Venus, Part 2
Stalking Venus
chapter 7
by
Paok
She got a window seat on the train. Score! It was unusually lucky for this time of day: still the morning rush. She liked to lean her head against the window and watch all the buildings go by. It would have been the perfect time for thinking, for dreaming, planning, and hoping, if she wasn’t feeling so sick. Even so, the drifting, blurred images out the train window, were mesmerizing, even meditative, although the shaking and jolting sometimes bumped her head against the window. Hopefully, nobody would sit next to her today. She hated feeling a stranger’s legs rubbing against hers. On a commute this early, it was already half-packed and still filling up.
She had been too icked out to wear her sneakers, plus the one was still wet. Instead, she’d slipped on her sandals. It wasn’t totally ridiculous to go to class in sandals, right? She hoped nobody stepped on her feet in this crowded train.
To Summer, the train was a pragmatic choice of transportation, though not a pleasant one, or at least not at this level of crowding. Faces filled the train to the brim. Old, young, middle-aged. Well-groomed and unkempt. Professionals, students, friends, moms, homeless. The shaking train moved them about like bowling pins wobbling around. The only seat free was the one next to hers, and she dreaded what was about to happen. Every time she got a pair of seats to herself, it wasn’t long before the adjacent seat was filled.
The train pulled into the next station and people piled in, struggling to break into the tight crowd of oblivious passengers standing right in front of the door, unaware or uncaring of the need to make room. So heads shoved through shoulders, and arms slipped past backs reaching further into the train. Those paying attention exchanged anxious glances, wondering how the train could possibly hold any more people. Heads were squished, shoulders were checked, and backpacks were swung into faces, often without even a muttered “sorry” or “oops”. Some of the newly cramped passengers glanced at the empty seat, but no one took it. Eventually, in a heroic and selfless effort, a man headed for the seat; a body looking for a place.
He was a red-haired man, in his late 30s. His hair was perfectly coiffed, and his full facial hair was sharply groomed and shaped. His face was all angular and well-defined lines, coming to a point at his nose. With a low but small brow that shaded his eyes, he resembled a hawk. On the breast pocket of his tailored button-down was a metal badge made of several colorful intersecting geometric shapes, and below it was the name of the company he worked for. Aside from his hair color, he looked a lot like Danny; Summer was more than a little relieved that at least someone like him was going to sit next to her, so she relaxed, turned away, and leaned against the window again.
His green eyes sparkled in the sun as his piercing gaze, well known among his subordinates (speaking in hushed tones) as being especially intimidating during one-on-one performance reviews, dug deeply and intently into her sun-lit cleavage, taking his time to sweep up and down along the slopes of her breasts as he sat down. She was about the same age as his daughter, except, in his opinion, more of a catch.
Summer was looking out the window, watching the cars and buildings whizzing by, lost in thought, feeling like a baby being rocked in its crib, as the train gently bumped along the old tracks flying over the city. She was thinking only of her gingham dress and her cottage, and how the sun warmed the hillsides and made the smiles of her playing children all the brighter – how she pitied all the other people packed in here like sardines. None of them had any idea of her perfect life.
The red-haired businessman groaned loudly and stretched his arms up, though there was barely any room. His swooping hand nearly bumped against the face of a young student standing there, who tried to back away, in turn jostling the woman behind him. His other hand bumped against a pole that other passengers were holding on to. His thick, chunky sterling silver wristwatch bumped against it. The man let out a loud, booming yawn. His left arm brushed across Summer’s head, pushing her long hair onto her face. She jolted up and stared at him. He seemed totally unaware of everyone else. She narrowed her eyes and glared, but his eyes were completely closed. Finally he brought his arms down, and scratched his own backside.
But then, his hand snaked from his backside to hers. A lightning bolt shot through her. For a brief moment, she felt his whole palm against her buttock. His fingers squeezed slightly. His palm was on her skirt, over the edge of her panties, pressing into her flesh – for just for a brief moment, less than a single second, almost unnoticeable as his hand moved across her.
