Valentine (27 page)

If only, Victor now thought. If only Mother had been another kind of woman. If only she’d listened to her parents before marrying Big Joe: they—the only sane people in town, apparently—tried to talk her out of the marriage, and later disassociated themselves from her as a result of it. But she had married him. And, when she realized that her parents had been right, she remained as silent as everyone else in the town, retreating more and more into her perfect-wife-and-mother sham as a balm for the reality of her life. She was an active regular attendee of the little Catholic church in town. She even had framed pictures of Christ in nearly every room of her immaculate
house, just to prove to everyone what a good and pious woman she was. She quietly nursed her own wounds, physical and emotional, and learned that survival meant always obeying her husband, even when obedience meant closing her eyes to his brutality. By the time Victor was sixteen, two years after the factory shut down, she would occasionally strike Victor herself, especially when she’d had too much wine at dinner.

Then, in his senior year at the local public high school, Victor suffered the ultimate mortification at the hands of his parents. He’d always kept to himself and never invited other kids around, for obvious reasons. His exclusion from all youthful activities in the town had already garnered him the nickname “Victor Diweirdo.” His one attempt to talk to a pretty girl in his class, who laughed at him and ran away, had resulted in a group of boys following him home from school, throwing rocks at him and calling him names. His father, hearing of this, had beaten him senseless—his second trip to the local emergency room—and locked him in his bedroom closet overnight. But all of this might have been borne if it hadn’t been for Angela Dimorta.

It was a Sunday afternoon. He remembered that, because his mother had been wearing her best dress and hat, having just returned from Sunday morning service and lunch with the priest. His father, who
never accompanied them to church, was out somewhere with his buddies from the factory. Victor had begged off church that morning, claiming a cold. The truth was that, at seventeen, he already knew he didn’t believe in God, and he was growing increasingly disgusted with the long, smarmy sermons he endured in God’s house. He had stayed home alone that day, lying naked on his bed staring at the magazine he’d stolen from the back racks of Mr. Garvey’s newsstand. So intent was he on the sight of Miss October and the rhythmic, ever-increasing strokes of his right hand that he hadn’t heard a sound until his bedroom door opened.

Angela Dimorta stood frozen in the doorway in her Sunday best, holding a glass of orange juice and a bottle of aspirin in her gloved hands, staring. The magazine fell to the bed as the glass and the aspirin bottle smashed on the floor. There was a long, charged moment as the two of them stared at each other in complete silence. Then, uttering a sharp cry of pure disgust, his mother turned around and marched down the hall to her room. Victor was out of the bed and fumbling frantically for his underpants when she returned, her husband’s largest belt in her hands.

The first blow struck him on the side of the head, just behind his ear, knocking him to the floor. He made a groggy, painful attempt to rise, to protest,
but the second, stronger impact of the heavy brass belt buckle sent him down again. His arms, his legs, his back: vicious lash after lash, seemingly without end. He lay on the wood floor, hearing the belt long after he ceased feeling it, as consciousness slowly seeped away.

A neighbor heard the sounds and called the police. When Victor woke up, he was in the hospital again. His mother soon joined him there, but not as a visitor. His father had come home that afternoon, roaring drunk, and Angela had told him what she had done, and why. Outraged by the unwanted police publicity, not to mention his wife’s punishing their son for what was—to his way of thinking—the only remotely normal thing the boy had ever done, Big Joe turned on her. By the time he was through, Angela had a fractured jaw and two broken ribs.

The sheriff couldn’t look the other way from that, and Big Joe spent three days in the only cell in the Mill City police station. He came home and locked Victor in the closet for three days. Payback, he called it, for three days in jail, for Victor and his mother causing his imprisonment.

That was the turning point for Victor Dimorta. Always ostracized by the other children, he was now the public laughingstock, the kid with the crazy parents. He hated the world, Big Joe and Angela most of all. He sat in the closet for three days, only being
let out to eat and go to the bathroom, and decided that he would get away from this. He would get out of Mill City and make something of himself. Once free of his parents, he would be accepted by society, by his peers. He didn’t know how he would get away, but he would. There, in the dark, he swore it.

The answer was waiting for him upon his release from the closet. It was in the form of a letter addressed to him from a law firm in a nearby town. His maternal grandmother, who had legally disowned her daughter as a result of her marriage to the town bully, had died in the rest home where she’d been for eight years, and she’d left all her money to her only grandchild, some eighty-four thousand, to be inherited upon his majority. That was only six months away. His English teacher, impressed by his capability in her class, had helped him to get a partial scholarship to her alma mater, Hartley College.

The following spring, on his eighteenth birthday, he presented himself at the law firm. Near the end of June, he received a check from them. He deposited the bulk of it in a savings account, taking only five thousand with him. Then, in the first week of September, he slipped out of the house on Franklin Street in the middle of the night and made his way to the bus station. Eleven hours and two buses later, he was in Burlington, Vermont.

Now, in the diner in Greenwich Village, he signaled to the waitress and ordered food. Might as well eat, he thought, feeling the tightness that always gripped his stomach whenever he thought of college.

It should all have turned out some other way. He’d thought that getting away from his parents and Mill City would somehow magically transform him, turn him into an attractive, well-adjusted person. But he wasn’t well-adjusted, he soon realized. He was shy, almost cripplingly so, and the slightest things made him angry. The other students at the college shunned him, and even the teachers mostly ignored his presence. The one bright spot in the whole place was a beautiful girl named Jillian Talbot.

