The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  WHEN MY MOTHER WAS FOUND FROZEN TO DEATH outside the family trailer I had a severe reaction, worse than might be expected, even after such a gruesome end. I hadn’t seen her for several years and I felt guilty that I had transferred my daughterly feelings to Naomi. To my surprise, Naomi herself was uninterested in—and almost hostile to—this problem. I became depressed, sufficiently gloomy for Wendy to insist I go to a shrink. As a favor to one of the successful painters we knew, Stefan Weinstein (described to me as the “shrink to the stars”) agreed to see me.

  Stefan was small and very dark, a browned nut covered almost everywhere with silky black hair, even in spots you wouldn’t think could grow hair. But the effect was fine and soft, a soothing fur, not an apelike coarseness. He was full of energy, cheerful and alert, the way an animated forest creature in a Disney movie is: eyes big and gleaming, teeth flashing while he laughs his deep, stomach-holding chuckle.

  Stefan bounded out of his black leather Eames chair only five minutes into my story.

  “Excuse me,” he said, going to his desk and writing on a pad. “I’m going to give you the name of an excellent psychiatrist who will see you. I’ll call him now and arrange a time—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, not at all, don’t be concerned, has nothing to with you—”

  Stopping him required that I wave my hand in front of the onrushing words, flagging down a runaway car. “I’m not sick enough for you?” I demanded, trying to be light. My anger at his rejection was unmistakable, however. I had come reluctantly. Even phoning to make the appointment required effort, pumping a bicycle uphill.

  “Do you think I want you to be sick—oh, this is ridiculous!” he interrupted his Socratic question. “I’m attracted to you. I can’t treat you. It’s unethical. And besides, it would make me unhappy in my work. Dr. Reynolds is superb—not as good as me”—he flashed his teeth happily between the night of his mustache and beard—“but he won’t be having fantasies—” He lowered his head, shaking it, silently scolding. “Do you understand?” he mumbled.

  “No,” I told him, furious at his coy desires. “I came here for help. Not to be propositioned.”

  “Of course, that’s why I’m sending you to Dr. Reynolds. Here you’ll get propositioned.”

  I was shocked by Stefan’s odd frivolity and wasted three sessions with Dr. Reynolds discussing it. I adjusted to my guilt feelings after four months. Although Dr. Reynolds wanted me to continue to resolve other conflicts (so would I if I were being paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars for a forty-five-minute hour), I stopped the analysis. Six months later, Stefan called.

  “Thank God you didn’t change your phone number,” he said after establishing it was me. “I wouldn’t have wanted to test Jim Reynolds’s medical ethics.”

  I resisted Stefan’s charm for weeks, refusing to date. Frankly, because he was a psychiatrist, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was unbalanced. Goes to show you, you can take the country out of the girl, but—

  I married him. I think he was the first man who was my friend. To be honest, I had had many one-night adventures and several passionate suitors, a stormy on-again, off-again year-long relationship, but until Stefan, no male friends. He was just there, seemed always to have been part of my life, as if he were a relative that had returned from a long journey.

  Naturally, this changed my friendship with Wendy. She had worried about marriage and children in the way we all do as our twenties seem to grind on endlessly, but once Stefan was on the scene and she turned thirty, she seemed desperate, talking obsessively, using phrases such as “old maid” and “biological clock.”

  I discussed this with Stefan. He said, “I think teaching the retarded is an expression of maternal—”

  “Shut up, Doctor, you’re not on call.” Thus I reminded Stefan of my rule for our life together—no textbook language about us or the people we know.

  “Okay.” He gleamed, a merry chipmunk. “I think she’s always wanted to have kids.”

  Stefan was right. She did. I don’t. And thus I must have willfully ignored Wendy’s desires. Once she began to work regularly with “special children” (as they were called at the clinic), Wendy, although she never complained, seemed sad, and began to talk more openly of her longing for kids.

  “Is it hard?” I asked carefully.

