Obsessed

by Rick R. Reed

  He smiled at her. "I'll be seeing you," he said, smiling wider.

  She slammed the door on him, afraid the smile would follow her into her nightmares.

  Joe pulled his coat tighter around him against the cold air off the lake. "If I can't have her," he said to the doorman, "no one can."

  He fingered the X-Acto knife in his pocket and felt an erection beginning.

  19

  Winter darkness filtered in through the living room windows. Anne sat on the couch, her feet drawn up underneath her, a cup of tea gone cold in her hand. The apartment was silent, so quiet she heard the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the soft tick of the clock near the dining room table. She knew she had to accept there was something horribly wrong with Joe. Something so wrong, in fact, that he might be hurting others a lot more than he was hurting her. A part of her told her she should take him back, maybe he could be rehabilitated. What she considered a more selfish part of herself said no, it wasn't her purpose in life to rehabilitate him. She had a right to happiness.

  She got up and crossed to the windows. Outside, the traffic moved sluggishly along the drive. Further east the lake looked angry, hurtling itself against the shoreline. At least, she thought, the lake eventually does make some impact, eroding the shoreline a little more each year.

  From Joe MacAree's journal (undated):

  Dawn light filters through winter silver. There. She waits. In her, I can see the blood boiling, same as I can see the fingers of the blood-sun boiling through the silver strata of the dawn sky. It's a brand new day, with brand new thirsts and hunger.

  My friend made of cold steel (and sharp) lends its strength to me as I stroke it in my pocket. Up and down, up and down ... as I walk toward her.

  She sees me. Where do all these little homeless girls come from? And why do they end up in the park alone? Easy prey for a boy like me.

  God! She sees me and smiles. Isn't she scared? I love the fear; I can smell it. It makes me hard.

  She had called Nick earlier, begging him to come over.

  "Montpierre." His voice was gravelly, rough. He had sounded tired.

  "Hi, it's Anne. I'm in need of a little protection. Come over?" She had tried to keep her tone light, but wondered how much desperation came through in the timbre of her voice.

  "I'd really like that, Anne. But I gotta do some work on my other cases sometime." He laughed to soften what he was saying. "I got an industrial case that I've really let slip. Lotta catch-up."

  "Isn't there some work you could do here?"

  "Nah. I really need to do it at the plant. See, they've got this guy who's been stealing and they need some proof. That's where I come in. Maybe I can come over a little later?"

  "You know you can." Anne had replaced the phone in its cradle and looked around the empty apartment. It had been so long since she'd been alone. She almost wished for Phyllis to come down and take her shopping . . . Saks and I. Magnin. Anything. Anything so she didn't have to think. Nick, she knew, was not a man who would bend to her whims. Joe had always bent to her whims and realized if he had a choice he would probably like nothing ftiore than to bend to her demands. But choice is seldom a reality, she thought. She would have chosen a life of happiness with Joe, like it was in the beginning. But that choice was ripped away from her. Just as it had been ripped away from Joe, she supposed.

  She wanted to know more. She remembered the pornography in his office and how much it had upset her. But maybe if she looked again, she could find something out. Something that would let her help Joe and give her the freedom to start a new life.

  She flicked on some lights, in the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. She turned the stereo on and put a tape of Rickie Lee Jones in the cassette player. She didn't want to be alone.

  The den felt cold because of the bank of windows on one side. Anne turned on the overhead light and the desk lamp and flipped on the little space heater Joe had put in the corner of the room. She ran her fingers over the polished oak of the desk, not really certain if she was ready to open it. She remembered when she and Joe had first seen the desk in an antique store on Halsted Street. They had been married for only a few months then and didn't have much money. She saw the glimmer in his writer's eyes as he slid the drawers open and closed, admired the brass handles. Christmas was coming up in a month or so, and Anne mentioned it to him. "Don't you even think of buying this for me," he had said to her. "We can't afford it."

  But she had gone back and with the little money she had saved from before their marriage had bought him the desk.

