I was on Brian’s side, but I nodded and kept my mouth shut.
Their arguments turned into fights that gathered increasing ferocity.
Another example of little things turning huge.
Soon, those knitted dog sweaters came to represent Noreen’s soul, her artistic contribution to the world, her love for their dog. To Brian, they reflected an attempt to control him — her refusal to let the dog be a dog, and by implication, to let a man be a man.
He began to make rude comments about the girly way she’d decorated their house and the cloying smell of gardenia that filled the bedroom, wafting out of her candles, and spritzed on their comforter. She accused him of dismissing everything feminine and female as inherently inferior. She came to believe he’d chosen to ride a motorcycle simply because they terrified her. Her refusal to get on the back allowed him to drive off alone whenever he felt like it, leaving her behind as if she was an insignificant part of his life, no more important than his backpack.
The dog was caught in the middle.
All day long Terry wore Noreen’s knitted sweaters, unless the weather was too warm, and a house perched on a cliff above the ocean doesn’t get hot very often.
When Brian came home from work, he removed the sweater, and he wasn’t very gentle with the knitted garments. Often Terry’s toenails snagged on the carefully constructed stitches. After Brian went to sleep at night, Noreen put the sweater back on the dog.
Listening to this, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. It was a good thing that they’d delayed addressing the parenthood question. The dog started showing signs of stress. He barked constantly and peed on the floor. Neighbors left angry notes in their mailbox, complaining about the incessant noise. Noreen tore up the notes.
Late one afternoon during a violent storm, a seagull landed on the railing of the back deck. Terry went nuts over this invasion of his territory. He barked more wildly than Noreen had ever heard him. The gull was unperturbed. Terry started flinging himself at the railing, barking maniacally, saliva flying out of his mouth. Noreen stood in the doorway, begging Terry to calm down. She held out biscuits and even a chunk of leftover steak trying to lure him back into the house. She didn’t want to go out there, certain the dog was angering the gull and it would fly at Noreen, digging its talons into her scalp, pecking at her eyeballs in the mistaken belief they were sand crabs meant to be dug out of her skull.
The gull hopped along the railing, and then flapped its wings and flew a few yards to one of the lower branches of the pine tree. Terry leaped. He cleared the railing, but the little knitted belt that secured the sweater around his ribs caught on an exposed nail. The force of the turtleneck sweater yanking on his throat broke his neck.
“Oh.” I put my hands over my mouth. “Oh, that’s so brutal.” It was sickening, knowing how her ridiculous outfits killed the poor thing. I wanted to rush out and adopt a dog right that minute. Maybe two. I felt if I could save at least one dog from a stupid human being, I would be doing the world more good than I had in my life so far.
Brian couldn’t forgive her.
But still, I wondered…he was so eager to escape her passive contribution to the dog’s death that he walked away from a million dollar cottage?
“Why, exactly, did he leave?” I said.
“I told you. He wouldn’t speak to me. He slept on the couch. Then his mother died, and he didn’t cope well with that at all.”
“Lots of people can’t deal with it when a parent dies, especially at our age. You don’t expect it to happen when we’re this young.”
She nodded and sipped her drink. “He fell apart.”
“And he didn’t care about his investment in the house?”
She shook her head. Her eyes grew red, brimming with tears. She put the glass to her lips and took hurried little sips.
It was a horrifying story, and yet, it seemed as if a piece was missing. Maybe more than one. Someone like me, who has lied when necessary, recognizes when the truth is being reformatted to appear like something different, but I couldn’t get a sense of where the story had been twisted to cover up the real horror. I felt as if I was standing on the edge of an abyss, looking into utter darkness, while Terry’s barking shrieks pierced my skull, preventing me from making out the words of a voice that was screaming right beside me.
5
It was embarrassing — watching Noreen brush up against Jared, put her hand on his arm, his leg, his back. Instead of the loose, flowing tops she’d worn over skinny jeans, now she squeezed her torso into t-shirts that looked as if they’d been purchased in the children’s department. When she wasn’t wearing a skin-hugging shirt, exposing the dip of her navel above the low-slung waist of her jeans, she chose spaghetti strap shirts, displaying an average amount of cleavage. She found every excuse imaginable to bend over in front of him, offering a more complete view.
He rarely looked.
One night, I heard her knock on his bedroom door. The first knock was so soft, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. When there was no response, she rapped more firmly — a pleasant thunk of bone on wood. The third time, it sounded awfully close to a fist on his door. He still didn’t answer.
I sensed her lingering, a few feet from my door, for a long time. I felt her breath in the small space between our rooms. I envisioned her face — eyes squinting in the darkness, lips parted as if he might feel her desire and suddenly wake up to his own. I pictured her squashing her ear against his door, trying to determine from whatever quiet sounds he was making what he might be up to. I imagined her turning and pressing her breasts against the door, as if she could melt through the wood and fall into his arms. Or straight into his bed.
It was at least twenty minutes before she walked away, bare feet slapping softly on the tile floor.
