Boyfriend from Hell

by Avery Corman

  “Yes! That’ll definitely fix everything.”

  They ordered the food, and when it arrived, Ronnie unearthed an album and for inspiration played Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” As they were finishing dinner, Richard called. Ronnie sat on the bed, Nancy seated herself on the floor of the bedroom to listen to Ronnie’s end.

  “Yes?”

  “What is it, Ronnie?”

  “Does the name Claire Reilly mean anything to you?”

  “Claire Reilly. Swam the English Channel in 1982.”

  His directness was audacious, Ronnie granted him. Are you onto me? he seemed to be saying. Well, you can be onto me. So there.

  “You knew her?”

  “Briefly. We both lived in Bridgeport at the same time.”

  “Did you have an affair with her?”

  “Nothing like it. I didn’t know her very well, an in-the-library, small talk acquaintanceship.”

  “Charming. And you lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. How come I don’t see you as a Bridgeport-Connecticut kind of guy?”

  “A sad story,” he said, brushing past her remark. “She became mentally ill, apparently.”

  “Apparently. But you didn’t know her very well.”

  “No.”

  “Does the name Raymond Scott mean anything to you?”

  “Raymond Scott. He was on the Satan circuit for a while. Don’t know what happened to him.”

  “So here’s the question everyone loves. If the book, given my psychology, was the absolute wrong book for me, once I said I wanted to drop the project, why did you encourage me to go on with it?”

  “You’re presuming I know your psychology. And I didn’t encourage you, Ronnie.”

  “But that was the effect. Seductively, you encouraged me. In a subtle, seductive kind of way. Reading what I wrote, praising what you read.”

  “I still think you were right for the book and perhaps one day you will be again.”

  “Working me a little, still?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Ronnie, the tone here troubles me. I think we’ve had something special together and when I get back I’d like us to see more of each other, become—more intimate.”

  “Slip out the back, Jack.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Make a new plan, Stan.”

  “Ronnie?”

  “We’re not going to become more intimate, Richard. We’re not going to become anything. You’re too manipulative for me. You’re too—everything for me. I’m going to say good-bye now. Like good-bye good-bye.”

  “Ronnie—”

  “I’m not the girl for you, on whatever level you want to take that. Good-bye.”

  Ronnie hung up and she and Nancy slapped double high fives.

  She nestled into bed for sleep, relieved, a weight lifted, singing to herself, “Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.”

  A priest at an altar, an impressive man, tall and elegant, an El Greco figure, the church interior ornate. The priest speaks in Spanish. Ronnie is in a pew in a summery white cotton blouse with a yellow skirt, sandals, a red flower in her hair, dressed like many of the other women who are present. The men are in European working men’s Sunday suits and ties. As the priest intones, suddenly Richard appears at the side of the church. He wears tight black pants and a black silk shirt open at the neck. He carries a guitar case and opens it. The worshippers gasp. He has a gun. She is dreaming Richard as Antonio Banderas in a Robert Rodriguez movie. Richard/Antonio speaks argumentatively in Spanish to the priest.

  “En la guerra entre Dios y el Diablo, el ganador será el Diablo. Porque en la tierra, Dios encontró a los débiles y los humildes, pero el Diablo encontró a los fuertes y bravos, por lo que las fuerzas del Diablo en la tierra serán más poderosas y más peligrosas …”

  She begins to speak the words he speaks, along with him, in agreement, “… y ellos pueden encontrar formas de destruír a los débiles y los humildes.”

  “Ronnie, for God’s sake, Ronnie, wake up!” Nancy was standing over her, shaking her hard, and she was roused out of sleep.

  “What?”

  “You were shouting in Spanish.”

  “I was dreaming, a church—”

  “You woke me. What kind of dream was it? You don’t speak Spanish.”

  “I don’t. I don’t. Oh, Jesus Christ.” She held her face in her hands, sitting upright now. “It’s another sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “Of possession. Speaking in a language unknown to the person.”

