She laughed. “Oh, God! How do you know?”
“And I’ll bet your mother never let up on you. ‘Put down that book, get up, get out, meet boys!’”
“That’s her! That’s what she said!”
God, this was uncanny.
“What single phrase during your developing years most typified her attitude toward you?”
“Oh … I don’t know.”
“How about, ‘What’s the matter with you?’”
The words pierced her. That was it. God, how many times had she heard that through the years?
She nodded. “How—?”
“Your mother never paid you a single compliment, I’ll bet. An insecure bitch who couldn’t bring herself to say that you looked nice, couldn’t stoop to bolster your confidence. You got the message: ‘Sure you’re a brainy kid, but so what? Why don’t you date more? Why don’t you dress more in style? Why don’t you have popular friends?’”
Lisl was getting uncomfortable now. This was striking a little too close to home.
“All right, Rafe. That’s enough.”
But he wasn’t finished yet.
“And when it wasn’t something they said or did that cut you off at the knees, it was what they didn’t say, didn’t do. Never went to parents’ night to hear your teachers gush about you. I’ll bet they never even went to the science fairs to see how your project stacked up against the others.”
“That’s enough, Rafe.”
“But somewhere along the line, late in the game, I’ll bet, your father became a believer. Throughout most of your adolescence he was afraid you’d become a spinster school marm and hang around the house forever. Then somebody told him that your SAT scores made you prime scholarship material, that you could qualify for a free ride at one of the state universities. Epiphany! Suddenly he got religion and became Lisl’s big booster!”
This was becoming too painful. “Stop it, Rafe. I mean it.”
“Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he was bragging about his daughter, how she was going to tap into the state for big bucks and get him back some of the taxes he’d been paying all those years.”
“Shut up!”
It was true—too true. She’d seen it then, she’d known it all along, but she’d never faced it. It had hurt so much she’d buried it in some deep, dark recess. But now Rafe was digging it up, rubbing her nose in it. Why?
Rafe smiled. “Suddenly Daddy was standing foursquare behind his precious little academic meal ticket!”
“Damn you!”
She swung a fist at him. He didn’t turn, didn’t try to block it or fend her off. She felt her knuckles land square on his chest with a meaty impact, saw him wince.
“He was a creep!” he said.
She hit him again. Harder. Again, he took the blow.
“He drained off your self-esteem like a drunk guzzles beer! So what did you do? You hooked up with a creep in college who was the same! Good old Brian! He proposed and you accepted. He let you support him through med school and then he dropped you the first time a pretty nurse smiled at him!”
Lisl was almost blind with fury now. Why was he doing this? She rose to her knees and began slapping at him, scratching him, pounding on him. She couldn’t help herself. She hated him.
“Goddamn you!”
But Rafe wouldn’t stop.
“They all dumped on you! And you know why? Because you’re a Prime. And all those petty nothings who raised and educated you hate Primes. But worse than that, you’re a woman! A woman who dares to be intelligent! Who dares to think! You can’t do that! You can’t be better than them! Not unless you’re a guy! And even then, don’t be too much better!”
Lisl kept slapping, scratching, pounding. Rafe flinched with each blow, but took it all.
“Go ahead,” he said in a lower tone. “Get it out. I’m you’re mother. I’m your father. I’m your ex-husband. Beat the shit out of me. Get it out!”
Like smoke in a gale, Lisl’s anger suddenly dissipated. She continued striking Rafe, but the blows were fewer, and lacked their previous force. She began to sob.
“How could you say those things?”
“Because they’re true.
Lisl gasped when she saw the scratches, welts, and bruises on his chest.
I did that?
“Oh, Rafe, I’m so sorry! Did I hurt you?”
He glanced farther down and smiled. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
Lisl followed his gaze and gasped. He was erect again. Hugely so. She let him pull her atop him. He kissed away her tears as she straddled him, then he slipped smoothly inside her. She sighed as her turbulent emotions faded and became lost in the misty pleasure of having him so deep within her. She couldn’t be sure, but he seemed bigger and harder than ever before.
5
“I can see we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Rafe said as Lisl got dressed.
Her hands shook as she rolled her panty hose up her legs. Never had she experienced anything like their second bout of lovemaking today. Numerous smaller eruptions had led to a final explosion that had been, well, almost cataclysmic. She was still weak.
“I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve got that down pretty near perfect.”
Rafe burst out laughing. “Not sex! Anger!”
“Who’s angry?”
“You are!”
Lisl looked at him. “Rafe, I’ve never been happier or more content in my entire life.”
“Perhaps.” He sat down beside her on the mattress and put his arm around her. “But way down deep inside, where you don’t let anybody go but you, you feel you really don’t deserve it and you’re convinced it’s not going to last. Am I right?”
Lisl swallowed. He was right. He was so right. But she didn’t want to admit it to him.
“Lisl, you’ve said as much, haven’t you?”
She nodded.
“And you don’t want to feel that way, do you.” It was not a question.
