A Writer's Life (47 page)

No matter how critical Erma Castro was of John Bobbitt, Lorena continued to go out with him, and to regard his shortcomings in a positive manner. He was habitually late when he came to the Castros' house in the early evenings to take her out—as he was admittedly late most mornings when reporting to his sergeant at the motor pool—but Lorena interpreted his tardiness as a sign of his independent spirit. And the fact that he had a speech problem—racing his words, repeating everything that he said two or three times—she also found agreeable; since she was still in the early stages of understanding English, she was often obliged to ask Americans to please repeat what they had said. With John Bobbitt, it was never necessary.

He was also very honest and open when talking about himself, not being reticent about discussing his painful boyhood in his native Niagara Falls. It did not seem to bother him when, after he had knocked on the Castros' door, intending to see Lorena, he was met instead by Erma Castro, who invited him in, sat him down in the living room, and then began to bombard him with leading questions: What did his parents now do for a living? How long had they been in America? What did his brothers do? How long did he plan to remain in the Marine Corps? If he could not
reenlist at the completion of his four-year contract, what would he do next?

John replied freely to every one of Erma Castro's questions. He said that he had brothers who were drug users, that his mother was mentally unstable, and that his father, a mean-spirited drinker who had been a motorcycle mechanic, had abandoned his wife and three sons when John was about five. John recalled that his father used to store a few motorcycles in the living room of their second-floor apartment, and once, as the apartment house was being destroyed by a fire, his father had run down the steps carrying his motorcycles to safety before concerning himself with the well-being of his family. John confessed that he had done poorly in school, being hampered by what was later diagnosed to be attention deficit disorder, and as his mother's mental condition had deteriorated while John was in grade school, he and his two brothers had been sent to live in the small home of one of his maternal uncles, who resided nearby in Niagara Falls. His uncle and the latter's wife had three sons of their own, and so John and his brothers grew up with an abundance of young male companionship and competitiveness, and the bedroom that they shared was not unlike the barracks that he would later come to know as a marine. Except for being an outstanding weight lifter and swimmer—he was maybe the best swimmer among the marines at Quantico, he told Castro—he was unable to claim any other abilities or achievements.

Erma Castro did not interrupt him as he proceeded to tell her more about himself, although she knew enough already. She knew that if Lorena continued to date this man, she would have to live elsewhere. Meanwhile, Castro sat in her living room across from Lorena and John, nodding her head occasionally, or forcing a smile, as John rambled on. At other times, when Castro seemed to be confused or dismayed by what he was saying, she would raise an eyebrow and glance quizzically at Lorena. But Lorena, sitting close to her boyfriend with her head down, seemed to be totally absorbed within the folds of the big fleece-lined Marine Corps jacket that he had earlier draped over her slender shoulders.

A
FTER THE COUPLE HAD GOTTEN MARRIED ON
J
UNE
18, 1989, and had rented a small apartment in Manassas, John Bobbitt spoke often about visiting Niagara Falls, New York, so that Lorena could meet the family who had raised him. After telephoning his uncle and aunt, it was decided that the couple should have a church wedding in Niagara Falls on July 4; but by the time John arrived at the church, it was July 5. John had gotten the date mixed up. When the pastor described how irritated all the guests had been and how his adoptive parents had left the church and gone directly to a trailer-park camp they frequented in Canada, John could respond only with stuttered and repeated apologies. Lorena, for her part, was too overwhelmed to speak.

Hoping to make amends to his relatives by apologizing in person, John led his bride to the car and drove directly toward the Canadian border. But there they were delayed. Lorena had not brought her passport. It would never have occurred to her that she would need a passport anywhere in North America. As the border guards ordered them to the side of the road, one of the guards followed and stood next to John's window. Lorena waited for John to plead their case, to
do
something. But he merely sat forward behind the wheel, staring silently through the windshield, not even facing the guard. Finally, she leaned over and, in the most convincing English she could muster, and in a forthright manner that was both charming and persuasive, informed the guard that they had just been married and that she was a Venezuelan wife of a United States Marine, and that this was her first time at the Canadian border, and that their honeymoon—and maybe their marriage—might all be ruined due to her ignorance of the regulations. There were tears in her eyes. The guard motioned for them to move through.

