The Hand That Feeds You (8 page)

In my bedroom, almost all the furniture had been removed. Rugs, too. A new mattress was on a standard-issue, metal bed frame against the wrong wall. I always slept on the right side of the bed, and I never slept next to the wall. I had told Bennett about an episode of
The Twilight Zone
I had watched as an impressionable child, in which a little girl, asleep next to a wall, fell into the fourth dimension; the wall closed behind her. At first, Bennett found my habit charming, but the last time we’d met in Maine, he had said, “If you love me, you’ll sleep next to the wall.” I didn’t see how doing that would show him I loved him more than my telling him I did. I remember thinking that was a standard red flag for any number of controlling pathologies. I moved next to the wall, but I didn’t sleep. He made love to me the next morning with a ferocity that seduced me once again. He could always seduce me even though I knew that he prided himself on being able to do so no matter what he had done.

I found clean sheets and made the bed. I ordered Chinese food from the corner place and sat at my kitchen table sorting through junk mail and bills. Nothing that couldn’t wait.

I opened my laptop and watched CNN. I might have been the only thirty-year-old in Williamsburg watching news at that hour. I kept watching after the Chinese food came. Not until I finished did I notice I had not used any soy sauce. Normally I mixed it with hot mustard and drenched the food. No wonder I hadn’t tasted anything.

A quick survey of the cabinet I used for liquor showed that I had only a half bottle of tequila and some old rum. So much for the Scotch I thought I wanted.

The bedroom had no reading light. I guess the professionals couldn’t get the blood off the watered-silk lampshade I bought at the Meeker Avenue Flea Market. I lay down and closed my eyes. The mattress was firmer than my old one. The sheets had a higher thread count; Steven must have splurged. Yet no amount of physical comfort could go up against the images that owned that room. The memory of what I had seen conjured symptoms of shock and grief—I started shivering and crying. Why would I think I could enter the death room, much less sleep in it? Had I lived anywhere but New York, I would have had the choice to move, but in this rental market that was not an option. Still, I did not have to sleep in this room.

The kitchen was not safe either. I remembered the mornings that Bennett had scolded me for leaving the counters littered with crumbs when, the fact was, he had made himself something to eat during the night after taking Ambien and had not remembered the common side effect of sleep-eating. Sometimes he did not remember making love to me. Or so he said. At those times, he swore that the one thing he could never forget was how much he loved me. Even though it was corny, I allowed myself to be persuaded.

I carried a glass of rum into the living room. It would not be the first night I had slept on the couch. If I could sleep. And how could I? The TV was in the bedroom (wall-mounted), but I still needed company, which left books.

I wasn’t up for the Immortals, nor did I give a shit about the life of Winston Churchill. I was hardly going to reread
Crime and Punishment.
I didn’t want to reread anything. Scanning the shelves, I stopped at a title I didn’t recognize:
Dangerous Liaisons.
I’d seen the movie years before, but I didn’t remember buying the book. This paperback copy was well worn, with many pages dog-eared. I saw comments written in the margins, but couldn’t tell if they were Bennett’s. I realized I didn’t know his handwriting. His taste in books had not been parochial. He sometimes left behind novels I was happy to discover—Doris Lessing’s
The Fifth Child
, for example. It mattered to me that we liked the same books.

Here was something underlined: “They are imprudent creatures, for in their present lover they fail to perceive their future enemy.” I backed up and saw that this was a woman speaking about other women.

In the film of this novel about decadent French aristocrats in the 1700s, two former paramours entertain each other with stories of their sexual conquests. The Marquise and Valmont make an art of destroying those they have seduced, those who have come to love them. They care nothing for these discarded souls; for them it is all about the game and their ultimate allegiance to each other. But when this allegiance is compromised, when the Marquise accuses Valmont of falling in love with one of his objects of desire, the game turns deadly.

Had Bennett underlined it or had he bought the book used?

Also underlined: “A man enjoys the happiness he feels, and a woman the happiness she gives. . . . The pleasure of one is to satisfy his desires and that of the other above all to arouse them.”

