there. He said there was no need. And so she left. And what can I do? I'm here and Alison's there! I was paralyzed! I did nothing that I should have done! Nothing that anyone would have done! I should have rushed the child to the doctor! I should have called the police! It was a criminal act! There are laws against such things! Instead I did nothing! But he said nothing had happened, you see. He says that I'm hysterical, that I'm deluded, that I'm mad
—but I'm not. I swear to you, Simon, I'm not mad.
I saw him doing it.
"
    "That's horrible. A horrible transgression," Axler said. "I see why it's done what it did to