  “Just tiring,” she said. “Sometimes it’s great. I get excited. Joey’s learned how to zip up his coat or bounce the ball, and then, two days later, he can’t. Or worse, he still can and nothing else has changed and I think, so what?”

  “They’re always going to be retarded. You knew that.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” she said, her lips thinning, irritated. “I wish I had a child, a healthy child. Then it wouldn’t be so depressing.”

  I haven’t described Wendy. I wonder if that’s because—well, she was plain. She had wide, maternal hips, narrow shoulders, small breasts. Her face was as round as a human’s could be, her skin unblemished, but always a bit yellowish, unhealthy. She had small blue eyes, very pale in color, and overshadowed by her thick brow. Her hair was a dull brown, halfheartedly curly, sitting uncertainly on her head. There didn’t seem to be enough of it, yet when she allowed her hair to grow long, the effect was merely sloppy, not full. Maybe I should have taken her to expensive make-overs; I thought that would hurt her feelings. Although I usually don’t tread lightly, I did about Wendy’s looks. “You’re so beautiful, and I’m bland,” she would say, her shoulders sagging in despair while she checked herself at the mirror in my hall before we would go out manhunting—pre-Stefan, of course.

  How could I answer that, except with reassurances she wouldn’t believe?

  “I hope I have a healthy child,” she said so often during her first year at the clinic that I finally told her to quit if it preyed so on her imagination.

  “I have to get married and have kids!” she yelled, frantic, the morning after she attended a high school reunion full of women with husbands on their arms and hands flipping photos of babies.

  I understood her loneliness, her wish for a male companion. But pregnancy, birth, the abnegation of self to another for years, years of youth and strength that could never be recovered?

  “That’s because you’ve always been the adored child watching your various mothers wither, beaten and frustrated,” Stefan said.

  Shut up, I answered.

  That summer, Wendy was…well, I can’t help but use the term man-crazy. Wendy, once timid, almost squeamish, went to every party, every singles scene, and did it with any guy who even glanced down her unbuttoned blouse. She pursued one big blond hunk, the kind she used to long for fearfully, as a fantasy, and got him into bed.

  “How was it?” I asked. “Disappointing?”

  She dropped her head down low, looked up from beneath her heavy eyebrows, grinning. “It was great! What a body! I loved every minute of it!”

  She astounded me. My little mouse of a friend, who had to be pushed from behind to approach the nerdiest of men, had become a ferocious tigress.

  “Her womb calls,” Stefan explained that night, and rushed into the bathroom to evade the shoe I threw at him.

  I’m not complete, I decided. I’m not all female. Naomi had ruined me with her talk of strong women: I imagined strength to be lack of emotion. I wasn’t brave, you see. Wendy was. Wendy was human, fully baked, willing to risk weakness and defeat. I loved her and wanted her to be happy, so I cheered on this dismal hunt until she succeeded, until she found her boxed set of gonads.

  “I’ve met this guy,” Wendy called one morning, much earlier than usual. “I like him. He’s…” She grunted, an amused noise. “He’s from the old neighborhood.”

  He wasn’t, not exactly. Ben Fliess was a working-class Jew from Brooklyn, a similar but different enough population from Wendy’s Manhattanite, more professional class. Ben’s father was a rare example of an unsuccessful businessman in post-World War II New York. But his son had don
e well: Ben earned a scholarship to Cornell, majored in economics, and ended up on Wall Street as a securities analyst. He should have been living in the suburbs, I suppose, already married, but he had been detoured—like the rest of us—by the sixties, by drugs, and thus become hopelessly trendy in an effort to avoid his parent’s trends. He lived downtown, near his office, one of the first to resettle Battery Park. Those were the facts I knew before I met him.

