She knew that a “Devotee” is what they called someone like him.
I don’t deserve this, Nina thought, my life is bigger than this. “I am more than this!!!” she screamed at him, as she ripped the photos in half. He was truly startled by her fierceness. “Don’t you ever follow me again or I’ll have you arrested!”
He looked crestfallen. She was lucky. He could have been violent. She never saw him after that, although he could have been there. He could have stalked her, harassed her, been dangerous.
Walker could be dangerous. His was a fraternity of violence. Instinctively, she had rightly pegged him early as fitting into this same fringe category. He could not have known he was revealing his Devotee tendencies in their little car escapade or when he sent her the misshapen coffee mug inscribed: “Nobody’s perfeck.” He had sent it along with an apology for his behavior.
But Walker hadn’t figured himself out yet. He wasn’t exactly your typical Devotee.
Sure, he had some of the signs, but not the history.
Until Nina.
iii.
Anybody, or any thing, can be somebody’s fantasy.
For Devotees the attraction is the disability itself, not the person. It’s love on the perceived edges of society, the thrill of the unusual, the exotic, the foreign. The control.
Most of the Devotee profile fit Walker: professional, married, high intelligence, over-achiever, low in social interest, emotional stability and personal relations. Always wanting an encounter to be less threatening, with the other person more easily dominated, a touch of sadism and bondage, a captive audience without much chance of getting away. Walker was comfortable with these echoes of the typical interrogation room. So it never occurred to him that these feelings were out of line with his obsession for Nina.
Of course, one major difference that threw him off course was his wish to take care of Nina, as he also wished, under all that control, someone would take care of him. But there was also another difference. Why this obsession now, when it had never occurred before in his life?
It was Nina: the antagonism, the lively contentiousness, the love impulse in men set off by the possibility of conquering conflict, of a victory made sweeter by triumph in the face of resistance, the two emotions of elation and fright. The job description of a law enforcement officer.
But the unbearable erotic combination for Walker was that Nina seemed both helpless and unconquerable. Yet, in spite of her attitude, he still had hopes for them. He knew Nina wanted nothing to do with him now, but even real love is often tainted with dislike.
He believed she would see that their constant friction was a form of intimacy in itself.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
i.
My poor sister, Nina thought, if this guy is still on her case.
“Did you know Detective Walker called me again?” Nina asked Regina. “He’s coming over because he said he thinks he may have a ‘new idea.’ What’s he doing...? I didn’t think he was still working on your case....”
“Since, apparently as far as the police are concerned, I don’t have a case, I have no idea what he’s doing.....!” Regina said hysterically into the phone. “I don’t know what any of them are doing. I thought it was Detective Vega--that weird Angela woman--who was doing the real work on the investigation, but maybe not. She just comes and takes some information as though I were merely reporting a stolen TV, instead of multiple threats to my life!! Actually I don’t think anyone is really ‘on’ my case. All they do is wander around and tell me not to worry.
But neither one of them seems to be able to put a stop to this craziness.”
Regina did not add that for some strange and unknown reason, Angela was occasionally able to put a stop to her fear. Maybe she just wore it out with her incessant talking. Regina had this image of her fear drowning in a sea of Angela’s words and not being able to come up for air.
“Well, I really don’t want to see Det. Walker again,” Nina told her, “but for your sake I feel--if there is something new--I don’t have a choice.”
Nina did not tell Regina why she was uncomfortable with Walker. She thought there was as much chance that it could be just another excuse for him to bother her, as well as to be a real breakthrough. But maybe it would be all right now. Walker sounded very matter-of-fact this time, even abrupt.
ii
“You know what I think? I think you’re the one threatening your sister,” Walker swept into Nina’s apartment. He didn’t sit down. “And even if you started this game as just a way of teasing or punishing her for some reason, I believe it has grown into more than that. Possibly you are a real threat to her life.”
Walker didn’t believe a word he was saying. But he thought it would put Nina so off guard that she would be grateful to him for anything less than such an accusation.
“You don’t believe a word you are saying,” Nina told him. “What do you want from me now?
Walker wasn’t pleased. He couldn’t get Nina upset. But he would try another approach.
“You want to hurt your sister because she can do anything you want to and can’t. You are full of envy and resentment.”
This was all beginning to sound hollow even to Walker. He had to rescue it before Nina’s obvious disbelief turned to disgust and she threw him out again.
“The last threat was a birthday card. To me, that’s proof the threats came from someone who knows her very well. I’ve ruled out everyone else. Except you.”
Nina thought this sounded like bad movie dialogue. It brought her irony back.
“Well, then I guess you must be right, detective. Arrest me.”
He thought about it. Or rather thought about pretending to arrest her, putting on the cuffs, pushing her chair to wherever he wanted her for however long he wanted. Then what? He may have been strange, but he wasn’t crazy.
Eventually, it would make a fool out of him and they both would see it.
iii
Nina laughed out loud when Walker left.
