The Love of a Bad Man Read online

  I try to touch him, the way I did with those uni students outside the window, the way I’ve done so many nights just like this one. It doesn’t happen though. It doesn’t happen back at the house either, and David starts crying, slapping himself, bashing his head against the wall. He curls into a ball, his ribs and spine shaking, no different from that scrawny twelve-year-old boy.

  The heart wants what the heart wants.

  The next Monday, I’m woken at midday-movie time by David ringing from work.

  ‘I did it, Cath,’ he tells me from the other end. ‘Found a chick. She came into work, right up to me. Wanted new tires for her Galant.’

  His voice is rushed, happier than it’s been in days.

  ‘The other blokes were at lunch. No one saw. I told her to swing by the house after work, said I’d give her a good price.’ He laughs. ‘’Member those ones I fixed?’

  I nod. He can’t see.

  ‘You gotta do some things for me. Don’t worry about the knife, I got that. But you gotta call her, set up a time. Got a pen?’

  Pen. Notepad. He’s drawn a cunt on the first page.

  ‘I’ll give ya her number.’ David pauses. ‘I told her you’re my wife.’

  There’s a half-gram left over from last weekend, hidden in a drawer of the spare room. If David had plans for it, tough shit. I do a line on the kitchen bench before phoning the chick; another after hanging up. The rest I snort in secret while David’s checking locks and fixing chains to the bed. When I’m done, I feel as strong as he needs me to be.

  It’s after six, and the sky is changing from orange to purple. She’s got the right address. Still, she glances around after getting out of her car, like she hopes it’ll be one of the other houses. Then she checks the number three on our letterbox, slings her bag over the shoulder, and starts walking up the path, ponytail swinging.

  David flicks his finger off the blind. He takes hold of my arm. He’s got the knife in his hand but isn’t pointing it anywhere as he steers me out of the room, hard dick nudging me forward. When we get to the hallway, he turns me around and runs his hands up and down my body.

  Somewhere out back, the dogs start barking.

  ‘Go get her, Cath.’

  I don’t feel those steps to the front door, just my heart pumping hot blood. She stands in the shadows of the porch, clutching her purse. It’s funny, but I can’t help thinking how little she brought with her.

  Karla

  I’m sharing my room here with a nun. Seriously. Her name is Sister Constantine and she wears a rosary and everything, and spends all her time praying or else staring into space. The staring creeped me out till I realised she’s just doped up, and now I totally want what she has. Like, why should some nun get to be high all the time and they have me on only 10mg of Valium, when I’m the most miserable woman in the country?

  I told that to Dr Voigt yesterday, and he looked sad and asked if I couldn’t think of anyone more miserable than me. I saw what he was getting at and said those girls’ parents, I guess, even though I didn’t mean it. Whatever they’re going through, it can’t be as bad as the crap I had to go through with Paul.

  Five years of crap. The more I think about it, the more I think I must have been totally crazy.

  That and under his spell.

  But whatever spell Paul put me under is broken now. Ever since they printed his picture in the Toronto Star with those headlines spelling out exactly what he is. Because even though I’ve known these things longer than anyone, I didn’t really know them. Like, I was always seeing them through the sparkly cloud of my love for him or whatever.

  Now I know better. He’s a loser.

  A loser with perfect cheekbones, but that won’t do him any good where he’s going.

  Sister Constantine wasn’t too doped today and I was crazy bored so I came and sat on the edge of her bed. I had Bunky with me, and she smiled when she saw him and said what a beautiful bear. Bunky was one of the first gifts Paul ever gave me but that’s not Bunky’s fault and he is beautiful — plush and white with a velvety brown nose and real glass-button eyes. Even with all the bad associations, I’m never giving him up.

  Anyway, I was sitting next to Sister Constantine and she had out her Bible, an old black one that’s frayed at the edges. I asked her what it’s like to believe in that crap, and she said it’s a trial sometimes but makes life worth living. Then I asked her about Hell.

  Hell is eternal death, is what Sister Constantine told me. It’s like all the agony you can imagine multiplied by infinity, with no hope of it ever stopping.