Summer froze. Her whole body tensed up, solid as steel. Her breath quickened. A rush of dread fell over her. Then, just as quickly, his hand returned to his lap, his stretch complete. The man opened his eyes and looked at his watch, grumbled, and pulled his phone from his breast pocket, scrolling like nothing in particular had just happened. The wake of his hand on her butt left a disgusting tingle, a wavering sensation as though she could still feel it there, grabbing her.
The edges of her sight dimmed. Her eyes darted around at the other passengers. Their faces and expressions seared into her vision, but they weren’t looking at her. They weren’t even averting their eyes. There was no reaction. No one looked at the rude man, and no one looked at her. She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, daring not turn her head. He was calm, ignorant, placid, almost like a sitting guru. He was completely relaxed, and his leg was still against hers, rubbing against her with the train’s movements.
Had nobody else seen that?
The traincar before her flashed like a strobe. Her heartbeat became deafening, and the rustle and jostling of the train vanished into it. Surely, if he had groped her, others would have noticed? Her breathing came in short, quick stops. He touched her? He groped her? Was she just groped?
But. Did he really? Was it the back of his hand? Was it an accident? She didn’t know. How could she know? She wasn’t looking. Nobody was looking! The train was so cramped, everyone was so close together – how could no one have noticed? Or was it just a mistake? Did she feel it at all?
No, she was sure she felt it. She had to have felt it. The tingly feeling that his hand, that thick hairy hand, left on her – despite it having laid there for only a second, it now felt like a mass of flies swarming on her flesh and prickling it all over with little bites. Her body was taut like a wire; she didn’t dare move an inch. She was frozen like a statue. But... She wasn’t sure. She had no idea. The moment passed. It had already passed. The moment was gone. If his hand had lingered, then she would have been sure. But it didn’t. She played the short memory back over and over, rapidly inspecting every single little detail. It didn’t add up. Did it?
She didn’t want to make a scene. She didn’t want to get hurt. What else was he capable of? She didn’t want him to grab her. She didn’t want him to shove her against the wall and shout and scream in her face. She didn’t want to be picked up and slammed against the wall.
She had places to be. She needed to pass the test. She had to pass it or she’d fail the class, and then she’d fail the degree!
Her breath came in short ragged gulps. She felt like she was hyperventilating. His fucking leg. She could feel his hairs. She was nauseous.
What should she do? What could she do? The man scrolled his phone. Was it really just her imagination? She could still feel the prickling. The electric current. The burn of the hand-shaped brand.
She thought about screaming. Slapping him. Making a scene. But. But. But. Her stomach was bubbling up and her bile was burning her throat. She was nearly vomiting. Nobody – nobody else saw. Surely someone else saw. In a train packed like this, nobody saw? Someone had to have seen. But no one reacted.
So it didn’t happen. Yes, it never happened. It wasn’t a big deal anyway. It was just a touch. An accidental touch. Why get so upset about something like that? It was a perfectly common accident on a train so cramped. It was nothing! Nothing to worry about at all. After all, worse things happen to some women. Other women. Such terrible things happen to them that they call the police, and they make a big stink, and the guy is arrested, thrown in jail, and put on some kind of list. Summer didn’t need to do anything so drastic – and throw a wrench into the morning schedules of everyone else on the train? Please. Summer wasn’t some sort of helpless victim. It wasn’t even that bad! Really, nobody would ever do that sort of thing to Summer. Of course not, nobody would. It couldn’t ever happen to her – it didn’t ever happen, and it wouldn’t, either.
She needed to cool down. She needed to focus on her breathing and calm herself. Right, she needed mindfulness meditation, just like the therapist said. She needed to focus on the now – and “the now” was nothing more than her breath. He wasn’t doing anything now, she wasn’t doing anything now. Nobody was doing anything at all. It was all gone! Gone and in the past; it slipped through her fingers, just like sand, just like her therapist said. It was all okay. Her breathing went in, and it went out. In, and out...
