I Love You More: A Novel (32 page)

It was then that I decided to become Oliver Lane. With my computer skills and a little help, I created an entire person. Oliver Lane had gone to the best prep school in Boston. Oliver Lane had gotten straight A’s and extremely high marks on his college entrance exams. Oliver Lane had won several awards for academic achievement and intellectual talent. Not surprisingly, my creation won a scholarship to Syracuse. Not surprisingly, my creation excelled. Not surprisingly, my creation went on to Harvard Law. And over time, my identity became so fused with that of my creation that I hardly remember that other boy, the boy who
grew up in the wrong part of town, the boy who stole and beat and watched, the boy who kept no less than three women happy at a time.

I’d been practicing law for nearly four years when I first saw Diana. My Boston law firm had just opened a satellite office in Raleigh, North Carolina; we were working on a large money laundering case there and needed someone on-site full time. At first I’d resisted the offer, but then a partnership was dangled in front of me. I was having drinks at a ritzy martini bar with some clients down in Fayetteville, near Diana’s hometown of Hollyville. She and another woman were sitting at a corner table; some guy had zeroed in on them. She was exquisite: light and lovely with the golden hair and physical attributes of the goddess Aphrodite. I decided to watch her before I moved in for the kill like any good warrior would do, study her habits, what she liked and disliked. A man can smell an experienced woman, one who loves the act of lovemaking for its pure pleasure. That wasn’t the only thing that drew me to her. She wasn’t easy prey; she was damaged. She’d lost her parents and brother in an auto accident while in college, and had just ended a relationship with an unappreciative asshole. I liked that she’d chosen to make her home in the small town where she grew up. I liked that I could disappear there. I was determined to disarm her, conquer her, make her love me like she’d never loved any man. I knew that first time I talked to her that it wouldn’t be easy to gain her trust. I also knew that she wasn’t the type of woman who had affairs; she was the kind of woman you married. I had never intended to get married, but Diana was worth it, and for a long while I didn’t stray.

Things changed when we had Picasso. Don’t get me wrong. Although I’d never much taken to kids, Picasso was different. She was funny, whip smart; her brain could decipher any puzzle I threw at her—she took after me in that respect—and she cherished those dictionaries I bought for her. It wasn’t Picasso herself
that changed things, it was the way Diana loved Picasso, with a kind of protective fury, an unwavering focus: the way Diana used to love me. I’d become second, something I couldn’t be.

Jewels was an experiment. Intuitively I knew that having a mistress would bring Diana back to me. She would sense my withdrawal. I was having lunch at a sidewalk café near my office in Raleigh when I saw her. She was running toward me, her ponytail flipping back and forth, her body so lean that from a distance you could mistake her for a kid, her legs wiry and sculpted. She passed me, stopped at the curve, waited for the light to turn, held her side, bent forward at the waist, her running shorts creeping up, exposing a fine ass, small, round, firm. She straightened, walked across the street, and entered an office building on the opposite corner of the intersection. I threw money on the table and ran after her. After a maddening maneuver through rotating glass doors, I caught a glimpse of her getting into an elevator alone. According to the digital readout above the door, it stopped on the second floor. There was a shiny metal directory on the wall near the elevator doors. Three things were located on the building’s second floor: a coffee shop, a cafeteria, and a gym. I bought a one-month membership.

In the beginning it was only sex, but then she fell in love. I can’t say for certain why I asked her to marry me. I didn’t love her, at least not in the way that most men love, the way that the detective loves. In all honesty, I didn’t love Diana either; I didn’t even know what people meant when they said they loved someone or something. I didn’t experience those other sensations either—sadness, fear, compassion. I’d done a lot of reading on emotion, so I was certain no one knew I was acting, but there were times that I’d forget. I wouldn’t respond on time, register the correct sentiment, or the true me would show himself, but I noticed that even if I did get a questioning or confused look, that as long as I got it right a large percentage of the time, and as long as I went over
and above in the kindness, romance, and gift-giving categories, I could get away with pretty much anything. It’s true that like Diana, Jewels pleased me. I told myself I married her because I wasn’t ready to lose that, but it was probably more likely that I didn’t want to lose the adrenaline rush, the excitement of the balancing act.

When the twins were born, it felt more like an inconvenience than a wonder. Several guys in the Boston office had boys. They were always bragging about their athletic accomplishments, or their coaching positions on their sons’ baseball, basketball, or soccer teams. I’d expected to feel at least some of their fervor, some pride, but all I felt was tired. Tired of hiding. Tired of pleasing. Tired of losing.

Bert was perhaps the biggest surprise of my life. I didn’t find her remotely attractive when I met her, but nonetheless I was drawn to her. I wanted to penetrate her defensive posture toward men. I’d gone on a camping trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Boone to reconnect with nature. My blood pressure had registered high at my last annual appointment; the doctor said I had too much on my plate (if he only knew), and the anxiety and depression I’d battled since childhood was looming. I went into town for supplies, stopped in the local bookstore. The mousy, overweight clerk walked me to the mythology section. Like I had with Diana, I imagined my hands cupping her breasts, squeezing her flesh until she begged me to stop. Until she whined. I imagined returning that night, following her after she left work, putting my hand over her mouth, holding her against me. After the camping trip, I thought about her day and night. I dreamed about her.

Bert and I married three months later.

Soon after, Jewels started asking questions. She wondered why I’d been working so much, where I went when I wasn’t in Raleigh with her. My answers never appeased her. She began following
me, which was fun at first, like a little cat-and-mouse game, only, contrary to what she thought, I was the cat. It wasn’t long before she discovered Diana and Bert, and then everything took a turn for the worse. The three of them began meeting. Within a few months they’d dyed their hair the same color and were dressing alike. A month or so later, they were making extravagant expenditures and maxing out their credit cards. And then, one day, when I was taking out Jewels’s and my garbage, I found an empty burner phone package. I carried it back inside.

