The Dispensable Man

The Life and Adventures of Gillian McKenna

“Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.” -Spinoza

Part Five

40

Gillian owned a couple of cats that she’d had long before getting married. Mikey was black and white with tuxedo markings, and Pinky Lee was all white with pink ears, nose, and paw pads. They curled up next to her when she was upset, lay warmly on her abdomen when she had stomach pains, and became her greatest companionship and comfort while married to Jack. Before the baby came, her mother and her aunts began scolding her about the felines, demanding that she get rid of them because the demonic creatures were known to kill infants by creeping into their cribs at night and stealing their breath. That didn’t sound quite right to Gillian, but her family’s relentless verbal attacks led her to bring Mikey and Pinky Lee to the animal shelter. She cried the rest of that day and, for a good while, every time she thought about them.

Bringing them to the shelter was a bigger mistake than even she realized. She and Laura were no longer friends. Jack’s interaction with Gillian consisted in his forcing her to have sex, since he was aroused by her still swollen belly after delivery. At one point he burst her stitches, necessitating another surgery to repair the perineal tears. After about six weeks her figure returned to normal and he no longer required her services.

After bringing the baby home, Gillian would have liked some help from her mother, who would have at least provided a modicum of physical assistance and support. Emily’s own mother was dying, however, and she devoted most of her time to sitting with her. When Emily wasn’t in the hospital with her mother, she was sitting with Schultz, who had gone into a nursing home some months back. Without Mikey and Pinky Lee, Gillian was alone.

Audrey turned out not to be the easiest of babies. When she received the Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis vaccination, she went into convulsions that night, her face beet red, eyes rolled back, her little fists balled up. She was allergic to the Pertussis, they said. Seeing her child in that state upset Gillian greatly, but she got though it. Audrey was born with two bottom teeth, which hurt like hell whenever Gillian tried to nurse. At her first checkup, the doctor said the teeth were too loose and would probably fall out, whereupon Audrey would choke on them. By the time they got the teeth removed, Audrey had adjusted to the bottle, so that’s how they kept it.

Gillian weathered these and other minor contingencies well enough, but they were not the issue. From the start, she found herself at odds with the child. Audrey howled bloody murder non-stop all day. Gillian could not make her happy no matter what she did. She would give her a bottle or a pacifier, attempt to play with her, change her diaper, rock her, the result was always the same, the kid screamed and cried without letup. Gillian wanted to flee, or take her back to the hospital and retrieve her two cats from the shelter. She might have considered it possible that Audrey’s continuous shrieking had a medical cause, except that when Jack finally got home and held her, she immediately shut up. She smiled and looked contented, almost as if out of spite. The next day she would start up again. Their first month together, Audrey screamed and Gillian sobbed.

Jack made himself as scarce as possible during this time, or he might have noticed that more was going on with his wife than just a bad mood. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. He had no patience with her misery. He would tell her her to just shut up, then leave the house when she didn’t stop crying. He wasn’t aware that Gillian was having difficulty putting whole sentences together, since to do that, he would have had to have talked to her. Sometimes she wasn’t quite coherent, but again, not something Jack was astute enough to discern. One evening Gillian, after another long day of shrieking and frustration, became unhinged. Jack came in and found her once again at the end of her rope. He was furious. “Why do I come home to this shit every day?” he shouted. “Because every day you go off and leave me with this little bitch!” Gillian wailed, then dissolved into sobs. Gillian in her right mind would never have referred to her daughter that way, but even this didn’t register with him, and he stormed out, as usual. It was also becoming harder and harder for Gillian to drag herself out of bed. She never seriously considered suicide, but she found herself weighing the pros and cons: alive or dead, which was preferable? A few weeks after Audrey was born, Jack’s family had a get together on behalf of the new baby. Gillian, exhausted, numbed out, and all but unresponsive, sat on the couch in a state of torpor.  Had anyone asked her the date or the name of the president, she couldn’t have told them. Jack’s sister-in-law strode over, parked herself on the couch, and scowled at her. “You’d better straighten up,” she declared, “or you’re going to lose your handsome husband.”

One afternoon the water burned out of the pan when Gillian was heating a bottle of milk, causing the kitchen to fill up with smoke. Audrey had been screaming all day and was still screaming. Jack had just gotten home but had gone to the back of the house. In her deeply muddled state, Gillian panicked. She ran out the back door and clambered over the fence, completely unmindful of her second set of stitches, which hadn’t healed yet. She stumbled sobbing to the neighbor’s back door and pounded on it. Fortunately, they were home. They calmed her down as best they could and walked her back. Jack was surprised to see them at the front door. In an unusual display of compassion and good sense, he took her to her gynecologist the next day, who referred her to a shrink, a Dr. Carey.

Carey’s nurse handed Gillian a clipboard with several pages of forms on them. She lacked the wherewithal to fill in any of the blanks and simply signed her name at the end. When Carey sat down with her in his office he flipped through the pages, then began firing questions at her.  He wanted to know how much alcohol she drank. He wanted to know if voices spoke to her when there was no one around. Gillian heard the questions as if from a great distance away and answered mechanically. He wanted to know if she had any illnesses or injuries. None, she continued dully, except for her second set of perineal stitches. When he asked how that happened, she told him. That shut him up for a minute or two. He continued in a softer tone with questions about anything similar that might have happened to her, recently or otherwise. Gillian told him.  At the end of the hour he wore an expression of extreme dismay, and he had barely scratched the surface.

She didn’t have health insurance, so Emily paid for that visit with the headshrinker and a couple more. He seemed to feel bad that she didn’t have the resources to pay for the sessions, but not bad enough to lower his fee.

Gillian was starting to pull out of it anyway. Her mood went from depressed to pissed. She didn’t want to play Suzy Homemaker, stuck in the house around the clock with a screaming infant, a million things to do, no help or support, no friends, and no company. Everyone had acted like they were so excited about her having a baby, then they all disappeared. On the phone with her mother one day, Gillian broke down, crying in anger and pent-up frustration.

Emily responded immediately. She called Gillian’s father, Arnold, and relayed to him verbatim everything Gillian had just told her. “Find out what you can do for her!” she admonished. “Go visit your grandchild! And bring Gillian something to eat! That’s the least you can do!”

A couple of days after she spoke with her mother, Gillian was having a typical evening with diapers, bottles, housework, and her wailing, discontented daughter when she heard a tentative, barely audible knock on the door. It was her father.

Gillian stood in the doorway looking at him.

“Hi sugar,” he said. “I brought you something and came to meet my grandbaby.” He held up a covered casserole dish. “It’s a pot roast with potatoes, carrots, and rice. Hot off the press. It’ll be delicious.”

Gillian let him in but she wasn’t in a good mood about it. She was seething, in fact. Halfway to the kitchen she turned and faced him.

“So just out of curiosity, where have you been the last five years? You would run away from me in the street. Now you show up out of the blue with a pot roast, like that’s going to smooth everything over?”

He listened contritely with his head down. Gillian drilled her eyes into him, trembling inwardly in a violent rage. Then her anger opened a door; something wanted to slip through, and she let it.

“By the way, I know you messed with me when I was a kid!” She hadn’t thought about it, she just said it. As soon as it was out, she was glad.

Arnold’s head shot up, his face twisted with fear and outrage. “You’re crazy as hell! You were dreaming! You—”

Gillian cut him off. “No, I don’t think I was! And I don’t want you around here molesting my baby!”

That really wasn’t a concern of hers; she knew she’d never let him be alone with Audrey, but she knew the statement would rattle him. He took a few backward steps and made for the door. Gillian let him go. It would be years before they saw each other again.

Even after Emily’s mother died, Emily made it clear she wasn’t interested in being with Gillian and the baby and wasn’t going to babysit, so don’t ask. Neither was Jack’s mother, the lady without a personality, an option for assistance or companionship. She was so distracted and forgetful Jack simply didn’t trust her with the baby.

To Gillian’s surprise and relief, Jack became a help with Audrey. He would get up with her at night, sometimes dress her to take her to visit his mother or to the park. Gillian was so grateful she hugged him and kissed him and thanked him profusely. He would shrug off her gratitude, not hiding the fact that he didn’t think much of her as a mother. As the months went by, she strove to make inroads into her daughter’s affection, but she didn’t know how. Sometimes when she was able to grab a nap during the day, Jack would come into the bedroom with Audrey in the “ventriloquist’s dummy” position in his arms. It was more of a lie-down than a nap, but she always remained still, with her eyes closed. “Look at Mommy, she’s still sleeping,” he’d say quietly. “She doesn’t love us.”

It wasn’t true, she loved her daughter more than she could express; that she had no substantive rebuttal broke her heart. She would sit by the crib whenever Audrey was sleeping and gently stroke her cheek. “You look so beautiful, like a princess. I wish you loved me.”

Interlude—Present Day 2

Anne Booth set her purse on the bar and ordered a beer. Walter Callonet stumbled through a couple more songs before he set down his guitar and joined her.

“Sounding good,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“I actually just came from Gillian’s appointment. She wanted to move it to Thursday. That’s our day to meet, so it worked out perfectly.”

“While it’s fresh in your mind.”

“Exactly. So you’re pretty much caught up on her history, the high points anyway, up to about halfway through her first marriage.”

“Yes.”

“I have a couple of questions.”

“Fire away.”  The bartender brought him a Scotch. Anne poured beer from the bottle into her glass. When she was sure the foam wouldn’t bubble over the rim, she went on.

“Would you agree, from her description of the events leading up to her pregnancy and the early part of her marriage, that she would meet criterion for PTSD, generalized anxiety, and major depression with post-partum onset?”

“Sure,” Callonet nodded. “I would.”

“Would you also agree that she probably met criterion for the first two of those for most of her life up to that point?”

Callonet swirled his ice cubes, took a sip, carefully set down the glass. “Describing a person’s whole life, ‘up to that point’ in clinical terms, is a mistake.”

“I know you don’t like to use that language, but I have to. I’m at work. I have to document everything in clinical terms.”

“As you described, PTSD and depression with post-partum onset make perfect sense in her case. She was raped and she feared the child was the rapist’s. She received no support from her husband, friends, or family. She was in a destructive marriage and she was sexually assaulted by her husband. The baby had some health issues, an extremely difficult temperament, and there were breast feeding problems. There could very well have been medical issues, dramatic hormonal shifts that we don’t know about. So those diagnoses, for that period of her life, I’d say are accurate.”

“All right. So she went to a ‘shrink.’ Whether it was a psychiatrist or a psychologist is unclear. Lots of people don’t know the difference between the two.”

“Right.”

“Either way, she got virtually no treatment. Gillian usually remembers everything, but she doesn’t remember being told about any of those diagnoses.”

“That’s because they didn’t exist back then.”

“What?”

“The specifier ‘post-partum onset’ wasn’t added to major depression until 1994. Until then, women were saddled with a diagnosis of ‘post-partum psychosis.’ PTSD did not exist as a diagnosis until 1980, when some Viet Nam veterans, with the help of a couple of New York psychiatrists, successfully lobbied the AMA to make it one.”

“How about that,” Anne said.

“That disorder has always been recognized unofficially by everyone except the U.S. government. They had other names for it.  ‘Soldier’s Heart’ in World War One, “Shell Shock’ in World War Two.”

What took so long, I wonder.”

“What took so long was the VA fought it at every step. Their official position was, and I quote, ‘It has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veteran’s Administration.’ They have to acknowledge it now, but if you ever have to deal with the VA, be warned. Their unofficial policy is that people with PTSD are simply weak.”

Anne nodded. “Then since neither of those conditions were officially recognized in the mid seventies, nobody bothered with, for example, prescribing her an antidepressant.”

“Antidepressants weren’t around in the mid seventies either. The drug ‘Fluoxetine’ was the first. It was released under the trade name ‘Prosac’ in 1988.”

“Oh. Well, that’s a shame,” said Anne.

“What’s a shame?”

Anne turned her palms up. “That she wasn’t able to benefit from antidepressant medications, of course.”

“Antidepressant medications don’t work.”

She chuckled. “Of course they do. SSRIs boost Serotonin levels in the brain and—”

“It has never been shown that Serotonin levels are low in a depressed person. The whole chemical imbalance theory in psychiatry is a marketing scam. Study after study has shown there is no chemical imbalance of any kind in any of the so-called ‘mental illnesses.’ No physician or hospital, psychiatric or otherwise, ever orders Serotonin, or any other neurotransmitter level, to be checked because they have never been found to be abnormal in mental disorders.”

Anne squinted at him dubiously.

Callonet went on. “The pharmacological effect of psychiatric medications in general is not significantly different than placebo. They don’t work, in other words. They do get you a little high, which is why people like them. But they fix nothing. They’re cosmetic. Like alcohol or marijuana or any other drug, illegal or otherwise, they allow people to suppress their problems without addressing the underlying issues.”

Anne held her hands in the “time-out” signal, like a coach on the sidelines. “Hold on. Psychiatric medications are a multi-billion dollar industry. Why would they constantly be prescribed if they didn’t work?”

“Because they’re a multi-billion dollar industry. If antidepressants, for example, actually worked, depression would be a minor issue in this country. As antidepressant use continues to rise, so do hospital admissions for depression. The number of people treated for depression has tripled in the past twenty years, and ten per cent of the population now takes antidepressants. If anything, these statistics seem to indicate that antidepressants cause depression. I won’t even go into the expense and side effects of these drugs. That they weren’t around when your client had post-partum depression, I’d say, is a good thing.”

Anne thoughtfully poured the rest of the beer into her glass.  “I agree there’s a lot of ambiguity in what we do.”

Callonet took a sip of scotch. “There’s no ambiguity in what I do. Either I can play the song, or I can’t.”

Anne turned and glanced back at the guitar and amplifier in the corner. “Speaking of, do you need to go back to work?”

“No. It’s not like he pays me. In fact, since he doesn’t even comp my drinks, I’m actually paying him to play here.”

“He doesn’t pay you anything?”

He pointed to a large glass jar at the end of the bar.  “He lets me set it there, for tips.”

Anne noticed a lonely dollar bill at the bottom. “It looks like at least one person has enjoyed your music.”

“I put that in there so people would know what the jar was for.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “In that case I’m in no hurry.” She fortified herself with a long draught of beer and continued. “Gillian and Jack were together about five years. Their marriage never improved. In fact about a year after the wedding, frustrated and angry with the whole relationship, she told Jack that Trevor had raped her before she got pregnant, that she’d spent the whole pregnancy worried sick that it was Trevor’s baby. Gillian said he didn’t react at all, just looked at her. Either he thought the worst, as her so-called friend Laura had, or he simply didn’t care, since the baby was his, after all. She said she’d pretty much disengaged emotionally from Jack when he’d been so callous to her right after the baby was born, and his blank stare when she told him about Trevor just kind of put the lid on it. She said she cheated on him a couple of times after that. Good on her, I say. One was a nineteen year old who worked at a nearby bank, the other was a taxi driver. Neither came to anything.

“Her relationship with Audrey didn’t change appreciably either. She told me she could see why her daughter never wanted to be close to her. She had no idea how to behave with a child, how to please her or make her happy. She remains confused and despondent about that to this day.”

“Didn’t you tell me that Audrey has cancer?”

“Yes. She’s not doing well.”

Callonet nodded.

Ann turned her glass around a couple of times. “I guess the question I have for you is, what is it with men?”

“What is what with men?”

“What is the problem? Is every last one of them a salivating predatory sexual weirdo? Gillian was raped and sexually assaulted multiple times in her life. That’s not including the occasions when she was very inappropriately accosted, aggressively propositioned, or sexually harassed. I don’t believe that I’ve stumbled onto the one woman, or even one of the few women, who has had that kind of history with men. I’m guessing it’s much more common that anyone wants to admit.”

“You’re right, unquestionably.”