Now time had stopped completely. The train was suspended in midair, floating as if by magic. It was completely still, afloat inside a shining rainbow bubble, held aloft by hundreds of delightful little faeries in the air. The bubble was still, calm, and peaceful: suspended in the clouds, the train was playing a silly little Mary Poppins song from its speakers for all the world to sing along with, and in the next moment it was careening towards the next station faster than a fighter jet igniting the air behind it in a blindingly bright column of screaming plasma lightning and SLAM! it crashed into the station exploding casting plumes of lightning flame in all directions killing everyone in sight and how their bodies became electric filaments of sparkling colors raining over the streets turning them into rivers of death and how flesh filled the sky like so many birthday streamers.
No, no, no. Those were bad thoughts. Take a deep breath. Remember what the therapist said. He said that when things got tough, she needed to do more self-care, so that she would be calm, so that she would be okay, and so she would return to baseline. But first, she needed to breathe and focus, and remember that no matter what happened, everything would be okay, the therapist said, because remember, everything was no more than sensations in consciousness, and that was all anything was, and Summer did not understand, but maybe later, the therapist said, once you really get it, maybe later, we’ll learn about ego death, but that’s a little too advanced for you right now, so let’s just stick with the basics for now, let’s stick with the basics and strongly consider community college as an alternative to-
She had to listen to Danny. She jammed her earbuds in tightly and slammed her head against the window, shutting her eyes.
Time flies so quickly
My love is so holy
God do I feel alive
She knew that river – that tranquil river near the cottage. She knew how often she and Danny passed the afternoons sitting on the stone riverbank steps, watching the limpid water flow, laying in each others’ arms. Her head was resting on his shoulder, and his warm, rough cheek was against hers. The leaves of the weeping willow framed their view, and she loved the sound of the leaves rustling gently in the wind. There were no clocks, no timers, no schedules to keep; the only things she could count were the branches gently swaying, or she could watch as their shadows slowly crossed the water like a sundial. Danny’s breathing was calm and billowing, lulling her into deeper meditation. The season’s first lily pads were scattered across their shining river, some in bloom, as if opening up to welcome the sky. Then, Danny sang sweet poems quietly into her ear, with a soft breathy voice over a delicate acoustic guitar melody. Her weary mind slipped away into serenity. Nothing in the world was more important than this. Nothing could have distracted her from this dreamlike comfort. Not even the river itself. Gone from her awareness were the blood-curdling screams that kept her awake all night and all morning. Forgotten were its colors of red blood, white pus, and black necrosis; and not anymore did she worry about the severed limbs and rotting bodies ferried by the river, and neither did she worry about how large that heap of bubbling viscera must be that lies at the river’s end, and she did not hear its hypnotic beckoning anymore. Instead, she heard:
Life’s a dream babe
A dream with you
Cause I love you babe
And I know you love me
Even though you don’t know me
The heavens answered my lonely prayers
The angels gave me my dream girl
You’re my dream girl...
As a matter of fact, Dan Barley didn’t tour very much. So Summer was always extremely excited when she got to see him perform live. She went to every single concert she could, even if it meant buying bus tickets to follow his tour schedule. She tried to arrange meetups with the other attending Danicorns at each one. They split hotel costs and often roomed together, and they always had plenty of fun drinking and playing games together late into the night after the show. Those meetups were some of the most fun she’d ever had since growing up.
She always tried to meet Danny after each concert, too. He was just as wonderful in person as he seemed. If anything, his chiseled face was even more handsome. He looked like a man out of a dream – so perfect, it almost seemed unreal. His blue eyes were seriously hypnotic. He was even friendly and charming, laughing loudly at her dumb jokes with his whole belly. Although he let her hug him for the photos, he didn’t exactly hug back – he always maintained a certain professional distance and demeanor.
A bodyguard who frequently saw her at Danny’s backstage meet-and-greets once asked her, half-jokingly, if she was stalking Mr. Barley. She giggled and denied it. The bodyguard reassured her, and said he saw girls like her all the time. They all loved Mr. Barley. But, he said, he was sure Mr. Barley saw something a little special in her, and he winked. This made her heart flutter so much that she became a flustered mess. (The bodyguard liked messing with the fangirls a little.)