  She told me this thing as well, some Bible quote: Fear not those who kill the body but are powerless to kill the soul.

  Now I’m lying with my Walkman in, listening to Guns N’ Roses, and I’ve had my Val — 10mg still, but intramuscular instead of pills. Dr Voigt is finally starting to believe me about my drug tolerance being way high, and those bimbo nurses, too. They got me to hike up my baby-doll for them and stuck the needle in my butt, a sweet little sting I barely even felt. Yeah, my pain tolerance is pretty high as well.

  I was on ‘sleep therapy’ when I first got here. Three days of cottony soft nothing, not even dreams. Dr Voigt says the time for sleep is over, and ‘spilling’ has begun, but the Val is supposed to keep me feeling safe and thinking calm thoughts. So I’m turning over what the sister said, thinking how powerless Paul is over there in his cell, and I’m me here in this room, where everything is soft and white.

  I was sitting in Dr Voigt’s office today with Bunky, going over my wedding pictures. Paul and me climbing down the stairs of the church. Paul and me in the back of the white horse-drawn carriage. Paul and me smiling as we take our first dance. They’re beautiful, even with all the badness. I look like a princess in my puffy white dress, and Paul is my prince, so blond, so handsome.

  You look sad, Dr Voigt told me. Like you’re at a funeral.

  Everyone says I look pretty in those photographs so I was offended but whatever; the doctor is always right. Especially Dr Voigt, who’s like a doctor in a movie with his beard and glasses and that accent.

  You’re right, I told him. I do look sad.

  Dr Voigt wanted to know whose funeral I thought it was, and I said Leslie’s, since she was killed so close to the wedding. I told a story about driving around the lake in our carriage, and feeling sick because Leslie’s body had gone in a lake too.

  But it was also your funeral, Dr Voigt suggested.

  My funeral, because part of me died with Leslie, and because marrying Paul was like dying again for eternity. It was like Hell.

  We talked more about Hell. ‘My honeymoon from Hell’, I called that week in Hawaii. Us driving around the island, and Paul seeing a girl he liked and wanting to take her back to the hotel. Us climbing some totally blah volcano, and Paul hitting me because I wasn’t filming right, not getting the smoke in the background when he was standing in front of it. Then I filmed myself in secret back at the hotel saying how much I loved him, more than all the sand on the beach, more than the Hawaiian sunset, more than life itself.

  Anyway, Dr Voigt says we’re making progress and I cried a lot so they’re going to give me lots of drugs — 30mg of Val at least, and hopefully some of that Sinequan stuff that just zonks you out. My mind is a hard place to be right now, I told Dr Voigt. I’ve got so many bad thoughts.

  Lori and my parents came to visit today and Lori gave me this book, The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker. She thinks it’ll help explain Paul and me and, from what I’ve read, I think so, too. Like this:

  Middle- and upper-class women do not want to make their batterings public. They fear social embarrassment and harming their husbands’ careers.

  And this:

  Batterers are often described by their victims as fun-loving little boys when they are not being coercive. They are playful, attentive, sensitive, ex
citing, and affectionate to their women.

  How perfect Paul was when he wasn’t being a bastard. How perfect we looked to everyone else. Lori gets it.

  I’m lucky to have someone like Lori in my life. Even before what happened with Paul and Tammy, Lori was always my favourite sister.

  Lori and Mom both talked to Dr Voigt alone for a while. Not Dad, since he thinks he’s too macho to talk and said he had to get back to work. Anyway, the three of us were chatting afterward about what they told to Dr Voigt, and it seems like they were both just ragging on Dad, how lame and useless he’s always been.

  Sister Constantine was in the corner of the room the whole time, staring at the bunch of daffodils. Lori thinks it’s pretty cool that I’m rooming with a nun, and said I should try to find out why she’s crazy. Like, maybe she’s seen the Devil or something.