“What a jerk! “
She had made him feel like one too. He knew he had gone too far. Whatever his obsession for Nina might be, he had an even stronger dislike of being seen as an idiot, as he always seemed to feel around Nina. It was too much this time. His recent emotions for her lost the battle to his long-time overbearing pride. He would have to give up and be finished with it all.
But Walker had worried her. Not for herself. For Regina. The more threats Regina got, the more they did come closer to home. At first they were impersonal, coming from all over the country. But by now her sister had received one under her apartment door, which indicated the would-be bomber might be in this very city, and another which showed he even knew her birthday. That was too close. Sure, some disembodied insurance company’s computer might also know, but as a rule not even all your friends and relatives can remember your birthday.
iv.
One relative knew. Nina didn’t mention Roscoe to Walker, because of the recent quarrel between their uncle and Regina.
Both she and Regina agreed it was spooky how much he had changed since Aunt Doris was gone. But Nina also dismissed any fleeting, vague, grabbing-at-straws suspicion of Roscoe because the threats had been coming long before Doris died.
And Nina knew Roscoe would never really hurt Regina. He didn’t have the heart for it. With his aggressive incompetence, giddy ineptitude, and view that not good enough was good enough for him, he was almost useless. She always saw him as someone whose general operating procedure for life was to push the elevator button up to go down and the down button when he wanted to go up.
“Well, at least he is good-natured about it,” Regina once remarked.
“Since he can’t do anything right, he’d better be good-natured,” Nina had replied.
Like Regina, Nina remembered that Doris found doing any ordinary thing with him unbearably difficult. It was hard to enjoy even the simple pleasures: taking a walk, joining friends for dinner, attending a
concert. Among other things, he had no follow-through. Usually, he would charge forward enthusiastically with un-thought out plans and then let whatever had been concocted in the bright moment fall by the wayside. His life was like perpetually rushed knitting where stitches were missed and dropped, leaving after all the effort, a ragged garment.
So, if Roscoe were now the one threatening Regina, it would be ok.
Nina knew he would never have the ability to pull it off.
CHAPTER FORTY SIX
i.
“You’re glad she’s dead,” Regina accused him.
“Well, no,” Roscoe answered,” But it turns out I’m happier without her.”
“You could have been happier ‘without her’ while she was still alive. She didn’t need to die for you to be happy.”
“She didn’t need to die at all. She just did.”
“Well, apparently for you to be happy, she did need to.”
“The next thing you know you’ll be accusing me of killing her. Regina, what is wrong with you!”
Nothing was the way it used to be. Regina found herself lost in a maze of fear and unwelcome changes. This innocuous, always pliable uncle, whom she thought she had pegged for better or for worse, on whom she could count, as before, for affection, compassion and attention, had become totally different. She didn’t recognize him anymore and wanted to strike out at him for that.
She regretted her former justification of this uncle to Doris, who revealed he had “whined for sex”, and who now suddenly had become a ladies’ man, a traveler, a party-giver, a heart breaker. A tyrant.
“Lucky you got all the insurance money,” Regina said.
“Is that what this is all about? By god, I’m entitled to it, and I more than earned it in my roll of hen-pecked husband all those years.”
“Well, why were you ‘hen-pecked’....apparently you didn’t have to be!”
“You saw that Doris only loved you so she could punish you . She believed it was not only her right, but her duty to tell people how awful they were.”
“Never mind what Doris was,” Regina answered Roscoe.” What were you?”
“……I beg your pardon……?”
“I hear you want to take your new girlfriend on a cruise. You, who would never go near the water even though Doris loved it, a cruise! Where is your loyalty!?”
“My new loyalty is to those who treat me right and only for as long as they treat me right.
It’s my turn now. No one is taking control of me anymore.”
“No one ever took it: you gave it up. It wasn’t Doris. You would have been oppressed with anyone. It’s who you are.”
Regina felt half-bad giving her uncle such a hard time. She had enjoyed their earlier days, when he would occasionally meet her in the city for a coffee break, making it his reward for a good sales day. Actually, they were all good sales days, according to him, as long as he could spend time with the fabrics, the textiles, as long as he could hold the nap between his fingers and feel its give, its smoothness, how it insisted on moving in its own direction, the perfection in the weaving, the stimulation of the never-ending colors.
With the smell of mocha and pastries surrounding them, she would ask him, and he would tell her, stories about their mutual family life, about the forces which had shaped them both.
One day her told her, “You were too young to know my mother. Maybe just as well, before she started messing with you too. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, and not think me a terrible son, your grandmother Sylvia would wait until I came home from school to stick her head in the oven and pretend to kill herself just to show me how miserable her life was. And, of course, since I was part of that life, she expected me to fix it by meeting her outlandish expectations to become rich and famous, so scammed was she by our culture on what was important and possible in America. And if she didn’t have her head in the oven, she had the radio on, listening to country and western songs of loss and failure, crying over her life, which disappointed her as if it were some shabby thing she inherited and not something she had to make for herself.
