Arlie Moberly
Palace
He wants to have sex, but she’s feeling sick again and sends him to sleep in the study. She lies curled like a bug and sighing in the bed, watches him slink out the door, notes the force with which he shuts it, the trace of sound lingering a moment before it dissipates. She sinks into the quiet, closes her eyes, waits for the nausea to pass.
These days, she spends a lot of time feeling sick. He doesn’t think she’s sick. He thinks she has uncontrolled emotions, says she needs to work on it. Work on her unreasonable demands. She, too, is not always sure whether it’s entirely physical—until the moments when it swells up and suddenly it is undeniably, all-consumingly physical; when she’s swept up in it, worse than pain, the kind of sensation that used to make her bargain with some invisible god or force or anything really, promise she would never drink again if they could make it stop, back when it was alcohol that caused it. Nowadays, she can’t seem to find its roots, and she wonders if the toxins are everywhere, if the fog through which she experiences the world is less a lens—a passing issue, the consequence of one thing inhaled, imbibed, absorbed through her skin—but rather something more permanent, scalded onto her, never to be removed.
When she’s not nauseous, she’s stuck with the inherent sickness of having a body: swollen with unexpelled uterine lining and snot passed on from children, probably head lice too; breasts like the weight of a wooden sign hanging round her neck, the pressure of it on her back and her brain; the sheer shame of the exposure of her physical being, sprawling and leaking onto the world. This might be worse. Whatever she is experiencing at the time is the worst thing. She cannot remember much in between.
If she were medieval, they would tell her to pray. This would be deemed a result of moral failings, unconfessed sins. The weakness of woman. This is—in a manner of speaking—what they told her when she finally got an appointment. It’s what he thinks, too. She is an uncontrolled woman. Her uncontrolled body is a result of her uncontrolled womanness.
She needs to wash constantly, wants always to be cleaner. Sometimes she imagines herself expelled from her body, hovering above it, discarding its carcass like a dead sheep left on the hillside. She cannot conceive of a greater form of freedom.
In the quiet, she imagines scenarios over and over until she gets confused between the versions that actually happened and the ones she thought of, the words she rehearsed or rewrote or ripped apart. She can’t tell the imagined cuts against her skin made in imagined conversations from the real incisions, real conversations, but then again, none of them were real anyway, he would remember them differently, he’d tell her differently. Sometimes, she wishes they had a referee or a camera, a witness to adjudicate their recollections. She’d like to play out their whole life in a courthouse, really settle it. Is it really a marriage if they’re living separate existences, even when they’re both present for an event or a conversation? They can’t narrativize together anymore, and these days she’s not sure if they ever did, if she didn’t just ignore her own version because his was true, and he told her so, and he was going to make her better; she was going to be better for him. She’s not sure if it’s real. She’s been living in circles.
If she weren’t so sick, she would leave him, but she can’t surface beyond the immediacies of her life now, what’s in front of her—she doesn’t have enough energy for a daily routine, let alone an uprooting. Things she means to do in the background get left for months, years; the garden she didn’t get to for a decade. Leaving is a conversation she imagines, a life she considers when she runs scenarios in her head and nothing more. Other times, she imagines something happens to him, and she takes the news with a kind of solemn stoicism and reclaims her household. Her sickness is cleansed by a kind of elegant grief, and she reemerges out of it respected and somehow less embodied. Deep down, she suspects this one will be translated out of her imaginings into hard life events the way she believes that when she buys a ticket for the luxury house raffle she’s seen on the internet she will win it, that they will call her, and she’ll go and live alone in this vast house mourning her husband. Or she imagines she’ll become ill—genuinely, nobly sick, not gross like her current sickness but something more Victorian, a kind of wasting gauntness—and in the crisis he will change; then fast forward to the recovery and something in the two of them will spark again. Her return to wellness will be remarkable. In all of these scenarios she emerges thin, unimpeachable. She is all hard angles and ethereal grace. Somehow, these are compatible.
• • •
Even with him expelled from the bed, she doesn’t sleep well. When she’s alone, it takes her five minutes to stop functioning. She’s a wind-up toy; she exists and acts and comes to life only in the presence of other people, for other people. They pick her up and twist her dial and set her down in one direction or another and off she goes while they laugh or ooh or do whatever it is they’re going to do. Sometimes, she’ll get stuck on the same bit, skipping over and over, unable to move on and trapped by the impulse of rage like hot vomit coming up inside her, overriding all else, unable to think of anything else, until someone gives her a kick or a knock and picks her up and sets her down again, let it go, and the anger comes out in a puddle, slack and formless now, ridiculous as soon as it’s made visible.
She considers the ways that she could let sickness take her, simply stop doing or being. She starts to wonder if being a stopped toy, mad and alone, is better than dancing for someone else. As the first morning light emerges, she wonders if it’s not being alone that stops her from functioning; it’s the moment of release, when everything she’s carrying from the day surges out. The nausea has ebbed now. But she needs to stop carrying so much in the first place. She can’t remove the core disease, the sheer physical being she is trapped in, but she can remove the irritants. If everything is toxic, she must remove everything. Stop the world from reaching her.
She gathers herself, summons a great effort to get to the door. Clicks the lock shut. Blocks it with the armchair to be sure, just in case he has the key. She claims their room as her kingdom, like a child playing pirates. Her world will be the bedroom and the little bathroom, the mark on the wall, the wobbling dresser.
The room isn’t right yet. She starts rearranging things, hiding his objects from view. Eyesores.
By the time the sun is fully up, she has made the space her own. She draws on the walls. Starts writing her own versions of events all over the furniture, giving them certainty in ink. The room becomes thick with her thoughts, layered on each object until she can glance at something and from it springs a whole history.
At eight, she hears a knock on the door. The turn of the handle, the slight thud as he realises he can’t open it. His voice calling her name through the wood, questioning.
She keeps scrawling on the floor, doesn’t respond. She knows how this will go. She has a few days, a week at most. At first, he’ll try to get her out himself. When it doesn’t work, he’ll wait a day or two, quietly check on her through the keyhole, play chicken, hope she gets hungry. She won’t. He’ll call in the cavalry. Family, friends. When they eventually break down the door and pull her away, no one will recognise what she has created.
She has built a palace with no exits. It’s still a palace, marked and grand and beautiful, the greatest thing she’s ever built.
Arlie Moberly is a writer based in London. Her work has been published in Five on the Fifth, the Kindling, and Our Culture, among others.
Banner Art:
A Bedroom in Bernstorff Palace near Copenhagen, Johan Vilhelm Gertner Danish, ca. 1845, The MET