  That happened in front of John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street, a casual double date: a quick bite, a movie, coffee after. It was an oven-hot night in July. I arrived separately and ahead of Stefan, who was seeing patients late. Ben came forward, stepping in front of Wendy. He was big, six four, a thick body, not muscled, yet not fat either. The strong lenses on his black-framed glasses diminished his eyes, and he had lost all his hair but for a laurel around his head, exposing an elongated and large skull. The baldness aged him. I was surprised he was only thirty-five. His features were gross: a wide oppressive brow; big ears, drooping heavy lobes; thick white skin, heavy as an animal’s hide—except for his mouth and lips. They were comically small compared to the rest, bright red, as if he’d just finished sucking on a red lollipop. I took one look at him, shocked by his plainness, and decided she would never marry him.

  “Hello.” He spoke thickly, like his body, the words stuck behind his tongue. “Wendy said you were beautiful, and you certainly are—”

  Wendy quivered with excitement, shivering like a toy poodle from its pedigree nerves. She interrupted with a bark: “I didn’t tell you to say it!”

  “Well you told me not to faint when I got my first look! I thought she was exaggerating. She wasn’t.” Ben gestured at Wendy with his hands; they were big, of course, but once again there was an out-of-place bit of finery—the fingers. Slender, tapered, the nails longish for a man, and very clean for any New Yorker at the end of the work day. “There’s no point in keeping secrets between us. You two have a great friendship. I don’t want to mess it up.”

  “Good. Don’t,” I said sharply, and surprised him. I knew his type. He asserted himself at every opportunity, assuming boldness would compensate for his other defects. And I especially didn’t trust his immediate declaration that he wouldn’t mess up the friendship. It has been my experience, particularly as a lawyer who often has to negotiate contracts, that what people announce they don’t intend is their real objective. Stefan calls that unintentional truth telling, the subconscious peeking out from behind the curtain. I call it lying.

  Ben chafed my nerves all night: he bragged about his correct stock recommendations, teased Wendy whenever she spoke, was flirtatious to me and obsequious to Stefan.

  “Wendy says you’re the psychiatrist to the stars,” he said, embarrassing her again when Stefan arrived. Indeed, Ben accurately guessed the more famous of Stefan’s patients, and asked for confirmation that he was right. I accused Wendy with my eyes: I had told her the names in confidence after she complained that I didn’t trust her, thereby violating a promise of silence I had made to Stefan. For a moment, there was a silent ring-around-the-rosy of betrayed glances. Of course Stefan refused to say. I suspect he was flattered by Ben’s awe and that’s why Stefan defended him.

  “He’s insecure,” Stefan argued when we got home. “Ben wanted to impress you and so he bragged a lot, talked too much. I have to know him better before I can judge.” So fucking reasonable. Sometimes I imagine how Stefan might respond to the news of nuclear attack: “Partly, I’m sad. So many people I know and love will die. But it does give me a chance to review case histories and work on my book.”

  The next morning, just as I was ready to leave for my office, again Wendy phoned uncharacteristically early. Ben had changed her rhythms. “I’ve been up all night. We have to talk.”

  “Why don’t we have lunch?” I knew her, that quavering voice was a warning, and I wanted her to face me if she was angry. Wendy feared confrontation, liked to write letters when she should phone, phone when she should see.

  “Uh…uh…I don’t think I can wait that long. I’m so upset.”

  I gave up. “Go ahead.”

  “When you met Stefan, I feel I welcomed him.”

  “You liked him,” I said, smart enough to be preparing my defense. Or was it smart? I wanted her to acknowledge that she liked Stefan, not out of duty to me, but approved of my choice.

  “Yes, I did. So what does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I think it means something.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Well…” She sighed. “I felt you were hostile last night.”

  “You mean to Ben?”

  “Yes.” She spoke in a tense monotone, paused, ready to pounce on a denial.

  I thought it through. Wendy had many acquaintances, but no one else would tell her the truth. We were true sisters, after all. The time to object was now. “I didn’t like that he told me how beautiful I was, that he embarrassed you—”

  “He didn’t embarrass me!”

  “Wendy,” I implored softly. I had been honest. “Come on.”

  “He’s open. He likes to be open with people. Especially people he wants to like him.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you mean, you see?”

  “You’re kidding yourself.” I couldn’t contain my irritation. “He was putting both of us in our place.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Her voice squeaked.