John's aunt and uncle forgave him, perhaps in deference to the bride. At the cookout, Lorena met others in John's extended family and responded sincerely to their good wishes. But when the couple headed
back to Virginia, she was silently angry. Without consulting her, John had invited one of his brothers—a brother on drugs, who carried needles in his overnight bag—to drive with them back to Virginia and stay with them for a week or two, sleeping on their living room sofa. The couple's sex life, which had been on an at least once-a-day basis, was now minimized by Lorena's expressed misgivings that her brother-in-law, occupying the sofa, might become privy to their love sounds at night. John complained that she was trying to punish him for bringing his brother into the house, and, in any case, he professed not to care if they had sex or not. He called her “selfish” and “spiteful,” and even “un-American.” America had opened up its door to people from elsewhere like herself, he shouted, and where did she come off trying to ban his brother and deny him the chance to live for a while in a different part of the country?

Months later, during Thanksgiving of 1989, after John's uncle and aunt had decided to drive down to Manassas and stay with the Bobbitts for a few days, Lorena avoided them, moving into the apartment of a nail sculptress she had befriended at her job. In December, however, the couple's compatibility had been restored, perhaps influenced by their abandoning their small place in Manassas for a much larger apartment in Stafford that had two bedrooms, a dining room, and a living room with a balcony that overlooked a lake. It was also located close to the Marine Corps base at Quantico, meaning that John Bobbitt no longer had to endure a forty-mile drive to work every morning, a tense time, in which he feared being late and consequently received many speeding tickets and sometimes sideswiped the bodies of deer and dented the fenders of his car.

During the second year of the marriage, while the couple was still living in Stafford, Lorena discovered that she was pregnant. She was now twenty, John was twenty-two, and they both agreed that this was not the right time to have a child. She would get an abortion. She was preoccupied and pleased with her job, being one of Janna Biscutti's leading nail sculptresses. Lorena's list of regular clients at the salon in Centreville had been increasing constantly, and her annual income, with tips, was in excess of thirty thousand dollars—a third more than John was earning from the military and whatever work he was picking up during his off-hours. Lorena was also developing a close bond with Janna Biscutti, who was to her the personification of modern American womanhood. Janna had success, money, enjoyed an active social life, could ski well and sail a boat, and she owned a gorgeous house and now had a second child, a daughter, born of Janna's second marriage, to Nizzar Suleiman. Janna inspired within Lorena the will to want more out of
her
life; and one of the things that Lorena began to want was a house—nothing as grand as
Janna's, of course, but certainly more than the apartment in Stafford, which, after a year's occupancy, no longer satisfied her.

She convinced her husband that they were wasting their money on rent, that they should
own
a piece of America. And so they soon found a white frame one-family house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, which stood on an acre of land in the Yorkshire section of Manassas—meaning that John would once more have to get up at dawn in order to be on time at Quantico, making him prone to the roadway pursuits of the police and the wanderings of stray deer. The price of the house in Manassas was $135,000, and the monthly mortgage payments would exceed $1,300, which John found intimidating; but Lorena explained that she could bear much of the expense from her earnings, and he said he would work longer at extra jobs when he was not on duty with the Marine Corps.

After the couple had moved in, John decided to install a satellite dish. He had given little thought about its price prior to ordering one. Owning a satellite dish had seemed to him to be
the
thing to do; if you owned a home with some land around it, why not decorate it with a dish? He had seen several of them sitting on the lawns of the homes he passed while driving to and from Quantico, and he had sometimes wondered what it must be like to own one. Now he would know.