She felt a tear form in each eye. “No.”
“It makes you angry, doesn’t it.”
“I hate it.”
“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. You ‘hate’ it. That’s the key, Lisl: anger. You’re riddled with it. You seethe with it.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You’ve bottled it up so well behind this placid exterior of yours that even you don’t know it’s there. But I do.”
“Oh, really?” His know-it-all Psych grad student attitude was beginning to annoy her now. “How do you know?”
“Recent experience. Like maybe half an hour ago.”
She glanced at his chest. The wounds she had inflicted—the scratches, the welts and bruises—were almost completely gone. She ran her fingers over the near normal skin.
“How—?”
“I’m a fast healer,” he said quickly, pulling on a T-shirt.
“But I hurt you!” She stifled a sob. “Oh, Jesus! I’m so sorry!”
“It’s all right. It’s nothing serious. Forget about it.”
How could she forget about it? She frightened herself.
Maybe Rafe was right. Now that she thought about it, she did resent her parents for the way they had managed to denigrate all her interests and cheapen her accomplishments. And Brian—God knew she had reason enough to hate her ex-husband.
“It’ll never happen again, I swear it.”
“I didn’t mind, believe me. As a matter of fact, I want you to take some of your anger out on me. It’s good for both of us. It binds us more closely.”
“But why … why would you want to put up with that?”
“Because I love you.”
Lisl felt her heart swell within her. It was the first time he had said it. She threw her arms around him and hugged him to her.
“Do you mean that?”
“Of course. Can’t you tell?”
“I don’t know what I can tell. I’m so mixed up now.”
“We’re going to have to
fix that. We’re going to have to find a way to cleanse you of all that anger.”
“How?”
“I don’t know just yet. But I’ll think of something. You can count on that.”
THE BOY
at ten years
Two patrol cars and an ambulance in her driveway. Carol dashed toward the kaleidoscope of red and blue flashing against the front of the house.
More than a house. A three-story mansion. The former pride and joy of an oil company executive, with a pool, lighted tennis courts, even an elevator from the wine cellar to the third floor. They’d bought the place last summer. In the five years since he’d begun managing the inheritance, Jimmy had increased their net worth to twenty-five million dollars. He no longer felt the need to remain in the Arkansas boondocks, so they’d moved here to the outskirts of Houston.
“What happened?” Carol cried, grabbing the arm of the first policeman she saw.
“You the mother?” he said.
“Oh, my God! Jimmy! What’s happened to Jimmy!”
Shock ran through the fear coiling within her. Jimmy was so self-contained, so self-sufficient, she couldn’t imagine anything happening to him. He seemed almost indestructible.
“That’s some boy you’ve got there,” the cop said. “He’s fine. But his grandfather…” He shook his head sadly.
“Jonah? What happened?”
“We’re not sure. He was in the elevator shaft. Why, we don’t know. But whatever the reason, he was trapped in there when the car came down.”
“Oh, God!”
She pushed past the policeman and ran toward the open front door. She stopped when the ambulance attendants appeared, pulling-pushing their wheeled stretcher. A black body bag was strapped atop it. Blood oozed from one of the zippered sides.
Carol pressed a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. She’d had her differences with Jonah, and many times had wished he’d pack up and move out on his own. But this!
She slipped past the stretcher and into the house. Something had been going on between Jonah and Jimmy lately. Jonah’s previous deference and almost slavish devotion had undergone a strange transformation during the past year or so. His attitude had become challenging, verging on threatening.
“Jimmy!”
She spotted his short, slight figure, dwarfed by the pair of policemen flanking him. Her impulse was to run to him and gather him in her arms but she knew he’d only push her away. Affection was repugnant to him.
“Hello, Mother,” he said softly.
“Quite a boy you’ve got here,” one of the cops said, tousling Jimmy’s dark hair. Only Carol saw the glare Jimmy leveled at him. “Kept his cool and called us as soon as he saw what happened. Too bad we couldn’t get here in time.”
“Yes,” Jimmy said with a slow shake of his head. “He must have been in such terrible agony for so long. If only I’d found him sooner.”
His eyes reflected none of the sadness in his voice.
When the police and the ambulance were gone, she faced him. “What happened, Jimmy?”
He shrugged and gave her a bland look. “Jonah had an accident.”
“Why did he have an accident?”
“He made a mistake.”
“It wasn’t like Jonah to make mistakes.”
“He made a serious one. He was here to guard me. But he started believing he could be me.”
As a numbing frost gathered in Carol’s marrow, Jimmy turned and walked away.
DECEMBER
SEVEN
1
Lisl had just finished addressing the last invitation to her Christmas party when the phone rang.
“How’s my favorite Prime?” Rafe said.
Warmth flowed through her at the sound of his voice.
“Pretty good. Glad to be just about done with these invitations.”
“Feel like doing some Christmas shopping?”
