Boyfriend from Hell (23 page)

“I never thought of it.”

“Wouldn’t seem likely, would it, the way you’ve described your relationship, that you’d put your father in the same frame as your mother? He was always distant, from eleven when your mother died, to the day you went off to college?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did you eat separately at dinner?”

“We ate together. He’d call from work to pick up food if we needed it and usually he cooked something, short-order things, or I did when I was an older teenager.”

“And you ate together and it was then in the evening that he would withdraw?”

“Pretty much.”

“So your father sat down with you for dinner every night?”

“I suppose he did.”

“And weekends you said sometimes he would take you to the movies.”

“When I was younger.”

“And it stopped when?”

“Sixteen or so, when I started seriously hanging out with friends.”

“Did he ever take you ice skating or roller skating or museums or—”

“Baseball games. He took me to some baseball games, and the other things, too.”

“Maybe he wasn’t such an absent father. Maybe he was a man who couldn’t cope with the role he was cast into, and he managed as well as he could, given his limitations. And so, he has a part of your heart, too, Ronnie, and you miss him, too, and you feel guilty that you’re here, and he’s not, and for the sadness you feel you created in his life that became such a burden for him. You know your mother loved you, you feel it. May not be such a bad thing for you to know, and my guess is it’s true, that your father loved you, too. And he didn’t blame you for your mother’s death. His grief was profound and ultimately it overwhelmed him, but you were his little girl and he was trying.”

Ronnie sat for a few moments, reflective.

“Possibly,” she said, softly.

“I’ll take ‘possibly,’” Kaufman said.

Richard returned to New York, Nancy was with Bob, and to fulfill a fantasy of hers, they made love in Ronnie’s bed, in the apartment, Ronnie wanting the feeling that he was there with her in the place where she lived, slept, so she could feel the added intimacy. She thought about her performance. She believed by the very nature of their sex together she was getting better at it and that she fulfilled him. She couldn’t imagine how she might compare with some of his other women—she assumed there had to be others as he made his rounds, German actresses, Swedish nurses, her fantasies about his sex life—but she was mainly comparing herself to herself and decided that he was with her, he returned to her, he must have thought she was worth it, and if it came to pass that he did limit his travel it might begin looking like a genuine New York affair, after all.

Richard told her they were invited to dinner at Antoine Burris’s apartment and Ronnie was very interested to go, an opportunity to observe some aspect of Richard’s private life. They went on a Saturday night, Ronnie wearing a new black dress, Richard picking her up in a taxicab, in his ever-constant blazer, jeans, and a white silk shirt this time, dress-up for Saturday night.

Burris lived on West Twelfth Street in a converted factory building, the apartment overlooking the Hudson River, the main living room/dining room area filled with books, outdoing even Richard’s display.

“Tremendous,” Ronnie said.

“I’m a collector,” Burris responded. “I’m also compulsive, a deadly combination.”

He introduced her to a woman he described as “my lady friend,” Olga Sirvaya, six feet two, long black hair, pale white skin, hazel eyes, out of the pages of
Vogue,
wearing a skintight white dress.

“That dress,” Ronnie whispered to Richard. “It’s so tight, I’d say it was designed for her to ride the Tour de France.”

“Olga is a model.”

“No kidding. If I stand next to her I don’t think we look like we’re in the same species.”

Olga barely spoke. She ate sparingly, a dinner of beef curry, prepared in the kitchen and then served by two elderly ladies in white server’s outfits. The dinner conversation at first was dominated by Richard’s recent trip and the feasibility of the Swedish behavioral scientist’s findings, that there is a “joiner gene” that impels certain people to habituate toward groups, and in its extreme, to join cults. Her publisher then asked about the progress of the book and Ronnie gave a positive account of the work thus far. Knowing it would be of interest, she reported on her interview with Father McElene and the crystal surety of his beliefs.