“When Audrey was about two, Gillian told me, they were in the tub together for their nightly bath. Suddenly Audrey pointed over her mother’s shoulder and began shouting, ‘That man! That man!’ Gillian turned around and saw a guy’s face in the bathroom window. She jumped up, wrapped herself in a towel, and called the police. The cops knocked on the door while she was still dialing the phone. They had been driving by and saw this peeper standing on a concrete block. ‘Yes ma’am, we caught this man looking in your window,’ they said. Turns out he was a neighbor. Gillian was friends with his wife. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The wife got mad at Gillian because her husband had seen her naked and never spoke to her again. The guy told the cops he was just playing a joke. I doubt they believed him, but they let him go anyway.

“Another neighbor, Bart or Burt or something like that, came rapping on the back door glass at 6:30 one morning. Jack had already gone to work, Audrey was in a high chair, and Gillian was feeding her breakfast. Gillian said Burt was fairly attractive and had seemed like a nice guy. In the complete absence of any kind of relationship with her husband, she’d flirted with him once or twice, and they waved to each other across the street. So he’s rapping insistently on the glass and hollering for her to let him in.  Gillian took Audrey out of the high chair and did just that, let him in. He then knocked her down, dragged her into the bedroom, and raped her while Audrey cried at the door.  When he was done he walked out like it was nothing. They didn’t wave to each other across the street after that. Gillian said she didn’t call the police because she figured she was to blame, flirting with him the way she did.”

“Is it getting to you, listening to Gillian talk about these experiences?” Callonet asked.

“I know not all men are rapists,” Anne said. “But I guess I do have concerns, since I’m getting ready to marry one.”

“You’re wondering just how good a judge of character you are.”

“Maybe that’s it. How do I really know my fiancé isn’t one of them?”

“How do you know that he isn’t a salivating predatory sexual weirdo, to use the clinical term?”

“Right. Gillian never once saw them coming, and she’s no fool.”

“It’s not about intelligence.”

“That’s what’s scary. And hey, once again, good on her for giving her dad hell about his sexual bullshit, right? He didn’t admit to anything, but she definitely got it out in the open.”

“Good on her indeed,” said Callonet.  “That’s rare. By the way, pedophiles never, never, ever admit it. It doesn’t matter how reliable the victim or how clear and consistent the victim’s story, they always deny it. The only time they ever admit anything is when they’re caught dead in the act. FYI.”

The two of them contemplated the remaining liquid in their respective glasses.

“I’ll be interested to learn if she ever finds herself a decent fellow,” said Callonet.

“She told me her second husband was a good guy. We’re about to delve into that marriage. It lasted twelve years. Eight of them were good.”

“Eight good years.” Callonet mused.

41

Audrey began walking at nine months. Shortly thereafter she wobbled into the kitchen, said, “bye bye binky,” and threw her pacifier into the garbage can. Gillian thought she might want it again, so she retrieved it and sterilized it. When she offered it to her daughter the next day, Audrey reared back and hit her. It was that kind of relationship. Throughout her toddler years Audrey never wanted Gillian to hold her, and would scream whenever her mother tried to. She was much the same when any female went to pick her up or give her a hug. She wasn’t as standoffish with men, for some reason. After age two she started to like Gillian a little bit, although she remained resistant to any kind of physical contact with her.

Audrey was around three years old when Gillian went to work at Odeco Oil Company. She’d called Frank Patterson, her boss when she worked at Merle Norman, and asked if he knew of any place that was looking for help. Frank was then working for Odeco in the Canal Street Office. He put in a good word for her and she got the job.

With only one vehicle, they dropped Audrey off at day care, then Jack drove Gillian into the city much earlier than necessary. She killed time before work with a book at one of the Canal Street restaurants near her office, usually Tiffin Inn or the Delta Towers Cafe.

At the Delta Towers eatery, Gillian often sat near a noisy group of four women and two men who presumably all worked together. She would give them the side-eye when they got so loud she couldn’t read. Whenever she did, one of the men was usually looking back at her through his horn rims. He wasn’t very attractive. Balding, overweight, with a barrel chest and round belly.

Gradually, this guy began nodding and smiling. Gillian kept a diary, and he began appearing in its pages. “He’s always dressed in a suit, his shirts crisp” she wrote. “He’s no Adonis but he looked distinguished.” She noticed the gold band on his left ring finger, but she always smiled and nodded back. It was just a smile, after all.

It wasn’t long before he added a wave to his nodding and smiling. He seemed genuinely happy to see her, and she found she looked forward to this exchange every morning. She began eavesdropping more and reading less. She heard him say “Charlotte” a couple of times and she suspected that to be his wife’s name. On days when the group didn’t meet, she was disappointed. In her diary she wrote, “He seems like someone I’d like to get to know.”

One day he vanished from the morning get-together. She missed his smile-nod-wave and realized just how much she came to depend on the daily boost it gave her.

Each morning she hurried into the Delta Towers Cafe hoping the overweight-but-distinguished guy had returned, and when he wasn’t there, her heart sank. Finally, after a whole week, she walked into the cafe and found him sitting there alone, as he had arrived earlier than usual. She was elated when he gave her his friendly greeting. As she walked toward her table, he spoke for the first time.

“I sure missed that smile,” he said. It sounded rehearsed. He looked down and fiddled nervously with the spoon in his cup. He seemed embarrassed.

Gillian’s heart went out to him. “Same here,” she said cheerfully. “This place was so empty without you.” The moment the words were out of her mouth they seemed a bit much, and she hurried to her table and began reading.

The rest of his group arrived shortly. She kept her nose down until she heard one of them, an elderly women, say, “What’s your name, honey?” Gillian peered around her book and saw that the lady was talking to her. They invited her to come sit with them, and after they introduced themselves around she was chatting away with her new friends. The nice, distinguished man’s name was Ben Wallace. She noticed he had pretty blue eyes.

The group worked for the Louisiana State University Medical Center, who had offices on the third floor of the building. Ben was a purchasing agent. Gillian thereafter sat with them most mornings, but Ben began showing up when she did, about forty-five minutes before everyone else. Gillian found him eloquent and effusive. He was intensely interested in her daily activities. He was astonishingly observant. He noticed and complimented every detail, such as when she changed her hair, wore new shoes or clothes, even different eye shadow.  He told her how much he admired her.

They quickly discovered they were the same age and had been in empty marriages for about the same length of time.

“We don’t talk much,” Ben said during a discussion about their respective spouses.

“Why is that?” Gillian asked.

“We never really did. She comes home from work and goes immediately to sleep on the couch. I fix dinner, wake her up when it’s ready. We eat in total silence. Then she goes to bed. That’s pretty much it.”

From the few conversations she had with the shrink after Audrey was born, it sounded to Gillian like this woman was depressed, but she didn’t say anything. Ben showed her a picture of Charlotte. She wasn’t at all pretty.

“It’s the same with Jack and me. No communication at all.”  It was probably too soon to talk about her husband’s sexual fixation with distended abdomens and her busted perineal stitches.  “So, how did you come to be ensnared in Charlotte’s web?” she asked.

Ben laughed heartily. He laughed heartily at all of her jokes.

“I met her in college.” He seemed about to say more, then stopped himself.

“That makes sense,” Gillian said. “It must have been nice, meeting someone on your level.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She shrugged. “I have a high school diploma, you both have college degrees. I’m sure I sound like a simpleton sometimes.”

He was completely aghast that she could even think of such a thing. To the absolute contrary, he said, he held in very high regard her inborn intelligence and wisdom. He told her she had an “old soul,” and concluded by saying, “Your qualities are priceless and can’t be bought with a degree.”

Gillian discovered she was having similarly warm and laudatory feelings towards him, and she began devoting more space in her diary to him. “He’s extremely expressive, but a very private person. If he wants to say something sweet and other people are within earshot, he’ll write it on a pad or a napkin and push it across to me. How charming is that!”

Before long Ben was driving her back and forth to work. Since he was her ride, they could stay to have coffee before he took her home. If Jack even noticed she was coming in late every evening, he didn’t care— or at least he didn’t complain. He was just as uninterested when Ben invited her to his office Christmas party. Gillian told Jack she was going to “the office Christmas party.” She wasn’t lying.

Gillian wanted something special to wear to the event. Her mother went with her to buy a new dress. Emily frowned upon Gillian going to another man’s office party, even if he was only a friend, but she said nothing more about it. It wouldn’t have changed anything if she had. When Gillian arrived at the party, Ben rushed to greet her. He was bowled over by her red dress with black velvet trim. They held hands under the table, danced dreamily to Christmas songs, and re-clasped hands the instant they sat down again. At one point he rested his palm on her thigh. It was a charged moment. Her diary entry read, “My heart was thundering loudly. It was the most physical intimacy he’d ventured yet.”

They began having lunch together, and they stayed later and later in the evenings after work. Ben’s penchant for wooing Gillian with words on paper continued; each night he wrote her a charming letter, which she found waiting for her on the passenger seat each morning. Gillian had been careful to place Ben in the “friend context” with Jack, casually mentioning, “Ben did this” and “Ben said that” now and then. Nevertheless, she felt a little odd spending so much time with a man-not-her-husband, so she invited him home for dinner to prove to Jack that she and Ben were just good buddies. The dinner was uneventful, but afterward, Jack commented that their guest was interested in being more than just her friend. No, she replied testily, he isn’t. She asked Jack why he gave a shit— was it because someone else was looking at her?

That’s when it occurred to her that there was a missing piece. Ben gushed compliments, spent every spare minute with her, guffawed at her jokes, wrote her a florid letter every day, and had clutched her hand tirelessly at the Christmas party. “All well and good,” her diary entry read, “but for a guy in a loveless, sexless marriage, he sure is satisfied with the status quo.” Ben never broached the subject of whether or not they were going to get serious, and a serious relationship, preferably a marriage, was what she wanted. She was, she had to admit to herself, more than a little disgruntled with his complacency. She continued to meet Ben before and after work, just not as often. 

Gillian would occasionally drink coffee and read her book across the street at the Tiffin Inn, where she caught the attention of a tall, handsome, well-built policeman who never failed to stare her down. One morning at the register she came up two cents short.

“I got this,” someone said behind her. She turned and looked up. It was the cop.

“That’s all right. I just need two cents, but thanks.”

“No, I got this,” he insisted. He paid for her meal, then extended his hand. “I’m Lance.”

“Gillian, and thank you,” she said as they shook. “You just made my day.”

“You make my day every day,” he said. He took out a business card and handed it to her. “Call me if I can ever help you with anything.”

Gillian was pleased to have a direct number to a policeman, especially this one, and she soon had occasion to use it. After a torrential downpour that flooded large sections of the city, she found herself stranded in her building on Canal Street. Even had Ben been in town, he wouldn’t have been able to drive her. She called Lance. “Not a problem,” he said. He picked her up in a police jeep with oversized wheels and ferried her home.

They would have coffee together at Tiffin Inn on mornings she didn’t meet Ben and his crew across the street. She was very attracted to Lance. When he told her he knew of a secluded, woodsy spot not far away and suggested they could go there for lunch, she quickly took him up on it. It wasn’t as if Ben were stepping up his game, after all.

Lance picked her up in his personal vehicle. It was a nice car but it had a rear window stuck in the open position. They were having a great time in the back seat until it started raining sideways and they got drenched. “I’ve been meaning to get that fixed,” he said. They checked into a motel a couple of times after that, but Gillian knew the thing with Lance would be short-lived. He wasn’t someone she’d ever consider getting serious with. He, too, was married, for one thing. He was great looking and easy to talk to, but the instant they were alone together, all conversation stopped in lieu of making out.

She’d been seeing Lance for a few weeks when Ben gave her a letter on the way home instead of putting it on the seat for her the next morning. Jack was in his recliner in the living room, so she went into the bathroom to read it. “I thought I had a lot of time to work up the courage to tell you how I feel,” the letter said. “Now I see someone is using you to get into your pants. My time has run out. He doesn’t love you, I love you.”

Ben must have seen her with Lance at the Tiffin Inn and decided to get a move on. Gillian was surprised and elated. “I almost fell off the commode!” she exclaimed in her diary. Gillian had to sit through dinner with Jack thinking about how she was going to end it with him. She couldn’t wait to see Ben and start making plans. He was the guy she wanted in the long term. He was kind, smart, educated, responsible, he obviously loved her dearly, and now that he’d made his feelings clear, they could finally embark on their life together.

“I just feel like we should get to know each other better,” Ben said, “before we make any big decisions.”

Gillian cocked her head sideways and squinted at him, as if a different angle might make him a little more comprehensible. They’d been together at every opportunity for months now, had both expressed their love for one another, and had declared flatly that they had no intention of spending the rest of their lives with their current spouses.

“Look, I’m not asking you to meet me at the altar any time soon,” Gillian said. “But if we’re going to be together— which you say we are— then I need to move out of Jack’s house. I have to buy a car. Again, I’ll pay my own way, but I’ve never had to support myself and a child and I’d like to know you’ll help me out if my back is ever against the wall.”

“But what exactly are you asking me to do?” Ben said, waving his arms. Gillian knew this was a go-to behavior of Ben’s, gesticulating exaggeratedly whenever he felt cornered. “What does ‘back against the wall’ mean?” he went on. “Of course I’d always help you out… if I possibly can.”

“I understand there are no guarantees, but I want to hear you say you at least intend to be there for me if I need you.”

“Once again, the term ‘be there for me’ is so vague!”

“You know what it means. I want a commitment from you.”

“A commitment! A commitment! Don’t I seem committed?”

“One of us should be committed,” she snapped. “And I think it’s me, for putting up with this!”

Gillian marveled at her own prescience. She had told her mother and her friend Billie about Ben, but at the same time she hadn’t burned any bridges with Jack nor, for that matter, Lance. Billie was happy that Gillian found a good guy she wanted to be with, but with a caveat: if Ben couldn’t commit to her, she should let him go.

“Seriously, Ben, I don’t understand what the problem is,” Gillian said. “This isn’t making any sense. I’m not giving you a deadline. Why is it so hard—why is it impossible—to tell me you’ll be as devoted with your actions as you are with your talk?”

He winced when she impaled him with the word “talk.”

“I just… of course I’m devoted… there’s just a lot of stuff…”

“Stuff? What kind of stuff?”

An elaborate shrug. “I don’t know. It could be anything. Who knows? Who can foresee these things? I mean… just take for example… with Charlotte… my mother hates her…”

“Your mother hates Charlotte.”

“Jeezus, yes.  Part of the reason I married Charlotte was I thought… well I thought she’d approve of her… or could at least accept her…”

“You married Charlotte because you thought your mother would approve of her.”

“Mom can be very opinionated… she doesn’t like people from New Orleans.
“Oh, has she met everyone from New Orleans?”

“No, of course not. She’s against them on principle…she’s always been very clear about that…I admit I dread telling her you’re from here…from New Orleans.”

That night Gillian wrote two words in her diary. “His mother?”

When she’d told her mother about Ben, Emily’s response, predictably, was that Gillian was making a terrible mistake and should stick with her husband. Emily had her own ideas, too,  about commitment. “If this guy loves you so much,” she said, “let’s see him find you a place to live.”

Gillian was frustrated, but she didn’t want to give up on Ben. They talked through it, much of the time on paper, exchanging letters when they saw each other before work. The whole thing took on a soap-operatic feel. Even though she and Ben had yet to have sex, his co-workers knew they had a romance going. Whenever she walked by they watched her searchingly, trying to glean the current state of the relationship. Gillian didn’t mind—she knew they disliked Charlotte and were rooting for her.

One morning, at a time when Ben was feeling more or less safe and comfortable with her, they ran across each other in the cafe. They decided to sit down together. While they sipped their coffee, she saw Lance looking at her through the door window to the parking garage. In a panic she remembered she’d promised to meet him at Tiffin Inn for breakfast. Lance’s expression didn’t indicate anger, exactly, but he waggled a finger at her, as if to say she shouldn’t be spending time with another man. Perhaps Ben saw him, too. Lance’s face vanished from the window, and Gillian took out after him, leaving Ben in mid-sentence. She hurried out and spoke to Lance in the garage. She told him she hadn’t stood him up, that she was just having coffee with a friend of hers.  When she got back, Ben was gone.

