Hard Feelings (20 page)
Paula had picked up groceries on her way home from work and she cooked her specialty—chicken piccata with wild rice and pine nuts. We ate by candlelight, listening to a CD of classical masterpieces, talking almost nonstop. I told her about how, after my parents’ divorce, I had felt very lonely. My mother and I had moved to Manhattan when I was in ninth grade and I had to transfer to a junior high school where I didn’t know anybody. A few cruel, popular boys started picking on me, calling me “faggot” and “homo.” I was beaten up several times and I had no friends. Because my grades in junior high school were poor I couldn’t get into Stuyvesant High School and my mother was disappointed in me.
Paula shared more stories from her life. She told me about the time when she was fourteen and she and a friend had tried some cocaine they found in her friend’s brother’s bedroom. Her friend had a heart attack and nearly died. When Paula was fifteen, shortly after her uncle Jimmy died, she had her own brush with death. Hopelessly depressed, she got in her parents’ car, which was parked in an unventilated garage, and turned on the engine. She had started to pass out when her sister discovered her and dragged her to safety. Afterwards, her parents sent her for a psychiatric evaluation. She talked about everything with a psychiatrist except “the big thing,” fearing that it would put her parents through too much pain if they found out about Uncle Jimmy. She was prescribed antidepressants, but she continued to suffer from self-loathing and worthlessness.
Then, sounding suddenly serious and foreboding, Paula told me that there was something else she wanted to tell me about her teenage years. Paula had the habit of making trivial issues sound overimportant. One time she had told me that there was something “very serious” she wanted to discuss with me and I braced myself, fearing that a relative had died or had been in a horrible accident, but then she said, “I’m thinking about getting my hair cut.” So now I was expecting her to tell me some lighthearted story about her sweet sixteen party or her prom night, but unfortunately this wasn’t the case.
I’d always assumed that Paula had been with about ten guys before she met me, which wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I was way off. Paula rattled off the names of about twenty boys she’d had sex with in junior high school and high school and she assured me that there were “dozens” of others whose names she couldn’t remember. Two of the “unknowns” were the guitar player of an opening band at a Who concert she had attended when she was sixteen, and “some forty-year-old guy” she had met at a roller rink when she was in junior high school. Her only serious teenage relationship was with Andy Connelly—she referred to him as “you know who”—during her senior year of high school. In college, where I had met her, she had “reinvented” herself as a girl with limited sexual experience.
If Paula had broken this news to me a few days ago, I probably would have gotten very upset—after all, finding out that your wife had been a teenage slut, when you had a completely different image of her, is not the most pleasant news a husband can receive—but now I felt nothing but sympathy for her. It was as if there was suddenly an even greater bond between us. We had both been abused as children and had responded to it in different ways—I had lashed out against the person who had hurt me, and she had lashed out against herself.
Later, after we made love, Paula started to cry against my shoulder. I asked her what was wrong, but she insisted it was nothing. Finally, she told me that maybe it was hormones, or maybe it was because she was so happy.
On Thursday, two of my projects got under way. After checking in at each site and meeting with the various coordinators, I returned to my office, where I had internal meetings with project managers and people from Purchasing. Although I was working hard, I didn’t feel at all exhausted or stressed.
After work, I joined a health club near my office. I had brought gym clothes with me from home and I spent about twenty minutes on a LifeCycle machine, and then I did a couple of sets of bench presses and pulldowns. I was full of energy and I could have worked out longer, but I didn’t want to push myself too hard on the first day. From now on, I planned to work out at least several days a week, during my lunch hour, and on weekends at the health club’s Upper East Side location. My goal was to lose fifteen pounds by August. Of course, this meant I wouldn’t fit into my old clothes and I’d have to go shopping for a new wardrobe. All the clothes I owned now were plain and conservative, mostly from Today’s Man. I needed a sharper, hipper look. Maybe I’d start shopping at Barney’s or at boutiques on Madison Avenue.