  Nancy attempted to make sense of it. “Look, we live in New York. It’s getting to be a bilingual city. You must’ve picked up more Spanish than you think you know. Or you heard something and memorized it without realizing and it came out in sleep.”

  “Right,” Ronnie said, largely to release her. “Go back to bed.”

  “When is your next session?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “You’ve got to get in earlier,” and Nancy withdrew to her room.

  Ronnie lay awake waiting for the morning sun. However she arrived at this point, by being suggestible in stress, by exposure to the research, or by something beyond logic and rationality, something was in her, she could feel it, and it was taking her over.

  15

  TRADITIONALLY, many New York psychotherapists planned their vacations for the month of August, a practice Claire Kaufman followed for her private patients, whom she felt welcomed the respite. She and her husband favored a warm weather vacation in the dead of winter, however, and took their time then. In August she maintained her hours at the clinic, where her patients’ mental health issues did not seem to abate with the heat of summer. She received the call from Nancy at her apartment. The outgoing message on her office phone gave Kaufman’s home number for cases of emergency and Nancy called her there.

  Nancy identified herself as Ronnie Delaney’s roommate and told Kaufman that Ronnie had fallen back to sleep after an extremely troubled night in which she shouted out loud in Spanish while sleeping, a language Ronnie did not even know. Nancy was intervening to say her friend, in her opinion, had taken a turn for the worse, and that Ronnie had raised the possibility of satanic possession. Kaufman, concerned, told Nancy she was coming to the apartment, Nancy should make certain if Ronnie awoke that she waited for her. Kaufman set out for the roommates’ place on 111th Street and West End Avenue, an uncommon occurrence, a New York psychotherapist making a house call in August.

  Nancy and Kaufman talked softly in the living room while Ronnie continued to sleep.

  “Everything she says is a sign of possession, I can see an explanation for,” Nancy said. “The race—she’s a closet runner. The telepathy—that was pretty weak, she knew something about my boyfriend’s parents, except he might’ve told her. The language—she said some words in Spanish. Okay. She may have memorized something she heard and it emerged in sleep. It’s the other things that worry me. The nervous breakdown things. Seeing Satan. Thinking Richard Smith could be the human embodiment of Satan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She went to see this Claire Reilly at Empire State.”

  “Did she?”

  “Not a mentally well person. Thinks Satan takes a human form and that she was possessed by him, as a Raymond Scott, who might also be Richard.”

  “Really?”

  “This Raymond Scott’s behavior was the same as Richard’s. Same planting satanic images in her thoughts. Same manipulations. She showed Ronnie a picture that was taken of her with this Raymond Scott and it looked to Ronnie like it was Richard. Anyway, she broke up with him yesterday, and you’d think she’d be on the way back, but last night—”

  Ronnie entered the room, apprehensive.

  “Dr. Kaufman, what are you doing here?”

  “Nancy called me. She was worried about your episode last night.”

  “You came to my apartment? I must be in pretty bad shape.” She sat in a chair and kneaded her forehe
ad to relieve the tension. “Nancy told you about the Spanish?”

  “She did.”

  “Last item for my résumé on possession.”

  “Veronica, possession does not exist,” Kaufman said. “It has absolutely no basis in fact or science.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “You know the subject of possession as well as anyone by now. People need to believe in it, and so they do, but that doesn’t mean they are possessed.”

  “But for those people who believe, and who begin to manifest the symptoms, believing is the same as being possessed. They end up in the same place.”

  “Are you telling me you believe you’re possessed, Veronica?”

  “Technically, it’s obsessed, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In a full-scale possession, I’d be bouncing off the walls. I believe I have the symptoms of satanic obsession.”

  “Which you’ve been recycling from the book,” Nancy said.

