Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  Then came a girl named Karin Aparo. Of course I fell for her immediately. And again I found myself, somehow, willing to give more than I had ever given in my life. I told her I loved her—because I did. I gave her what I could—because I did. I resigned my life to the sharing of hers—because I did. I still do, and always will. But no matter how I feel, or what I do, it’s happened again. Even as I have begun to give and compromise and try as hard as I could, her lover eyes have been looking beyond me. She loves another and doesn’t want to be near me. Her eyes look beyond me. Yet I give—for her—because I do.

  Now I think about it and wonder. I can’t bear to think of what would happen to me when/if she leaves me with more pieces than ever. Shattered. Would it multiply my hate or drain everything out of me? Even that I do not know. Yet, amidst my present rage, there is love. The one remaining pinnacle of devotion to which I cling. Hanging for my life above a sea of images. Of hate, and envy, of power, and corruption, of disease and rage. Of emotions so strong they could consume my mind. And I recognize these images. They are the frail and poorly mended pieces and fragments of my life. The ones that had been broken so many times before. The sea which with each storm grows deeper. The sea into which she might cast me into, my own self breaking the surface and not returning up again for the air. The air I call love, life and happiness. Immersed, and surrounded by the broken pieces of my life … once again. And never again. Karin, oh Karin, I need you. Can’t you hear me? Why don’t you see? I’m sorry I am what I am. You ask so much. So much. Yet I shall always give for you. Forever, and ever and ever.

  I know you love Alasdair and that you’ve had a “crush” on Rob [a boy from school] for some time. I know you’re only 15. You can see other guys than me if you want to. Maybe it would be better. I ask only one thing. Please don’t kiss him, or anyone. I’ve been struggling with that image now for days. Please dear. The one thing I ask, and not give. I love you gorgeous. Please understand me. I need you.

  Alasdair Neal was soon gone after that concert, and Rob was put to the side, and Karin once more assured Dennis of her love and devotion. And so they resumed, Dennis more deeply dependent on her than ever.

  She offered him a prize, a way in which she would make up for those hurts of January. Through the previous years Joyce had become increasingly friendly with Albert Markov, Karin’s violin teacher. She had hinted to people at Athena that a romance was in progress, a romance not deterred by Markov’s wife. From all evidence the romance was just another of Joyce’s tales, though she and Markov had indeed become friends, drawn together by a mutual affection for stones and climbs. And as their friendship developed, she began to talk to him about joint ventures, about their becoming partners and opening a music school. At the beginning of February Joyce and Markov went off to Colorado for a week, to climb, to search for stones and to explore the possibility of forming a music school.

  Karin was left home alone. She did not remain alone long. Hardly was Joyce out the door before Dennis was in. “We played husband and wife for that week,” Karin said. “We got up in the morning and I made breakfast, and when Dennis got home from work, we had dinner and watched movies on television.”

  They also took a trip into Hartford and went shopping for a wedding dress. Her sixteenth birthday was approaching, and both of them thought it a fitting gift. They went to several stores, finally found one in a shop on Franklin Avenue, a formal gown. Karin tried it on. She wanted it. Dennis made a down payment. The dress would be ready in a few weeks. “We were planning to get married,” Dennis says, “but not in a couple of months or anything like that, not for years. She had school to finish, and I was going back to school and I had to finish, and then we had careers to think about. So it wouldn’t happen for quite a while. Shopping for that wedding dress and putting money down on it was just part of our fantasy life.”

  Sixteen, sweet sixteen, a pivotal year. It could not be ignored, nor could it be celebrated like any other birthday. They would have to do something special. Karin wanted to have dinner at Cavey’s, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in their part of Connecticut. Dennis made the reservations. Karin wanted flowers. Dennis bought them. He bought her a costly piece of jewelry. He hired a limousine to drive them to the restaurant. Then Karin told him she wanted her best friend Shannon Dubois to be part of the celebration. Dennis did not demur. He changed the reservation from two people to three, and they all went out to dinner, a meal that cost him close to two hundred dollars.

  “All Karin had to do,” says Shannon, “was ask Dennis for something and he’d get it for her. He was spending all his money on her.” In about six months he spent more than ten thousand dollars on jewelry, clothes, dinners and more on her.

  Hardly was the birthday party over before Karin told Dennis that the whole idea of buying a wedding dress was ridiculous and she had canceled the order. He knew it had been a foolish fancy, but nevertheless, he was upset. “One day you ask me to buy you a wedding dress,” he wrote her, “the next day you ask me to let you grow up. Karin, all I ask is that you think. You decide, Karin, are you 16 or 23? You cannot be both. You ask too much. What you did, so you say, was play a game. My love, my life, my pride and everything we share are not a game and not something for you to play with. No games like that. What good is it?”

  They made up after that, as they always seemed to make up. As much as Dennis needed her, she needed him. Her relationshipwith Joyce had deteriorated once more, and Dennis was a prop to support her.