Paula had told me that she wasn’t going to be home until around eight o’clock, because she had an appointment with her therapist, so I decided to surprise her by cooking dinner. I printed out a recipe for chateaubriand from the Internet, and I went to the gourmet food market down the block and bought all the ingredients. I was an awful cook, but I figured that I couldn’t screw up too badly with a recipe. When Paula came home the apartment was filled with smoke and the loud, shrill smoke alarm was going off. When she came into the kitchen and saw the charred meat we both had a good laugh.
We threw the food away and ordered in Vietnamese. Afterwards, we walked Otis. It was a warm night, and we were both wearing shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. On First Avenue, we bought Tasti D-Lite cones and ate them on a bench outside the store. We talked, taking breaks to kiss or to just look into each other’s eyes.
On the way home, Paula told me how she’d called Dr. Lewis today and canceled our upcoming marriage counseling appointment. Now that we had been getting along so well together, Paula didn’t think we needed counseling.
Later, while we were washing up, getting ready for bed, Paula told me that she wanted to have a baby. At first I thought she was joking, but then I realized that this wasn’t something she would kid about. She thought that maybe it had to do with her sister giving birth last week or because— as her therapist had suggested—she had finally decided what was really important to her in life, but she wanted to go off the pill right away. I hugged and kissed her and I told her how thrilled I was. Then she said she agreed with me, that a child needs a backyard, like she’d had in Syracuse, and we decided that we would start taking trips to Tarrytown and other small towns along the Hudson to start house-hunting, maybe as soon as this weekend.
Paula said she was too tired to make love, so she went to sleep and I stayed up, watching TV in bed, switching back and forth between the various newscasts. Like the past few nights, there was no mention of the murder, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that the case had been forgotten. Within the next few months, Paula and I would find a house in a small, friendly community in Westchester. In the meantime, we’d call a real estate agent and start showing our apartment. Now that my job wasn’t on the line and I was on track to start making some decent money in commissions, it didn’t matter if we had to take a loss on the apartment. It would be a relief to get out of Manhattan. Maybe I’d miss the energy of the city, but I was sick and tired of living on top of people in an apartment building, sneering at my neighbors in the elevator and not knowing, or wanting to know, their names. I wanted a calm, relaxing, suburban life. I’d ride to work every morning on a commuter train, working on a laptop and sipping a cup of coffee. At work, I’d make a ton of money and I’d have a corner office and I’d be treated with respect by everyone. Then I’d return home and eat dinner with my family. If we had a son, I’d be friends with him, not a stranger like my father was to me. I’d spend time with him in the evenings and on weekends—helping him with his homework and taking him to ball games. Maybe I’d even become the coach of his Little League team.
I turned off the TV and hugged Paula from behind, continuing to envision my bright future. I saw images of us with our two children, sitting around the dinner table, laughing. Then I saw myself and my son, playing catch in the backyard on a bright, sunny day. Then a vision of our whole family appeared—we were standing on a manicured lawn, in front of a lavish house, as if posing for a picture. I was in great shape and I looked like I was twenty-five years old. I had a bronze tan and I was smiling widely.
Then, as I started to fall asleep, my thoughts and dreams merged, and my happy visions faded. The perfect house in the suburbs vanished and so did the children. Now it was just Paula and me alone in our dark, bleak apartment. I saw images of us fighting and heard us screaming at each other. I was calling her “bitch” and “whore,” and I was drunk, beating her, and she was crying, and both of her eyes were black and swollen. Then I was running along dark train tracks, holding a bloody butcher knife. It was windy and bitterly cold.
15
I WAS HAPPY to see the warm pot of coffee in the kitchen. Thanks to a horrible night’s sleep, I had a dull headache and I felt extremely weak. I poured myself some coffee, added some skim milk, and took a few sips. Usually, caffeine gave me instant energy, but this morning it had no effect at all.