I hoped that someone else had underlined this because it made me livid. It contradicted everything I felt about the way he had been with me.

I carried the book to the couch. Oh, the memory of the body!

But then I remembered other things. Bennett always showered immediately after we made love.

Bennett made me finish any dessert I ordered, until I stopped ordering dessert. Then he gave me an expensive leather skirt that was a size too small. A compliment or an admonishment?

These things did not happen at once. Plenty of time passed between these skewed acts to override my instincts and give him the benefit of the doubt, which is, after all, the godly thing, a virtue. This was the guy who would stop and turn me so that we could see ourselves reflected in a store window—“Look at them,” he would say. Pride, or arrogance?

Cilla may have thought nothing was to be gained by finding out who Bennett really was, but Cilla had not been in love with him, nor had she made up the blind study of predators and controls, the study that had brought him to me in the first place.

•  •  •

That night, I read pages of
Dangerous Liaisons
at random, looking for clues as to who Bennett might have been, or who he aspired to be, if he had indeed underlined these passages. The more I read of the Marquise, the more unsettled I felt and the more familiar she seemed. Bennett had told me about a woman he had known—he had put air quotes around the word
known
—in his late twenties. At a casino in Montreal, celebrating the sale of two paintings he had “inherited”—the quotes here are mine—he’d been approached by a beautiful woman who said, “You’ve got to see this.”

He said she led him to where a gray-haired woman was feeding tokens into a $5 slot machine, roped off from the rest of the slots. The woman’s opera-length, white gloves were filthy from handling coins. The beautiful woman showed him where, a short distance away, an old man with a bullhorn repeatedly asked his wife to step away from the machine. The casino had phoned him when his wife was down $30,000.

Bennett told me he thought the beautiful woman meant this as a cautionary tale, but she said in his ear, “It’s a game. They get all this attention. They get comped a room.” Bennett told me he made the obvious point, that they didn’t get the $30,000 back, and the beautiful woman told him the old man had millions. He asks his wife to put on the filthy opera gloves and elicit pity to the point where he has to be called in to save her from herself.
A man enjoys the happiness he feels, and a woman the happiness she gives.

Bennett asked how the beautiful woman knew, and she told him she had seen them the month before at another casino. The casinos don’t mind, they still get their money, she told him.

This was the woman, Bennett told me, who defined the next three years of his life.

•  •  •

Hours later, I still hadn’t slept. I slipped on my robe and took the stairs to the roof. My building was only six stories high, but taller than my neighbors’ clapboard houses with their tar roofs and crooked chimneys and satellite dishes. My roof had a clear if disrupted view of Manhattan. When I first moved here a year ago, I could see the Williamsburg Bridge, but the nonstop construction along Williamsburg’s waterfront had slowly closed that view corridor. I had taken Bennett up here to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, his first time spending a weekend at my place. Steven and I normally watched the fireworks together—we had since we were kids—but I had lied to him, said I was going out of town. Bennett had said he wasn’t ready to meet my big brother and he didn’t want to dilute our time together.

Every other year, the city switches rivers for the show. This year’s extravaganza was over the Hudson. Bennett had said it looked as if New Jersey were attacking New York. Who
was
he?

Ghostly clouds raced across the sky; I feared I would never feel normal again. Bennett had hummed the Drifters’ classic “Up on the Roof” as we slow-danced. He had said one of his emo bands was going to do a new rendition. And I believed him.

Someone had left a broken lawn chair near the roof’s parapet and I sat down. The only time I had ever seen stars over the city was after the lights went out during Hurricane Sandy. Tonight, most of the downtown office buildings were dark, but not the new World Trade Center. It was lit up, and a crescent moon—the symbol of Islam—was positioned such that it seemed to touch the tower.

I
did it. I got through the first night. Sleep wasn’t a big part of it, but I got through it. The kitchen cabinet I opened to get a coffee filter also housed Bennett’s granola. I would get coffee on the way to class. I’d lost a size so I put on my thin jeans and a cotton turtleneck. My concession to makeup was a swipe of concealer under each eye.

