A Very Simple Crime (2 page)

She pulled her leg back into the car and closed the door. She leaned across the seat and kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s go get some beer.”

In her dorm room, we played a drinking game that involved bouncing a quarter off a tabletop and into a glass of beer. We drank the beer and flirted with each other. She told me about her father. How he tried to control her with his money. When she reached to pick up the quarter, I noticed a bubble-gum-colored scar that stretched across her wrist. The scar was raised, textured, and repulsive. She followed my gaze and pulled her arm away.

“That happened a long time ago.” She carefully aimed the quarter. “I used to be a very sad person.” She threw the quarter hard against the tabletop. It bounced off the table, arced spinning through the air, and plopped into the glass of beer. I watched the quarter zigzag lazily through the amber liquid until it came to a rest at the bottom of the glass. Bubbles erupted around the quarter and foamed to the top of the glass. “I used to be a very sad person,” she repeated, and pushed the glass aside. She leaned across the table. “But now I’m a very drunk person.” She kissed me. I hesitated at first. Then I kissed back.

Can I admit it now? Can I acknowledge that on some level, even then, I was attracted to her mental illness? Certainly it was there, like a badge of achievement for all to see. I saw it, stretched and pink-edged across her wrist, and I responded to it. Darkness is drawn to darkness.

Once, while we were still dating, she caught me appreciating the figure of a salesgirl.

We were shopping in a mall clothing store, and I waited, as all men do, while she tried on different garments. Rachel emerged from the dressing room to get my opinion of the latest choice. I didn’t notice her. I was idly watching the salesgirl put away clothes. Rachel gauged the emotion in my eyes and followed my gaze to the stockinged legs of the young woman. A sound escaped Rachel’s throat. A sound I had never before heard. It was neither animal nor human. It was inorganic. It was anguish. Rachel seemed to crumple in on herself, as though the horrid sound she emitted were her escaping life essence. I went to her, hands open. She warded me off. “Don’t! Don’t you! Don’t!” Her hands went to her head. Her fingers tore strands, then clumps, of her hair out of her head. Her scalp began to bleed. The salesgirl stared at us, horrified. I have been very careful ever since.

“So she’s crazy. Guess what? All women are crazy. You know why? Because all men are liars. Like you don’t know. You’re telling me what? That if this salesgirl says to you, ‘Come on in the back, let me suck your dick,’ you’re gonna say what? No? ‘I don’t want you to suck my dick even if you are young and beautiful.’ Bullshit.”

Monty had passed his bar exams the previous year. Whereas I had perfunctorily gone to school and received a degree in business, Monty had soared through his education and was given a junior partnership at a prestigious law firm. It was quite an accomplishment, but then again, Monty usually got what he wanted. What his sunny blond hair and rugged good looks did not bring to him, his sharp mind could figure out a way to obtain. Every year a local magazine listed the city’s most eligible bachelors, and Monty’s name was invariably at the top of the list. I went to see him at his office. The secretary escorted me in, and I found Monty reclined with his shoes, black leather buffed to a luxurious glow, propped up on his desk, a cigarette clipped between his fingers. Since our father’s death, I always consulted Monty with my problems. He was stronger, smarter, and more worldly than me.

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“It’s exactly like that. I know it. You know it. She knows it. Men cannot be trusted. And it drives women crazy.”

Monty lit another cigarette, blew a smoke ring. It drifted into my face.

“And she’s worth how much? How many millions? She can afford to pull her hair out.”

“Please.”

“Look, Adam, your track record with women isn’t exactly phenomenal. People are starting to wonder, you know.”

“This is your idea of advice?”

“I’m just saying that you have a history of running away from girls who want you.”

That was a low blow. I was shocked that he would dare mention it at all. He was referring to an incident from our childhood. A girl who vacationed with our family. A girl I had a boyhood crush on. Some extremely unpleasant things happened that summer—including our parents’ deaths at the end of it. It was an unfortunate slip on his part.

“You have a history as well,” I said. “How many women has it been now that you’ve allowed the pleasure of your company?”

“Beyond number.” He smiled. It wasn’t much of a jab from me. He was quite proud of his reputation as a Lothario.