  Someone once called adolescent love one of life’s great tragedies or, if not a tragedy, at least one of its sorrows. It lasts only a moment and envelops those who are stricken with a white flame, passion so intense they are sure no one has ever experienced anything approaching it, agony so excruciating it is unbearable. Teenage lovers are certain their love is eternal and will never die. Yet it burns too fast, and in its dying, it afflicts those who suffer with such anguish they are sure they will never recover. No one can escape it, no one can be immunized against it and there is no antidote. Yet for most people, adolescent love is a necessary thing, a stage of growing up, of turning from dependent child into independent adult, a passing through so that someday mature and lasting relationships can form. Perhaps Karin was beginning to accept that. Dennis was not. For him this love was the only love.

  But they were drifting, and things were changing. In April he got his first real sense that something had passed beyond his control. Joyce had gone away again to Colorado with Albert Markov to continue their search for a music school. Karin was left home alone once more.

  “One night we went out to a movie,” he remembers. “On the way we stopped at a Pizza Hut in East Hartford to get something to eat. The place was very crowded, and we had to share a table with some other people. We were sitting there, and suddenly she said, ‘Well, you’re not going to sleep in my bed tonight. You’re not going to share my bed while my mom’s away.’ Everybody at that table, and I think everybody around us, heard her say that, and they started staring at us. I got very embarrassed. It’s the way I am. I didn’t like things discussed out in public for everyone to hear. I said, ‘Karin, shut up.’ She got very angry with me. Our whole relationship changed after that. Nothing was ever the same again.”

  On a Friday evening a few weeks later Karin told Dennis he shouldn’t bother to drive her down to Rowayton for her lesson that night and go to all the trouble of driving her home and then down to New York early on Saturday. She had her own car by then, a used Volkswagen Rabbit; she had gone shopping for it with her mother and Archbishop Whealon when she got her license in March, soon after her birthday. She would just drive herself, she told Dennis, stay over at the Markovs’ and then drive into Manhattan in the morning with Albert, return with him to Rowayton, pick up her car and drive back in the afternoon. He protested, complaining that she was spending too much time at the Markovs’. She was adamant. Her lessons were going well. Besides and perhaps most important, she said, Albert Markov had b
ecome a father figure for her, a real father figure such as she had never had before. Dennis accepted that, but he didn’t like it.

  “One time I called the house, and Joyce told me she was down there,” Dennis says. “I called again on Saturday, and Joyce told me she was still down there and was staying over another day. I remember the next morning waking up at five-thirty and driving down to the Markovs’ house and hanging around the house, just driving around. About seven-thirty or eight o’clock I went over to a pay phone and called the house. Alex Markov answered, and then she came on the phone, and she was really pissed at me for showing up. I got out of there. I made it back to Glastonbury in about forty-five minutes. It usually took more than an hour. I had my foot on the gas and the needle as high as it would go. I just didn’t care.”

  21

  There was something in Rowayton to attract her, to keep her there longer than usual. It wasn’t Albert Markov and the violin lessons. It was Alex Markov.

  He was the personification of Joyce’s fantasies for Karin even more than Alasdair Neal had ever been. Despite what Joyce said, her attempts to lure Michael Zaccaro for Karin had failed, and she knew it. Alasdair Neal was no longer attainable. Alex Markov was handsome, young and exotic, even more exotic than Neal. The Russian-born violinist fitted Joyce’s dreams closely. If he was not in the first rank of concert virtuosos, if he did not have a catalog of recordings of major concertos, chamber pieces and solos, nevertheless he had won his prizes and he had his tours. He was successful and seemed on the verge of greater renown, and he was in demand for performances on the concert stage and at festivals around the world. Joyce saw him as the perfect match for Karin.

  She did everything she could to throw them together as often as possible. She made sure that Karin spent more time in Rowayton with the Markovs, without Dennis along, arranged that Karin spend nights and weekends there. She talked about Karin constantly to Alex, piled praise upon praise about her talent and her beauty, let Alex know that Karin was developing deep romantic feelings about him. She talked about Alex to Karin unendingly, lauding his talent and his looks, and let Karin know that Alex was more than mildly interested in her. “I wouldn’t mind if Alex got you into bed,” she told sixteen-year-old Karin. “Just make sure I don’t become a grandmother.”

  Joyce had been having some medical problems. She went to her doctor. She had to have a hysterectomy. The operation was scheduled for May 20, and she was to be in the hospital for about four days. She arranged for Karin to spend those days in Rowayton with the Markovs.

  A few days before she was to enter the hospital and Karin departed for Rowayton, Joyce summoned Karin and Dennis into the Aparo living room and sat them down. She was, she said, very worried and nervous about the outcome of the surgery. “If I don’t come out of it,” she said, “I want you to know that I’ve arranged for Karin to be taken care of.” She turned to Karin. “You know where all the papers are, in the hall closet. If anything happens, you should get them and get in touch with Michael Zaccaro. He’ll take care of you and everything else.”