Sleep took a long time coming, even after she was gone. I’d felt her staring at my closed door, thinking about me, worrying that I was a competitor she was going to have to remove from the contest. Starting with his aggressive wink the first time we met, he seemed to want to rub it in her face that he was drawn to me, not her. But after a while, I didn’t understand why she didn’t take the hint and move on. Who wants to be with a guy who has his eye on someone else?
Ignoring advice isn’t a flaw unique to Noreen, but part of the reason she found it easy to ignore my advice was that I hadn’t been strong enough in my warning. I should have told her how I knew it was a terrible idea to mix a financial power imbalance with sex — I lived through it with roommates in my very first apartment.
After two years of college, I’d reached my limit with dorm life. It was nothing but a factory for cliques and cat fights. Claymore Hall was a six-story building that looked like a shoebox. So many tiny rooms formed by cinderblock walls, filled with women who were paired based on the untruthful answers they gave in their dorm applications. What woman admits she snores? And what eighteen-year-old writes on a dorm application that she prefers peace and quiet? It makes her seem unfriendly, dull, a loser, a poor candidate for dormitory life altogether. And those were the minor mismatches. There were also the predators who failed to mention they would destroy a woman’s reputation if she chose to wear plain white underpants instead of a thong. The days were filled with gossip and betrayals. By the age of twenty, I needed a change of scenery.
The apartment I wound up in was only two years old, twenty-two-hundred square feet with lots of windows and a sleek kitchen. Lucky me.
Dianne Whitaker, a woman who lived on my floor at Claymore Hall, invited me to share the place. Her mother was subsidizing the rent on the palatial apartment one block from campus on a tree-lined street. Mrs. Whitaker had paid the deposit, hired a housekeeper, and told Dianne to pick two friends to share the second bedroom. Dianne was installed in the master suite, complete with an oversized jacuzzi tub. But even the shared bedroom awarded to me and Lisa Allen, also from our floor at Claymore, was large enough for two beds, two dressers, and two desks. We had a walk-in closet and
our bathroom featured two sinks, a long counter, and a shower large enough for all three of us, if we desired. Dianne’s mother picked up the entire tab for the utilities and paid half the rent while Lisa and I paid a quarter each. It was more than fair. A very generous woman, but it turned out, not generous enough, in Dianne’s opinion.
The first month went smoothly.
On September thirtieth, Lisa and I handed over our checks for the second month’s rent, made out to Dianne’s mother.
On October third, Randy Flynn moved in.
Randy was Dianne’s boyfriend. He was not on her mother’s approved list of boys Dianne should be dating. He’d been a student at UCLA for nine years because he was having difficulty pinning down a major that would launch him into a satisfying, profitable career. Randy liked to smoke pot, drive his motorcycle at ninety miles an hour, and didn’t show the proper respect to Dianne’s mother. The last was what doomed him. Randy was also hot, which meant nothing to Mrs. W, but apparently Mrs. Whitaker thought that moving her daughter out of the co-ed dorm where anyone was allowed to live, and into a nice apartment, would curtail the amount of time Dianne and Randy spent together. Mrs. W thought the relationship would die a natural death if she didn’t fight too aggressively to split them up.
In the middle of October, Lisa, Dianne, and I were sitting in the living room drinking beer and planning a Halloween party. Lisa put her bare feet with their pointy toenails on the coffee table and crossed her ankles. “Is Randy going to stay here more or less permanently?”
“Yes,” Dianne said.
“Shouldn’t he be sharing the rent?” Lisa wiggled her toes to show she was asking a friendly question.
“You only pay a quarter, so it wouldn’t change your share.” Dianne’s voice was hard and slightly louder than her normal speech, an echo of Mrs. Whitaker’s tone.
That night, when Dianne closed her bedroom door, Lisa and I whispered about the unfairness of this deal, although neither one of us could explain why it wasn’t right. It just wasn’t.
Time passed. Once in a while, Lisa and I whispered about it, wondering what Dianne would do if we alerted Mrs. W to the arrangement, but knowing it was equally possible such a move would jeopardize our invitation to stay in the lovely apartment.
In January, Dianne broke up with Randy, but there was a catch — she felt sorry for him. He’s trying so hard to focus on his education. He thinks architecture is for sure the right choice. I feel bad that I dumped him and he can’t find housing mid-year, so he’ll stay with us.
Lisa and I glanced at each other. We both knew in the same moment that it was unlikely Randy would be staying in Dianne’s bed.
“You two can sleep in my room,” Dianne said. “Randy can take your room.”
“And we still pay seven hundred bucks a month?” Lisa said. “I don’t think so.”
“Would you rather look for a new place? You’ll never find anything mid-year.”
“It’s not right,” I said.
“There are no other options,” Dianne said.
“What if we leave and your mother finds out he’s here?” I said.
“You’ll be in the same position. No place to live.”
She was right, and we knew it. Apartments were almost impossible to find anywhere within a five-mile radius of the school even a month before classes started in the Fall. Neither of us had a car, so even if we found a room to rent farther away, we were stuck. Public transit went nowhere useful.
“You can trade off sleeping in my bed with me,” Dianne said. “Every other week, or whatever — you two work it out.”
