Beyond Obsession (30 page)

He agreed to whatever she suggested, whatever she wanted. He was sure he had no other choice. To celebrate her return to him, even on these terms, on whatever terms she set, he decided to give her something special. School was coming to an end for the summer. He drove up to the high school in a rented Bentley; the backseat was filled with flowers; in the middle of those flowers was an expensive gold bracelet. Karin accepted the gifts as her due. But, she told Dennis, she was a little disappointed. Why had he rented a Bentley and not a Rolls-Royce?

Karin, someone said later, was playing him like a fish on a line, and he was offering no resistance. She was manipulating him and his emotions as far as she could. In her friend Kira Lintner's yearbook Karin wrote:

So I just finished failing a geometry exam. No problem! Hope that you enjoy the summer & get to spend some time with Chris. Just the two of you together, you know? You guys are great with each other so I hope it works out & I
expect
to be in the wedding party! As you may expect to be in mine. Although you have yet to meet the groom. No, it's not Dennis. Surprised? No, not really. His name is Alex. Yes, the Very same Alex who is down in Rowayton. He is really very special & we get along great together. He is Russian, as you know, with an accent that could stop a train, a body that stops my heart & just the sweetest disposition in the
world
! I haven't gotten him yet, but I will soon you can be sure. You don't know how close it was this weekend though. I have news for you. Alex talks in his sleep!
That's
how close it was. O.K.—so yes, our first son will be named Kevin Alexander. What do you think? Den & I are still inseparable friends though. He buys me things, lets me drive the Triumph & takes me for rides in Rolls Royces & Bentleys. It's a cool life. But we'll never be like you and Chris. What you guys have is special & I admire it. Stay cool O.K. If you're around during the summer, we'll talk. Enjoy senior, your
last
year in this place. Well, I'm happy to be 1/2 way through & still surviving. Take care kid, Karin Aparo.

Kira Lintner, who was then involved with Dennis's friend Chris Wheatley, says that about this time Karin passed her a note in school. Would Kira agree to sleep-with Dennis? Why? So she'd have an even tighter hold over Dennis, be able to control him even more firmly than ever; if Kira slept with him, Karin would be able to go to Dennis and say, “I know what you did with Kira.” Dennis would feel so guilty he would have no resistance to anything she asked.

Kira refused. Karin asked her if there was someone else in the class who might be willing. “After class,” Kira said, “we went to the cafeteria, and Karin asked several other girls if they'd sleep with Dennis. At least two of them were friends of Dennis, not Karin, and she went over to them and asked if they'd sleep with him. They said, absolutely not, they were Dennis's friends and not hers.”

She didn't need that to control Dennis. She didn't need anything. On the surface, she didn't even need Dennis any longer. She had Alex Markov. On June 20 she slept with him for the first time. Yet she would not give up Dennis or her hold on him. “My feelings toward Dennis were very mixed,” she said. She still loved him, but she needed to get away from his clinging, needed some freedom. Besides, though she didn't say it then, she might well need him in the time to come.

22

A crisis was approaching, the worst crisis of her life. She was going to abandon her mother's most cherished dream, the fantasy that they had shared for more than a decade, since she was five. She knew now that it had always been nothing more than a delusion, a goal she could never reach. Hearing the other violinists at the Manhattan School, working at her lessons with Albert Markov, listening to Alex play, she understood at last that the small talent she had was not enough, that she would never play on the concert stage, that a career as a professional musician was closed to her. She would have to find something else. Worse, she would have to tell Joyce, sometime and in some way, and prepare herself to deal somehow with the inevitable reaction and consequence.

At first she held the decision to herself. Then she told Maria Bonaiuto, the school nurse who had become her adult confidante. “She was,” Bonaiuto says, “beginning to develop an idea for the future. She had felt so desperate so often I was truly worried that Karin felt she had no future and might commit suicide. Now she was really talking about college and becoming a psychologist. She said she only had to get through two years and then she would be in college and then she could get counseling and there would be no more problems once she was in college and away. She was beginning to sound much more adult and real. She seemed to have something she could hold on to.”

