Boyfriend from Hell (28 page)

When she met with her husband, Kaufman was not nearly as guarded as with her patient.

“I told her imagining you’re seeing Satan when you’re conscious is similar to drawing Satan unconsciously. And it is, in a general sense, a variation on her theme.”

“But it’s more extreme.”

“It is more extreme. I didn’t want to alarm her. I need to keep her focused on understanding her own guilt. She’s placed a huge burden on herself and she’s accelerated her self-recrimination. A lovely girl and she’s unraveling.”

“So how wise is it not to alarm her?” he asked.

“It’s a balancing act. She has to concentrate in the sessions, not be unhinged by what I say. Frankly, I’m a beat away from trying to keep her inside.”

Ronnie was reading between the lines of Kaufman’s responses. She knew that seeing Satan at a nearby table or through a bus window was a more powerful aberration than illustrating him without being aware of the act, or merely dreaming him. A therapist’s restraint could not conceal from her that a nightmare by day was more serious than a nightmare by night.

The following morning she sent an e-mail to CR:

I need to ask you, did you ever see Satan when you were awake? Not in a dream. In a waking state?


A few hours later she received a response. She stared at it, not wanting to believe what she was reading on her screen.

I did see him when I was awake. Several times. The first time I remember as if it was today. I saw him across a dance floor.


On the words “across a dance floor,” Ronnie began to feel ill again. She sent CR an instant message.

Ronnie: These things are happening to me. I’m desperate. Could you please consider having a visitor?


CR: My name is Claire Reilly. I’m at Empire State Psychiatric Facility in Cold Spring, N.Y.


Ronnie: May I come today? Are there visiting hours?


CR: Visiting hours are open. Come when you wish. I never have visitors.


Ronnie took the train, an hour and a quarter ride from Grand Central Station, unable to concentrate on the magazines she brought. She resisted looking out the window. She took a taxicab for the remaining ten-minute ride to the facility.

The main building resembled a penal institution: a three-story unadorned red brick structure half a city block in size. The grounds were more felicitous: a tree-lined campus with a rolling grass lawn. Ronnie passed through a security guard and electronic scanner and announced herself at the front desk. The guard there called on his phone and she was told to wait in the visitors’ lounge off the main lobby, a room with fluorescent lighting, cafeteria-style tables and chairs, a few unmatching sofas and chairs, and yellow walls decorated with fading art posters. The place had a point-of-no-return atmosphere. The time was approaching 3:00
P.M.
No one else was in the lounge.

After a few minutes a woman in her forties entered in the company of a nurse in a white uniform. Claire Reilly was five feet six, the trace of attractive features in a puffy face; wearing a print dress twenty years out of date, her auburn hair in a ponytail with a pink ribbon. She carried a little matching pink handbag, as though she meant to be at her best for a visitor. Ronnie wondered if she was looking into her future, if this was who she could end up being, in a place like this.

“Ms. Reilly, I’m Ronnie Delaney.”

“Will you be all right, Claire?” the nurse asked.

“Fine. We’re going to sit under a tree. Is that all right with you?” she said to Ronnie. “This room is so institutional.”

As they headed for the front door, Claire walked slowly, her gait uncertain, and that, along with the puffy face, indicated to Ronnie the woman was living with the effects of heavy medication.

Claire guided them to a shaded bench. A few patients wandered around the grounds listlessly, with nurses nearby watching out for them. Ronnie felt as if she had stepped into a Diane Arbus photograph.

“So, my dear, I can see the anxiety in your face.”

“Terrible things have been happening to me, Ms. Reilly.”

“I gather. It’s an exclusive circle.”

“An exclusive circle?”

“We ladies. I assume we should be flattered. If you read about it, you’ll see some people think we invite Satan in by our behavior. I’m not sure of that.”

“I’ve been having parallel experiences to yours. I won a race in Central Park. I never ran like that before. Like you swam the English Channel.”

“The English Channel. It not only feels like another life—here’s the irony, it felt like another life at the time.”

“And the telepathy and the drawings and the terrible dreams, and now I see him, Satan appears when I’m awake. In a car. Across a dance floor.”

“Sounds very familiar. You’re possessed, my dear. He’s found his way into you.”

The chilling remark was said casually and Ronnie shuddered.

“You say that very confidently.”

“Well, I don’t have to
examine
you. I see it in your eyes. Same eyes as I had.” She suddenly became secretive, unbalanced, and whispered confidentially, “You have to watch out for the medication. They start you out to keep you calm, but after a while it becomes how you live. You don’t belong to yourself anymore.”

“Dear God, what am I doing here?” Ronnie said aloud to herself, softly, rhetorically, but Claire answered.

“Looking for an answer. What’s happening to you, how can you stop it? I was a teacher. I wanted to live a responsible life. And this is what happened to me. If you read about these things, if you’re possessed, completely, you’re not functioning, Satan takes you over entirely. What I was, what you are, is a form of possession they call ‘obsessed,’ where you still function, but he gets into you.”

“Yes, I know the distinction,” Ronnie said.

“A complete possession is the easy one. Because you’re taken over, you’re not really conscious of what’s happening to you. But obsession, that’s the true act of cruelty, when you’re aware of your torture and not able to do anything about it. It’s satanic in its cruelty.”