Ben was still angry when she went up to his office that afternoon. She tearfully explained she had rushed out only because she needed to apologize to Lance and didn’t want him to get away. “I agreed to meet him for breakfast and I totally forgot because I was with you.” Then she said, “I’m not going to see him any more, anyway. You’re more important to me than Lance or anyone else.”  She meant it, and she hoped it would put an end to Ben’s see-sawing.

It didn’t. Whenever she managed to reassure him sufficiently, he would settle down and turn back into the kind, appreciative Ben who was happy to discuss their future together. Then something would scare him. He became wary and uncomfortable, for instance, when men ogled Gillian, which happened often. The next thing she knew he’d be talking again about how they should get to know each other better before making any plans. This usually frightened her and made her angry, but she was sometimes able to shrug it off and find opportunities to tell him how attractive he was to her. “You’re intelligence and sense of humor are a definite turn on,” she said. She remembered that men don’t want to be appreciated for their mind alone. She told him he had beautiful  blue eyes. He looked good in shorts, with his strong, athletic legs. She also loved his beard. “I can’t take my eyes off you,” she declared.

Gradually he would feel more comfortable and resume talking about their life together. Then came something, any little thing, like Gillian smiling at a joke some guy made at the register, and he’d back off. It always surprised her, the kind of thing Ben interpreted as a dealbreaker. They argued about it ceaselessly in letters back and forth.

“How long are you going to keep vacillating?” she wrote. “How many times are you going to get your back up about something and break it off?”

“I never said I want to break it off. I just need a little space.”
“I agree.”

And she would give him his space, staying away from the Delta Towers Cafe and having coffee with girlfriends from work at Tiffin Inn. Then she’d look up and there would be Ben, watching her from a table across the room.

They were having drinks in the revolving bar at the Top of the Mart. It had been so long since Ben had last become frightened and bolted that Gillian was certain all of that was behind them. They discussed separating from Jack and Charlotte and maybe getting a place together while the divorces were finalized. Gillian had never been happier with Ben. He was more relaxed and open than she’d ever seen him. They’d been drinking for a couple of hours and Ben said he wanted to know more about her life before they met, and Gillian, completely off her guard, proceeded to tell him. She told him about all of the men, and all of the things that had happened with them.

Ben held it together for almost another two hours. Had she been paying closer attention, she would have recognized his deer-in-the-headlights expression much sooner. But it was too late. The man was so terrified he was trembling.

“What’s that matter?” she asked. But she already knew.

He appeared sickened. He began shaking his head. “Look, I… I’m sorry…”

“Ben.”

“No. No, I can’t. I love you but… I can’t handle this.” He left, and immediately broke off contact with her.

They’d had separations before, but this one felt different. Previously, she had been the one to storm off, angry at his reticence. Nor was he disgruntled by something she did, like flirt with a handsome waiter. This rift had an air of finality.

Gillian was devastated. She moved vacantly through the days like a wisp of smoke, unable to find purchase on the ground or her shadowy surroundings. She watched herself drift in confusion, it seemed, through a dank fog. She had believed herself about to begin a life with a good man she loved. A simple thing, but as it turned out, it was too much to ask. The reason? She had foolishly let the man see her for who she really was. Marrying Ben had been impossible all along, a castle in the air. She wrote despondently in her diary, “I should have seen this coming.”

Ben startled her on the sidewalk on Canal Street one week later when she exited the building for lunch. He’d been waiting for her. He stepped closer and delivered one of his rehearsed speeches, like he’d done when he first spoke to her. He talked with tears streaming down his face.

“I don’t care what happened in your past. I’m going to make the future the best part of your life, and I will love you through all of your pain. Being without you in order not to deal with your past is far worse than being with you and having to deal with it.”

Gillian was crying too, but she laughed because that last sentence was so awkward. She wiped her eyes and smiled sadly at him. Of course he meant what he said and he would try his best to live up to it, but she recognized it as more of his great talk.

Just as she’d often been surprised by the kinds of things that had frightened him off, he surprised her again.

“I ended it with Charlotte,” he said. “She moved out.”

42

Gillian moved into an efficiency apartment several miles down Canal Street from Odeco’s offices. Ben had started searching for a suitable two bedroom apartment, but Gillian needed something quick. Jack had read her diary, learned all about Ben, and pitched a fit. He screamed and cried that it was all his fault, that he deserved it because he was a terrible husband and didn’t pay her any attention, and so forth. In the middle of the tantrum he flipped over the dining table, slamming it into her leg as she tried to lunge out of the way. Other than a sore shin, she felt little more than irritation at his invasion of her privacy— her diary even had a lock on it— and mild confusion, since he’d never before given a damn whether she came or went.

Ben helped her with the deposit and the first month’s rent. She took the bus to work with a stop at the day care center to drop Audrey off. After a few weeks she bought one of Odeco’s used fleet cars for five hundred dollars. Her note was twenty-five dollars per month. Gillian was making ends meet, but money was tight. A few months later she found a higher paying job as a clerk at Canal Mortgage, three blocks down the street.  She still worked at Wilson’s Jewelry and Department Store on the weekends.

The tiny apartment wasn’t large enough for Ben to move into, but he was with Gillian every night. Charlotte never gave him a moment’s trouble about splitting up. She quietly went back to Texas to live with her parents.

Ben soon found a suitable two bedroom apartment in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb not too far from downtown. They moved in and set up a bedroom for Audrey, who spent every weekend with her father. Gillian had to hand it to Jack; he didn’t welch on child support, and he appeared to have a good relationship with his daughter. In fact, Audrey couldn’t wait to get there on Friday evenings and cried unconsolably on those occasions when Jack didn’t have her over. Gillian couldn’t help but feel a little dejected about that, but forced herself to be grateful: Jack had never attempted or pretended to love her, perhaps he was trying harder with Audrey.

The law at that time required that married couples remain separated for a year before they were eligible for divorce. During that period, Jack began dating a woman named Leanne. Very quickly she moved in with him. Gillian didn’t know much about her, but she got along okay with Audrey, which to her mind was all that mattered.

Ben had worked out a plan to propose marriage one morning at a restaurant called Steak and Egg, where they often breakfasted before work. Ben was always playing romantic songs on the juke box. He put in his quarters and returned to their table with the ring and his speech all ready to go, but in instead of “Endless Love” the speakers blared “I’m Going to Hire a Wino to Decorate Our Home.”

“I did not play that!” he protested loudly. They both had a good laugh over it. He could have spent another quarter, but the moment was lost. The marriage proposal wasn’t going to be a surprise, anyway. He and Gillian had already picked out the engagement ring. He’d asker her to go to the jewelry store and select two or three that she liked. She did, then urged him to buy the cheapest one. He bought the most expensive one, one quarter carat. It cost $1,200, a lot of money at the time, especially on Ben’s salary. At their next visit to Steak and Egg, he pressed the correct button and, when Lionel and Diana began their duet, Ben took Gillian’s hand and asked her if she would do him the honor of being his wife. They set a date for September of that year. 

Even after they’d set up housekeeping, lived together for almost two years, and had become engaged, Ben would still come down with the fantods. These episodes were usually triggered by men looking a little too closely at Gillian. He would begin expressing his reservations about their relationship, Gillian would then become defensive and angry, and the result was a big fight. So it was with the greatest trepidation that she stood before him ashen faced one day and said she needed to talk to Jack.

“What about?” Ben asked warily.

“About getting back together with him.”

Ben looked as though he were going to pass out, so Gillian went on hurriedly. “I don’t want to be married to him, I love you, but just hear me out.”

“Ok,” Ben said as he moved shakily to a chair.

This conversation, during which Gillian quickly put Ben more or less at ease, had been preceded by one disaster and one stroke of good fortune.

  The disaster had been Gillian’s introduction to Ben’s parents, or rather, Ben’s mother. His father, Milton, had been physically present but was otherwise absent, having long before replaced his manhood with numb resignation. Ben would intermittently attempt to engage him in the conversation, to no avail. When he became visible at all, it was only to smile wanly at his wife, Ben’s mother, who had long ago replaced her loneliness and dissatisfaction with cold viciousness and a diffuse, undisguised, and indiscriminate hatred.

Ben believed that his mother hated New Orleans and everyone in it because of some unpleasantness she once endured on Bourbon Street. He decided he would change her attitude with a more pleasant experience, so he invited his parents to meet Gillian at Brennan’s, a famously fancy restaurant on Royal Street, also in the French Quarter, just around the corner from Rue Bourbon. His parents agreed to drive down from Alexandria for a late breakfast.

Gillian had picked out a lovely pink suit and matching shoes for the occasion. She was determined to make a good first impression, but in truth, it was all over before it even began. Francis, or Fran, as she liked to be called, wasted not a moment. When they met on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, she gave Gillian the disapproving once over, complete with unsubtle sneer and narrowed eyes as she examined her pointedly from head to toe and back again. When Ben introduced them, Fran was ready with, “I’m pleased to meet you” executed with a patronizing drip. Gillian, on the ropes before she knew it, could do nothing but be polite. She was confused further by a kind of horrified fascination. The woman had this hairdo that was flipped up on both sides like wings with a ridiculous curly-cue in the front, and a pinched face that was rigid, grim, washed-out, oily, and immeasurably unhappy.

  Ben had reserved a table in the posh Chanticleer Room. They ordered coffee.

“What do your parents do, Gillian?” Fran asked.

“My mother is a banquet waitress at the Fairmont Hotel.”

Silence.

“My father is a watchmaker.”

“He makes watches?”

“Well, he fixes them.”

“Oh. Then he’s not really a watch maker. He’s a watch repairman.”

“That’s what it’s called,” Gillian sighed.

“Can he make a living doing that? Are there that many watches needing repair?”

“Um, Dad,” said Ben. “You should order the Eggs Benedict. This place is famous for them.”

His father smiled at him.

“That’s what I’m going to have,” said Gillian.

“Do you have any siblings?” Fran asked.

“My brother, Gary.”

“And what does Gary do?”

“He’s a waiter at Shoney’s.”

“I see.”

It was clear to Gillian that she was not making a good first impression. This rattled her enough that when the waiter appeared and placed two containers of cream on the table for their coffee, she grabbed the one in front of her and took a big swallow, as if it were a glass of milk.

“Do you realize you just drank everyone’s cream?” Fran said, making no attempt to hide her jubilation at the blunder.

“Oh…I thought that was…sorry.” She glanced around the table. Fran’s smirk was equal parts disdain and triumph, Ben rubbed his forehead, and Milton looked down at the tablecloth. Fortunately, the waiter soon returned with their coffee and took their order. Gillian gripped Ben’s hand under the table while he made light chit chat with his parents until the food arrived. When everyone had their meal, Gillian said, “Excuse me, Sir?”

The waiter, walking away, turned around. “Ma’am?”

She touched the sides of her plate with both hands. “Could you please ask them to cook my eggs a little more?”

“Yes, of course.” He quickly picked up the plate and vanished into the kitchen.

“Don’t you know what you want before you order it?” Fran asked Gillian.

“Yes Ma’am, I do,” said Gillian. “I ordered Eggs Benedict.”

“You do realize they are going to have to cook you a whole new breakfast, don’t you?”

Gillian looked at Ben for a long moment, then back at his mother. “I ordered my eggs over medium. They were raw. The slime was running over the English muffins. I thought I was going to vomit.”

Fran snapped her eyes. She turned to her husband. “Milton, don’t you think they will charge her for another whole breakfast?”

“Uh…uh…” said Milton.

Ben broke in. “If they do, I’ll pay for it,” he said, exasperated. “Let her eat what she wants to eat.”

That evening, Ben told Gillian his mother called him as soon as his parents returned to Alexandria. Fran had tearfully begged him not to marry Gillian, that she didn’t raise him to end up with a person of such low caliber.

“What did you say to her?” Gillian asked.

“I told her she didn’t know you like I know you.”

The stroke of good fortune was a call to Ben from a head hunter about a position in Alexandria.  It would be some months before the job actually opened up, but it was a great opportunity. He would be a department head at a much higher salary, plus the cost of living there was lower than in New Orleans.  “I’d prefer you didn’t work,” he said, “and you wouldn’t have to. You could really get closer to Audrey. Sort of win her over.”

“I guess that’s true,” Gillian said.

“My parents would be in our lives,” he said. “I know you and my mother didn’t exactly hit it off.”

“No,” said Gillian, but clearly the offer to Ben was too good to pass up. “I guess I’ll just have to win her over, too.”

Their wedding date was just around the corner when Gillian stood before Ben ashen faced and said she needed to talk to Jack.

“What about?”

“About getting back together with him. Ben, I don’t want to be married to him, I love you, but just hear me out.”

“Ok.” When he was sitting down, Gillian continued.

“What you said about winning Audrey over. I’m not sure I can do that. I’m afraid I can’t, Ben. If I moved to Alexandria I’d be taking her from away from the one person she’s close to.”

Ben looked at her meaningfully, but Gillian stopped him before he could say anything.  “I’m not willing to let her live with him. I can’t give her up. And you should take that job.”

Gillian closed her eyes. Ben usually became anxious and angry when another man looked at her. Her proposing that she return to Jack would certainly be cause for a full-fledged melt-down.

Instead, he startled her by placing the tips of his fingers together and becoming the soul of reason. “I do understand your concern,” he nodded slowly. “But it’s not like we’re moving to the moon, angel. It’s Alexandria. It’s not even three hours from here.”

Gillian refused to trust her senses. It sounded to her as though he wasn’t upset at all. “What?” she said.

“Jack could visit Audrey whenever he wanted, of course. We could even meet halfway for the exchanges, to save everyone time. Say, in Krotz Springs or somewhere.”

Gillian didn’t know whether to nod or shake her head, so she alternated between the two for a few moments. Finally, she mumbled, “I should ask him, though.”

“If you must, you must,” Ben said amiably.

If Ben’s equanimity were the result of a belief that she wasn’t serious or that she would never actually go through with it, he was wrong. She wept non-stop as he drove her to Jack’s, then asked that he wait in the car. In the house, she asked Leanne to wait outside. When Jack’s girlfriend had gone, Gillian broke down into bawling, hyperventilating, snot-nosed hysteria.

Jack listened uncomprehendingly, unsure of what she was asking and completely mystified as to the reason for this emotional display. In fact, Gillian was just as in the dark as he was. Any disinterested observer would have seen a desperate 29 year old woman in a brutal marriage who struggled despairingly to connect with her daughter, but who also saw a chance for happiness. Not apparent in the moment was her mauling by the American egregore, that blind and stupid monster who tore and shook her like a doberman with a rag doll: Gillian saw herself as a contemptible failure as a mother, adulterous and amoral, who selfishly spat on her sacred marriage vows, and in so doing would probably cause her daughter to dislike her even more. Since everything was her fault, it fell to her to rectify everything, even if that meant rejoining a man who ignored her at best and abused her at worst.

  Through Gillian’s sobs and tears, Jack was finally able to discern that she was offering to get back together with him for Audrey’s sake. Fortunately, this was Jack she was talking to.

“What? No. That’s absurd. How could you even… that’s out of the question.”

“Alexandria is pretty far away,” Gillian said between gasps and sobs.

Jack waived his hand dismissively. “It’s not that far. I can drive up to see her. She can come here in the summer. Anyway I’m with Leanne now. In fact it’ll be good to have the weekends to ourselves for a change.”

Gillian blinked away tears and breathed easier. “Really?”

“Really.”

