by Greg Iles
“Then you had better tell me about Mallory. What started her slide into madness, as you called it?”
Waters looked to his left, where a large window gave a view of the backyard. There was a nice play set made of treated lumber; he’d built one like it for Annelise. “I don’t know if that’s possible, Penn. I mean we’re two guys sitting here in the light of day, twenty years after the fact. I’m not sure I can communicate the reality of what went on then. Not with the impact that it had.”
Penn smiled. “I’m a writer. I wrestle with that every day. If words could convey human emotion with sufficient force, we wouldn’t need to shed tears, hug, or kill someone. Because I know that, I listen in a different way than most people.”
Waters felt encouraged, but still he hesitated. “When I graduated from South Natchez, I weighed one hundred eighty-five pounds. During my freshman year at Ole Miss, I gained another fifteen. After one year with Mallory, I weighed one hundred sixty-five. I looked like a skeleton.”
“I’m going to ask some questions,” Penn said, “but don’t feel bound to answer them in a narrow way. Say whatever comes to mind.”
“Okay.”
“If you had to give me one word that summed up the root of Mallory’s mental problems, what would it be?”
“Jealousy.”
“Elaborate.”
“Mallory was pathologically jealous. You wouldn’t think she would be, as beautiful as she was, but that didn’t seem to matter where I was concerned.”
“Was she jealous in her previous relationships?”
“I don’t know. She only slept with two guys before me. One was a football player from St. Stephens, older than she was.”
“Wade Anders, probably. I remember them dating for a while. He was an asshole.”
“Then she was with a guy at Ole Miss, before I really knew her. Her freshman year. When I asked who it was, she told me he was older and already gone. I assumed she meant he was a senior who had graduated. I was curious, because she told me they’d done a lot of sexual experimentation. And I believed her, because there was nothing she didn’t know or do.”
“And?”
“I found out later that the older guy had been an English professor, thirty-eight years old. He lost his job over it. Resigned or was fired, I’m not sure which. He basically flipped out when Mallory dumped him. He stalked her, the whole nine yards. I also later learned she was lying about the sex. They hadn’t done all that experimentation. She’d got him to tell her all the exotic things he wanted to do to her, and what he wanted her to do for him, but she didn’t do those things with him. She basically tortured the guy, I think.”
“But she did those things with you.”
“Yes. And that’s where the problem began. I was the first person she ever really took off her mask for. She gave herself to me totally. Showed me the darkest corners of her personality…and there were some dark ones. And once you do that with somebody, and they reject you…”
“What happens?” asked Penn.
An image of Mallory’s face, desolate and cold, filled Waters’s mind. “I once saw an Oprah show where these distraught parents were talking about their college kids, kids who couldn’t get over a romantic relationship. Some had committed suicide, others simply couldn’t move forward with their lives. Their parents couldn’t help or even reach them. And they couldn’t understand why parental love couldn’t alleviate some of the suffering of these kids. These are healthy families I’m talking about.”
“That made you think of Mallory?”
“Some of those parents were describing Mallory perfectly. But I already knew the answer they couldn’t seem to see. Not even the shrink on the show. When a young woman gives herself completely to a man—sexually and every other way—she shows him parts of her personality that her parents have never seen and never will. The guy knows everything about her, things she may have seen as shameful for her whole life, but he loves her in spite of these things. Or maybe because of them. But if he then leaves her, if he stops loving her, the rejection is absolute. You know? There’s no way parental love can console the girl, because her parents don’t really know her. ‘If they really knew me like he does,’ she thinks, ‘they wouldn’t love me either.’ That’s what takes her to the brink of suicide.”
Penn seemed intrigued by this theory. “And you rejected Mallory?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“She got pregnant.”
“When?”
“My sophomore year. She was a junior.”
“How long had you been together?”
“Six months.”
“She terminated the pregnancy?”
Waters nodded.
“Jackson? Memphis?”
“Memphis.”
“Did she want the abortion?”
“I don’t think any woman really wants an abortion.”