He remembered that first day he saw her, sitting two desks away from him in English class in a yellow dress, her long, dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon. She was quiet, almost as quiet as he, and like him she was something of an outsider. Whenever he saw her in that first semester, she was alone. He took to following her around, and he would watch her in the cafeteria or the library, wishing he could work up the courage to go over and speak to her. But, remembering the girl in Mill City who had laughed at him, he never did. He simply continued to adore her from a distance. At night, in his dorm room, he
would lie awake making up elaborate fantasies in which they were married, running together on beaches and shopping in grocery stores and lying in bed, naked, making love. And when he slept, he dreamed of her.

After intercession, when classes reconvened, she had changed. No longer alone, she was now always in the company of three pretty senior girls, the ones who were called the Elements. He’d seen them around, and he’d sometimes substituted the blond one, Sharon, for Jillian in his masturbatory fantasies. He’d even tried going up to Sharon, and even the other two Elements, and speaking to them—as a sort of warmup to Jillian—but they all told him to get lost. But Sharon often looked at him in the hallways, he noticed, and there was always a gleam in her eye. He decided in private that she was attracted to him.

All of which led him into their trap.

One day, at the end of class, he steeled himself and went over to Jillian Talbot. He’d finally convinced himself to ask her for a date. She’d smiled and was polite at first, but when he’d tried to touch her she’d pulled away from him and fled, leaving him to shout down the hall after her receding form.

“Wait a minute! I just want to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you. Jill? Jill!!”

A few days later, he’d overheard this same girl, the object of his adoration, telling another student
that the blond senior, Sharon Williams, was hot for him, confirming his own secret suspicion. The next day, Valentine’s Day, Jillian Talbot had smilingly handed him the card with Sharon’s bold invitation.

“Simmonds Hall, Room 407, 11:00 tonight. Just you ‘n’ me, Victor. Be there. Sharon.”

He would never, ever forget that night on the fourth floor of Simmonds Hall. He’d cut the rest of his classes that day, walking through the snow to the nearest candy store some three miles away. He’d bought the biggest, most expensive heart-shaped box of chocolates in the place. Then he’d gone back to his dorm and taken two showers. He hadn’t been able to eat dinner that evening, he was so nervous. He put on his best shirt and pants, combed his hair for about an hour, and borrowed a bottle of Brut cologne from his next-door neighbor. Then he made his way to Simmonds Hall, arriving outside the room at exactly eleven o’clock.

As soon as he knocked, the soft, sultry voice on the other side of the door told him to come in. He opened the door and walked into Heaven. The room was dark, sort of red-tinged, and there was a scent in the air like smoky perfume. A beautiful female voice was singing softly from the stereo, something about valentines. Sharon Williams was lying on the bed in black, lacy bra and panties, her long legs curled under her. He stood over the bed looking
down at her, and she grinned and told him to take off his clothes.

He’d never done that before while a woman watched him—he’d never been with a woman—and he removed his clothes awkwardly, self-consciously. He had to put down the candy box, so he handed it to her. She tossed it aside. She watched as he took off his shirt, then socks and shoes, then his pants. When he stood before her wearing only his briefs, she sat up on the bed, reached out her hand, and groped him through the cotton material.

“Oh what a big boy you are! Show me.”

He was feeling more relaxed, more confident now, after her action and her remark, and he was about to burst out of the cotton briefs anyway. So he reached up, hooked his thumbs under the elastic at his waist, and slid the underpants down. They hit the floor as his erect penis sprang forward. Then he picked up the candy box and clutched it to his chest as he whispered to her in the dark.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sharon.”

Sharon stared, smiling. Slowly, slowly, she reached up to the wall behind her and switched on the overhead light.

He was blinded by the sudden assault of whiteness. When his vision cleared, all hell broke loose. The closet door burst open and two giggling women came tumbling out. One of them was holding up a
movie camera, aimed at his manhood. The other had a microphone. Sharon jumped up from the bed, pulling on a bathrobe, her lovely face contorted with derisive laughter. At her instigation, the three of them began to sing along with the record.

Victor never really remembered exactly what happened next. He remembered being filled with a sudden rage such as he had never experienced before, not in all the years at home. He remembered smashing the record, and he remembered their screams of laughter turning to screams of fear. He knew he pushed one of them into the closet, the one with the video. And someone else hit the wall and started to bleed. And Sharon: he’d pulled her robe open and tom off her bra. Then he’d clawed at her with his nails, and she had fled from the room, screaming.

“Rape! Rape! Rape!!”

The word had filled him with sudden panic, replacing the rage, and he had stumbled down the hall to the open elevator. Downstairs, he was still clutching Sharon’s bra when the three large, uniformed men had grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground. He’d looked up from the floor of the lobby to see about twenty people, mostly young women, staring down at his naked body. Many of them were laughing. And all he could hear was that song, over and over in his head . . .

Then Big Joe and Irrelevant Angela, the two people
he hated most in the world, arrived in Burlington to take their runaway son home. His father had remained mostly silent the entire trip, his big hands gripping the steering wheel, as his wife raged from her seat beside him. All the way home.

“I can’t believe you did this, Victor! Do you know how much you upset me? How you worried your father? What on earth has gotten into you, you wicked creature? What will the neighbors think? We give you a good home and all our love, and look how you repay us!”