She revealed that crucial change of plans to Dennis as well. Deep inside, she explained, she had never really wanted to be a concert violinist, and she had known, really, that she didn't have the talent or the drive to succeed. That actually had been her mother's plan, her mother's dream. She had used the fantasy and the violin to get what she wanted, which was now to be a psychologist.

Everyone else might accept Karin's decision, might consider it admirable and mature, a sign that she was growing up and finally becoming independent, especially when she told Shannon and others that no matter how bad things got, she knew she only had to get through another two years and then would be free. Still, there were those two years, and at sixteen even a month can seem a very long time. And there was the question, How would Joyce take it? If the past is prelude, there was little doubt that Joyce would not take it well.

Karin says that she did tell Joyce, did discuss it with her not once but several times and that her mother's response was to suggest that they both get psychological counseling. That is what Karin says. No one knows for certain.

And Karin maintains that from late May on, she and Joyce were actually getting along better than they ever had before. If so, the reason was Alex Markov. Joyce adored him, and Karin's growing attachment to him was a source of enormous pleasure; even if Karin discussed abandoning the violin with her, it was always possible that the Markovs, Albert, the teacher and Joyce's friend and Karin's father figure, and especially Alex, the son and now Karin's lover, could be a palpable influence in turning her back to that first dream, that first love.

But even as Karin's affair with Alex blossomed and flourished, a crisis loomed there, too. Despite whatever protestations he might be making, the affair was only an interlude, a temporary thing. In August Alex was going to leave for an extended concert tour that would take him out of the country. It could not have been pleasant to look forward to the time with Joyce when both Alex and the violin were gone.

On June 26 Joyce was in Greenwich on business. She had driven Karin to the Markovs', dropped her off and gone on her way. The plan was for her to retrieve Karin in the afternoon and drive her home. It was the anniversary of Karin's first date with Dennis, and they were going out to celebrate. But on the way from Greenwich Joyce's car was rear-ended. Karin was called at the Markovs' and informed that Joyce was at Middlesex Memorial Hospital, that though she had not been seriously hurt, she would have to remain in the hospital at least overnight. Alex offered to drive Karin to the hospital. She accepted. Joyce greeted them, said she was in some pain and then told Alex to drive Karin back to the condo in Glastonbury, stay the night and drive her back to the hospital the next day. Alex agreed.

Knowing nothing about Joyce's accident or the arrangements she had dictated, Dennis drove up from South Glastonbury to the Aparo condo early in the evening. “I went up to the back and knocked,” he says. “Karin opened the door, and I could hear the shower running in the bathroom. I asked her who was there, and she said Alex was taking a shower and I couldn't come in. She said her mom had been in an accident and was in the hospital and Alex had driven her home and was staying over so he could drive her back in the morning. I asked her where he was going to sleep, and she said on the couch or in her mother's room. She said, ‘Don't worry, he isn't going to sleep with me.' I was on my little cloud, so I accepted it, but I didn't like it, and I was upset by it.”

Dennis couldn't get it out of his mind. He worried it constantly, and the more he worried it, the more he became concerned that Karin was having an affair with Alex Markov. At the end of June he put the question to her.

Not an affair exactly, she said. She had gone to bed with Alex once, she told Dennis. “It was just a physical thing,” she said. “I had to get it out of my system. Now I've done it, and I don't want to do it with him anymore.”

Dennis began to cry, sobbing bitterly, uncontrollably. But she was still seeing Alex, he protested.

Yes, she said, but it was purely platonic, and that was the way it was going to remain. She still loved Dennis.

He convinced himself that she was telling him the truth. Inside, he couldn't really believe it, was filled with doubts and fears, but he tried as best he could to push them away. Still, the effect on him was apparent. He was nervous, edgy, had trouble concentrating, his stomach was acting up again, he wasn't eating, he was losing weight, had lost perhaps ten pounds since the time they had gone “incommunicado” in May, was to lose another ten over the next month, and he could not afford to lose weight.