Ben and Gillian were married on September 12, 1981. Gillian had talked with the minister at a Presbyterian church not far from the apartment, and agreed to let them have the ceremony in one of their back offices. Ben’s parents were presbyterian, so maybe she could score a couple of points with Fran. Gillian wore a grey pin striped suit with a pink frilly shirt and her hair up; Ben wore a matching grey suit with a pink shirt. The wedding was performed by her attorney, who was also a justice of the peace. He had helped her with the divorce from Jack.  Besides Ben’s parents, Gillian’s mother and brother, Gary, attended. Her friend Billie from Wilson’s Department store served as Maid of Honor. Ben didn’t have any close friends, so he asked a guy named Rick from work to stand as best man. The wedding was a very small to-do and only took about ten minutes, after which everyone went home.

Ben negotiated for a while with the folks from his new job, and there were some delays, but he was eventually locked in to everyone’s satisfaction. Gillian tried to spend more time before the move to Alexandria visiting with her mother, taking Audrey along. Emily was more available now, as Schulz had died in the nursing home some months before.

On July 9,1982, shortly before Ben and Gillian were to pack their bags and move to Alexandria, Pan Am flight 759 crashed in Kenner, Louisiana, killing all 145 people on board and 8 on the ground.  Kenner, a New Orleans suburb adjacent to Metairie, where the couple lived, was the location of Audrey’s day care center. As soon as Gillian heard about the crash, she left work and raced to pick up her daughter. All roads into the small suburb were closed, however. Attempts throughout the night to reach the center by phone failed. Gillian called a couple of other parents, who were having the same experience. Ben tried to reassure her that since the plane hit the main road, the day care center, located in the back of the suburb, was safe. Gillian passed the night sick with worry and stomach pain.

It wasn’t until  late morning that someone from the center contacted them saying everyone was fine. Enough debris was cleared from the highway that people could come get their children.

They arrived at the center at the same time as many of the other parents. Some of the children seemed to have treated the event as a surprise sleepover and excitedly told their relieved parents about their adventure. Others were frightened and crying. Audrey seemed utterly indifferent until Gillian, in tears, tried to embrace her. Audrey, who still resisted any physical contact by her mother, wrenched herself angrily from Gillian’s grasp and stood several yards away with her arms folded. She went to Ben when he kneeled down and opened his arms, however, and she offered no resistance when he put her in the car.

“As I told you,” Ben said as they drove off. “Everything’s fine.”

43

In Alexandria, Ben and Gillian rented a three—bedroom house across the street from Ben’s parents. Gillian thought they were a bit too close to their in-laws, but Fran had already picked out the home and completed all the arrangements short of signing the lease. The streets in the subdivision, called Castle Village, had names like Cinderella Avenue and Sleeping Beauty Boulevard. They lived on Snow White Drive.

She heard Ben moving around in the bathroom, getting ready for work. He always tried to be quiet, but the squeak of the hot water knob when he turned on the shower never failed to wake her. She turned over and settled under the covers, then saw the envelope on her night table. She decided she would read it with her morning coffee. It would start the day off on the right foot. As when they were courting, Ben wrote long, dithyrambic love letters, which Gillian pored over and then carefully saved. His prose was full of sap and treacle, but it spoke to something in her heart and could be very poignant, if you liked that sort of thing. Gillian loved it. He also, on occasion, indulged a mischievous streak, also on paper, casting the two of them in tales of sexual adventures set in medieval times— knights and princesses and such. Gillian wasn’t sure what to make of them; was it harmless erotica or pornography? With her history, the distinction was important but unclear. She kept those letters, too, only because Ben asked her to, but she locked them up in a strong box hidden in the closet.

She listened as he stepped into the shower, then closed the noisy glass door as softly as possible. She had fallen in love before with bad results, but this time she was sure she got it right. His generosity in expressing his affection for her was the most satisfying feeling she’d ever experienced. It wasn’t just the letters. He wanted them to share everything. He came home for lunch every day to watch As The World Turns with her; if he had to stay at the office he asked that she write him a synopsis of the episode so that he would be up-to-date when they discussed it. On weekends he woke her up with a gentle neck rub and served her coffee with her favorite sections of the newspaper folded beside her. They held hands driving down the road singing along with the radio. They went for walks together, did yard work together. On Saturday he would get up early and map out a route for her to hit all the garage sales; when she returned he admired the junk she bought as if it were treasure of inestimable value. He never failed to notice every detail about her, from her tweezed eyebrows to her polished toenails. They had long, heartfelt conversations during which he looked deep into her eyes and hung on her every word. And often, when they went to bed, he implored her, “Please don’t ever leave me.”

Gillian knew the plea wasn’t rhetorical; he still struggled with inadequacy and was unable to fully trust the relationship. Whenever some random fellow on the street happened to look at Gillian, Ben put his head down and remained silent, as if expecting her to finally decide she was tired of him and walk off with this new guy. Gillian made a point to state explicitly from time to time what she strove to show him every day: “The kind of attention we give each other is all I’ve ever wanted.”

Her notion that Ben’s mistrust was amenable to logic was excusable, since her complete satisfaction with the marriage made perfect sense to Gillian. Her relationships with men had been, for the most part, reenactments of violent exploitation. With Ben, however, she had something else: safety. 

That she felt safe with him was the overarching attraction; everything about him that she liked or admired was one more articulation of his gentleness or, as perceived by Gillian, his protection.

Gillian never even considered the possibility that he would hurt her physically.  More to the point, Ben’s physicality, which ran counter to narrow notions of “manliness,” was never, for Gillian, part of the equation. He was overweight and physically weak. He had so little strength in his arms and back that he couldn’t support himself in the upper position when they made love and would quickly fall whenever he tried. This mattered to her not a whit. She could detect no violence in his body; he seemed incapable of producing any, at least of the physical sort. She would say he was “like a big teddy bear.”

Gillian would vehemently and correctly deny that her feeling for Ben sprung entirely from the knowledge that he would never hurt her. She loved his sense of humor, and his romantic letters impressed her, quite apart from their sentiment, by his use of language in its own right. But Ben’s intelligence was a safe haven of another sort: he was smart enough to know— and to care— that she was smart.  Until she met him, she hadn’t realized that this was a kind of safety, or that being appreciated only for one’s  looks was a kind of danger. With Ben, she experienced the novel and reassuring sensation of being thoroughly visible; in his presence she felt she was a living human being, important for who she was, not a doll to provide relief by being fucked or beaten or both.

This feeling of reassurance was strongest when they were alone together. Ben was uncomfortable around other people. His anxiety in social situations took the form of stiffness, formality, of a man hamstrung by shame masquerading as dignity and pride. It frustrated her because the guy was a genuine sweetheart. Ben’s employees would tell her what an easy going and accessible boss he was. One elderly lady in his office warmly declared in sandpapery tones that if he wasn’t married already she’d marry him herself. He had only one friend that Gillian knew of, a fellow from work. The moment he was around strangers he was quiet, on his guard, and withdrawn.

Alone with Gillian, however, he was very much the opposite.  When he wasn’t being unreservedly effusive in expressing his feelings for her, he was cracking her up with arid one-liners. Her family considered him a snob and, to be fair, he was a bit condescending towards them, but his disparaging comments were so dust-dry and on the money, Gillian had to laugh in spite of herself. Every October they would rent an A-frame cabin for four days at San Miguel State Park in Toledo Bend. They cooked on the grill, held each other in front of the fire, spooned under the covers for as long as possible on those frosty fall mornings, picked wildflowers on nature walks, sipped hot coffee while reading to each other, did an inordinate amount of laughing, and generally forgot that the rest of the world existed. This was how they were when they were alone together, and they could pull it off every time.

Gillian was always aware that Ben was a troubled man. He had a drink or two in the evening, no big deal, but there were occasions that stood out. In his mostly luminous love letters dark anomalies would sometimes emerge, uncertainty that he could always make her happy, that the marriage would last and, if it didn’t, the suggestion that he didn’t know if he could quite handle that. And for a period of time his alcohol intake would increase. It didn’t last, and Gillian never addressed it because she didn’t consider it a serious problem. With Ben there had always been an undercurrent of fear and doubt, but when it was just the two of them, he seemed genuinely happy. She was, for sure.

Gillian always believed that she was the reason the marriage failed, and why Ben eventually succeeded in killing himself by consuming alcohol. It seemed so to her even after she learned this was an impossibility and that it was much more likely that the marriage extended his life by eight years or so.  What is clear is that for those first eight years, Gillian felt safe and Ben did not.

44

Gillian made the decision to enroll in college while standing in the checkout line at a K-Mart. She held in her hand a credit card with Ben’s name on it, and she imagined having a credit card with her name on it. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she thought, “if I were a person in my own right?” If she had a college degree, Ben could be proud of her, and they would have something else in common. It was a spur of the moment decision that had been years in coming.

Her enrollment in 1990 in an undergraduate psychology curriculum at Louisiana College in Pineville coincided roughly with the dissolution of her marriage. Ben, who worked as a purchasing agent for Toledo Parish Regional Medical Center, had a bachelor’s degree in business management. Because he had a diploma and she didn’t, she had always felt intellectually inferior to him. Her situation was similar to that of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, with an important distinction: the Scarecrow didn’t have to contend with Fran, whose joy and gratification— not to mention expertise— was to seize upon and exploit feelings of inferiority in others.

Fran’s stated reasons for despising Gillian included, but were not limited to, her lack of a college education. Her un-stated reasons included, but were not limited to, that Gillian was beautiful. Fran had also despised Ben’s first wife, Charlotte, a homely woman with a college education, but that was irrelevant; Gillian felt just as despised. Fran often berated her because she was from New Orleans on the grounds that women from New Orleans were trashy, amoral gold-diggers who married strictly to obtain a free ride. Add to that the dearth of initials after her name, and it was clear that Gillian was not good enough for her son. 

As she had promised Ben, Gillian did attempt, from the outset, to win over her mother-in-law. And the from the outset, the three found themselves locked in a kind of victim-tormentor-bystander choreography that directed every aspect of their relationship.

Fran felt Gillian’s choice of clothing was immodest. To correct that, she bought floor-length, long sleeved, high-necked dresses so that her daughter-in-law could cover herself appropriately. Gillian could make even Pentecostal garb look good, however, so Fran would sew the dresses herself, making them as floppy and frumpy as possible.

Ben was afraid of Fran, and he was unable to see the boundary where his mother left off and his wife began. He would instruct Gillian, “Don’t tell my mother,” if he was doing something Fran might disapprove of, such as smoking a little pot. Rather than return the clothes to Fran and politely and firmly tell her that the amount of skin his wife showed or didn’t show was none of her business, his faint-hearted approach was to shrug and tell Gillian that she could wear what she liked, knowing she was doing her best, for his sake, to assuage Fran. Nor did he exactly hate it that his pretty young wife looked less attractive than she actually was. He preferred that she wear no makeup, that her hair was straight and brown instead of eye-catching auburn, and that she refrain from any behavior he deemed show-offish. Ben became greatly upset whenever Gillian sang in public, for example. One evening they were visiting another couple when the husband pulled out a guitar. Gillian began to sing along. Ben turned beet red, went into the bathroom, and threw up. The mere suggestion of his wife in the spotlight terrified him to the point of physical illness. He would never tell Gillian to make herself into a sexless introvert, but he was ok with it.

Then came the moment when Fran’s rudeness and insults got the better of Gillan, and she would dress herself in hot pants and halter tops.

“What are you wearing?” said Fran, incensed.

“I’m wearing what I want to wear. Got a problem?”

This dance was repeated endlessly throughout the marriage, although the issue of covering up Gillian’s skin was particularly illustrative for a creepily ironic reason. In public, Fran dressed as she would dress Gillian, covered from her chin to her toes. Occasionally, though, Gillian was surprised to see Fran with her clothing in a particular state of disarray, usually with one breast exposed. Not in its entirety, of course, but to a startling extent. It usually happened at Fran’s house, but Ben was always present, and Gillian felt it imperative to alert her.

She would sidle up to her mother-in-law and advise in a discretely low voice, “Fran, you’ve got something sticking out.”

Fran’s response was always to shoo Gillian away. “I’m fine! I’m fine! leave me alone!” She wouldn’t even bother to check herself, which to Gillian indicated she knew about it and was pretending not to notice. On another occasion she and Ben were visiting Fran in the hospital, and the gown had slipped way off her shoulder, with the same result. Gillian went to lift it up for her, and Fran pushed her away. “Stop it! I’m fine! I’m fine!”

Ben also pretended not to notice. Gillian understood that— what else could he do? But she wondered, if Fran pulled that trick when the three of them were together, what occurred when Fran and Ben were alone? He wasn’t one for voicing displeasure directly, especially to Fran. Ben had once expressed the desire to learn to play the keyboard, so Fran bought him one. Ben put it in the closet and never touched it. He later bought himself another keyboard. Ben once stated he liked those corduroy coats with the patches on the elbows, so Fran bought him one. He promptly hung it in the closet and never wore it. It was an odd form of communication those two had.

If there had been any doubt that mother-in-law’s intentionally accidental strip-tease was for her son’s benefit, that doubt vanished one afternoon when Fran had asked Ben to stop by. Gillian went with him. Upon entering the house, they didn’t see Fran at first. Then they heard her call from the bathroom, “Oh, Ben, would you come in here a moment please?”  Ben and Gillian both figured it was about some small repair job. Into the bathroom Ben went, where he found his mother stark naked in the tub.

“Oh geez, I wish I hadn’t seen that,” he said to Gillian when he returned.

On rare occasions, Ben ventured briefly out of the innocent bystander role. One afternoon, Gillian came home and was startled to find Fran at the kitchen sink. She had previously made it clear to Ben that she was against Fran having a house key, but Ben had given his mother one anyway, without Gillian’s knowledge. When Gillian came in the front door, she at first thought she had a burglar. Then she saw that it was Fran in the kitchen. The woman had the sink full of water and appeared to be washing something.

“What is that?” Gillian said. “What are you doing?” The questions were rhetorical. Gillian had seen immediately that Fran was washing Ben’s underwear.

“They’re yellow,” Fran said curtly. She was hand scrubbing them in the sink with bleach to get them really white.

Gillian complained to Ben about it, and he did ask his mother to stop washing his underwear in their kitchen sink. Fran then got angry at Gillian as Ben faded into the background. Fran refrained from cleaning Ben’s underwear, but she continued to let herself into the house to do other articles of his laundry and occasionally the dishes, to clean the coffee pot, or to change the kitty litter.

Ben did not want children. He got along well enough with Audrey but he didn’t want any more. Gillian, after her first and only experience, had already sworn off ever becoming pregnant again. Fran wanted a biological grandchild, however, preferably a girl. Ben acquiesced readily to his mother’s wish. Gillian, still trying to win points with mother-in-law, began trying to rationalize it, telling herself that, because Ben was a good guy, perhaps pregnancy and childbirth wouldn’t be the horror it was the last time. This potentially disastrous situation resolved on its own when Ben’s sperm count was found to be too low to conceive a child.

Fran enjoyed hitting people. She often accompanied the slap with an insult. If her husband, for example, reached for more food after she had deemed that he had had enough, she would slap his wrist. “You don’t need any more, you’re too fat as it is.” Then she would remove his plate whether he was finished eating or not. Ben seemed not to notice this kind of thing; such admonitions were part of the family routine. “You’ll never find a girlfriend because you’re too fat,” his mother used to inform him. “You’d better work on your brains because you’ll never get by on your looks.”

Fran disagreed with Gillian at every opportunity, seemingly as a matter of policy. “You’re wrong,” or “That’s not true,” were knee-jerk responses whenever Gillian said something. If she took strong exception to her daughter-in-law’s opinion, she would punctuate her objection with a hard slap on the forearm. One Sunday while in church, Gillian, who had been a member of several choirs herself, mentioned that she had heard a particular hymn performed better. Fran’s smack on Gillian’s arm resounded off the pews. “Nobody cares what you think,” she said. In the lobby after a performance of “Annie” by the Toledo Parish Community Theater, Gillian said she thought they could have found someone more suitable for the titular role.

“She was perfect!” Fran snapped, popping her a good one. “Who asked you, anyway?”