  “And what was all that teasing about you crying at commercials and eating in bed?”

  “Oh, you’re just picking—”

  “He seemed bent on embarrassing you, diminishing you in our eyes.”

  “Did that diminish me in your—?”

  “Don’t be silly! Of course not!”

  “I think it did! I think it must have! Everybody knows you’re more beautiful. Is that so embarrassing to me it can’t even be mentioned? Am I so ugly that—”

  “Stop it! Don’t turn this around on me! That pisses me off! How long have you known this man? Two weeks? We’ve been friends for seven years!”

  “So that’s what this is about! You’ve always been possessive of me, but this is insane! What do you expect me to do, always be the third wheel? Dragged along like some maiden aunt?”

  “Hardly maiden,” I said, as if I were playing the bitch in a soap opera. The remark surprised even me.

  “What!” Wendy breathed heavily into the phone. “What does that mean? Since when are you Jerry Fallwell? You made the rounds too—”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t know. I don’t want to have this fight—”

  “Oh, of course, just as we’re getting to it, really getting down to—”

  “Okay! Fine. We’ll agree: I’m possessive of you, I can’t handle you falling in love with me. I mean, with some—”

  “Falling in love with you?”

  “I mean, with someone—”

  “I think that’s a very revealing slip, I really—”

  “Fuck off!” I hung up. I was panting, my heart was pounding. I thought, maybe I’m crazy, maybe I don’t understand my own feelings.

  Stefan had come into the room, presumably to find out what the shouting was about, dripping from the shower, dark little head cocked, the long semicircles of his eyebrows pasted up high on his forehead, questioningly: “You didn’t tell her your opinion?”

  The phone rang. Wendy disliked confrontation, but once the battle was on, she would fight to the last feeling.

  “Do I want Wendy to be in love with me?” I spoke rapidly to Stefan, and in so low a tone, I could have been the subway, rumbling underneath the sidewalk, a distant tremor.

  “Of course.”

  The phone was ringing.

  “Then that means I’m a lesbian.”

  “No. It means you want people you love to love you back.”

  I picked up the phone. “I can’t talk—”

  “How dare you hang up on me! Don’t you ever do that again!”

  “I ha
ve to go to work!”

  “That’s bullshit! That’s such bullshit!”

  “Listen to me!” I was screaming. “Listen to me!” My throat filled with the sound and blocked my breathing. “Listen to me!” I yelled this last one so hard my ears rang, a blue spot appeared in my vision, and my veins seemed to expand, ballooning dangerously.

  I had silenced Wendy. She waited, panting into the receiver.

  “I love you,” I said. “I don’t care whom you love or what you do, I’m with you. I’m on your side. You want me to lie to you about my reactions, I’ll lie—”

  “I don’t want you to—”

  “Just tell me how you want me to behave and I’ll follow your instructions. I can’t lose your friendship.”

  “I don’t—” She sighed. “Can’t you hear yourself? I don’t want to have to instruct you.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” Tears were flooding out of my eyes. Stefan appeared with a box of tissues (a psychiatrist’s antibiotic, he called them) and discreetly left. “Okay?” I was begging her. Arguing with her hurt too much. I was scared by my tears, rolling from me, a river of me flowing out. “Please? Can’t we forget about it?”

  “I don’t—look, I don’t want to drag it out—”

  “I really have to go. I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to hang up now. Okay? You understand. I’m not angry. I have to get to a meeting. Okay?”

  “I think we have to talk later,” Wendy insisted, primness in her tone, a teacher scolding. “I think we have more to talk about.”

  There was a bit of sadism in her self-righteousness. She had to hear at length that she was right. I resented her for wanting to drag it out, but I wrote that off as my being a strange person, a poor girl from Maine, desensitized to real feelings, a Wasp, used to preserving emotion in jars and storing them in cellars. I knew that’s what they thought, my husband and my best friend. I couldn’t help myself: I suspected there was cruelty in all the churning of emotion.