She had long lost track of how much money she had spent on Danny. Of course she had all his albums, but also all of his re-releases, singles, vinyl editions, collaborations with other artists, limited editions, 15th year anniversary specials, best-hits and compilation albums, virtually everything he had ever released. On top of clearing out every item his online merch shop had ever sold, most collaborative merch, and all his posters and postcards, she owned every Barleycorn twice over. At concerts, she bought everything from the merch tables she could, carrying home several stuffed oversized tote bags each night, along with everything she brought him to sign. She brought as many items as she could, and paid for each signature. Sometimes the attendants had to pry her away from Danny – there was a limit on the number of signatures per attendee, no matter how much she offered or pleaded. He had signed most of her vinyls, CDs, several framed pictures of the man, dozens of Barleycorns, even some of her daily planners, and – she was the most proud of this one – the top of her left breast, for which he, laughing, took no payment. The selfie of the event she tried to share privately with a close group of Danicorns ended up going modestly viral on social media, much to her embarrassment. Her face wasn’t in it, thankfully, but when her family found out, they teased her for months. They still brought it up sometimes – it was a guaranteed source of embarrassment.
Darlin’ we’ll dance in the autumn leaves
Darlin’ we’ll kiss in the moonlight
Oh babe we’ll run together under the sun
Danny had gotten her through the toughest times in her life. His lovey-dovey serenades were the background music of her crushes. His sad, sweet ballads comforted her through heartbreak. His emo-inspired soft-metal made her feel less alone when she was depressed. His blaring, nigh-incomprehensible industrial rock fueled her anger when she began having inexplicable health problems, which the doctors didn’t believe, refused to believe, who had even started to accuse her of pill-seeking or illicitly buying drugs she’d never heard of, yet still they refused to treat her alarmingly deteriorating health. She’d written them down and stared at them, utterly confused. Melarsoprol? Eszopiclone? Fluoxetine? What the hell? They couldn’t prescribe her the drugs she needed until she stopped taking those, apparently. But she wasn’t on them! They treated her so horribly. But Danny was always there for her.
When she needed comforting, she’d imagine his gruff, caring voice whispering sweet words to her. She dreamt about eloping with him, running off together to start a family on a farm on an isolated ocean cape somewhere, in some far-off country full of green grass and tall fjords, where nobody would ever bother them. They’d raise beautiful children together. Gingham Summer was in perfect health, was perfectly thin, never aged, and was kind to all ladybugs.
That poor ladybug. She’d never killed a little, defenseless ladybug before. She even hesitated to kill spiders. What was wrong with her today?
Were it not for Danny, Summer would have spiraled completely into despair at many points in her life. She needed him to whisk her away. She needed him to understand the yearning look in her eyes every time she saw him. He might carry her off in the tour bus, and they’d go on an adventure together. Late at night, she would imagine him doing more than just signing her breast.
She had never yearned for Danny more than in this moment. Her whole body longed for him, needed him here now. It was painful. She needed him to show her the inner purity of her heart, prove to her that it really existed – that small vulnerable baby soul of hers – she needed him to hold her, nuzzle her into his breast, and tell her everything would be OK. Listening to his music was the closest she got. She felt, just a little, like he was holding her tightly in his arms.
She was sure that one day she would break free from it all. She would be free from her health problems, free from the stubborn doctors, free from the exam and from school, from Target, from her therapist, from everything, even her own stupid self. Yes. She had a solution. She had a way out. She had something to fill her soul with:
Her Danny. Her true love. Her everything.
Several years after graduating with her SHRM-CP, which proved her general competency in Human Resources work, Summer Weaver found a stable HR job at a boring old company, whose actual economic function was far too boring to remember. She found it didn’t really matter for her day-to-day duties, and she just nodded along whenever anyone mentioned this or that business jargon. Summer pushed paper there for a long time. A few years into the job, dreaming of children, she hastily married a slightly older man off a dating app. He was moderately interested in her, and he even tolerated her Danny obsession. After they married and had children, she quit her job – having never risen much beyond the rank and file of the HR department – to be a stay-at-home mom.