Gillian, having again reached her saturation point, squared off. “If you touch me again I’m going to knock the shit out of you. You want to see how women from New Orleans behave? I’ll show you.”

Whenever Gillian encountered Fran sitting on the couch filing her nails, she knew the woman was coiled to strike.  A favorite point of attack was Gillian’s being unemployed. Fran worked for the Toledo Parish School Board, and she thought Gillian should also be making money.

“Have you found a job yet?” Fran said, not looking up from her fingernails. She never looked up.

“I haven’t. As I mentioned before, Ben and I talked about this. He wants me to be able to spend time with Audrey.”

“You can’t sit around all day drinking coffee and watching Oprah.”

“I don’t. I keep busy. I volunteer at Audrey’s school and with the local girl scouts. I help with other community projects. I’ve joined the church choir.  I do all the cooking and cleaning at home.” Including, she refrained from saying, washing Ben’s underwear. 

“Tuesday morning at nine,” said Fran.

“What about it?” Gillian asked warily.

“I got you a job interview.”

Ben of course told her she didn’t have to go. Gillian hadn’t, at that point, completely relinquished all hope of getting on Fran’s good side, and the job was only part time, so she kept the appointment. They told her she’d gotten the job at the interview. The position was for a secretary at an office that sold business products, pagers and copiers and so on. She worked from eight until noon three days per week. She answered the phone, took orders, ignored crass sexual overtures from one married salesman and deflected moony-eyed entreaties of romance from another.

Gillian’s intention to spend more time with Audrey, as she told Fran, was sincere. She remembered her own mother getting down on the floor with her and her friends and playing jacks or board games, so she tried that. Audrey tolerated playing Candy Land with her mother, and the two had a few good moments— sometimes they’d cackle together while playing old maid— but essentially the relationship with her daughter didn’t change after she married Ben. For the most part, Audrey remained in her room when she and Gillian were home together. When Ben came in from work, she would emerge and stand in the hall doorway looking at him.

“What do you need, Audrey?” Ben would ask.

The girl would seldom have an answer. Sometimes she would shrug.

“Let your mother and me have a little time together.”

And Audrey would disappear back into her room.

Why didn’t she come out when it was just me here, Gillian wondered.

Audrey visited her father on some weekends, but she spent a great deal of time with Fran. Gillian was determined to keep her marriage from getting stale, and to that end arranged frequent weekend trips with Ben. Audrey always stayed with Fran. She would accompany her grandparents on their weekend trips as well.

From the outset, Fran lavished gifts on her granddaughter. Audrey quickly learned to demand the most costly stuff. Nothing less than the most popular items, ostentatious brand names, and expensive designer clothing would suffice. Grandma provided them. It seemed to Gillian that Fran was trying to win her daughter over by buying the girl’s affection, and it appeared to be working. Whenever Audrey had a choice between going with her mother or with Fran, she always chose her grandmother. Gillian again recognized the perverse irony, since Fran had always accused her of being a gold-digger.

One Christmas, Audrey— still relatively young— wanted a bicycle. Fran bought the best one she could find and insisted that it be kept at her house. At home on Christmas morning, Audrey tore through her presents growing angrier by the minute.

“I don’t want any of this stuff!” she shrieked. “I told you I wanted a bicycle!”

Gillian was flummoxed by her daughter’s behavior, but she wasn’t going to scold her on Christmas day. “Sweetheart, now look how you’re acting. We haven’t even gone to see what Santa left at Grandma’s house.”

“What?” Audrey stopped yelling. “Oh, yeah. I should’ve known my bike was over there. Y’all can’t afford that.”

Gillian and Ben planned on telling his parents that evening at dinner that she had enrolled at the college in Pineville. it was already a celebratory occasion of sorts because they had both recently quit smoking. Her mother-in-law hated cigarettes, so Gillian figured this had to have earned her a few points. Now she would be able to tell Fran as well that she was on her way to becoming one of the highly educated.

It was eight in the morning and her stomach was already beginning to roil.  She hadn’t had a puff in sixteen hours, but nicotine withdrawal wasn’t the cause of her anxiety. It was a festering dread. She’d gotten away from cigarettes and was officially an undergrad. Those were unassailable victories impossible to disparage; she didn’t know how Fran was going to manage it, only that she was.

45

As soon as she heard it, a cross between a groan and a curse as Ben emerged from the shower, she knew the money rash had flared up again. If they came up short when he paid the bills each month, the rash would appear, big circles as red as burns around his belt line. He’d been checked for shingles, ringworm, the gamut of skin conditions, but the dermatologist was baffled. Thankfully they didn’t hurt, just looked bad and itched a little. They vanished after a few days.

“How much in the hole are we?” Gillian asked.

“Nothing we can’t handle.”

He didn’t say much more before he kissed her goodbye and left for work.

Financial troubles bothered her less now that she was starting school. They felt more temporary. One day she would graduate and make good money.

Throughout the day she caught herself worrying about that evening’s dinner with Fran and craving a cigarette, but she handled it by keeping busy with housework. She was straightening up in Audrey’s room when she spotted something familiar on the closet floor. She snatched it up, her stomach knotted in dread, and with good reason; it was a page of one of Ben’s racy letters. She stormed around the house pitching a fit and feeling as though she would be sick. Did Audrey pick the lock of the strong box where she kept those letters, or had Ben taken one out and failed to put it back? They made her uncomfortable to begin with, but they were meant for no one but her and Ben; that Audrey, now a young teenager, read them was intolerable. That was the end, she vowed; she would tell Ben, no more of that!

Her hands shook as she fumbled with the pack of cigarettes she knew was buried in the junk drawer in the kitchen. Just one would steady her nerves enough to get through the rest of day. It wasn’t the same as starting up again. She tore off the cellophane, then Audrey walked in, home from school with her friend from down the street in tow. Gillian dropped the pack in the drawer and shut it.

“Mom, Tonya’s with me,” she said.

“Ok,” said Gillian. “Hi Tonya.”

“Hi Ms. Wallace.”

The two girls went into Audrey’s room. Gillian drummed her fingers on the counter. It was no good now. If they smelled the smoke Audrey would unquestionably tell Ben. It didn’t matter, she didn’t need a cigarette anyway. She only wanted one, and she wanted one all the time.

She grabbed a book and read the same page nine times before giving it up. She thumbed through her college catalogue. Finally Tonya’s father arrived to collect her.  Gillian could never remember his name. They were Jewish and he had a Jewish first name. Isaac? Abraham?

“Hello Gillian,” he smiled when she answered the door.

“Hello there! Let me run and get Tonya.”

“Thanks. Um, do you think I could use your bathroom?”

“Of course. On the right down the hall.”

She called through Audrey’s door. “Tonya, your father’s here!” She returned to the living room.

Isaac Abraham emerged first. Gillian thought he wore an odd smirk on his face, then she saw why. He was holding his crotch, gripping his pants to show that he had an erection. “Do you see what you do to me, Gillian?” he said.

She took a deep breath. “Audrey! Tonya! Get out here now!” she shrieked so loudly Abraham Isaac winced.

The two girls came running. “Mom, what is your problem?” Audrey demanded.

“It’s time for Tonya to go! Her father is in a hurry.” She opened the door and stood to the side as Tonya and her still smirking father shuffled through it. Gillian shut the door and locked it. Then she unlocked it, opened it, slammed it as hard as she could, and locked it again. Audrey had already returned to her room.

Gillian went to the kitchen, grabbed the cigarettes, and smacked them angrily upside down on her hand to pack the tobacco. She tore them open and took one out before realizing the same problem existed, Audrey would smell it and alert the media. Gillian threw them back in the drawer and shoved it closed.

As soon as Ben got home she told him what happened. “‘Look what you do to me Gillian!’” she yelled, imitating a man grabbing his crotch.

“Well we’re not putting up with…do you want me to talk to him?”

Gillian settled herself enough to think about it. Ben confronting the man didn’t make sense, and Tonya was one of Audrey’s few friends. “No, no. Tonya can come here if she likes, but her father is not setting foot in this house, and Audrey will never again go over there.”

She didn’t remember about the page of Ben’s risqué prose in Audrey’s closet until they were getting dressed for dinner, but she was still riding the wave of anger from the Jewish perv. She told Ben she was destroying all of those letters and he wasn’t to write any more of them. 

“Ok, ok,” said Ben.

Dressing to go out was a kind of meditation for Gillian. She still wanted a cigarette, but by the time she was ready, she’d calmed down considerably.

“Where are they taking us for dinner? she asked.

“Neptune’s,” said Ben.

“Neptune’s? Why there? It’s noisy and the food’s not very good.”

“It’s nice they’re taking us. They’re paying, so, gift horse and all that.”

Gillian remembered the money rash. “Right.”

Ben locked the front door behind them, then started walking across the street.

“Where are you going?”

“We’re riding with them.”

“Do we have to?”

“The restaurant’s a mile and half away. It doesn’t make sense to take two cars.”

“Right.”

“Have you had any trouble with cravings, Gillian?” Fran asked as Milton drove them down the boulevard.

“None whatsoever.”

“And what about you, Ben?”

“Same here.”

“That’s great, sweety.”

Neptune’s formica furniture, packed into every inch of available floor space, together with its tiled floor and cement walls, made for assaultive acoustics. When telling others about the place, Gillian described the dining room as having the ambience of an elementary school cafeteria.

When they were seated, Fran looked around and smiled. “I love the atmosphere in here.”

“More like an atmospheric disturbance,” Gillian said in a normal tone.  No one heard her.

As soon as the waiter left with their order, she took a sip of water and cleared her throat. She spoke cheerfully. “Ben and I have an announcement.”

“Yes, we already heard,” said Ben’s father. “You two have quit smoking.”  He reached for a breadstick.

Fran slapped his hand away. “Milton, let’s not start with the carbohydrates,” she said.

“It’s something else, Dad,” said Ben. He turned to Gillian. “Go ahead, honey.”

“I’m going to start taking classes in January,” Gillian said. “I’ve enrolled at Louisiana College in Pineville.”

No one spoke for several moments.

“Well,” said Fran. “That’s interesting, I suppose. What are you going to study?”

“Psychology,” said Gillian.

“Psychology,” repeated Fran.

“Yes. I’ve always been interested in that. I’m very excited about it. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out my crazy family.”

“Good for you,” said Milton.

“Thank you, Milton.”

“I’m not sure how good it is,” said Fran.

Ben grabbed a bread stick and hurriedly took a bite. “These are excellent,” he said. “Go on and have one, Dad. One won’t kill you.”

Milton stared at his water glass.

Gillian ignored Ben’s attempt to change the subject. “Why isn’t it good, Fran?” she asked tersely.

“Because. Psychology? That’s a useless degree. It doesn’t help anyone. Nobody listens to what they say. And you won’t be able to pay back the loan without a Ph.D.”

Gillian felt tears of frustration welling up. She unclenched her teeth and took a gulp of air. “Oh, I’ll pay back the loan.”

“Why can’t you think of a worthy profession? You should be a nurse or a teacher.”

“Ben isn’t a nurse or a teacher. Is his profession unworthy?”

Fran ignored the question. She looked at Ben. “It’s a waste of time and money,” she said.

Ben said nothing. Gillian stood abruptly and strode to the ladies’ room before she gave the evil bitch the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She had expected Fran to crap all over her and it still felt like a punch in the gut.

It took a while to sob out her rage and re-do her makeup. She returned to the table as the waiter was bringing their food.

Milton was the first to dig in. He had a saying he used whenever he liked something at dinner: this tastes like my foot’s asleep.

“This tastes like my foot’s asleep!” said Milton.

Gillian laughed every time he said it.
“Ha ha!” she chuckled.

Fran glared at her. “Why do you laugh at that? You laugh every time he says it.”

“It’s funny every time he says it.”

“Oh Please,” Fran said. “You laugh like it’s the first time you heard it.”

Gillian waited until everyone else had started eating, then cut into her fish. She managed to chew it and swallow but she set her fork down and sat quietly until the waiter passed by.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m sorry to be a bother, but this fish is really over-cooked. Would it be possible to change my order?”

The waiter picked up her plate and examined it. “Yeah, that does look a bit overdone. I’ll bring you another one.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Not a problem.”

“How you love to do that,” said Fran.

“Oh, jeezus,” Ben said under his breath. Only Gillian heard him.

“Excuse me?” said Gillian.

“You just love sending things back, don’t you? Is that how you make yourself feel special?”

“I’m sorry, but it isn’t what I ordered.”

“It was exactly what you ordered.”

“No, I ordered an edible meal.”

“You ordered blackened redfish, and that’s what you were served.”

“‘Blackening’ is a culinary technique used to heighten the effect of the seasoning, not to turn the fish into a rock hard piece of cinder charred beyond all recognition.”

“Such the highbrow lady from New Orleans. Little Miss Fancy Pants.”

“‘Fancy pants?’  Because I expect, when I go into a restaurant, to be served what I payed for?”

“Well you’re not paying for it, are you?”

“Oh, I’m paying dearly for it.” Gillian snatched her purse off the floor, pulled out her wallet, and extricated a ten dollar bill. It was the last of her cash for the month, but the money rash be damned. She wadded the bill in her fist and threw it to the center of the table. “The meal was $6.75. Be sure to give the rest to the waiter.”

She walked out.

It took Ben a couple of blocks to catch up to her. “Honey… wait…” Gillian was really moving and he was gulping air.

“I’ll be damned before I get back in the car with her. It’s only a mile and a half to get home.”

Gillian spotted something on the other side of the street. She crossed abruptly towards a gas station; Ben fell behind as he waited for several cars to pass. She walked straight up to the cigarette machine and dug around in her purse. Thank God she had enough change. She shoved the coins in, yanked the handle; the machine’s insides clunked, the pack fell into the tray. She quickly found a lighter in her purse— no reason to get rid of lighters— and fired one up.  She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes, then slowly expelled the smoke in a lazy plume. She sagged back against the machine as Ben crossed the street and joined her. He was still a little winded, but able to speak.

“Give me one of those, will you?” he said.

46

By the middle of her first semester, he stopped doing things with her. He didn’t want to go for walks in the evening. He didn’t want to get away for the weekend. He didn’t come home for lunch. He didn’t want to talk or hold hands or write letters to her.  Making love was out of the question. He had been very supportive of her going to school, at first, but as soon as she started classes, he became suspicious. She’d catch him rifling through her satchel and her notebooks. If she got home five minutes later than usual he wanted to know where she’d been and with whom she’d been talking. He became absurdly defensive. If she forgot to write him a soap opera update because she had too much homework, he’d get insulted and declare it was proof she no longer cared for him. His drinking had previously been excessive only sometimes, but excess was becoming the rule rather than the exception. He went for volume, keeping a “box o’ wine” in the fridge at all times. At first she tried sitting down in the evening and having a glass with him, but it got overwhelming. He could drink a gallon a night. She proposed they go to Waffle House and drink coffee instead, but that was a non-starter. One day in the front yard, her neighbor asked if they’d thrown a party. One of their garbage bags broke and it was full of of beer cans. He’d started getting really loaded on the two nights a week she had a late class. Before she knew it he was drinking in lieu of meals. He stopped going to bed, would pass out in the recliner and stay there all night. If she told him he drank too much, he became furious. It was a sore issue always at hand, and instead of conversing, they fought and screamed. He accused her of trying to find someone else. At other times he became apathetic. She would throw a fit about his drinking and pack a bag; he would put her stuff back in the closet, not exactly threatening suicide, sobbing that he might lose his mind because she wanted to leave him. She didn’t want to leave him, she shrieked in frustration, she wanted him to be the guy who hugged her and kissed her and held her hand while they walked around in the evening and talked to the neighbors.

Gillian tried to see it as a problem she could solve. He was pulling away from her, perhaps, because he was simply tired of her, but she didn’t think so. Frankly, and she would never allow another soul hear her say this, he was too needy. It had to be about the alcohol, but what was his reason for pickling himself? Fran’s response, when Gillian went to her for help, wasn’t unexpected: “What are you talking about? He can stop any time he wants to!” Her own mother was equally unsurprising: “What are you talking about? He’s always been an alcoholic!”