One evening when Lorena was working late at the salon and he was sitting at home exploring the great variety of channels that were available on the screen, he happened upon a porn channel called Spice. He then became so engaged in watching a few bare-breasted rodeo girls romping around in front of a cheering crowd in an arena that he did not hear Lorena unlocking the front door and entering the living room.

“I wish you wouldn't watch that,” she said.

He turned toward her, feeling embarrassed and irritated.

“Turn it off yourself,” he replied loudly.

She left the living room, saying nothing as she headed through the hallway toward their bedroom and slammed the door.

The next morning, he left at dawn for the motor pool, but when he returned that night, she was not there. He drove off to a bar. Returning home later, he saw her standing in the kitchen, and she was furious. She had cooked dinner and now it had gone to waste, she declared; with tears in her eyes, she explained that what she had wasted could have fed a large and impoverished family for two days in Latin America. She was not going to cook for him anymore, she continued. She was tired of doing all the household work and paying most of the bills while he was either loafing at home watching television or was out drinking and carousing in
bars. This was not the first time she had accused him of carousing. He had met a woman whom he fancied months earlier when he was working parttime at a restaurant, and later, during an agument with Lorena, he had said that if Lorena was dissatisifed with him, he was acquainted with a woman who might not be.

But the marital discord had accelerated in intensity. Whether this was primarily due to the increased costs of the house or to Lorena's aspirations to be more like Janna Biscutti, John did not know. What he did know was that he was frustrated. He had been unable to find extra work that paid enough to offset the increased costs of the house. His speech problems precluded his getting sales jobs. Indeed, his speech difficulties were compounding the frustrations he was feeling at home with Lorena. She was now winning every argument. She, who had struggled greatly with her English a few years earlier, had now—thanks to her ongoing dialogues at her manicurist table with processions of well-spoken American women—exceeded his ability to speak in his native tongue. When she spoke in the harsh manner that characterized their nightly exchanges, his only recourse was to outshout her and maybe give her a vigorous shove—but she had lately gotten into the habit of shoving back. Small as she was, she was combative, and once when he shoved her backward against the refrigerator, she responded by slashing him in the neck with her long sculpted nails.

The depth of his inadequacy against her verbal thrusts became sadly clear to him during one noisy fight they were having in late August 1990, a fight from which he abruptly retreated, picking up the telephone and dialing 911. He was asking the Manassas Police Department to come to his home and solve his marital problems. And they did come, although they solved no problems. They merely asked questions of him and the crying Lorena, who complained that he was abusing her but said she did not wish to press charges. The police checked the house for weapons. Finding none, they left.

In the latter part of November 1990, after the couple had become embroiled in an acrimonious exchange over a matter that in less stressful times might have not transpired—
this
confrontation, incidentally, took place in the presence of Lorena's mother, then visiting from Venezuela—Lorena quickly reached for the phone and dialed 911 on her own, and with similar results: a police visit, more interrogation, more searches for deadly weapons, no filing of a complaint. In the Manassas Police Department report, it was noted: “Mother-in-law is there and not helping much.”

In January 1991, John Bobbitt was released from the Marine Corps. In a period of military cutbacks and relative world peace, he was a very
expendable leatherneck. When he told Lorena about his release, she said nothing. Now he was a man without a predictable paycheck, and this at a time when their expenses were higher than ever. He assured her that he would get a job, and he did—driving a Yellow Cab in and around Manassas. He worked a late-night schedule that contrasted greatly with his routine in the Marine Corps, and sometimes he went days without seeing or speaking to Lorena—which was just as well. There had been another 911 incident at the beginning of the year, a few days after he had been released from the military, and this had provoked John to grab Lorena, to wrestle the phone out of her hand, and then to rip the cord out of the wall. The couple's shouting back and forth had alerted one of their neighbors, who, in turn, telephoned the police—who came again, as usual, and, as usual, left without obtaining a complaint from Lorena. No matter how angry she was, no matter how elaborately she described him as the villain in every altercation, when it was over, she was reluctant to file a complaint.