His name was Michael. He was a mid-level manager at a similarly dry company, some other sprawling and incomprehensible workplace, one with enough hierarchy that as a manager he was completely removed from any person actually producing things. He paid for all their expensive date nights at restaurants far fancier than Summer was comfortable eating at. At their wedding, they danced to one of Danny’s songs. They had a generally happy relationship. Not one of soaring heights, but not one of cataclysmic lows, either. As a husband, Michael was usually kind to her, and when he was in a bad mood, he was only violent once – the night he dragged a bottle across her skull, shattering it into jagged chips all over her face, cutting it up so that she resembled a broken window.
The night it happened, Summer locked herself in the run-down family minivan and listened to Danny’s old music as she wept and held her wounds. For the first time in many years, she needed to imagine herself on that pastoral farm, with the white cottage, in that blue gingham, with the tall dark man and their beautiful children, living their perfect lives amidst the perfect scenery: happy, laughing, joyful, and loving each other with all their weary hearts. Sitting in the worn-down leather driver’s seat, she was enraptured for several hours in this fantasy with his music on repeat, as the blood dripped down her blouse.
But, eventually, the fantasy faded. She knew it was just a fantasy: nothing more. She took a clean section of her shirt and wiped the dried blood and tears from her face. She knew Danny didn’t love her. She wasn’t sure about Michael either, but at least he was real. Danny wasn’t. She needed to go back – for her children, for the promise she’d made to her husband, for the vows they’d made in front of God. So she turned off the car, stopped the music, and sat there in silence for a moment, wondering whether the weight of it all had already crushed her. Looking through the back of the car, she could see her husband’s face up on the second-floor window. He seemed sad and distraught. He clutched their young children to his waist. They were all crying – they needed their mommy back. She sighed and her whole body deflated, sinking into the seat. She stared at the blank roof, but there was no comfort there either. OK. That was that. That was enough crying. That was enough bleeding. She had to go back. She needed to go back. It was the responsible thing to do.
And they really did make up. Michael was never violent towards her again, though he sometimes had to stop himself after raising his voice and seeing her cower and shield her head. He knew he had to make a change. He struggled through intense therapy, and through a great inner fight, he eventually made peace with his own tumultuous childhood. Slowly, painfully, he learned to be different, and learned to channel his anger into more healthy outlets. He – timidly – asked, one night, if she would stop listening to Danny for him, and if she could throw out most of her merchandise, (except for the more valuable items). It seemed somehow unfair to him, that she had that intimate thing which excluded him, when she was so supportive of his progress otherwise. He knew what Danny had meant to her. He said she needed to be fully present for him, and for their children. She reluctantly agreed.
Soon, Michael was a changed man. The therapist congratulated him, and said he was so proud of him. Summer was proud of him too. She was so proud of his transformation, and so grateful that her husband was such a wonderful man – those were the only thoughts she had, looking in the mirror each morning. She got up very early every day, before anyone else. Because she was such a good homemaker, she wanted to make sure everything was set up just the way her boys needed it: to make sure all the dishes were clean, that there was a pot of coffee going, that the boys’ lunch boxes were each prepared a with nutritious meal, made with love, that her husband’s clothes for the day were ironed and laid out on the dresser for him, and that after showering she took special care to apply thick foundation and plenty of concealer to each and every scar on her face.
Several years after the incident, celebrating the end of his therapeutic journey with a date night, Michael suggested that to truly move on, in a more symbolic way, they should renew their vows. He could think of nothing more beautiful. So, the next fall, they took a flight to Norway, and stayed in a cabin together for a weekend, just the two of them, surrounded by natural beauty in a picturesque national park. They both cried as they read their new vows to each other, standing together at the end of a wooden pier that stretched into a clear autumnal forest lake, autumn leaves of all colors blowing around them. They remained married the rest of their lives.
Sometimes she stole away to the minivan in the dead of night, after he was asleep, just to hear Danny’s voice again. She did this every few weeks, whenever the regret kept her awake.
Yes, her marriage was unhappy. But there were songs for that, too.
They raised two children together, a boy and a girl. As teenagers, their children thought Danny’s music was out of fashion, hokey, and cliche. But she didn’t mind, and she wasn’t insulted. In truth, she was happy she got to keep his music to herself. Her own little fantasy. Her Danny.