  Dr Voigt was asking about my dreams yesterday so I made up some freaky stuff. One dream I said was like the Guns N’ Roses music video where the bride dies, but I was the bride and Paul had killed me. I didn’t see Paul killing me, but I knew he had, and I was seeing myself from outside lying in the coffin. I was still in my wedding dress and had a mirror over one side of my face, just like the bride in the video.

  Dr Voigt asked me what it reminded me of, and I thought for a while then said Tammy’s funeral. Because she’d been wearing white and also because she had that big purple stain on her cheek that no one could figure out. Even with a load of makeup on, you could still see that stain. Everyone who was at the funeral kept saying what an ugly way it was for a pretty girl to go, choking on her own barf with one whole side of her face messed up. And they were totally right, even if they didn’t know the half of it.

  We talked for a long time about how pretty Tammy was, like a doll, and how every little sister is kind of like a doll to her big sisters. I cried so much Dr Voigt gave me some pills and a shot, this time in the little blue vein in my arm. I had to lean on Dr Voigt on my way back to my room, woozy with a cotton wool ball taped to the spot. It was a cool feeling, like being Sleeping Beauty after the spindle pricks her or being drunk and taken home by some guy.

  Not Paul. Just some guy. I miss that feeling.

  Now I’m thinking up other dreams to tell Dr Voigt. Maybe something in the hospital with Paul as an evil doctor, cutting me up with a scalpel or whatever. And another one where all the girls are ghosts or vampires coming to get me: Tammy with that stain on her face, and Leslie and Kristen with electrical-cord burns and popping eyes.

  Sister Constantine gave me a crucifix. It’s a little one of false gold on a false gold chain. I decided to swap the chain with the real gold chain from my heart locket; the one Paul gave me our first Christmas together. Engraved For Eternity.

  Anyway, she gave me this crucifix and also a holy card of the Virgin Mary who doesn’t look like a virgin at all by the way. Maybe it’s those frumpy blue robes she wears or the thing covering her head, but to me she looks, like, thirty. Nothing like the virgins Paul was always drooling over.

  Long hair.

  Knee socks.

  Plaid skirts flipped up.

  What a load of crap.

  I was talking to Dr Voigt about the virgin thing, how Paul always held that over me. How what he really wanted was a whore and a virgin at the same time, which nobody can live up to. I was sitting on the couch with my legs tucked under me and fingering my crucifix, and Dr Voigt asked me if I enjoy ‘sexual relations’. It was such a weird thing coming from him in that accent and me in my pink baby-doll. I giggled for a full minute then told him, sure I do, I’m not a fucking nun.

  Of course, not all that stuff I did with Paul, I added.

  Some of that stuff I’d be glad never to do again.

  Because he’s not just kinky, he’s sick.

  Dr Voigt ended our meeting soon after that, and I was still in the mood for talking so I sat with Sister Constantine awhile. Sister Constantine knows I’m married and that my husband used to hit me. She feels sorry that I’ve had to go through so much at such a young age and says I’m just like the martyrs, Agnes who got her throat slit and some other chick who died on a wheel.

  It’s Easter weekend, and they’ve been handing out little chocolate eggs with our meds, and taping up pastel decorations. Sister Constantine has been praying more than usual, getting all hyped up about the Resurrection like it doesn’t happen every damn year.

  Because it’s Easter and because my family is coming to visit, I decide to change my baby-doll for something festive. So I’m wearing white court shoes with a long floral dress and my ‘Blossom hat’ — big and straw and loaded with flowers, just like Blossom wears on the TV show.

  I’ve got a whole spill prepared for Dr Voigt, too, about how hard Easter has been, exactly a year after we took Kristen and all. How I tried to make her last days less painful by pretending it was one long slumber party, with some kinky shit thrown in between the makeovers and pizza dinners. Being a friend to her, basically.

  In those three days, I was probably a better friend to Kristen than any of my so-called ‘friends for life’ have been. It’s crazy how shallow people can be, ditching you as soon as they realise you’re not perfect.

  I got to see another psychiatrist today. He’s an old guy called Dr Brown and he likes me a lot. We talked forever about my work at the animal clinic, and he was totally impressed when I said about French poodles being a good breed for people with allergies. Because of their tight little curls, they don’t shed so much hair and dander.