They talked about faith among the clergy, to what extent, in their bones, modern-day clergymen still believed in the eternal struggle between God and Satan. The discussion shifted to Richard doing the book on satanic ritual abuse. The subject, which included satanic cult members possibly abducting children, with some accounts supposedly extracted from recovered memory, was fascinating to Ronnie, although it did not seem to register with Olga, who sat silently, bored and thin.

Ronnie considered the evening a great time. Michael was erudite, more so than anyone who preceded him, and he could have handled himself in the room, but it would have been as an observer. These men were right on good and evil, human behavior, satanic influences—the entire intellectual aspect of being with Richard that led her to sign on originally.

They went back to his place this time. He would be away about a week, research for the book. He needed to see a satanic cult in operation in Germantown, Maryland. The leader was ill and retiring, he had been in business for thirty years, and this was Richard’s last chance to observe the Family of the Fallen Angel and talk to its main person.

“Looks like I very well may be around come the fall. You’ll get bored with me.”

“Bored is Olga. I’d have a way to go.”

Ronnie rewrote the last paragraph she was working on, put her feet up on her desk, thinking about the material, whether to include her personal reaction to Father McElene’s remarks, which was a larger concern; how much of herself to insert into the book or to keep it all detached third person. She originally assumed a traditional third-person style was the way the book should be written and was now not so certain, a major structural decision. She wouldn’t solve it immediately and thought she might play with a portion of the text to see how it read. Nancy came home from the office.

“So?”

“An excellent evening.”

“Bet your Richard was nicer to his friends than he was to yours.”

“He was. Except with Antoine Burris’ date, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was barely listening. Olga, the model from outer space. The guys were high octane, though, like talk show guests on some quirky religious channel.”

Nancy was distracted. In the wastepaper basket next to Ronnie’s desk were pages Ronnie had printed out and then doodled on. Nancy removed a page from the basket, her eyes enlarging. On the top of the page was a drawing of Satan, vengeful, threatening, and along the sides of the page were his minions, demons ecstatic-looking in their evil, the drawings exquisitely rendered, malevolently powerful.

“This is unbelievable.” She held the page up for Ronnie. “I didn’t know you could draw like this.”

“I can’t,” she said, a headache suddenly rushing in.

“Did you copy it from a book?”

“I wouldn’t’ve been able to, nothing like that,” as she looked at it, bewildered, pressing her forehead for the pain. “I don’t remember doing it at all.”

S
HE WAS AFRAID TO
sleep, fearful the creatures of the page would inhabit her dreams. She and Nancy had settled on an explanation. Similar to the manner in which Ronnie had previously dreamed images from her research, she had somehow created these drawings from what she had seen in the research material or from her own dreams. Ronnie’s problem with the explanation was that never in her life had she exhibited the slightest ability at draftsmanship.

After lying awake for several hours she fell into a sleep of fatigue. In the morning she was relieved, not for the sleep, but because she could not recall her dreams. She was not due to see the therapist for another three days. She didn’t know how she could go that long and left a message on Kaufman’s machine asking if she could come in as soon as possible, that day. Nancy stood by while Ronnie placed the call, unsure if she should even go to work. Ronnie insisted she didn’t need Nancy standing over her and watching her and Nancy, under protest, went to the office. Ronnie sat at her desk, staring at the drawings. She still couldn’t make the connection, when she had done it, how.

She walked over to Broadway to buy a newspaper and the man in the box was in his place. He had disappeared for a while in one of his periodic absences, rather like Richard, she thought. Their last exchanges had been upsetting so she was going to give him a wide berth and walk past him. He noticed her, this man who didn’t respond to anyone, and spoke in a husky voice, “Keep away from me.”

He was in the rear of a television set box and tried to place more distance between them and there wasn’t any room, his back was squeezed against the cardboard.

“What do I mean to you?” she said.

He didn’t respond, within his private madness.

She moved on, feeling as though she could camp outside Kaufman’s office if she didn’t see her right away. She approached the building and became aware of a car cruising alongside her. The car stopped and Detectives Santini and Gomez emerged.

“Ms. Delaney, I see you’re wearing a Yankee hat,” Gomez said. She had popped it on when she was leaving the house.