Going on Lovefraud.com, after what I’d read the night before, spotlighted the eloquence of the Marquise versus the cheeseball American duped. In reply to the letter I had read days before, I wrote:

I read about your terrible experience with great empathy and an escalating sense of familiarity. I, too, was involved with a man who asked me those identical questions, who pretended to be an agent, who never invited me to his place but instead met up with me at B&Bs in Maine. Lastly, he gave me a key to his apartment and, as in your experience, there was no such address. You can see why it is urgent that I speak with you. You can contact me at [email protected].

This was the secure e-mail address I used for participants in my study.

•  •  •

Returning to class was not easy. I had planned to enter the lecture after the professor began and exit a few minutes early. One of my final courses after two years of graduate school was Psychology and the Law. It sounded like an entry-level course, but was, in fact, an overview of the latest intersections of mental-health and legal issues. I had already missed a quarter of the lectures. The last one I attended was the morning of the day I found Bennett dead. I dreaded the turning of my classmates’ heads, and the way I would be seen: a victimologist turned victim.

John Jay’s student body ranged from the beat cop getting extra credit that would speed a promotion, to a former prison guard whose goal was to become a warden, to a psychiatrist who wanted to perform psychological autopsies. The city campus was spread out over five square blocks in the West Fifties, near Roosevelt Hospital. The building always photographed, built in 1903 of marble and red brick, the one you might find on an Ivy League campus, housed the administration. All my classes were held in a generic modern annex. I slid my photo ID card through the electronic reader and headed up the stairwell to my class. The professor was consulting with one of the students about how to operate the PowerPoint system. The lights were still on, affording everyone a good look at me. I avoided eye contact as I shrugged off my backpack and took a blessedly empty seat next to my Dominican cop friend, Amabile, who was aptly named. When he and I were briefly dating, he said it meant “kindness.” He reached out and put his hand over my hand and held it there for a moment. I noticed he was wearing a
GO BLOODHOUNDS
T-shirt—supporting the John Jay basketball team. I must have been the topic of so much talk. It was not hard to imagine that a paper on my case would someday be included in the literature of criminology.

I went into this field of study to answer one question: not the one everyone asks—Why do certain people cross the line?—but why
everyone
doesn’t cross the line. I wanted to know what held me back and by how much. My interest was more than scholarly; it was personal.

Steven and I were Midwesterners with all the attendant stereotypes: our father was conservative, self-reliant, honest, and stubborn—that is, when he wasn’t cycling mania. Then he was charismatic, adventurous, and seductive. During one of those phases our mother had married him. She, on the other hand, had migrated to Illinois from California, the daughter of Okies who had fled the Dust Bowl during the Depression, failed to get a toehold in California’s Central Valley, and wound up working in the Chicago stockyards, living on the South Side with the newly arrived Southern blacks. Our mother was malleable, independent, reckless, vain, and a looker. She had no intention of remaining on the South Side. She was seven months pregnant with Steven when she witnessed her husband’s first ascent into full-blown mania. It began with his defying the obstetrician’s caution about late-term intercourse. When she refused him, he slept with my mother’s sixteen-year-old niece. Women have retaliated against their husbands for less. Why didn’t our mother step over the line?

I was a middling high school student dreaming about becoming an artist, an actress, a poet, in the tradition of clueless youth, without giving any consideration to whether I had talent. I took a Greyhound to New York City shortly after I graduated and arrived at Port Authority at 2:00 a.m. on a rainy summer night.

I had planned to stay at the YWCA, but I met a girl on the bus who had already done what I was planning to do. She had been visiting her mother in Cleveland and was going back to Brooklyn, where she’d been living for six months. She was waiting tables until she could get modeling work and invited me to crash at her place. She lived in a first-floor studio looking out onto the Navy Yard. The kitchen was makeshift—just a hot plate and minifridge. The walls were bare and the institutional sea-green paint was scuffed. I slept on an air mattress, while she took the sofa bed.