Lisl thought about that. December had barely begun. She had a small list of people to buy for and usually waited until the last minute. Purposely. She’d found that the trials and tribulations of last-minute shopping—the crowded malls, the clogged parking lots, anxiety over the very real possibility that all the good gifts would be gone—added a certain zest to the Christmas holidays.
But this wouldn’t be mere shopping. This would be a day with Rafe. They were together almost every night now. But daytime together was rare. He had his studies to keep him busy, and she had her classes and her Palo Alto paper.
“Sure. When?”
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
“I’ll be ready.”
As she stamped the invitations, Lisl double-checked to make sure she’d addressed one to everybody on her list—she had—and then she thought of Will. He wasn’t on the list because he’d be a waste of an invitation, but damn it, she wanted him at her party. So why let him get off easy by not inviting him? Quickly she addressed one last envelope, added a personal note to Will, and shoved the stack into her purse. Then she hurried to get dressed.
She thought of the Thanksgiving she and Rafe had spent together.
For the first time in her life, Lisl hadn’t shared the traditional turkey dinner with her folks. She had Rafe to thank for that. One result of her combative encounters with him was a deeper insight into her childhood. She was beginning to understand her parents better, to see them in a new light. And she didn’t like what she saw. As a result, it had been only mildly traumatic to call her folks and make up an excuse why she wouldn’t be there this year. They’d been very understanding. She’d almost wished they’d been less so.
Rafe confessed that he had almost no experience with Thanksgiving Day. His Spanish father and French mother had never celebrated the holiday. But since he considered himself a full-blooded American, he now wanted to join in the tradition. So Lisl had baked a breast of turkey with all the usual trimmings. They’d drunk two bottles of Riesling during the course of the evening and wound up in another bout of traumatic lovemaking.
Their time together had become a bit strange. Rafe would start out gentle and loving, then begin to probe her past. He knew all the weak points in her armor, all the most sensitive areas of her psyche. He’d probe and poke until he provoked her to violence. And then they’d make love. She’d be left feeling exhausted and ashamed for physically lashing out at him. But he encouraged the violence, seemed to want it, and she had to admit that afterward she felt somehow cleansed.
A strange relationship, but one she did not want to quit. Rafe said he loved her and Lisl believed him. Even amid all her nagging insecurities, despite the tiny insistent voice that kept whispering, Watch out, he’s going to hurt you, she sensed his deep interest in her. She needed that. Slowly, steadily, Rafe was filling an emptiness within her, a void she only vaguely had been aware of before now. His mind challenged her, his heart warmed her, and his body pleasured her. And now that she was beginning to feel complete, she couldn’t bear the thought of facing that emptiness again.
2
“Where are we going?” Lisl said as she slipped into the passenger seat of Rafe’s Maserati.
“Downtown.” He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. He wore gray wool slacks and a pale blue shirt under a cranberry cashmere sweater; black leather driving gloves, as tight as a second skin, completed the picture. “I thought we’d try the new Nordstrom.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Downtown was bedizened with Christmas decorations—animated Santa mannequins in the windows, giant plastic candy canes on the corners, tinselly arches over the streets of the shopping district, all under a bright sunny sky and temperatures in the balmy mid-sixties.
“Pretty garish,” Rafe said.
“And it gets more garish every year. But that’s the shopkeepers’ doing. That’s not what Christmas is about.”
“Oh? And just what is Christmas all about?”
Lisl laughed. “I can buy the fact that your family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but Christmas?
”
“Of course we celebrated Christmas. But I want to hear what you think it’s all about.”
“It’s about all the good things in life—giving, receiving, sharing, friends gathering, good-fellowship, brotherhood—”
“Peace on earth, good will toward men. And so on and so forth.”
Something in his voice made Lisl pause. “You’re not some sort of Scrooge, are you?”
As they pulled to a stop at a light on Conway Street, Rafe turned toward her.
“You don’t really believe all that brotherhood of man stuff, do you?”
“Of course. We’re all on this planet together. Brotherhood is the only way we’ll all come out of it in one piece.”
Rafe shook his head and stared ahead. “Man, oh, man, did they ever do a brainwashing number on you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Brotherhood. It’s a myth. A lie. ‘No man is an island’—the Big Lie.”
Lisl had a sinking feeling.
“You don’t really mean that,” she said, but deep within she sensed that he did. “You sound like that guy Hank Thompson and his Kickers.”
His expression turned fierce. “Don’t insult me. That man is an idiot.”
“Sorry.”
“Look around you, Lisl. Do you see any real brotherhood? I see only islands.”
The Maserati was moving again. Lisl watched the people on the crowded sidewalks as they flowed by. She liked what she saw.
“I see people walking and talking together, smiling, laughing, hunting for gifts for their friends and loved ones. Christmastime draws people together. That’s what it’s all about.”
“What about the children starving in Africa?”
“Oh, come on now!” Lisl said with a laugh. For a moment he reminded her of Will. “You’re not going to drag out that hoary old cliché, are you? My mother used to pull that on me to make me finish my Brussels sprouts!”
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