  Enough of this, she thought, pulling the center drawer open. It was filled with pens and pencils, a ruler, paper clips, some invoices he used to bill his clients, erasers, a packet of X-Acto knife blades—Anne picked these up and stared at them. She tossed them in the wastebasket. She reached in the back of the drawer to try and feel if there was anything else, but the drawer was empty. Just to make sure, she pulled the drawer all the way out of the desk.

  She went on and searched each of the shallow drawers on either side of the center drawer, but found nothing. When she got to the bottom drawers, though, the deep ones used for filing, she noticed right away that the drawer on the left side of the desk was deeper than the one on the right. The bottom of the right drawer was also a different wood. The drawer must have a false bottom, she thought, groping around for an opening so she could pry the bottom up. Near the back she found a small niche she could just barely get the tip of her index finger in. She lifted and the false bottom of the drawer came away.

  Inside were several composition notebooks with five-year periods marked neatly on the outside of each. They went back to 1963, when Joe was just a boy. Anne knelt and took the notebooks out. She thought, with some excitement, that she could finally find something out about Joe's family, about where he was from. She was also afraid to open the notebooks, frightened of what they might contain.

  She set them in front of her, laid out in chronological order, and stared at them for a long time, afraid of opening them. Finally she picked up the one where she would have been mentioned for the first time. She remembered so well when she and Joe had first met. They had both been going to summer school and the campus was quiet. She had been running, taking a path that she thought only she was aware of.

  She had always favored the woods, unlike those other runners who stayed with the roads, tracks, campus walks. Her roommates told her, "Annie, you're crazy going out there. Some creep'll grab you." But Anne had always felt safer in the woods.

  Summer. The campus was quiet, but the woods were alive. Leaves whispering in the trees, bird songs, and a chorus of insects. And the sound of her own breath, rhythmic with the pound of her Asics on the packed earth.

  A stream ran through the woods, and the sounds of splashing contrasted, almost jarring, with the other summer sounds. Anne slowed, keeping her head down, and looked. A man. A beautiful man stood on the bank and then dove in. He was big and tanned. The muscles glistened in the sunlight as he jumped up, finally arcing in the air, to cut the cold, blue water with his dive. Anne watched breathless as he swam, the biceps bunching and relaxing, shining from the water and sunlight. Finally he emerged from the water and lay down on the bank. His penis stretched onto one thigh. The sun dried his skin. Skin she wanted to taste. She crept away, wishing she knew of a way to meet him.

  Her wish came true not a week later when she saw him tending bar at one of the near-campus taverns she and her friends had never been to because, during the regular school year, it was a hangout for the fraternity and sorority crowd, something Anne wanted no part of. But in the summer, her friends convinced her, the bar was quiet, a nice place to relax. She had spotted Joe the moment she walked in the door, and it seemed to her that he noticed her right away too. She had gone back the next night, alone, hoping he'd be on duty. He was.

  That was sometime in the summer of 1979. She began skimming through the pages, looking with interest at the story ideas, the
descriptions of people he met in his summer job as a bartender, the women he had slept with, the classes he was taking. Then, on July 23, he made his first mention of her.

  •k ie "k

  A beautiful woman came in the bar tonight. As a matter of fact, behind me I can hear the easy sound of her breathing as she sleeps. I wanted to get up and try to write about my feelings for her as soon as I could. I have slept with many women, all of them attractive in one way or another, and at times have even believed I have loved some of them. But I have never been in love. Because I didn't know what love was until tonight when Anne walked in. It's funny; I noticed her right away when she came in. I was surprised to see she was alone. But right away I felt she was alone because she was to be with me. When she came and sat down at the bar, I wanted to jump over and join her, take those long, pale white fingers in my hands and kiss each one. Her hair is blue-black, and when she undid it from the braid she was wearing it in and spread it over my pillow, I thought, I never want to be apart from this woman. Lust? I'm not a fool; I won't deny that lust plays a part in all of this. But I've had lust as a friend for years now, and I know what I feel for Anne is so much more. I never would have believed in love at first sight, but it's real. I know I love her.