This wasn’t in the syllabus in Psych 101. If it was a case of operant conditioning there had to be a payoff, but what could he possibly be getting out of it? He drank until he vomited. Until recently they were both deliriously happy, and he wasn’t faking it, either; he’d worn a smile on his face for eight years. Now he was sullen and brooding and stinking drunk. No, it was about the drinking, and there had to be a first cause, a precipitating event. Shortly before she started school, his company held a groundbreaking for a new hospital. As purchasing agent, Ben was responsible for obtaining supplies, equipment, and materials. He’d thrown himself into it, putting in overtime, answering calls at all hours of the night. They would of course be acknowledging all that hard work at the celebration. He rented a tuxedo for the occasion. The hospital president stood on the podium and praised one by one the stellar performances of the talented, dedicated individuals that had made the new hospital possible. Ben’s name never came up. Gillian felt him shrink to nothing beside her. He never said a word about it but she could tell he was crushed. That was the cause of his drinking, obviously, and all that alcohol in his system made him unhappy with her.

Having a theory was no consolation, however, nor did it help. Ben was as impervious to logic as he was to emotional entreaties. Nothing she said to him resulted in a reduction of ethanol intake. He only became angry, as did she. She strove to keep to herself the opinion that he was sentencing her to a fate she didn’t deserve. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t, and she resented the hell out of it. She understood there were no guarantees, but she had never asked for much. She cared nothing for money or status or even good looks, only that she had someone to feel connected to. It was all she wanted in the world, and she had been happy. Now, for no good reason, that was being ripped away. Her husband of eight years wanted nothing to do with her, the only good relationship she’d ever had was unraveling, and she could only watch helplessly while the man she loved destroyed his life. This ordeal was orders of magnitude more devastating than being overlooked at a company groundbreaking ceremony, yet you didn’t see her crawling into a goddamned bottle.

“Wasn’t there a certain type of cologne you wanted?” he asked. “Perry something or other?”

He’d spent a bad night on the recliner and looked it, and he still wasn’t making eye contact with her, but at least it resembled a conversation. It was Valentine’s Day. Maybe he was making an effort.

“There is,” she said cheerily. “But get the smallest size and a bottle of lotion. That stuff is ridiculously expensive.”

He grunted and left for work.

Gillian had arranged a romantic weekend in Natchitoches, a town about an hour Northwest of Alexandria. She’d made reservations at a posh restaurant there, booked a room in a nice hotel, and spent a couple of hours at the hairdresser.  When Ben got home that evening she greeted him in red heels and a lipstick red dress guaranteed to peel the paint off the walls. He shuffled in, filled a glass from the wine box in the fridge, and unceremoniously handed her a store-wrapped gift which, when opened, was a large bottle of the expensive cologne.

“Oh, honey, thank you but… this is way too much money. I asked for the small bottle and some lotion, remember?”

Ben had been moving toward the living room. He stopped in his tracks and turned to face her.

“So basically I fucked up again.” He held his arms out to the side. “I’m a fuck up, is what you’re saying.”

“No. We’re on a budget and this is too much to spend on cologne. That’s all I’m saying.”

A cabinet door next to him was halfway open, and he reached up and slammed it with a tremendous bang. It popped back open and he slammed it again. He walked into the living room drinking the wine and began pacing about.

“I don’t know why I fucking bother,” he said. “Sick and tired of this bullshit.”

Gillian followed behind him. Her tone was as conciliatory as she could possible make it. “Look, Ben, I’m sorry. It’s a gift, I was rude. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just… forgive me, will you? I’m the one who fucked up.”

It was as if he didn’t hear her. “I mean, you’re relentless. It’s never ending.”  He started yelling.  “What the hell am I supposed to do? Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide! How much of this shit am I supposed to take?”

“I really am sorry. Please, Ben. My mistake. Please.”

He shook his head and downed the wine, set the glass on the coffee table, and went to the front door, cursing under his breath.

“Where are you going?” Gillian pleaded.

“Away from here.”  He slammed the door behind him.

She wrung her hands for a couple of hours in the living room, worried he would tank up in some bar, then remembered he kept a bottle of wine in the back seat. She drank coffee for another couple of hours, alone in a booth at Shoney’s, in her red dress and heels. There was nothing to do but go home and cancel the room at the hotel. He came back at midnight, drunk, and konked out in the recliner.

One week later she sat on the porch and waited for him to come home from work, hoping to say what she needed to say before he got too much booze in him and became volatile.

When he arrived, she patted the stoop next to her. “Sit here with me,” she said breezily.

He looked at her for a long moment before joining her.

She had intended to keep it light, but she broke down the moment she opened her mouth. Fortunately, she had become pretty good at remaining intelligible while her body was racked with sobs.

“We’ve got to stop hurting each other. It’s both of us. I was wrong about the cologne and I’m sorry. I think I need to give you some spa-“

“Good idea,” he interrupted.

Gillian went on. “I’m going to move into the dorm until you get the drinking under control. I made a school loan and I borrowed some money from my mother to rent a truck. We have to solve this, Ben. We’ll solve it together. The dorm isn’t far from here at all.  I’ll do anything it takes. I’ll go to therapy, I’ll go to meetings, whatever. If there’s anything you need me to do, just tell me.”

He had remained impenetrable, staring straight ahead, while she talked and cried. When she was done he looked at her with cold contempt.

“I always knew you’d leave one day.”

47

“Well, you do exude sexuality.”

Gillian felt uneasy at the remark but complimented nonetheless, coming as it did from a therapist who was, she was sure, genuinely trying to help her. Nor was the statement entirely out of context. She’d just finished describing how jealous Ben was, and how insecure in the marriage.

“Um…thanks,” she said.

The clinician, Brian Hoople, took off his glasses and nervously cleaned them with a small white chamois. Hoople’s wife, also a therapist, had an office just across the hall. That probably helped him focus,Gillian thought.

He adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat. “But of course it wasn’t about that. Your husband had his issues.”

“My husband has his issues,” she corrected. “He’s still my husband. I haven’t completely given up yet.”

“Right, right. And now you’re moving out of the dorm.”

“Yes. Into a trailer he bought for me. I also got the car. In lieu of me not getting any money for the house.”

“What did he get for the house?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“How much was the trailer?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

Hoople’s eyebrows went up. “He made out like a bandit, didn’t he?”

“It was a fair enough deal. It’s a brand new Mitsubishi. And he pays for my car and health insurance.”

Hoople seemed a little disappointed. He shifted in his chair, signaling a change of subject. “Ok,  just so I’m clear, your goal for therapy—”

“To stop feeling this way.”

“Betrayed.”

Gillian nodded. She began crying silently. She’d been determined not to.

“Betrayed,” he went on, “even though it might turn out that in the long run, the demise of this marriage wouldn’t be altogether a bad thing. In which case he did you a tremendous favor. You should at least consider the possibility.”

She frowned as the tears continued to flow. “No. I was the lucky one, not him. All of my relationships before Ben were shit. He made me feel safe. I loved every minute of the time we were together.”

Hoople drummed his fingers on his desk while her sobs redoubled. He stood, walked across the office, picked up a box of tissues on the end table. “You know there’s a great clinical debate on the Kleenex issue. If a therapist gives them to a client,  is the unspoken message that crying makes the therapist uncomfortable and the client should stop immediately? That’s not very therapeutic, is it? On the other hand, what if the client’s mascara is running down her face and making an unsightly mess?”

Gillian laughed through repressed sobs and took the box.

He returned to his chair. “I would like to clear something up before we go on. Do you have any notions that you’re the cause of Ben’s drinking?”

She nodded, dabbing at her eyes. “It had crossed my mind.”

He shook his head. “Except at gun point, one person cannot make another person pour alcohol down his own throat. If a person could do that, the person would rule the world inside of ten minutes.”

She looked at him, sniffling. “I can sort of see that.”

“Great.” He check marked a giant box in the air. “So you originally moved into the dorm because his drinking made him impossible to live with.”

“Yes.”

“I agree that was the absolute correct decision.”

She dabbed at her eyes and composed herself. “We started out renting near his parents, but eventually we got our own place. We put a lot of love and energy into it. We made it our own. When  I moved out, I figured after a couple of months he’d realize I was more important than alcohol.” She looked down at the wad of tissue in her hands. “That didn’t happen. He dug in his heels, I guess you could say, with the drinking. I never went back home.”

Hoople scribbled something on his pad.  “The two of you did continue to communicate, though. How’d that go?”

“Badly.”

He waited for her to go on.

“He’d come by the dorm to pick up Audrey—”

“Audrey moved into the dorm with you?”

Gillian nodded. “I wanted to keep an eye on her. Before I moved out, I found her bedroom window unlocked a couple of times. She was either sneaking out or boys were sneaking in. She only stayed with me on campus a couple of weeks.”

“How come?”

“The dorm walls were made of cardboard, it seemed. The people in the adjacent room had a lot of sex. We could hear everything, moaning and screaming, it was ridiculous. Audrey told Ben’s mother about it, who then instructed her to tell me that she didn’t want to live there any more.”

“Your mother-in-law has that much influence with her?”

Gillian didn’t answer.

“Ok, so Ben would stop by the dorm.”

“Yes. Sometimes he cried when he saw me. And he’d tell me he would be trying to write me letters and would just sit there at his desk, crying. Because I left. But every time I saw him I’d beg and plead for him to slow down on the drinking and I’d come back. He didn’t want to hear that.”

“Just to clarify. You made it clear you wanted the marriage to work, but he was unwilling to decrease his booze intake to facilitate that. In the meantime, he starts sobbing at the sight of you, and he tells you that he weeps while writing love letters. Do I have that about right?”

Gillian nodded.

“Ok. Just checking. Sorry to interrupt.”

“He had a key to my dorm room, and if he came in when I wasn’t there he’d go through my stuff or listen to my machine. One time he heard a message from a kid I work with.”

“Your part-time job at the office products store.”

“Yes.  A completely benign message that started out, ‘hi, beautiful.’ That’s just how the guy talked. I had no interest in him. The message was about beepers or whatever. Ben went wild with jealousy. When I got home a few minutes later and tried to console him, he shoved me away. I fell and twisted my ankle, and he ran out of the dorm and took off. He later told me how stupid he felt because he could see that obviously I’d ‘moved on.’”

“You’d ‘moved on.’ Despite all your begging and pleading to reconcile.”

“Yes.”

“And when you tried to explain he was interpreting the message on the machine all wrong, the big teddy bear, as you had described him, pushed you down, actually causing an injury.”

“He was very upset.”

“Mm-hm. The two of you continued to talk, though, I suppose to hash things out?”

“I don’t know. We talked, but more and more it seemed like he’d made his decision. He asked me to dinner for our anniversary. No gifts, he said. I agreed to that, fine. But I bought him a couple of pairs of shorts and put them in a bag, nothing fancy.  I couldn’t help myself. He picks me up at the dorm, I give him the shorts, he becomes livid and yells at me, ’We agreed no presents!’  Dinner was strained, we just stared at our plates. He didn’t want a gift from me.”

“He was angry with you. For buying him a gift.”

“He was angry a lot.  In my third semester, I was inducted into the Psy-Chi Honor Society, for psych students who maintain at least a B average, which I had. Which I still have. That irritated him, too, because he’d always been a C student. I went to the ceremony by myself, which felt strange, since the other inductees had someone there with them. To be proud of them. After the banquet was over I went to the house. Ben didn’t let me in, just stood in the doorway while I told him about it. I just wanted to share it with him. He mumbled something and closed the door in my face.”

Hoople nodded.

“He got mad at me again when I found some work with a singing telegram company.  Financially I was digging myself into hole— still am— taking out loans so I can stay in school and stay in the dorm. I’m always looking for ways to make money.”

“Singing telegrams?”

“Yes. The office products store where I work, the owner’s wife has a singing telegram business. First I sang a little radio promo for them. It was a ten-second excerpt of a song. Someone told his mother about it, she told Ben, and he got mad. He called me at work and complained that I was making a spectacle of myself.”

“That you were making a spectacle of your self.”

“Yes. Then he got really mad when I did the actual singing telegrams. I was dressed as a princess, with the long white gown, heart-shaped cut, the tall cone-shaped hat and the veils. I sang the tune, put my arm around them, kissed them on the cheek. I did twelve jobs on Valentine’s day. I went to a fire station, a gas station, a boot store, a dock at a military base, where the recipient got all embarrassed and hustled me back into a store room. I went to a dentist’s office, and the guy in the chair thought I was there to sing to him and gesticulated wildly for his mouth to be unpacked. In a long-shot coincidence, the wife of our homeowner’s insurance agent set up a telegram at the donut shop where she knew he’d be. Afterward, the guy called Ben and told him how much he enjoyed me singing to him. Ben was not happy. I was embarrassing myself all over town, he said.”

“You were embarrassing your self all over town.”

Gillian looked at him. “Why do you keep saying it like that?”

Hoople shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It just strikes me as odd. You’re working an extra job to make ends meet and you’re able to utilize your singing talent and have a little fun while you’re at it.  Ben’s response was to try to make you feel ashamed of yourself.”

“I think I mentioned before how he reacted to me singing.”

“You did. So I suppose you made certain not to sing in his presence. Because it upset him.”

“Yes. Well, no.”  She looked a little sheepish. “We’d planned to meet and talk. We did that a lot, met and talked. It was always the same conversation. I wanted him to quit drinking, he refused. Anyway we met at a restaurant with a bar, and there was a band.”

“Uh oh.”

“They were very nice.”

“So you got up and sang a song to Ben.”

Gillian hung her head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

“And of course he bolted.”

“Straight to the parking lot.”

“I imagine it was a while before he met you to talk again.”

“Yes, but you know, it didn’t matter. It was as if the universe were conspiring against him.”

“How do you mean?”
“I took a few line dancing classes, and Channel Two showed up at one of them. They were doing some kind of special. It aired not long after the song in the bar. For some reason the cameras focused on me all evening. One night Ben goes home and turns on the tube, and there I am, queen of the dance floor.”

“Making another spectacle of yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Hm. Did you do anything else to arouse his ire?”

“No. Well, yes. I took some lingerie photos and gave them to him. Garter belts, fishnets. I thought he would like them. I thought they’d change his mind and he’d ask me to come home.”

“How did that go over?” Hoople asked evenly.

“He yelled at me, said they were disgusting. Maybe he imagined the photographer had designs or something. Ridiculous. The guy was nothing but professional. He was Raymond Burr’s photographer. He asked me to do it because he wanted the pics for his portfolio. Didn’t even charge me.”

Hoople again removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes.

“After the singing and the dancing and the pictures, Ben told me that when he met me, he would never have imagined I was capable of such behavior.”

“He actually said that.”

Something in Hoople’s tone stopped her. “He was just lashing out. He was hurting.”

“Why are you defending him? That was a vicious thing to say. You act as though by telling the truth, you’re betraying him.”

Instead of crying, Gillian set her jaw. “He wasn’t the only one who behaved badly.”

Hoople glanced at the clock on the wall positioned just over the client’s shoulder.  “Ok. Let’s start there next time.”

48

“A friend of mine told me she saw Ben in a restaurant with a pretty blond woman. She couldn’t tell if it was a date or a business meeting. This was maybe six months after I moved out. I still thought we might get back together, that he would go to rehab and get straight. I couldn’t imagine that he would date anyone else, not that soon.”

“Had you gone out with anyone?” Hoople asked.

“I hadn’t yet, at the time. Not exactly, anyway.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That’s next.”

“Ok.”