“Point taken. But she agreed to its necessity?”
“She went through with it.”
Penn mulled this over. “You talked her into it.”
“I don’t like thinking about it, and maybe I didn’t admit it to myself for a long time. But yes, I basically made her do it.”
Penn nodded with understanding, if not sympathy. “You went with her for the procedure? Stayed through it, before and after, all that?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it. What do you remember most?”
Waters didn’t have to think. “You couldn’t just go get it and be done. You had to go for counseling first. This huge impersonal building on Union Avenue, like an office building. The waiting room was full of girls. We could hear them talking. Some were there for second or third abortions. We couldn’t believe it. We felt so stupid for letting ourselves get into that situation even once. These women were talking like it was an alternative form of birth control. Mallory felt sleazy just being there. She hated it.”
“Go on.”
“They show us into this room with an older woman in a wheelchair. She starts questioning us. Why were we having sex? Did we understand the implications of having sex? It was surreal. Then she starts asking why we want to abort the baby. Why can’t we get married and have it?”
“Is that what Mallory wanted?”
“Penn, do you remember what Ole Miss was like when we were there?”
“Sure. Reagan in the White House. Young Republicans on campus. Conformity was the school religion. The de rigueur uniform was Izod shirt, Levi’s rolled at the ankles, and white canvas Nikes with the baby-blue stripe. I think of the early eighties at Ole Miss as a sort of superrich version of the nineteen-fifties.”
“Exactly. We grew up in the seventies, with dope and sex and rock and roll, but all the old double standards were still very much in force in Oxford. Especially for the girls. The good-girl/slut dichotomy still applied.”
“Sorority girls didn’t have babies and stay in school.”
“No,” Waters agreed. “Not Chi Os anyway.”
“Did Mallory want the baby, but know deep down that she couldn’t keep it?”
“That’s pretty close, I think. I don’t think she could have handled disappointing her parents to that degree, even though she hated her father at some level. But she wanted me to want the baby. You know?”
“Yes.”
“So the counselor starts in on adoption. Mallory didn’t want to do that, and neither did I. We couldn’t deal with the idea that part of us would exist in the world, and we wouldn’t know where. I’m sure that’s a callous, selfish way to think, but that was the only thing we agreed on.”
“And after the counseling?”
“They made you wait seven days to have the procedure. Agonizing reappraisal time. Those seven days were hell. Mallory stopped going to class. Her face showed nothing, but she was barely keeping it together. One day she wanted the abortion, the next she wanted us to run off to Canada, have the baby, and live like Bohemians.”
“Why did she finally agree to the
procedure?”
Waters looked back at the window, wishing he did not have to speak this truth. “I made a devil’s bargain. She made me promise her—in the dark of the night, parked on Sorority Row—she made me promise that if she got rid of that baby, I would never leave her. Ever. And she meant it.”
“And you promised that?”
“Yes.”
Penn sighed heavily. “Go on.”
“A week later, we were back in Memphis. Mallory was so tense, I didn’t think she could handle it. This was all supposed to be secret, right? But when she checked in, they asked for her parents’ phone numbers, everything. They said if anything went wrong, if she started to hemorrhage or something, they had to notify next of kin.” Waters could still smell the hotel-like scent of the place. “Mallory gave the numbers. They checked her in and told me it would be a minimum of two hours before I saw her again.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to sit in that waiting room, this sterile room full of women—only two guys there besides me—and I started to lose it. I couldn’t believe I was there, or what was about to happen to Mallory. I got into the elevator, rode down ten floors to the ground, and walked out into the daylight. That’s when I first realized that terrible things happened in the light of day. That things like the Holocaust happened while the sun was shining and people were having picnics. Anyway, there was a Burger King outside this building. I walked over there and ordered a cheeseburger, then sat there without eating it. I knew what Mallory was going through up there—the counselor had made sure of that—and I felt sick. I was growing up, I guess, learning that actions have real consequences.”