  Anne wiped a tear away. Where did it all go? She skimmed through, stopping to enjoy the parts where she was mentioned, reliving their first magic summer together, those times when neither of them could stand to be apart for more than a few hours. The times when they swam together in the stream in the woods and made love in the dying summer sun, the bank of the stream hot beneath her. For a while the memories came alive: She was there in Joe's little garden apartment, sitting naked with him on the floor, a candle between them, eating Chinese food. She was there when they would go sit beneath a fieldstone bridge they had found and he read to her . . . sometimes his own short stories or poetry, more often the works of writers he liked, writers that still filled their bookshelves: James Purdy, Eu-dora Welty, Raymond Carver.

  She skimmed through the rest of that year: her senior year and his final year of completion of his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She wondered if she'd ever have a year as happy as that one again. Yes, there was a page, written in the winter of that year, when the pages were blurred with Joe's tears as he realized he had lost her. The breakup had lasted two days. She was amazed at the depth of loss he felt when she broke up with him because she thought things were getting too serious between them. They had been getting too serious, but Anne would give anything to have the old seriousness back. She wondered where the man who had written these pages had gone.

  From Joe MacAree's journal (undated):

  " 'Lo, little lady. Pretty chilly morning to be out here, isn't it?"

  The eyes! God, so brown, windows to nowhere. "You got any money?" Her voice is soft, little-girl breathy. "I mean, maybe you and me can work somethin' out. I could do a chore or somethin' in exchange. You know?"

  This one's smart. Been picked up already? I look into those brown eyes, the sun rising in them. The day will begin soon and the park will get busy.

  "Yeah. Maybe you and I could make an exchange of sorts." I giggle.

  Near the day of their graduation, she noticed a weird entry. Joe had insisted he would not be going through with commencement, claiming it was meaningless to him. She had asked then about his family. He had always been vague with her before about them, but she pressed him, saying she didn't really want to go through with the ceremony herself but knew her mother wouldn't miss it for anything and Anne was doing it to please her. He said his family didn't care about things like graduations and asked her not to talk about them anymore.

  But apparently some of his family had come for graduation.

  What a pleasant fucking surprise! Bitch sister Margo arrived today on a Greyhound from Sum-mitville. Said she wanted to see little brother finally get his sheepskin. She wanted to stay with me at my apartment. I'm surprised she didn't bring Daddy. Oh, yes, the two of them could give me a graduation present I'd never forget. I tried not to let her know where I lived, but that was easy enough for her to find out on her own. I gave her the keys and cleared my stuff out. Anne won't mind if I stay with her until we graduate, and then the two of us can clear out for Chicago . . . and please God, may I never see any of them again.

  Anne leaned back against the desk. The mystery of why he had moved in with her the last few days before graduation was explained. Explained, too, was the mystery of why he had been in such a hurry to leave for Chicago; he had been hired by Ogilvy and Mather but wasn't supposed to start until July. Originally they had planned to stay on and just celebrate getting their degrees. Instead, Joe had gone into hiding until graduation was over and they could load up his car and head to Chicago.

  She read through (and relived) the early days of their marriage, the way each of their careers had taken off. There were long descriptions of weekends in Wisconsin—Lake Geneva in the fall, when there were fewer people.

  Bitch Margo appeared again. I don't know how she found me, but that's not important. She hurt me . . . hurt me like Daddy never did. I run every night, along the lake and through the parks. It was there she came to me. Margo had never looked so hideous. She was laughing at me, said she had something for me. I followed her into an underpass, only because she said she knew all about Anne and if I didn't do everything she told me she would tell Anne about what Daddy did to me.

  In the tunnel the underpass made, Margo, smiling all the time, took out a knife from under the sweater she wore. Everything happened so fast I didn't have a chance to defend myself. I could see blood spurting and flowing out of me. I remember dropping to my knees, trying to catch the blood, trying to stop its flow. I felt sure that I would die. And I heard the cars whizzing by overhead and Margo laughing, that shrieking laugh she had, the way she laughed when Daddy fucked me. Louder and louder . . . drowning out the traffic sound.