On July I Karin began a new diary. Over the next twenty-eight days she wrote regularly, filling the pages in a 7½- by 4½-inch book with a red plaid cover, on which appeared:

This book belongs to

Karin Aparo

Date

7–1–87

Each day when she finished writing, she put that diary into the drawer beside her bed, the drawer where she had kept the letters from Dennis Coleman that Joyce had found nearly a year before. The entries in this diary were a rambling compendium of the surface events of her days. At the center were Alex Markov and Dennis Coleman: Alex, strong, self-sufficient, talented, dominating, independent; Dennis, weak, dominated, clinging desperately, doing anything to hold on and easily manipulated. But for anyone who might have read Karin's writings over the year previous, since her meeting with Dennis, there was something odd about this volume. There was little of the introspection that had filled the earlier pages, few of the recriminations, no attempts to relate and juxtapose the present with the past and so draw parallels and emerge with insights. Missing, too, was Joyce Aparo. The references to her were few, and those were in the blandest of terms.

Among other things in that first entry Karin noted that she was sixteen, a terrible violinist, in love with nobody, having an affair with Alex Markov, seeing Dennis casually and very fat and weight-conscious. She was planning to go away with Alex for a week to Woodstock, New York, to baby-sit for the children of his cousin. July 9 would be the anniversary of the first time she had slept with Dennis; she had slept with him eighty times since. He had just bought her some diamond earrings and a pearl necklace. Though she hadn't spoken to Alex Markov in two days, they were in the midst of a wonderful affair and had slept together five times since that initial experience on June 20. She was very happy about this affair because she had gotten something she wanted badly and because she was the first girl he had ever had sex with. She thought he was very strong, and she died every time she saw his chest and arms and especially his back. Her marks had come from school, mainly A's and B's, except in chemistry, for which she got a C.

A day later she noted that she was listening to Alex play Paganini, at which he was brilliant, and though he had been trying to help her with her practice, she felt hopeless compared with him. She felt particularly hopeless because she had been working on a Bach gavotte that he had played as an encore at a concert he had given at New York's 92d Street Y. Listening to his tapes, she felt frustrated, but, then, it didn't really matter anymore because now she intended to become a psychiatrist anyway. She had bought Alex some posters of Led Zeppelin, had even found one to hang in her own room, and she was going to help Alex write up a patent he was hoping to get for an electric violin.

On July 4, she wrote, she and Dennis were supposed to watch the fireworks in Hartford but, instead, had driven down to Rowayton in the Spitfire with the top down and watched the fireworks at the beach there. Later they drove by the Markovs' house and saw an American flag hanging from the porch. Dennis had barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs for them, and they went shopping and he bought her a pair of pink pants and white shoes, and then they watched some television and played with Dennis's ferret, Meegan. She had a long talk with Alex, and they both were excited about the pending week in Woodstock.

For Dennis that Fourth of July was not such a pleasant day. He remembers the drive to the beach at Rowayton. “All the way down,” he says, “she was being very clinical and asking a lot of questions. ‘How does it feel? What would you do if I did this, like sleep with Alex again?' She was trying to get me to explain what was going through my head. I just kept telling her I didn't really understand it myself. I used the term ‘territorial'; that was how I felt about her. But I didn't really understand it. I was getting very hurt by what she was doing, and she just kept pushing buttons, acting like the little psychologist she wanted to be.”

One of the things that they talked about, that Karin pressed him about, was her impending week in Woodstock. She had agreed, she said, as she had told him a few days before, to go to Woodstock with Alex Markov. They would be leaving on July 7 and would be gone until July 14. The reason was simply that Alex had been asked to baby-sit for his cousin's children, and Alex knew absolutely nothing about children, so she was going along to do more than help, to do the actual work. She was not, she insisted, going to be sleeping with Alex during that week. She was just going to baby-sit.