Penn listened like a patient priest, his eyes alert for the smallest clues to motivation. “Go on.”
“I was positive something terrible was going to happen. She was going to start hemorrhaging, maybe even die. There was this awful certainty in my gut that things were going to go very wrong.”
“Did they?”
“Not that day. When she came out, she was like a zombie. Literally in shock. The next day, she did start to hemorrhage. I took her to the ER in Oxford. They gave her six birth control pills, and it stopped the bleeding, but the whole experience was more than she could take. Everything went downhill from there.”
“How?”
“She was just never the same after that. But she didn’t react the way you would expect. I mean, when my wife lost a baby, she lost her sexual desire. But Mallory was the reverse. She became sexually ravenous. She constantly pushed the envelope, as though she were trying to use sex to banish whatever demons were in her head. She’d always been a little like that, but now it was scary. Do this to me. Do that. Hurt me. Rape me. Things I thought were demeaning, and I’m no prude when it comes to sex.”
Penn was nodding slowly. “And Eve resurrected some of this. What other changes did you notice?”
“Paranoia. She didn’t want me apart from her. If I left her for a few hours—even to go to class—she interrogated me endlessly. When I registered for the next semester, she asked who was in all my classes. She told me I couldn’t take two that I wanted, because of girls she knew who were going to be in them.”
“Did she ever get violent?”
“Yes. I’m talking clock you with a closed fist, and she was a strong girl. She’d try to claw my eyes out. The subtext of it all was, ‘You don’t really love me. You’re going to leave me the first chance you get.’ And this was the most beautiful woman in the state.”
“Her fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. When did the violence start?”
“Toward me? After the abortion. I don’t think I understood how deeply the maternal desire is embedded in the female psyche. Even in women you might think wouldn’t feel it so much—gung ho career women—it’s there. And in Mallory…I think terminating that pregnancy so violated her fundamental nature that it snapped something in her mind. She loathed herself for doing it. And she projected that hatred onto me.”
“I think you’re right. And obviously, you couldn’t stand that kind of pressure for long.”
“No. That’s when I lost all the weight. My grades went to hell. I felt like I was holding Mallory’s mind together by sheer force of will. I started talking to a girl in one of my classes, just from a desire for simple contact. It was such a relief, talking to a normal person. It was like coming out of a cave. And I knew then that I had to end it with Mallory.”
“Is this when she became suicidal?”
“How did you know she attempted suicide?”
“When I asked about the violence, you said, ‘Toward me?’ That told me she’d probably done violence to herself.”
“She tried with pills first,” Waters told him. “In my apartment, so I was almost certain to find her when I got back from class. I carried her to the ER again, and they pumped her stomach. That scared the shit out of me.”
“Which was exactly what she wanted.”
“Yes, but it didn’t stop me. She was smothering me. I had to get free. I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events after that, but the fights became unendurable. One night, she tried to run me over with my car. I jumped off a fifteen-foot embankment to avoid being hit.”
“Do you really think she would have hit you?”
“Absolutely. Looking back, I don’t think she would ever have killed herself. Deep down, she was too selfish for that. But me? No doubt about it. The same goes for any woman I was with. Mallory could have killed any of them under the right circumstances.”
“You sound like you have evidence of that.”
“I do.” Waters looked at his watch. “Jesus, I’ve talked for over an hour and I haven’t told you anything yet. She tried to kill me twice, herself four or five times. She attacked a girl I was riding in the car with in Jackson. She almost killed a girlfriend of mine in Alaska, and that was the year she won Miss Mississippi. She even got pregnant again, on purpose.” Waters heard hysteria in his voice, but he couldn’t seem to control it. “All this is so mixed up in my mind…her insanity, the secrets I’ve kept, the things Eve said—”
“John?” Penn dropped the foam basketball and came around the desk and squatted by Waters’s chair. “Hey. Take it easy.” Penn waited a moment. “I have a theory. But you haven’t told me enough yet to be sure about it. I need to know everything you know, and now’s the time for you to tell me. After today, we could be talking to each other at the jail.”