  “If you begin to believe it,” Kaufman said, “you’ll only reinforce the belief. The more you believe you saw Satan, the more likely it is you will ‘see’ him, in quotes. And it should come as no surprise that I would say to you, someone who believes they are obsessed by Satan must believe they deserve to be obsessed by Satan.”

  “Your basic theme.”

  “No, yours. Veronica, I have access to an excellent residential therapeutic facility. It’s in a townhouse on East Ninety-third Street. Run by a colleague of mine, Philip Wheatley. Private, very effective. You’d have your own room, there’s a lovely library. We’d work something out on the costs, so you needn’t concern yourself about that.”

  “You want to put me away like Claire Reilly?”

  “This is not putting you away. It’s therapeutic. I’d come by for our regular sessions, you’d have additional therapy with Dr. Wheatley, who is brilliant, and you’d be in group therapy with other people who’ve experienced childhood trauma.”

  “Is that my category?”

  “You’re defying category. But childhood trauma is at the core of things. And the combination of individual and group therapy over a period of time—”

  “Would I be medicated? Is that part of the therapy, finding the right antidepressant?”

  “Not without your consent.”

  “And do I give up my rights? Once I’m in, can I just leave, or don’t I own myself anymore?”

  “You wouldn’t be there against your will.”

  “And if my situation deteriorates, if the therapy isn’t working, do you have the right to keep me there?”

  “You wouldn’t sign yourself over. You’d have the right to leave. But anyone, Nancy, me, if they’re a threat to themselves or others can be remanded to a psychiatric facility. It’s the law. But you’re asking the wrong questions. It isn’t what happens if your situation deteriorates, it’s what do we do to get you better.”

  “They’re the right questions. I know the case studies; people live like I am now, normal at times, crazy at other times. And they’re in and out of facilities. And they drug them up. And their minds are never the same. All I have is my mind,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “I wouldn’t let any harm come to you,” Nancy said. “But you can’t live like this, ranting in the night, thinking you see the Devil. What kind of life is this?”

  “I appreciate your coming, Dr. Kaufman, and Nancy, you are my true blue friend, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going down that road and risk ending up like that woman. What I’m going to do is go right to where the symptoms are, to the kind of symptoms they are, and deal with them on that level. I’m going to have an exorcism.”

  “Veronica, it’s completely artificial!” Kaufman said.

  “A lapsed Catholic girl, maybe they’ve got the right mumbo jumbo for me.”

  “You have unresolved problems an exorcism isn’t going to touch.”

  “People behaving like I am have been helped by exorcisms.”

  “Some people. In a placebo sense. But for some people, it’s destabilizing. You can get worse.”

  “It’s what I’m going to do. I have a contact in the church. Now I’m going to go inside, take a shower, get dressed, and fix up my life.”

  Kaufman left, but Nancy wasn’t prepared to let Ronnie out of her sight. Ronnie insisted she didn’t want her as a bodyguard, that was no way for either of them to live either. She was rational, she had made her way to Cold Spring and back, she could get in a taxicab and go to the archdiocese office and then get back to the apartment. She called Father McElene, however, the priest was out of the office. She reminded the secretary she had been in to see him before and the furtiveness in Ronnie’s voice led the secretary to suggest she come to the office and wait, he would be in at 11:00 A.M. She took a taxicab downtown, looking straight ahead, not wanting to make eye contact with anything.

  Father McElene was back in the office when she arrived, and she went over her notes while waiting, having written down the various manifestations and approximate dates. The secretary said he was ready for her, he greeted her warmly, and she sat with her material in front of her, thinking this man was in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, he could make this happen, she had to be persuasive.

  Soberly, carefully, she presented the record of the accumulating manifestations, with a light dusting of the Raymond Scott as Richard Smith as Satan scenario, not wanting to appear to be merely a mixed-up New York girl caught in a bad relationship. She described in general terms the therapy she was in with Kaufman and Kaufman’s thoughts about the cause of her behavior, largely to convince him that she had tried therapy, and wasn’t getting better. She admitted that writing a book about possession might lead an observer to assume the subject matter combined with her suggestibility could bring her to this state. Whatever caused them, the manifestations were happening. And she had stopped working on the book. She repeated the position she took with Kaufman, she needed to go directly to where the symptoms were, and to the kind of symptoms, and was imploring him to arrange for an exorcism.