  The next day Karin and Dennis met for lunch, at Karin’s request—or demand. As they were eating, Karin looked at Dennis and without preliminaries announced, “I want to break up. I’m in love with Alex Markov.”

  Dennis couldn’t eat. His stomach turned over. His world was falling apart. He begged her to reconsider, pleaded with her not to take such a drastic and final step.

  She thought it over, then said, “All right. Then I want us to go incommunicado for a month.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, cut it off for a month. I won’t see you, and you won’t see me. We won’t see each other for the next month, and then we’ll see how things work out. They’ll work out. Don’t worry. I promise that we’ll be together again once this is over.”

  When Dennis left that lunch to drive back to his father’s house in South Glastonbury, he was at the lowest point he could ever remember. Everything was going sour. Karin was out of his life for the next month, unless he could do something to change it. Without her he felt his life had lost meaning. And he had just lost his job at Aetna; his department had been hit by budget problems, and thirty employees had been scheduled to be laid off. With practically no seniority, he had been one of the thirty. He had gone to work for his father’s computer consulting firm, but that wasn’t panning out well. “I was just overhead,” he says. “It was a small business where my dad contracted his people out to do work for other companies. I did pretty well at it, but there wasn’t that much business, and so there wasn’t really a place for me.” Still, he had intended that only as a stopgap. He would be going to college, to Central Connecticut, at the start of the new term, first classes scheduled, he remembers, for August 7. But that $375-a-week salary, almost all of which was gone as soon as it reached his pocket, spent on Karin, and on his car, wasn’t there any longer. He needed some temporary job at least to tide him over the next months, to keep him in funds. Eventually he found one, as a short-order cook at the concession stand at the Tallwoods Country Club. It wasn’t much, certainly didn’t make any use of his abilities, but at least it paid a little, about $200 a week.

  In his room the night he accepted Karin’s offer to go “incommunicado” for a month, he began to write her a log that he did not give her for some time. It covered most of that month.

  This is just a little diary of my doings from that fateful day, May 20. Goodbye.…

  It happened suddenly to me. We had to say goodbye. Something I had always hoped and prayed we’d never have to say in such a context. When the idea of not seeing each other first popped up, I accepted it rather bravely (or so it seemed to me). Deep down inside I knew it might help us. I’ve never been torn and hurt so deeply though. And as I sit writing with burning eyes, and a lump in my throat, I remember saying to myself, “I can do this if I must.” But when it finally came time to say “goodbye”—I realized just how difficult it is all going to be. I have never been so scared in my life. I have been shaking pretty badly since this afternoon.

  I wish my mind didn’t work the way it does. Immediately I started to make myself more scared, thinking that this is the beginning of the end of everything. Then I started thinking about what I could do in one month. Not do for me, but do for you. Fix the Triumph so I could give it to you on the 26th. Or buy the synthesizer from Todd [a friend] to write some songs for you. Save up all my money to get you some wonderous gift upon our return. But then I realized that that’s not the point of this whole thing. You want me to do something for me, while you do something for you.

  I’m living on your promise that you’ll come back. And stay back. Living on it. Should I be scared? I don’t see how I can’t be. So many things dear. Number I on this list: I love you … always, more each day. This is going to be a long month. Oh god.…

  My first full day without you. How lonely I felt. I did find, however, that keeping very busy helped me. Shannon and I talked a bit, but I’m not sure it helped me. Maybe if I was thinking the way I should, she would have been a great help. But right now I’m just so scared and depressed nothing helps. I’m tired so it’s off to sleep. Have a good night, stay safe and well. I love you.…

  I spent today down on Groton working on the boat. I got a pretty bad sunburn and I think my left pinky is either broken, or chipped. My finger has turned blue. I found out my mom is moving back here next Friday. She wants me to drive out to Michigan and back. I miss you. I wonder about it Kare. About the years we could have. All I need is your love and your faith. Oh please, please need me. I’m so scared. Love me. I love you.…

  I slept until noon today and worked on my model after that. Ripp [a friend] called me and we went for a ride in his new car, and then went up to Cotton Hollow. We’re planning to go skiing tomorrow. Denise called me this evening. I hadn’t talked with her since December. I’m afraid of going to bed. Once the light goes out, I lie here and think of you. It makes me feel terrible. I’m so afraid of s
pending time alone. I keep telling myself that it’ll all be o.k. soon. We’ll be o.k. I hope so. I know we can make it. Forever … and ever … and ever.…

  I drove by your house about 8:00, but no one was home. I went skiing with Ripp today. Up at Killington. It was fun. I figured it would take my mind off “things.” All that happened was that as we drove north, I counted the miles increasing between us. You never left my thoughts once today. I did a number on my hands today in the ice and rocks. I managed to hack a good bit of skin off my fingers. Not to mention my aching back. Anyway, I hope your weekend went better than mine. (Actually I don’t.) I love you silly. See you soon. (I hope.) …