“After I hear about his dinner, I manage to hold it together for about twenty-four hours. Around eleven o’clock the following night I drive over there. He’s in bed asleep. I go charging through the house, turning on all the lights. When I get to the bedroom he’s sitting bolt upright, ’What the hell’s going on?’ I yell at him to get the fuck out of bed now, we have to talk. ‘Calm down, you’re scaring me,’ he says. We go into the kitchen, where I scream at him like a banshee. ’Who’s the bitch you went out with?’ He says she was a business associate, that she had an early flight and they had work to discuss. It’s like I don’t even hear him. ‘You’re my husband,” I shout at him. ‘You’re supposed to be working on getting back together! You don’t love me, you don’t’ etc, etc. He tells me I’m maniacal and I need to go outside. He grabs me by the shoulders and pushes me out the door.”

“Then you left?”

“I sat on the stoop and bawled hysterically for about an hour. Then I left.”

Hoople nodded. “That’s it? That’s your bad behavior?”

“No, I’m just getting started. I would go to where he worked and pretty much degrade myself. All of his co-workers knew we’d separated. He would hustle me out of his office, usually for a walk on the levee, behind his building. I felt so unwanted.  I’d be crying my ass off.  ‘Don’t you want to try, don’t you miss us, tell me why you don’t miss us,’ blah blah blah.”

“Why do you sound disgusted with yourself? You were just trying to save the marriage.”

She shrugged. “Because I failed, I guess.”

“You said you dated but ‘not exactly.’ Tell me about that.”

“I went on a couple of dates. Nothing ever happened, not even kissing. However. There was this kid in one of my classes.”

“Oh?”

“His name was Andrew. At night he’d throw quarters at my window on the second story of the dorm. He’d walk me to class, put little notes on my car. He was very attentive. One time he took me to his house— he lived with his mom— put me up on the counter, and kissed me. I kissed him back…reluctantly. I would never have had sex with him, but I thought about it a lot. With Ben I’d been feeling like chopped liver for quite a while.”

“Ben never showed any serious interest in getting back together.”

“Not really. One time he called and asked if I wanted to do something. I got all excited, dressed myself up. When he arrived at the dorm he said we weren’t going anywhere. He just wanted to have sex. Of course he was drunk. I felt…” she looked at the floor, searching for the word.

“Insulted?” Hoople suggested.

“Insignificant,” Gillian said.  “Which made me mad. I yelled at him, ‘you can’t take me out to dinner but you think you can come over and fuck?’  He shouldn’t have been driving so I let him stay the night on the couch. He left early the next morning without a word.  All in all I was feeling a bit undervalued. I might’ve latched onto anyone who paid me some attention. So I got a little obsessive with Andrew. I hadn’t even realized it.  When he figured out I wasn’t going to have sex with him, he ignored me. I was surprised at how bad that hurt my feelings. I parked in front of his house a couple of times and had a good cry. I thought we were friends.”

“Hm. Let me ask you, all during this time you were attending classes and doing well.”

“I was.”

“Do you enjoy school?”

“I love every minute of it— did from the start. My professors have all been wonderful. Most of them are real characters. They make it interesting. I record the classes and then go home every evening and transcribe it all into written notes. I’m learning so much, in every subject, not just psychology.”

“And it was about the time you started school that Ben’s serious drinking started.”

“Yes.”

Hoople gave her a long look.

“What?” she said.

“I understand that you’ve lost a ten-year marriage. I’m not interested in trashing the relationship or talking you out of your grief.  But there’s a larger issue here.”

“Which is what?”

“You said all your relationships before Ben were shit.”

“They were. Well. Almost all.”

“And here’s this Andrew, who only wanted sex.”

“A kid with too many hormones.”

“The larger issue is that you’re determined to pick men who treat you badly.”

“No, I’m not ‘determined’ to do that. Ben did not treat me badly. He treated me like a queen. For eight years, anyway.’

“He treated you like a queen as long as you weren’t you.”

Gillian shook her head. “Not true.”

“He himself admitted it! He told you he never would have married you had he known who you really were.”

“He never said that. What he said was, he would never have believed me capable of those things when he met me.”

“Oh, excuse me,” Hoople said, elaborately rolling his eyes. “I stand corrected.” 

“No, excuse me. I’m pretty sure he would’ve married me anyway. Aren’t you?”

“Didn’t you tell me that it was a very rocky courtship? That  he played a constant game of approach and retreat? Approach and retreat. Approach and retreat. If another guy looked at you, he’d bolt. That’s all it took. You talked about how infuriating it was for you.”

Gillian said nothing.

“Sure, he probably would’ve eventually married you if you’d stood up on stage and sang to him in a bar… even though he couldn’t hear the second half of the song because he was hiding in a car in the parking lot. And sure, he probably would’ve eventually said his vows if the television camera happened to catch you at dance class, or if he and his mother heard you sing a jingle on the radio. But what if, in your courting days, he found out you’d been all around town in a princess outfit, crooning to strangers? Hmmm that one gives me pause. And how about if you had presented him with an album of glamour shots? Oh, my god. I’m pretty certain that would’ve been a deal breaker.  But let’s say even that didn’t frighten him off completely. What if you’d enrolled in college before the nuptials, and started making better grades than he ever did? Cancel the reservation at the church!”

“For someone who’s not interested in trashing the relationship, you’re working pretty hard at it.”

Hoople leaned back and sighed heavily. “I admit it looks that way. Of course Ben had— has— his good points. Yes, you loved him and enjoyed being with him for those eight years. I just want you to consider the possibility that he is absolutely part of the pattern.”

“Choosing men who treat me badly.”

“Not just that. Choosing men precisely because they will treat you badly.”

“Why on Earth would I do that? And how could I possibly know in advance they would treat me that way?”

“Boy, I wish I knew the answers to those questions.”

“And you’re telling me this…why?”

“So that you’ll cut it out!”

“I see. In other words, you don’t know why or how I do this, you just want me to knock it off! That’s your deep insightful therapy.”

Hoople guffawed. “I guess that’s about the size of it.”

They sat quietly for a few moments. Gillian glanced over her shoulder at the clock. “I guess our time’s up.”

“Yep.”

“I’ll call if I can schedule another session. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to.”

“Of course.”

She looked at him fondly. “I’ll miss these sessions. You know, I have this daydream, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, that I drive over here and sit in the driveway. You drive up by sheer coincidence, and we have an impromptu talk.”

“Oh,” said Hoople. “Really?”
“Uh-huh,” said Gillian. “Well, goodbye.”

“Um, before you go, would you happen to have a cigarette?” Hoople asked.

She retrieved a pack from her purse, shook a couple loose. He took one.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Gillian said.

“I don’t.”

As she was driving away, she saw him leaning against the side of the building, a cloud of smoke around his head.

Interlude—Present Day 3

Ann rolled up a five dollar bill and dropped it into the tip jar at the end of the bar. She ordered a beer and sat next to Walter.

“Were we scheduled for today?” he asked.

“No, but I’m out of town the rest of the week. I had to cancel Gillian’s appointment as well. I just felt like a beer, actually.”

“Oh. So where you headed?”

“Baltimore.”

“Going to catch an Orioles’ game?”

“No, we’re visiting Todd’s family.”

“Todd. Your fiancé.”

“Yes.”

The bartender set a glass of Scotch and ice on the bar. Walter put his hand around the cold glass. “Is this your first time meeting them?”

“Oh no. I know the Dyers pretty well.” She upended her beer.

“So you’re looking forward to the trip.”

Several moments later she finally set down the nearly empty bottle. She squinted for a moment at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“Sure.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Here’s something interesting. I’ve noticed some worrisome parallels.”

“Between?”

“Between Gillian and me. Between her in-laws and my in-laws to-be. Even between Ben and Todd.”

Walter waived his hand dismissively. “That’s pretty common.   To see yourself in clients.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Not significant.”

“Well that’s a relief. But it’s interesting.”

“Yes.”

“For example, Todd’s mother is no Fran Wallace, not by a long shot, but she has always made her smiling little comments. About what I wear, how I do my hair, whatever. Smile or no smile, she made it known she disapproved. I always thought it was me. That I was being overly sensitive. It wasn’t me.  And even as little as we see them, she always manages to draw me into at least one game of tug-of-war, with Todd as the rope.”

“Hm.  What about her Dad?”

“A nice guy. Something of a milksop.”

“That is eerily similar. But Todd isn’t drawn into his mother’s agenda, is he?

“I didn’t used to think so, but after listening to Gillian’s story, I’m not all that sure.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. “Todd always said he was remaining neutral. “That’s how she is, just ignore her, we’ll only be here a few days,’ he’d say. But it never felt to me like it was neutral. If he’s not going to align himself with his fiance, then he’s actually aligning himself with his mother.”

“Not ideal, but not all that uncommon. And for the sake of the discussion, Todd didn’t go off the deep end because you went to college.”

“We met in college. But when I decided to go to graduate school, he wasn’t thrilled. He told me one day, in a surprisingly stern tone, that he wanted children and that he didn’t want to wait forever to start a family.”

“You went anyway.”

“I did go anyway. The next time we visited the Dyers, future Mother-In-Law snippily gave me to understand that I was selfishly ‘putting myself before my family.’”

“I’m guessing she didn’t go to college in order to have baby Todd.”

“And Todd’s three siblings.”

“There you go. She wants you to do what she did. The knee jerk response of ninety-nine point nine percent of the population.”

“I think you’re missing my point.”

“No, I got it. You’re having thoughts that Todd is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“No, nothing so dire as that. I just find the parallels interesting. And troubling.”

“Sure.”

“My fiancé is a good man. Of course I have no doubts about that.”

“But then, so was Ben,” Walter said.

Ann ignored the remark. “Her therapist told her she’d chosen him because she knew, somehow, that one day he would treat her badly. That’s hard to fathom. I think Ben was more of a guy who ultimately just didn’t know which end was up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He bought her that trailer and the Mitsubishi, kept her on his insurance for five years. That’s honorable behavior. Then, Gillian told me he was later investigated by the hospital where he worked. For misappropriating funds.”

“Hm. Interesting.”

“They never got back together,” she went on, “after Gillian moved into the dorm. In retrospect that was clearly the end, but it wasn’t clear to them, at the time. After that, the relationship just sort of dribbled off.”

“Not with a bang but a whimper?”

“Yes. She put the trailer he bought her in a park in Alexandria. It turned out to be a terrible place. Drug deals, shootings. She was hit on by every male who happened by- the AC repairman, the men who built the fence, the guy who hooked up the dishwasher. They’d over-charge, then creepily insinuate she pay for the services with sex. Still married and missing her husband, it was upsetting. She clung to what remained of the relationship with Ben. They visited, shopped together, went out. She would break down crying in restaurants, but he wanted none of it. “Let’s not go there,” he’d say. Their communication grew more and more estranged. Gillian once asked him if he was gay. His reply was a caustic, ‘why, because someone would have to be gay not to want to be with you?’ After Gillian’s stint with Hoople, they went to a marriage counselor for a number of months. That ended when Ben stated outright in session that he didn’t want a relationship any more. Outside the office, he told her he had discussed it with his mother, and he decided it was the best thing.

“And that was the end.”

“Not yet. She asked him to a friendly lunch shortly thereafter. They were in the park by the Alexandria Zoo and she tried to talk him into reconsidering. ‘We have a life, a home, we’re a family, we’re connected, we have a history, you can’t throw all that away.’ was how her appeal went.  He folded his arms and turned his head. She tried to pull his arms open. He kept blocking her, pushing her back. “Won’t you even think it over,’ she pleaded. He said he didn’t want to discuss it. Gillian went to her knees on the ground, wrapped her arms around his legs, said, ‘I love you, I know you love me, I don’t understand.”  He pushed her off, told her to get away from him.  She fell back on her hands. He wouldn’t look at her, she said, so she left.”

“Quite a dramatic scene,” Walter said. “I suppose that finished it.”

“No. Even after she moved away from there, she didn’t give up on trying to get him back. One one occasion she made the three hour drive back to Alexandria. He never changed the lock at their house and he came home to find her waiting for him at the table.  He came in, said what the hell are you doing, you can’t just walk in, I’m going to change the locks, I can’t have you doing this.  Gillian cried all the way home.  So, yes, not with a bang but a whimper.”

“It’s not easy letting go.”

“No. Finally, Gillian tearfully asked him if they could remain friends.”

“Did they?” asked Walter.

“She said they did. Until he died of cancer in 2010.”

“Good for them.”

“She told me about their last conversation. Ben was living in Texas at the time, Gillian still in Louisiana. He was in Baton Rouge for work, called her up, they met for coffee.  They hadn’t seen each other in several years. They chit chatted a while, then Gillian asked him if he thought she’d been a bad wife.”

“Hm. What’d he say?”

“About what you’d expect. He told her of course not, she’d been a good wife. The reason they’d split up was just circumstances, and they were probably just doomed from the start. He acknowledged that she’d bent over backwards trying to get along with his mother.”

“All of that one hundred per cent accurate,” Walter nodded. “Did either of them mention his drinking?”

“I asked her that. They did not. I guess there was no point, really. For Gillian’s sake, though, I’m sorry he succumbed.”

“Succumbed?”

“To the alcohol.”

Walter downed what remained in the glass, ordered another, and sat scowling.

“What’s wrong?” Ann asked. “You don’t agree that he lost that battle?”

“I don’t agree that you can discuss a person’s life in terms of victory or defeat. It isn’t a contest, although, if you’re a good American, you see everything as one.”

“A good American? Which is what, exactly?”

“Anyone stupid enough to enter the contest,” Walter said bitterly.

“I have to say you’ve lost me. How many have you had?” she asked, glancing at his cocktail.

“Not enough.” He said with the glass on its way to his lips. “So in the language of the moronocracy, the man was a warrior who entered into battle hamstrung, blindfolded, and bound in chains. On the day of his birth he was dealt an unplayable hand, but he anted up anyway. He was hammered, pummeled, hit from behind, and kicked when he was down. He made one Sisyphean lunge at happiness that lasted eight years, and you can say he ‘succumbed’ if you like, but I say he went down swinging.”

Ann glanced into the corner and saw that Walter’s amplifier was switched off, his guitar in its case. “Did you drive here?” she asked quietly. “Can I give you a lift home?”

49

"This ia KRRV news brief. The Chamber of Commerce today rejected a proposal by the Alexandria Coalition for Mental Health to fund a one year study on the long term effects of child sexual abuse. The research, aimed at education and prevention and submitted by the Louisiana State University at Alexandria Department of Psychology, has received some grant funding but requires additional assistance. Dr. Nathan Holloman of LSUA addressed the Chamber at yesterday's meeting. (play recording:) 'The local, regional, and statewide impact of this problem does indeed reflect crimes against our children, but the implications for all of us, long post childhood, are significant not just psychologically but socially and economically as well."  A Chamber of Commerce spokesman stated that, quote, 'while the project is laudable, funds are not available at this time.' End quote. I'm Gillian Wallace."

“Would you like to make an old fat man very happy?”

As she moved away reflexively, Gillian glanced up and got an impression of a round red face, a shiny pate encircled by sparse gray hair, a meager beard. Having little room to maneuver at the crowded bar, she backed into the classmate she’d come out with, Lil, also a recent divorcee. The jostle caused Lil to spill some of her drink.

“Damn it!” she said, her Bloody Mary dripping from her fingers.

“No, not that,” the fat man continued affably. “You’re here with Lil, aren’t you? I saw you come in together. She can vouch for me.”

Lil, wiping her hands with a napkin, turned around. “Hi, Chuck,” she said.

“Hi, Lil. Please tell your friend here I’m harmless.”

“He’s harmless.” Her introduction was quick. “Chuck Burton, Gillian Wallace. He used to play golf with my ex. Gillian and I have classes together.

“Ah, another shrink-to-be,” said Chuck. “Feel free to peer into my psyche. You’ll find my motives completely honorable.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” said Gillian. They shook hands.

“And you, Gillian. I was actually being serious a moment ago. My company has an annual ball, quite the posh affair with all the money they blow on it. It’s held at Waverly Hall, you know, the place with the big chandeliers?”