  He did not respond immediately; he had made notes of his own and he looked them over before addressing her. He had surprised Ronnie in their first meeting by embracing the idea of possession; he seemed like such a sophisticated man, and yet he told her then that he believed in Satan, and in Satan, on occasion, possessing people. Possibly it had been a pose, created for a writer, and here, in this room, they were now into a test, this time Ronnie testing him—where did he really come down on the issue, and was he prepared to allow an exorcism if the person believed it would be the solution?

  “There is always someone,” he said quietly. He paused a moment, leaving her to wonder if he meant there is always someone who believes they are possessed, or if he himself was indeed a true believer, and meant there is always someone who is possessed. “You’re such a valuable person,” he said. “Exactly whom he would want to take down with his evil,” indicating he did believe it was possible.

  “Then will you help me? Please say you will, Father.”

  “I’ll do my best. But it isn’t that easy and it isn’t that fast. The church has procedures. First, we have to do an evaluation. A priest needs to observe the manifestations, if possible. I realize in your case, in an obsession, it may not be predictable, for someone to be right there when you’re in difficulty. Even short of that, we have to do a proper interview, make a report, and I’m not the one to do it, an exorcist has to do it.”

  “Fine.”

  “We really haven’t done many lately, as I indicated when we talked. In our church a priest performing an exorcism has to have purity of faith and experience in exorcism. We’ve been training people. This is a terrible way to put it, given your immediate need, but we have a backlog of cases.”

  “What do people do?”

  “Some aren’t really afflicted. The symptoms vanish on their own when the person is denied the attention they might have been seekin
g out of narcissism. Some are helped by other means, psychiatric treatment, drug therapies. Some are lost to us. And some live interrupted lives.”

  “Interrupted lives. I’ve read that. The manifestations come and go, over years, over a life. It frightens me.”

  “Ms. Delaney, let me work on it. See if I can pull some strings, move this along.”

  “How long would you say?”

  “Several weeks, and that would be a miracle.”

  “And several weeks is how many weeks?”

  “Let me see. I’ll look into it.”

  “I’d also like to talk to my childhood priest.”

  “You should.”

  “Maybe he could do it right away.”

  “If he’s qualified. And he’d still need permission. Let me get started. You’re going to get through this fine,” he said. “You have the power of God on your side.”

  “I haven’t been around that sentiment in a long time,” she said. “Thank you, Father.”

  She placed a call on her cell phone to Father Connolly in the Bronx.

  “Saint Christopher Church,” a woman answered.

  “Hello. My name is Veronica Delaney and I’m looking for Father Connolly. Is he in?”

  “This time of day he plays chess with the youngsters in the park. Should be back in about an hour.”

  “If he comes in, would you tell him Veronica Delaney is on her way to see him? And could he wait for me, please? He knows me.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  She couldn’t find a taxicab and headed toward the subway. She reached Lexington Avenue and was about to enter the station. She saw him in the mix of pedestrians on the other side of the street, a winged presence in with the crowd. She stopped walking, closed her eyes, her heart pounding; waited, hoping this would pass; and looked again and saw an ordinary-street scene. He was gone. He had not been smiling this time. He seemed to Ronnie to have been studying her, or possibly just checking in.

  She emerged from the station at Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and walked toward Saint James Park, located near the church. This was her childhood park. She had not been in this place for years and when she entered she remembered being a little girl here, being pushed on the swings by her mother, and yes, her father, dancing around a maypole with other children to mark the start of spring, walking hand in hand with her mother; the memories an intermingling of the joyful and the achingly sad.