  Dr Brown got me to do a bunch of written tests and at the end a Rorschach, which I’ve always wanted to do. It reminded me of playing Ouija at slumber parties, making up crap just for kicks. He held up the cards and I told him I saw a mask, a padlock, a skull, crushing boots. At the end of it all, he gave me 40mg of Val and some Sinequan.

  More tests later this week, and when I was on the phone to my lawyer, he said he’d try to get me profiled by some big-shot forensic psychologist who’s worked with all kinds of victims of trauma — cult people and one girl who lived in a box for seven years. He’s way famous, so it will totally help in court to have him telling the ways Paul messed with my head.

  They’re calling it a ‘sweetheart deal’ on the outside, or that’s what my lawyer says anyway. I don’t see anything sweet about twelve years for falling under Paul’s spell, especially when I’ve given him five of my best already. Sometimes, sitting here, I get thinking about how I’ll never be younger or sexier than I am right now, and how my skin is already less smooth than it was five years ago, and what will it be in twelve? And it makes me so sad I swear I’d trade places with those girls in a second, blotchy and rotten as they are.

  Last night standing in line for meds I found out one of the other patients gets Demerol. She’s not anyone special either, just some tiny woman with a bad dye-job and a name no one’s ever heard. So I told the nurses I want Demerol, too, and in my veins, no more of those useless Valium pills. I can’t even sleep on Val, I told them, it does nothing, and if I didn’t get the drugs I want, the way I want, they’d regret it. They didn’t believe me, so I started hyperventilating and cry-screamed that I was having a nervous breakdown till they called Dr Voigt.

  20mg, in my left butt-cheek. Awesome.

  Anyway, I had to give Dr Voigt a reason today about why I was so upset so I said I’d been thinking about Tammy, how scared I am of my family hearing the whole truth at the trial. Even though they’ve always known something went wrong that night, they don’t really know. So he said I should try writing a letter.

  I’m writing them this thing now, and it’s coming out easy, maybe because I’ve been reading The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Thinking how my life is just like Laura Palmer’s, with all the shiny blonde outside perfection and the darkness inside. It’s actually doing me really good to get all this stuff out. Anyway, this is what I’ve written:

  Dea
r Mom, Dad, and Lori. This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write and you’ll probably all hate me … Then a lot more about how Paul was obsessed with Tammy and made me swipe some stuff from the clinic to put her to sleep, and how we didn’t expect her to get as sick as she did. I can’t be bothered repeating it all, but basically it says I’m really, really sorry and they’ll never hate me as much as I hate myself.

  My hand is cramping like crazy now, but I guess that’s a good thing. Dr Voigt says spilling is meant to be a painful process.

  Dr Voigt put me back on sleep therapy after I sent the letter. Two whole days I was out of it, but I’m awake now, feeling like I’ve just been kissed by a prince. A real prince, not a psycho lying bastard like Paul.

  Lori wrote a letter in response to mine. It was on my bedside when I woke up, with a bunch of white roses. I was really scared to read it at first, but I sat there hugging Bunky and felt the fear flowing out of me. Because Lori gets it. She says she hates what happened to Tammy, but it’s Paul’s fault not mine, and he’s hurt our family enough without me blaming myself. Also that she’s lucky to have a sister like me, and so was Tammy.

  They all came to see me yesterday, and no one said anything about the letter. It’s like it never even happened. We all just hugged and then we sat on my bed eating caramels and going over what I should wear to the trial. Nothing too sexy, since it has to look good with my crucifix. Lori and Mom said juries love that kind of thing. Thanks, Constantine.

  Wanda

  We have had many miraculous years together Immanuel and I. We have been saints. We have been pioneers. We have built our own handcart and journeyed through this great land from one shining coast to the next. We have been to Nauvoo and the Sacred Grove and Sugar Creek. We have been to Independence Missouri where Adam did dwell in the morn of creation. We have been to babylons each more wicked than the next Boston Philadelphia New York City. We have sat in empty churches and I have played heavenly music to congregations of spirits and angels.