In a king-sized bed, that was a doable situation. The odd one out would use a sleeping bag. The carpets were thick with nice padding so it wasn’t awful. And we still had a first class kitchen, a huge dining and living area with a state-of-the-art TV, the luxurious bathroom, now shared by three, and a balcony custom designed for nice parties.
We swapped rooms with Randy.
On Valentine’s Day, Lisa went to a girls without guys, let’s love ourselves dinner. Dianne went to a very expensive restaurant with her expensive new guy — a charming guy who treated Mrs. W with respect.
Randy and I hooked up. After all, it was Valentine’s Day and neither of us had a Valentine.
Dianne came home from dinner, heard Randy and me in the bedroom, and threw a fit. It appeared as if she was still in love with him, and the worries about feeling sorry for him weren’t that at all. Or something like that. Her fury was a little confusing. Maybe she just didn’t want me to have him. She screamed so loud I thought the neighbors might call the police. Through her screaming about my whorishness and Randy’s betrayal, it came out that she’d been collecting seven hundred dollars a month from him as well — her own secret nest egg.
When she finally calmed down, she ordered us to sweep up the broken glass from the wine glasses she’d hurled on the kitchen floor, to never so much as look at each other again, and to start writing our monthly checks for nine hundred dollars each.
Once she received the first eighteen hundred dollar installment, she fell out of love once again. Money of her own, hidden from her mother, eased all her pain. I moved into the second bedroom with Randy, and Lisa continued to share Dianne’s room. For the time being.
During the final months of the school year, Lisa, Randy, and I sat on the balcony on balmy evenings, which is pretty much every evening in LA. While Dianne was wined and dined by her new guy, the victims of extortion and Lisa passed around a joint and devised ways to be rid of her. It was a mind-twisting game of course — without Dianne, there would be no apartment. We couldn’t really be rid of her.
On April first, we were doing the same, and Randy started laughing. He laughed so hard we thought he was going to puke on us. “We should kill her. She only communicates with her mother through text messages — it would be months before her mother figured out she was dead.”
I laughed. Lisa looked at me, guilty. Each of us picked up our bottle of beer and took a very long swallow, our throats pulsing in unison.
It became a game. We would go out on the balcony, light up a joint, and the first person to take a hit had to describe a method of murder. Throughout the spring, we considered car accidents, fires, staircases, guns, knives, poison, razor blades, ropes, and the swimming pool.
When I came home to the apartment after my Shakespeare final exam and saw Dianne face down in the swimming pool, I laughed. It was only an illusion induced by repeated fantasy, too much thought given to the matter. Too much dope. Randy was playing games with my head.
Dianne’s body, clothed in a navy blue bikini, a sheer white coverup clinging to her wet skin, drifted close to the edge of the pool. The partially deflated pink plastic raft prevented her from bumping against the side. I put out my hand and pushed her onto her back. It was no illusion.
I told the police I had no idea how it happened. I had been locked in a room writing about King Lear. It was easy to verify, so there weren’t too many questions. Then, I held my hands over my mouth, afraid I’d vomit, as they lifted her out of the water and placed her body on the concrete, covering her with a thick, black tarp.
6
Aptos
Jared had decided to resurrect Noreen’s dead vegetable garden in the side yard. The section of the eight-foot fence facing the front yard was actually a large gate. The whole fence could be opened, exposing the garden. Two sides of the fence were covered with thick vines that looked as if they were swallowing the wood. The back edge of the fence ran along the cliff with only a few feet of earth between the fence and the drop-off to the rocks below.
It was a sunny, clear Saturday afternoon. Noreen had driven over the hill to visit her parents in the East Bay. I guessed they were making up for lost time now that Brian was out of her life. She certainly seemed to be looking forward to spending the afternoon and eating dinner with them. Her willingness to take her eyes off Jared for most of the day was surprising, but she informed me that absence make
s the heart grow fonder. She also advised me to leave him alone so he could focus on his gardening.
I went out to the front porch and pulled out a cigarette. I lit it and took a long, pleasing drag.
“Noreen’s rule list says no smoking,” Jared said. He drove the blade of the hoe into the dirt.
“In the house,” I said.
“I think she meant no smoking at all. She doesn’t care for smokers.”
“I’m not a smoker. It’s an occasional thing.”
He stabbed the hoe into the ground again.
I sat on the edge of the porch. “So what brought you to Aptos?”
“I’m trying to make some changes in my life.”
“What sort of changes?” I tapped my ash on the ground under a shrub and shoved my heel in the soil to cover the evidence of my rule-breaking.
He dragged the hoe in a straight line, angling the blade so it made a small furrow. Then he dropped the hoe and squatted on his heels. He plucked out a few small weeds and tossed them to the side of the garden area. “I’m investigating Buddhism. Living in harmony with the earth and its inhabitants. Detaching from the endless quest for more.”
“So that’s why you have a new BMW?”
He had the dignity to blush.
I took another drag on the cigarette, feeling mildly anxious that it was shrinking so fast. I didn’t want it to reach the end of its life too quickly, and I didn’t want to light another and sink into old habits.
The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1) Page 3