“What?”

His voice was distant, outside her range of concentration.

“I said you’re wearing a Yankee hat.”

It still took a beat for her to concentrate, he was talking to her, talking to her about a hat.

“What of it?”

“You work out, Ms. Delaney?” Gomez said.

“Not really. I jog some. Look, I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

Santini was not fully engaged in his partner’s suspicions and let Gomez continue on his own.

“Sometimes a person’s physical frame doesn’t tell you how strong they are.”

“Yes? And? You’re a detective. Can’t you detect I’m not in the mood for questions right now?”

“Randall Cummings was murdered, Ms. Delaney,” Gomez said. “You were one of the last people to see him alive. If we’re trying to find the murderer and you think we have to check your mood first, you’re sadly mistaken. Familiar with Mariano Rivera, Ron Guidry?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them, wicked fastballs, nothing you’d take from their physical frames. A person’s size can be misleading. And someone who was harassed, in anger, might find the strength to perform a physical act on the person they thought was harassing them, an act you wouldn’t predict, given their physical frame.” She was overwrought, from everything, tapping her fingers on her side impatiently. “You’re nervous, Ms. Delaney. It isn’t easy living with something you’re holding inside you.”

She carried her cell phone with her and Kaufman hadn’t called. She also left the number for the apartment. She needed to get upstairs to see if there was a message on her machine. She had to get in to see her right away.

“What?”

“I said it isn’t easy living with something you’re holding inside you. Is there something you should be telling us, Ms. Delaney?”

“We’re in different solar systems,” and she walked away from them.

“That was effective,” Santini said as they observed her go into the building.

“Girl is a powder keg.”

“Maybe she figured Cummings was harassing her, and now
we
are.”

“Was worth a shot. Still is.”

Ronnie placed another call to Kaufman saying it was imperative to see her. She couldn’t work, she watched television, cable news, and finally a few minutes before 10:00
A.M.
the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Veronica, it’s Dr. Kaufman. What seems to be the trouble?”

“I can’t tell you on the phone. Can I come in and see you? It’s extremely urgent.”

“I’ll cancel a lunch. Come to my office at one.”

Ronnie tried an experiment, sitting at her computer, surfing the Net, checking herself periodically. Did she go into a cloud, do another set of drawings unconsciously? She did not. The slow morning passed and she placed the sheet of paper with the drawings in an envelope and headed for Kaufman’s office.

Ronnie immediately showed Kaufman the drawings, telling her she didn’t remember doing them and was artistically incapable of anything like it.

“First, let’s deal with the subject matter. It’s consistent with your dreams and your book. Satan and demons. With which you’re totally preoccupied within your work and within your personal psychology. Satanic images will eventually vanish from your reference, conscious and subconscious, when you come to terms with your guilt—over your mother, and may I now venture to say, your father.
And
—this is getting very significant in your life—
and
when you’re finished with this book. Right now you’re immersed in these images.”

“Dr. Kaufman, I can’t draw, I never could.”

To prove the point she reached for a book on Kaufman’s bookshelf, photography by Walker Evans, took a pen and a piece of white paper from the desk, and tried to copy an image from the book. The attempt was hapless, the work of a distinctly untalented person.

“All right,” Kaufman said.

“Terrible. I’m terrible. How did it get there? It isn’t some dark miracle. An outside force didn’t come and draw on my paper.”

“As a child, were you encouraged to draw?”

“No, not any more than other kids. I didn’t have any talent in school either.”

“But this is talented work, exceptionally so. It’s possible you have ability that was repressed.” Kaufman looked closely at the drawings. “Might be similar to automatic writing. Familiar with the term?”

“Something with séances.”

“People used to believe you could write thoughts that came from someone else’s mind, like a person who died. And they would attempt to contact that person. Very popular in the eighteen hundreds. Today we know there’s a subconscious and the people themselves were doing the writing. Like when the pointer moves on a Ouija board, it feels to the people doing it that it’s external. Subconsciously someone at the table is moving it.”