Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

The visits that Louise had recently been refusing, from his cousins and colleagues and friends of distant years, weren’t requests for a last audience with her husband, but for a keepsake encounter with the death of a man they had cast off years ago.

Nor was it in his nature to pursue those who stole from him what he did not value himself.

When we met she told me her name didn’t matter, and I laughed. I told her that many of the women in places like this started out saying so, used that same tired phrase, until they had a proper employer who explained to them that men didn’t like it. That men liked to test a name on the tongue and use and own it first, that it was an important première étape, and she explained that she wasn’t employed and never intended to be but that her name was Jean. The name was a lie, but it was acceptable, because it marked a compromise. She was doing what I had described, testing and owning the name, when she used it for the first time. This meant that it was always hers, would never be mine to have, only to borrow.

A word can have such force, and a name is an entire incantation.

Jean cost nothing, she told me so. In so many words, she said she would refuse tokens, gifts, money, anything but my body. It was not an offer I had ever heard, and the thought of my body as the offering, not the consequence of my company or my position or my funds that had to be dealt with in order to access what the woman truly wanted, I found irresistible.

It doesn’t seem fair that you have been inside my body but I haven’t been inside yours, Jean told me. That while it was Edward who had freely agreed to the taking of his body, she said, any casual watcher, any man of science observing from the corner with a chart and pencil, would observe that Edward’s body had not been given, but had instead taken Jean’s.

“There are no ethics to wanting life.