“Oh yes,” Gillian nodded.  “Very ritzy.”

“It is indeed. And I’d be honored if you would allow me to escort you to said extravaganza.”

Gillian looked around to get her friend’s take on this, but Lil had returned to her own conversation as soon as she’d made the introductions.

“I’ll pay for everything of course. Ball gown, new shoes, hairdresser, whatever you’d like. I’d want you to go all out.” He smiled at her expectantly.

He seemed to expect an answer immediately. “Why me?” she asked, buying time. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I’m an excellent judge of character,” he said. “I know you’d be the perfect companion for the evening. At the very least, I’ll make all my friends jealous.”

She’d been wary, now she was flattered. He was intelligently dressed for a fat man in his dark, double-breasted jacket, lighter pants with suspenders, and a wide blue tie that reached exactly to the top of his trousers. She didn’t get a great look at them but she guessed they were Gucci loafers. He could have asked any girl in the place, or any girl anywhere for that matter, but he’d picked her.

“I agreed to go,” she told Lil on the way home.

“And why not? You’ll do him a giant favor and be queen for a day.”

She found a store that sold second hand ball gowns and bought a solid black, off-the-shoulder, antebellum dress with a hoop skirt. To go with the black gown she died her hair fire engine red, reclaiming a side of herself Ben had not allowed.  She spent three hours getting her hair done and another two with the cosmetologist. The whole thing set Chuck back about $500. He made out like a bandit. At the ball, Chuck paraded her in front of his friends, who then buzzed around her all night long.  He was cagey when they wanted to know who she was and how in hell did he get her to go out with him. “I could tell them you’re the crown Princess of Mangrovia or somewhere and they’d believe me,” he laughed. They all asked her to dance, but Chuck refused to allow it. Gillian smiled and shrugged and played along. When the night was over he drove her home and, like a perfect gentleman, took her by the hand, walked her to her door, and received a kiss on the cheek. They thanked each other for a wonderful evening.

Gillian had a part time job at a Merle Norman outlet in the Alexandria mall. They’d hired her on the spot when they learned about her experience in their New Orleans stores as a 19 year old. She became friends with a co-worker, a woman named Millie, and the two would often go for drinks after work.

“He was absolutely the love of my life. My soul mate. It was one of those relationships where, when we were in each other’s company, we forgot about everything else. He was happy when we were together, I know that, and no one will every convince me otherwise.”

Gillian nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“And I know we were truly soul mates,” Millie went on. “I believe in that. The problem with Me and Charlie, we were each other’s first love, childhood sweethearts. We didn’t know enough to stay together. I still have feelings for him, and he’s never gotten over me. He’s obsessed with me.”

“How do you know that?” asked Gillian. Millie didn’t strike her as someone to become obsessed over, although attractive enough for 40, Gillian supposed, in a strange sort of way. She had pretty black hair and nice skin, but she had funny looking lips, and a lisp.

“Because his mother and I kept in touch all these years. She keeps trying to get us back together. She wants me to come visit her, and Charlie would come over, if I wanted, you know, to see if the spark was still there.”

“And what if the spark is still there?” Gillian said, becoming more interested.

Millie shrugged. “Nothing, really. I’m not going to break up my family. I guess it’s mostly a curiosity thing.”

“Where do they live?”

“Houston.”

“You should go,” said Gillian.

“I’d love to, but Mitch would have a fit.” Mitch was her husband, a nice enough guy but very dull. He watched a lot of TV when he was home. He worked every day and kept the yard nice, but there wasn’t much else. The marriage had gone stale.  She would have left him long ago if not for their two children, Millie once told her. Suddenly, she gave Gillian a significant look. “Hey, why don’t you come with me? Mitch wouldn’t have a problem if I were going with someone on a trip to Houston!”

Gillian thought about it. They could make it a weekend jaunt so she wouldn’t miss any classes. “Sure, why not?”

“Fantastic. You wouldn’t mind driving, would you?”

Charlie’s mother lived in an enormous elegant house in an upscale Houston subdivision. Cora greeted them warmly, and it was obvious to Gillian that she and Millie were good friends. They’d arrived late on Friday night, so Cora quickly settled them in a spacious room.They’d sleep in matching twin beds with gilt bedposts.They all visited briefly in the sitting room before turning in.

Charlie came over the next afternoon as soon as he got off work. He wasn’t unattractive but nothing to write home about. Around six feet tall with a paunch, mustache and goatee, glasses, thin, graying hair. He was a branch manager over several Luby’s restaurants in the area. Gillian watched in fascination as Millie melted into a quiet little flower. They all went out to eat and reminisced about the high school years. After dinner they took Cora home and the three of them drove to a club. They found a table and ordered drinks. The sweethearts held hands and stared at each other like puppy dogs. Charlie wasted no time. He told Millie he’d married briefly but that he’d never gotten over her. She said she thought a lot about him, too, over the years. He wanted her to leave her husband and move in with him. He would take care of her children, too. Millie asked him to let her think about it. Gillian was impressed. Her friend never so much as broke eye contact with the guy, even though she knew she wasn’t even going to sleep with him, let alone leave her husband. Charlie smiled at her. He’d waited this long. He squeezed her hand and went to fetch another round of drinks.

The place was a disco style bar with a Grecian theme, lots of rounded arches and hieroglyphs on the walls. A load bearing post, about twenty inches in diameter, was painted to look like a Greek pillar. A fellow with an extremely receding hair line, long dirty blond hair, and a dark mustache had commandeered the dance floor. He was short, stocky, and obviously very muscular in his too-tight white jumpsuit. He was putting on a show with a repertoire of slithery disco moves.

“He looks like a poor cousin of the Bee-Gees,” said Gillian, “but he sure can dance.”

He pranced over to the Greek pillar and began gyrating against it while tossing his hair this way and that. Gillian and Millie were delighted.

“Look at this shit.” said Gillian. “He’s having sex with the support pole.”

She was glad their laughter couldn’t be heard over the music and crowd noise. She wasn’t out to hurt anyone’s feelings, and after the song the Bee-Gee came over to their table. Millie and Charlie were still holding hands, so he asked Gillian to dance.

“I will if you stay away from the pole,” she said.

“Hm. You’re a feisty little redhead, aren’t you?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she laughed.

The first number was a slow one. Bee-Gee was smooth, professional, dipping her right and left.  Gillian had never danced with anyone that proficient, seamlessly re-directing her every misstep.  She found it very freeing. They stayed on the floor a while. After three or four songs she brought him back to their table. His name was Doug. He was friendly and had an ingratiating way about him. Gillian liked him. They went to lunch the next day and exchanged phone numbers. He suggested they get together more often.

“I really can’t come to Houston much,” she told him.  “I’m in school full time and I’ve got a job nights doing radio news. It’s part time and temporary- I’m filling in for someone- but I’m hoping to stay on there in some capacity.”

“I’ll pay for the bus if you want to make the trip,” he said.

They talked frequently on the phone. He addressed her as “baby girl,” which she liked. He told her he worked selling cars, mostly used, but that he had been a Chippendale dancer, the Houston branch. “I’m still in very good shape,” he said, “but you should’ve seen me then.” He sent her old photos of himself in his various outfits. “And I can still dance. I still got all the moves.”

After a month of long distance calls, Gillian agreed to visit him in Houston. It was the semester break, and the radio newscaster for whom she had substituted returned from maternity leave. She had a whole week off. Millie drove her to the bus station.

“I don’t think you should be doing this,” she said. “You don’t really know this guy. He might be an ax murderer.”

“I’ve been talking to him for over a month,” said Gillian. “He’s fine.”

But the moment she got off the bus in Houston, she noticed he was different. He was taciturn and seemed angry about something. He let her carry her own suitcase and walked ahead of her. Pushing through the heavy glass door out of the station, it swung closed behind him, almost knocking her down. He looked back impatiently and pulled it open, then grabbed her arm and snatched her through. “Hurry your ass up.”

“Excuse me?” said Gillian. “Don’t talk to me that way.”

“I’ll talk to you how I want,” he said. He tightened his grip on her arm. He was very strong and Gillian winced in pain. His breath stank. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed that before.

“Let go!” she said, trying to wrench away from him. She couldn’t. He glared at her for a long moment, then released her with a slight shove.

She wanted to get back on the bus to go home, but he had only bought her a one-way ticket. She was about to insist that he buy her another one, but he turned and grumbled an apology. Bad day at work, he said. He didn’t put much effort into selling it, but it was something.

He lived in an efficiency apartment, basically a tiny bedroom with a small adjoining bathroom and kitchen alcove, where the one cabinet prevented the refrigerator from opening all the way. A chest of drawers leaned against a wall in the bedroom. He had a television set and small formica table with two chairs. The place was cluttered and disorganized, strewn with dirty clothes and magazines. The sink and bathtub were filthy. Gillian set her suitcase in a corner.

He changed into his disco outfit, and they went to the Greek-themed club, apparently his regular hangout. There they met up with Harvey, a friend of Doug’s. They’d been Chippendales together, and now they worked at the same place selling used cars. Unlike Doug, who resembled a small tank, Harvey had kept his on-stage physique with the broad shoulders and slim hips. One side of his face appeared to have been melted with an iron. It was a pronounced red in color and streaked with deep scars from his cheek down into his neck. The eye on that side drooped a little. From the other side he was quite handsome, with dark curly hair and a pleasing, square-jawed profile.

While Doug was off dancing with himself, Harvey told her about the motorcycle accident that had left him disfigured. It happened during the time he was a Chippendale. This was before the mandatory helmet laws, nor was he wearing biker’s leathers. He was excited about buying the mid-sized Harley but was having difficulty learning to ride it. He kept falling off, he said. Finally, he got the hang of it. It felt great, tooling down the highway with the wind in his hair. Suddenly he hit something in the road, propelling him over the handlebars.  The pavement shredded his face, shoulder, arm, everything on his left side. Of course he couldn’t be a Chippendale any longer.

Every third or forth tune, Doug pulled her onto the floor. She remembered dancing with him on that first trip to Houston. She had experienced his crackerjack steerage as liberating; now she felt like a puppet on strings. She couldn’t wait to sit back down and talk to Harvey.  Something about a beautiful male figure having been mutilated in his prime was tragically compelling. He came across as humble, gentle, and sad; had he always been that way, or did the accident transform him from a Doug-like, prancing, narcissistic bully? She wanted to find out.

They said good-night to Harvey and returned to Doug’s tiny box. The moment they were inside, he wasted no time in trying to pull her clothes off. He untucked her blouse and she pushed his hand away; when he repeated the move, she slapped it away.

“No!” she said. “I mean it!”

He looked at her with rage and contempt. “You’re used to men falling all over you, aren’t you, Ms. Princess Spoiled Brat.”  He prowled around the small room as if searching for a way out, then went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

He came out in his underwear, giving her hardly a glance where she pressed against the wall. He climbed angrily into bed.

“There’s nowhere for me to sleep,” she said.

He yanked back the covers on the other side of the bed. “I’ll let you off this one time, but don’t pull this shit tomorrow.”

She stood in the dark until she heard him snoring, then eased as carefully as possible onto the extreme edge of the mattress. She lay awake most of the night, shaking in fear.

When she woke up, he was gone and she was dead bolted in. The handset was missing from the phone. “He’s going to kill me,” she thought. “Millie was right. He’s an ax murderer.” She passed the day in dismal apprehension of his return. She twisted the door knob a hundred times and tried to open the windows, which were painted shut. When she got hungry she looked around for food, but the cabinet and refrigerator were bare. There wasn’t even any coffee. The television supposedly worked but not without the remote, which he had either taken with him or hidden somewhere.

Doug came home at three that afternoon. Harvey was with him, which allayed her anxiety somewhat. Doug was munching something out of a white fast food bag. He didn’t offer her any.

Looking her up and down, Doug asked in an irritated tone what she had been doing. “No makeup, the same clothes? What the hell?”

“What the hell is right!” she said, about to cry. “You left me here locked in all day with nothing to eat or drink but tap water. There isn’t even any ice.”

“Oh, is that why you came here, to whine and complain, princess?”

This drew a scowl from Harvey, who then went to the refrigerator and looked inside.

“We’ve got to get back to work,” Doug said. “I expect you to be presentable when I get home.”

They left, but this time he didn’t bolt the door. The handset was still missing from the phone, though. Gillian frantically tried to figure out what to do. She had no idea what part of Houston she was in, but she figured it was probably best to put as much space between her and Doug as she could, then worry about getting home. But before she could finish collecting her things, Doug was back, this time without Harvey.

“Get dressed,” he said. “I’m not telling you again.”

Gillian’s back was pressed to the wall. “Please take me to the bus station.”

He shook his head. “It’s not time for you to go.”

He went into the bathroom and closed the door. He took forever, showering and primping. When he finally emerged in his disco suit, he hardly gave her a glance. “Don’t want to go out?” He shrugged.  “I’ll go without you.”  He left, locking her in again.

She felt like being sick but hadn’t eaten anything all day. Although she was exhausted the bed repulsed her, so she sat on the floor in the corner with her arms around her knees, unable to keep her eyes open but unable to sleep.

He returned around midnight, drunk. He put the handset in the cradle, then started again with the “princess” routine. “I guess you figgered the prince’d just take you to the ball without fuckin’ him, din’t you?” He yanked her off the floor and spit in her face. Then he hit her with his open hand on the side of her head and sent her reeling onto the bed. From the top drawer of the dresser he pulled out four pieces of rope. He grabbed her roughly and flipped her onto her back, then tied her hands and feet to the bed. If she struggled he backhanded her jaw. When she was secured to the four posts he raped her, calling her names like “princess bitch” and spitting on her. “I guess you thought you were gonna come here and play tiddly winks,” he said. His face was twisted in fury. When he was finished he untied her. She staggered sobbing into the bathroom. He was asleep when she came out. She slumped against the wall and watched him all night, afraid he would kill her.

When he got up the next morning, he was cheerful. “Good morning, princess,” he said jovially. He dressed and left, again locking her in.

The realization that he was not going to let her go sent her into a sort of stupefied calm. She began to numbly explore every inch of the tiny room, as much with her hands as with her eyes, searching for who knows what. A way out, perhaps, or anything that might be used as a weapon. On the other side of the refrigerator in the cubicle that was the kitchen, she discovered a couple of small shudders. They opened onto a grated platform that faced a distant shopping center. She screamed for help until her throat was sore, but she was three stories up and it was too far off, anyway.

After an hour passed, or maybe it was two, she wasn’t sure, she heard someone unlock the door and come in. It was Harvey.  The next thing she knew she was hugging him and sobbing uncontrollably. He’d brought her a hamburger and fries. Famished, she wolfed the food while tears still streamed down her face.

“Get your things together,” he said. “I’ll take you to the bus station.”

As they drove, she thanked him profusely and tried to  express her relief and gratitude. She labored to explain the situation, as much to herself as to Harvey, rambling on, sometimes breaking down into tears. “He was so sweet on the phone,” she said. “His voice had a… a kind of sarcastic lilt to it, like he was kidding about everything.”

“I could tell you were an innocent person,” Harvey said.

“I’m not, not really. I have a lot of experience with men, bad experiences. I didn’t see any of that in him. I understood we’d probably have sex sooner or later. I don’t even know his last name!”

Interlude—Present Day 4

“She said this experience changed her. It colored her life, is how she put it. After that, she said, she didn’t want anyone to touch her. She was mistrustful, emotionally closed. She said.”

Walter glanced over. “You’re not convinced?”

“What does ‘change’ mean anyway? A change in behavior? I kept thinking, maybe after that experience she would have stopped diving head first into bad choices in men.”

“It makes sense you would think that.”

“And yet,” said Ann.

“And yet— wait don’t tell me— the first thing she did was run out and dive head first into another bad choice in a man.”

“No,” Ann said. She picked up her beer, then put it down again without drinking. “Two bad choices in men.”