Paula was still in the shower when I got back into bed to get another five minutes of rest. I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, Paula was dressed, ready to leave. She was in a lousy mood too, so we didn’t talk much. She kissed me goodbye quickly before she left.
At work, I still felt lethargic. A crisis at Don Chaney’s site—he was unhappy with one of our consultants—distracted me for a while, but it was hard to ignore how miserable I felt. In a cabinet in the kitchen area of the office I found a bottle of Advil. I downed two caplets with some lukewarm coffee. My headache subsided, but the caffeine from all the coffee I’d had on an empty stomach made me extremely anxious. I went down to a cart on the street and bought a bagel and cream cheese, devouring it in several bites on my way back to the office. The food energized me for the rest of the morning, but by noon I was feeling fragile again.
Bob and Alan, the director of marketing, stopped by my cubicle and asked me if I wanted to have lunch with them. Bob had never invited me to have lunch with him before and the gesture was even more unexpected given how he had acted after the police came to the office. Alan was about Bob’s age, around forty, and although we always said hello and exchanged pleasantries in the hallway, he had never seemed very interested in me.
We went to a kosher Italian restaurant on Forty-sixth Street. The food sucked, but the conversation was pleasant. Bob told some of his old Polish jokes and then Alan talked about how his oldest daughter was going off to college at SUNY Buffalo. When I told him I had gone to college at Buffalo there was an immediate bond between us. I gave him my opinions about the campus and the city, telling him that Buffalo was a “great place to spend four years.” Although I really thought the entire city was a hellhole, I figured that since his daughter had already made a commitment to the school he wouldn’t want to hear anything negative. Later, Alan asked me what my plans were for the future. I was taken aback at first, unsure what he was getting at, and then I said that I wanted to make as much money for the company as possible and take it from there. “Good answer,” Bob said, and we all laughed. Then Alan asked me if I had any interest in getting involved in the “marketing side of the business.” I said that I’d be interested in any opportunity that was offered to me. Alan said he couldn’t make any guarantees, but that a marketing position could be opening soon and that he’d keep me at the top of his list.
We sat at the table, schmoozing, for a long time after the check arrived. On the way back up to the office, in the lobby, we ran into Steve Ferguson. Steve made small talk and tried to act as if nothing was wrong, but the way he refused to even make eye contact with me was a dead giveaway that he was pissed off. I could almost hear his shallow, petty mind pleading, Why are you taking
him
to lunch? What about me? Don’t I get any respect at this company anymore?
My future was looking very bright again. If I was promoted to a high-level marketing position, that would put me on track to become a vice president someday, if not at Midtown then at some other networking company. I would make a big guaranteed salary, at least equal to what I was making now, without the pressure of having to close sales.
I called Paula at her office, to tell her the good news, but I got her voice mail. I left a short message saying, “I just wanted to tell you how much I love you and I miss you very much.”
After I hung up there was a short beep on my PC, announcing that I had received an e-mail. Still smiling, thinking about Paula, I opened my e-mail log and saw the strange address of the incoming message:
A sick feeling was building in my stomach. There was no subject heading and I had no idea who had sent it. Hoping it was just spam, I opened the message.
CONFESS!
For about a minute, I stared at the single word on the screen in front of me, unable to think. Then I forced myself to concentrate, trying to figure out who could have written to me.
I looked at the address again: [email protected]. Anyone could start a Yahoo e-mail account for free, so the address in itself didn’t give any clues. I checked Yahoo to see if there was a profile for this e-mail account but, not surprisingly, there was none. I knew there were ways to trace e-mail addresses. I considered getting help from Chris, one of the web gurus in the office, who often bragged how he had once hacked into Microsoft’s system, but I decided that it would be a bad idea to get anyone else involved.
It was getting harder to stay calm. I thought about that night at the train station, wondering if it was possible that someone had witnessed the murder. It didn’t make any sense to me why a witness would be telling me to confess, but I didn’t know why anyone else would have sent the message either.