  I remember dreaming. I saw Daddy and Mother standing above me, their skin all peeled away, and you could see bones and muscle tissue; they looked raw. And Margo was pulling off what remained of their skin and eating it. She was laughing and would open her mouth to show me the chewed-up flesh. "Train wreck," she would say, "train wreck," and laugh. The dreams were in black and white.

  When I woke up I was in a dirty storage room somewhere. Margo was with me; her eyes were luminous in the room's darkness. I felt sicker than I had ever felt and my skin felt itchy with dried blood. I turned away as Margo slit her arm with a razor, but something made me turn back. The blood ran down her arm, and I knew I wouldn't feel sick anymore if I could have some of that blood. She pulled my head to the open wound and I drank.

  Later, she left me. The door closed and I stood, feeling better, more alive somehow, than I had ever felt. And I wondered what I had become.

  This was all a dream. It had to be. I hope writing it down releases it. I don't ever want to remember this.

  Jc "k 4c

  Anne closed the book and groped her way over to a chair. She sat down and leaned back, closing her eyes. What was going on? Had Joe died? Had she been living with a dead man, some sort of vampire for the last few years? Anne threw back her head and laughed. She laughed until her throat was raw, until the tears made red rings around her eyes and the snot made it hard to breathe.

  The next day, Anne wasn't sure what she should do. Should she share what she learned with Nick? It was all insanity. It had to be. It just had to be. Sure, Joe had some problems, but he would never hurt anyone.

  From Joe MacAree's journal (undated):

  Bold. That's what I am. The hunter never hesitates going in for the kill. My prey backs up only for an instant when she sees the X-Acto. I hear her thoughts, just like I hear the blood thrumming through her veins. "He ain't gonna do nothin'. He ain't gonna hurt me, just make me blow him or somethin'." Little girl's so stupid

  Slash. Slash. Christ, look at it! Red and thick, spurting out of her like some kind of come. Oh, God, and just th
at gurgling, because the little bitch can't scream. She can't scream.

  I attach myself to that hot white throat, feeling it flow into me.

  Anne put water on for tea and sat down at the kitchen table. She didn't think she had slept at all the night before. She had forced herself to go over the early years of Joe's life, even though it upset her so much she had to stop reading to run, panting, into the bathroom and vomit. All the details were there: how he had been repeatedly raped through the years by his father, how his mother had looked the other way, never once trying to help, how his sister Margo had helped, even holding Joe down so his father could abuse him while she laughed. God, she thought, no wonder he's insane. Who wouldn't be?

  The journals had ended shortly after Joe's entry about his sister, Margo, and Anne wondered if there were more. Joe had kept the journals religiously since he was a boy, never missing more than a week in all those years. Surely, there were more.

  Anne had searched for the missing journals. Joe's den now looked like it had been vandalized. Anne had torn it completely apart to find the journals from recent years.

  But what she was looking for was not in that office.

  Anne poured the boiling water over the tea bag. She stared into the water, not thinking, just watching the tea darken the water. She didn't want to think about the missing journals.

  My God, she wondered, what horrors would those journals contain?

  SO

  The apartment was still filled with the smell of burnt Monterey Jack cheese. A pall of gray smoke hung near the ceiling in the kitchen. He'll understand, Anne thought, picking away some of the blackened cheese, Nick will understand why my mind wasn't on cooking after I tell him about the journals. She lifted the fluted white casserole dish and took it to the waste can. With a serving spoon she emptied the casserole into the trash. She had just put the dish in the sink when the buzzer sounded.

  All through the day she had tried not to think about what she had read in Joe's journals. She had spent the day doing things: laundry, dusting, vacuuming, washing windows and mirrors. The casserole she had tried to make for dinner this evening was the most complicated recipe in her vegetarian cookbook. While the casserole was in the oven she had taken as much care with her hair, clothes, and makeup as she did with any professional assignment. The white knit dress and the way she pulled her hair back severely from her face served only to emphasize the beauty of that face.