And the blabbering, the constant blabbering, the rattling on and on:
‘ I bought this new shirt for you, do you like it, let’s see if it’s the right size, is it too big, it’s too big, I’ll take it back, should I get it in white instead of blue, it’s not too big, you’ll grow into it, is it too big, blue is a good color on you, white gets dirty, should I get it smaller in white, I’ll change it after work, I hate that place, that bitch took the phone book off my table, said she didn’t but I know she did, they laugh at me behind my back, they accuse me of being too slow for the work, I’m not slower than them, they’re the slow ones, the lazy ones, my phone book was where I needed it, but they took it because they’re lazy, that’s why, I’m not slow, the work is hard and they make all the money because they can make the calls faster with the phone book they said belonged to the whole office, but they took it from me, I can get the shirt in a smaller size in white or should it be smaller in blue, if it’s big like this don’t wear it now, you can grow into it, if your father were still alive those lazy bitches wouldn’t call me slow and take my phone book so I wouldn’t have to get up and down, you know how my legs hurt, how sick I am and how no one helps me and Me?! Talk?! Are you crazy?! I’m not talking! I never talk, I’m quiet as a mouse, do I ever talk, no, you never hear anything from me, not a peep, what do you mean: stop talking?! You! Who do you think you are! I never talk. You couldn’t have a quieter mother……’
Ah, my dear Regina, there were times I couldn’t get air, needed air, felt a thick membrane, a rubber mask cover my nose, my mouth. It was like being buried alive.”
Regina wondered why her own mother never told her any of these things. When Regina would ask, all she would say was “Yes, I used to feel as Roscoe does when we were both children. Roscoe obviously never grew out of it, but long ago I realized that our mother was simply an inept, frightened---befuddled---immigrant widow with so much sorrow. I couldn’t really appreciate this until I became an adult myself and she was dead. Even now I want to thank her for so many things that then I just took from her with distain and no understanding. She tried so hard--under such bad conditions--and I..we… must have hurt her terribly. She probably died with her only knowledge of her daughter as someone she wanted to connect with very much but who was rude and indifferent to her. I’ve learned since then, Regina, there is no punishment in life worse than your own regret.”
That was then, but now, although her old blood ties to her uncle struggled to be kind to him in the wake of Doris’ death , her disappointment in him overshadowed everything.
“Who are you? I don’t even know you anymore!” she said.
“Listen, the one thing I know first hand from Doris’s death is that it all went too fast and that it is going to be over, cosmically speaking, for the whole species in about twenty minutes. And the last good thing that happened to me took place thirty years ago. In the next thirty years, just sixty celestial seconds from now…I won’t even be here.
When people utter the cliché ‘Life is short,’ you hear it and think it means everybody else’s life.
But even now the world is casually gearing up for events that are planned to take place in the not too distant future when it’s clear I’m not going to be on the planet anymore: flights to Mars, the next meteor shower, maybe even the next summer Olympics. It used to be that I would hear of these things and just automatically assume they would be part of my everyday life. They will be part of everyday life. Maybe just not mine. It’s shocking proof to me that even though I won’t be here, the world plans to just flow on. My whole life will have been the sum of an unnecessary past, and then I’ll be snapped off and fall away with a great inconsequentiality.
So I’m just not capable any longer of giving even two minutes more to anybody else’s bullshit.”
“What about your own bullshit.”
“I do the best I can, unti
l I can’t. What personal crap I haven’t been able to get rid of by now, I just have to make my peace with. Besides, if everyone else is so right, then why is everything so wrong. Anyway, Doris loved to tell me, ‘Take it from me; enjoy it while you can.’ So do you think she would deny me happiness now? Hey, somebody around here ought to carry the banner for happiness”
He held his tongue just before he could say, “We know that’s not you….”
“Well, that’s great.” Regina said, “I mean it. I think it’s great that you are coming into your own. What’s not so great, as far as I’m concerned, is that you always could have. But apparently if Doris had lived, in spite of her advice, you would have continued to let yourself die on the vine. So, it requires the lack of Doris in the world to give you life.
I call that murder by attitude!”
“What the hell does that mean?!”
“Well, as I explained to Marius……..”
“You told Marius I murdered Doris….???!!!”
“No, of course not. I simply told him I thought it was a kind of ‘metaphysical murder’….”
“That’s ridiculous. There is no such thing.”
“There is. It’s committed by those people who can’t choose life for themselves, who sometimes need other, stronger people to die so they can acquire strength by default, in the vacuum left behind to become fully alive themselves. People like you want nothing less than people like her not to exist so you can feel the world is big enough for you to breathe free.”
“Don’t you dare accuse me of that!!”
Regina had gone too far.
Roscoe would no longer put up with anyone’s negative judgment of him.
It was done.
And so was his relationship with his once favorite niece.
He was so angry, he wanted to explode.
CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN
One of Regina’s unshakable habits was to stare at nothing.
It was a way of remarshalling her forces, of grabbing hold of the many little pieces of herself from the far corners they had fled into, a way to prepare for battle, for the war between her two selves: being in the world and away from the world. Yet after all the silence and solitude, she was often disgusted with herself that at the bottom of her emptied mind were merely petty slights and small ambitions.
War in a Beautiful Country Page 13