“I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist who feels everything can be explained.”

“Then why are you here? Too much of a coincidence, the two of us? Be interesting how many others there’ve been like us. Maybe some of them killed themselves. I should consider myself fortunate.”

“Could I ask, please—how is it that
you’re
here?”

“It happened very quickly. I was going along, with the various signs of obsession that you know very well by now building in me. I was confused, not knowing what was happening to me; functioning, not normally, but not where you’d have to send me to a place like this. And then it accelerated. Satan himself appeared when I was awake. I didn’t know where or when he was going to show up next. All this while, Satan, in his human form, was inhabiting my real world. First one Satan, then the other, and I couldn’t keep everything together. Eventually, I just couldn’t function.”

“Satan in his
human
form?”

“When he assumes the aspect of a human being.”

“What do you mean?”

“Part of his guile, his evil. First he uses your body, which he can only do if he appears to be real. And then he works on your mind. That’s what he’s really after, I believe, to destroy your mind, which is infinitely more cruel. He must think of you as virtuous.” She was still for a moment, reflective. “The evil angel appears to me from time to time, just to make sure I stay here.” Changing moods, she said, “The sex is fantastic, isn’t it, with our Raymond?”

“Raymond?”

“Aren’t you seeing someone; talk, dark, handsome, fantastic sex?”

Ronnie couldn’t bring herself to answer at first.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“I knew that. Goes with everything else. Raymond Scott. Also known as Satan.”

“I don’t follow …”

Claire opened her pocketbook.

“We were in a club and a photographer wanted to take a photograph of the two of us. Raymond didn’t want that. How can you be sleeping with someone and not have a picture of the two of you? So I had a friend take one secretly when we were on the street.”

She removed the photograph and showed it to Ronnie. It was a younger version of Claire. She was with a man who looked exactly like Richard. Ronnie stared at it, astonished.

“He looks just like the man I’m seeing. But his name is Richard Smith,” she said, her heart racing.

“Smith, Scott, Satan.”

“You’re saying this man was Satan in human form?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I know now. I didn’t know then. His behavior: itinerant, unreliable, drawing me in, letting me out, using sex to hold me in place, playing cat and mouse; and the books he gave me to read, rare books with drawings of Satan, powerful images that embedded themselves in my mind, found their way into my dreams, until I was drawing them, seeing them, and he was doing this to me, working on me, finding the weakness in my mental state and breaking me down.”

“What did he do for a living, Raymond Scott?”

“He was a Satan scholar. He lectured on Satan.” Claire suddenly noticed something behind Ronnie. “No!” she gasped. “No!”

Ronnie turned. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

“He’s back. Satan is back.”

“Where?”

“Right there. He’s grinning at me.”

“I don’t see anything.”

She started to run awkwardly, heavily, toward the main building.

“Claire!” Ronnie ran after her.

While running, Claire looked back apprehensively to the place where she said Satan appeared to her. She stopped. “He’s gone now.” The woman looked forlorn; the bad thing had happened again. “Talking like this, it isn’t good for me.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Out of compassion Ronnie kissed her gently on the cheek.

With compassion of her own, Claire said, “Be the mouse that gets away.”

On the trip back to the city Ronnie’s mind was so flooded with bits and pieces of the conversation with Claire Reilly, she thought, ruefully, she didn’t even have room for her own sighting of Satan. She wrote down everything she could remember of the meeting and when Nancy entered the apartment Ronnie overwhelmed her with a report.

“Whoa. You’re saying Richard was with this woman twenty years ago?”

“It looked exactly like him, and he was a lecturer on Satan, and the things she described, how he manipulated her, planted images of Satan with her, how he came, went. It’s describing Richard.”

“And he’s
Satan in human form?
Ronnie? Could we just settle on he’s a really bad guy?”

“This woman, she knew it all, the whole relationship with Richard. Maybe Satan
does
exist. The old argument, if innate good exists, innate evil can exist. And if innate evil can exist, it can … materialize, as an evil angel, as an evil person. I am so messed up. I am so messed up,” and she began to cry, a deep, heaving cry. Nancy put her arms around her.

“Easy, girlfriend, easy. It’ll be better. You got yourself out of the book. Next, you’ll be out of this guy. And little by little you’ll be yourself. You have to be yourself, Ronnie, you have to,” and then Nancy, too, began to weep, and they held each other.

“Crazy people look in my eyes and they see something. I’ve been having absolute signs of possession, Nancy.”

“It’s the book. It’s got you totally screwed up, like you’re living out your research.”

“I went on Google. Nothing for a Raymond Scott. Is it possible he
is
the same person, Richard
is
Raymond Scott? But he hasn’t aged. There’s got to be like some Dorian Gray portrait turning old somewhere. This is so weird. I’m in something so weird.”

“He’s
weird. And if this is his pattern, and he changes his name, and manipulates women, he’s a goddamn sociopath. Even if he isn’t Raymond Scott, he’s still a terrible, terrible guy. You have dated the worst guy ever.”

“I’m beginning to think he isn’t for me,” she said, deadpan.

She dialed his cell phone and left a message. “Richard, it’s Ronnie. Most important you call me.” She went to her computer and e-mailed him the same message.

“What we need are spareribs,” Nancy announced.

“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?”