“What is this?” I asked Jewels while holding it up.

“I have no idea,” she said. “What does it say it is?”

“A disposable phone.”

“How odd,” she said. “Maybe one of our neighbors put it in there.”

“It was in our wastebasket, not the Dumpster.”

“You’re sure? Like I said, I have no idea. I haven’t purchased a disposable phone if that’s what you’re wondering. Why on earth would I? I have a brand-new cell phone, and we have a landline.”

The following afternoon back in Hollyville, I walked in on a teary Diana and very upset Picasso. Picasso was smart, but she’d never been able to disguise her emotions. In that way, she was like Diana. The look on her face was a combination of pleading and fear. When she saw me, she ran upstairs to her room without even saying hello. Diana was shaking. I asked her what was wrong, tried to hold her, but she shuddered at my touch.

“Nothing,” she said. “We were just talking about school.”

“School?” I asked. “Seemed pretty serious for a discussion on school.”

I didn’t tell Diana what I’d heard Picasso say right before I opened the front door: “Please Mama, don’t kill Daddy. I don’t want you to go to jail.” I didn’t tell Diana that with those words all the puzzle pieces had fallen into place. I found it comical at first. Not one of my three wives was intelligent or brave enough
to perform the act of murder. Then I got curious. How did they propose to do it? Diana and Bert were humanitarians, and Jewels was fastidious. Guns were messy. Knives required strength. Poison pointed directly at them.

The sense of malaise that had been lingering for some time got worse. It’s difficult to describe how and why suicidal thoughts enter a man’s mind. For me, they came on quickly. One day I was fine and the next day I felt something I couldn’t quite identify, and since I had no experience with feelings, I panicked. My blood coursed with uncontrollable anger as I held the gun. My wives were supposed to love me whether or not I loved them. They were supposed to be grateful. I’d provided for them, given my children everything they wanted. I hadn’t stolen their truths from them: I let Diana keep her inheritance a secret, allowed Jewels to believe she was a great architect, told Bert she was beautiful on a daily basis. I’d mirrored my wives, molded myself into each of their ideas of the perfect husband. It was one thing to meet behind my back, but to plot my murder? Although I was certain they wouldn’t go through with it, couldn’t go through with it, I found the fact that they’d even considered it unacceptable.

I imagined my lips wrapped around the gun’s barrel, the bullet entering my mouth, blowing my brain into pieces. I imagined the fireworks I’d see, sparks of red and green and yellow and blue, and somehow that alone seemed worth the challenge. I brought the gun to my face—

“Is everything okay, Daddy?” Picasso said. She stood in the bedroom doorway.

I pushed the gun away from my face, wiped the sweat from my brow with a sleeve, asked her if she wanted to hold the gun.

“Won’t Mama get upset?” she asked.

While I taught my eleven-year-old daughter how to handle a gun, I came alive. I realized that they were the problem, not me. Their petty dissatisfaction was their childhood baggage, their
unacknowledged hatred for their fathers. Sure some men were assholes, but that didn’t even slightly apply to me. “Oliver Lane” was utterly perfect;
I’d
created him. My head began spinning with schemes and tactics, and then I knew what I had to do: play them against one another.

I gave myself a timeline. By the time Diana, Picasso, and I got home from our annual trip to the beach, my plan would be in motion. All I’d have to do was sit back and watch the three of them battle it out.

As I stood drinking my coffee and watching Diana swim that final morning, I was struck by a feeling I can only describe as euphoria. At that moment, I did feel something for Diana: The pride an owner feels for his finest thoroughbred. The one he’s groomed, poured every ounce of his sweat into. The one he’s loved as much as he could love anyone. I’d felt the same for Jewels that last time we’d made love, and the same for Bert when I called her from the beach house. But none of that mattered. I would take their children, their money, their homes, anything and everything they ever cared about. I would destroy them.

The two of them are sleeping now, Diana and the detective. She’s buried inside his arms. I allow him to breathe me in. I travel through his mouth, his nostrils. I swirl through his mind, join the words dancing inside it, consider adding the name of my killer, but see the situation for what it was. If I hadn’t underestimated my wives, I’d still be alive. It’s true that I’m not angry and that I no longer care about life, but one cannot escape one’s nature. The game isn’t over yet.

I float by them one last time, curl around them, and then pull myself away. Spread. I am a mass of shimmering molecules, white and silver and gray and black. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. How long death will grace me. I do know the air is always changing, and we who inhabit it are forever reborn. And so I wait. One day a body will take me prisoner again, and though I will fight life,
will kick and scream my way into it, I will overcome it. I will be the brightest, most cunning, most powerful. I will win all games. Manipulate all circumstances. Fell all adversaries.

That
is who I am.

Thank you, Oliver Lane, for lending me your name, for allowing me to build those eight fragile moments into a larger life. If you are still here somewhere, still wander, or you’ve left and returned, look for me hovering near my grave site, the one with the stone that bears your name. I’m there for several moments every night visiting the body beneath it, a man who hides in death as he did in life. A man named Peter Ares. A man his wives and children never knew.

Beautiful, lucky, sorry, gun, motive, liar, dumb ass, wives, guilty as sin, rendezvous, Picasso
.

I’d waited a week before I told Mack about the note I found in Diana’s catchall book, mainly because telling him about the note meant I’d have to tell him why I’d been making pizza with Diana and Picasso in the first place. I tried to play it down, but I’m pretty certain Mack was putting two and two together. It wasn’t that I was worried about Mack ratting me out to the brass—I knew he wouldn’t—I was worried about his opinion of me. He’d always looked up to me, and I didn’t want that to change. Not then. Not when it already felt like my life was falling apart.