His casual mention of this reality shook Waters to the core of his being.
“I don’t think that will happen,” Penn went on, “but we have to be realistic. The odds of carrying on an affair like you and Eve did without anyone knowing about it are very small. Even if it only lasted two weeks. Someone always knows. Lovers confide in friends. Neighbors are nosy. It’s almost inevitable.”
“So what do I do?”
Penn got up and went back to his seat. “I need you to give me the basics of the other stuff you mentioned. You said Mallory tried to kill you again after the time with the car?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about that.”
“I had a hunting rifle in my apartment, a Winchester thirty-thirty. During one of her ‘You’re going to leave me’ fits, she got hold of it and threatened to kill herself. I figured the best thing to do was walk out of the room. Remove her audience, you know? She ran after me, held the barrel below her chin, and got her finger inside the trigger guard. I was more worried about her killing herself by accident than by design, so I grabbed the barrel and we fought for the gun. She screamed that she’d kill me if I didn’t let her kill herself. I let go and yelled, ‘Go on and do it, then!’ She stuck the barrel under her chin and went for the trigger. I grabbed the rifle again, and this time it wound up jammed into my side. I saw something happen in her eyes, a kind of crazy triumph, and then she yanked the trigger. I felt that pull all the way into my bones.”
“It wasn’t loaded?”
“It was loaded. The lever ha
d gotten half cocked in the struggle, so when she pulled the trigger, the action wouldn’t operate. That’s the only time I ever hit her. When I realized she’d meant to kill me, I backhanded her across the face. She laughed. She wanted me to hit her.” Waters’s mouth was dry. “God, it was so twisted by then.”
“What about the thing in Alaska?” Penn asked. “She almost killed a girl?”
“You remember I worked the pipeline in the summers. I had a French-Canadian girlfriend named Marie. Mallory flew up and followed us for a few days before I even knew she was there. She put sugar in Marie’s gas tank and stranded her in a blizzard. It was a miracle she was saved. Mallory barely got out of the state without being arrested. Alaska tried to extradite her, but her father pulled some juice in Jackson and got that quashed.”
“Jesus. And you said Mallory got pregnant a second time. Was that by you?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after she was Miss Mississippi?”
“Just after she gave up the crown.”
Penn shook his head in amazement. “God, the things that stay hidden in small towns. The women in Natchez would snap their garters if they heard this. How did the next pregnancy happen? I thought you were trying to leave her.”
“I was. I spent most of the year she was Miss Mississippi trying to stay away from her. Her duties made it a little easier, but she spent a lot of terrible nights alone in hotel rooms. I talked her through a lot of them on the phone. But eventually the bad episodes got farther apart, and she came to realize I wasn’t going back to her.
“After she gave up her crown, she took a job in Dallas at one of the TV stations. Some political big shot had arranged it for her. Well, she didn’t have a car. Since she had completely alienated her parents by this time, I agreed to drive her the three hours down to the New Orleans airport. She told me she was scheduled to fly out at seven p.m., so I got her there at five-thirty. That’s when I found out her plane had left at five. She said she’d made a mistake, but that was bullshit. I should have made her show me the tickets. There was no flight to Dallas until the next morning.”
“You spent the night together?”
“We got a hotel in the Quarter. We went to dinner at Galatoire’s, and the waiter just had to tell us what a perfect couple we were. Mallory asked where in the Quarter we could go dancing. He said we were too nice for the Quarter. Go to the old Roosevelt Hotel, the Blue Room. So we did. What else were we going to do? Go back to the hotel and stare at each other? We danced to a piano and bass. It was poignant, because I really thought that was the end of it all, and I was proud of her for leaving. Soon we were the only two people left in the place. The pianist played ‘As Time Goes By,’ and Mallory reminded me how we saw Casablanca together at the Hoka in Oxford, and how the first person you see Casablanca with is supposed to be the person you’re going to marry, and…shit, you can guess the rest.”