“Look, so she’s a little loony tunes. You say she’s pretty. You say she’s rich—”

“It’s her father’s money.”

“And he’s how old?”

“You’re certainly a lawyer.”

“Thank you. Want me to be the best man?”

Rachel and I married two years later. Was I attracted to her mental aberrations? Does darkness call to darkness?

The product of our marriage was spoiled. Our son, Albert, was born mentally retarded, and as he entered adolescence and physical adulthood, he became prone to unpredictable outbursts of violence. Secretly, I blamed Rachel for our damaged offspring, and she, in turn, secretly blamed me.

We did not know at first that Albert was incomplete. His arrival from the hospital was ripe with hopes and dreams of a secure future. As I suppose happens all too often, we invested the arrival of our son with magical, healing qualities for all aspects of our lives. My job, I believed, would take on new meaning; life would not seem pointless. And Rachel, I’m sure, bargained on reawakened passion from her indifferent husband and a wider focus to dilute the glare of her maniacal love, saving both husband and son from wilting in the intense rays of her emotion.

And, indeed, these prophecies seemed to be realized. I really did find an unremembered vigor in life and a renewed closeness to Rachel. I felt that our lives were on the right path, the correct course. And if Albert was a little late in reaching some of his developmental milestones, surely it was nothing to worry about. Surely he would soon begin to make up for lost time and amaze us all with his innate intelligence. But inevitably, relatives and friends began to voice aloud the questions that we had not yet dared voice ourselves.

“Shouldn’t he be talking by now?”

“He never makes a sound.”

“Are all babies this quiet?”

“His eyes. Don’t they look strange?”

We took him to many doctors, specialists, organizations, each with a differing opinion. It was hard to say for sure, they told us. Difficult to pin down an exact cause. But, in the end, a diagnosis was agreed upon. No one’s fault, they said. Fragile X. A soft X chromosome. Unavoidable. No way of foretelling. These things happen.

We resolved, as I imagine all parents in such situations do, to love Albert. We would raise him, love him as though he were normal. Rachel carried the brunt of the responsibility. She devoted her life to ensuring the quality of his. She took him to special classes, hospitals, learning centers. And through her sheer will, her withering love, she taught him basic life skills. He learned to perform tasks that the doctors told us he would never accomplish. Dressing himself, feeding himself, bathing, grooming, continence. And when he reached age fourteen, we had the perfect five-year-old. A five-year-old teenager who thought it natural to strike out at those who slighted him in any perceived way. A five-year-old adolescent who put his mother in the hospital for one rigid week after smashing in her skull with a crystal ashtray when she scolded him for a toileting accident.

I have never cared for my work. It is too clichéd to contemplate, but I took a job with my father-in-law’s company, Lawson Systems Financial Risk Management. I arrived every day at eight and spent nine hours behind my desk in my small office. I brought my lunch and ate it at the desk. I signed papers and drew graphs. There was certainly nothing dramatic in my responsibilities. My work was competent, drawing neither praise nor condemnation.

As I say, I have never cared for my work. But during our son’s upbringing, I applied myself to the job as never before. And an amazing thing happened. I was successful. Raises followed promotions, and respect followed these. I excelled at the not always legal task of peering into the financial lives of others. At times, my duties were more akin to a hacker than a pencil pusher.

A certain tension remained between me and Rachel, but she enjoyed my success. Rode my coattails. I became, in years, a top executive. Rival companies vied to steal me away. But I remained loyal to my own. I reached a plateau where I could rise no higher. Just as Rachel had reached her own plateau with our son. He was too violent, too unpredictable for her to safely manage. After her injury and hospitalization, a change seemed mandated.

It was at this time that we finally decided to institutionalize Albert.

At first, we visited Albert every week. The halls of the institution were brightly lit and carried sound alarmingly well. It was impossible to discern if the scream you heard was right behind you or yards ahead into the brightness. The smell of industrial disinfectant (a smell I associated with Band-Aids from my boyhood), though it permeated the atmosphere, could not quite mask the odor of human life exerting itself at its most biological level. Rachel’s newly permed hair glowed like a curly halo in the bright fluorescent light as we made our way down the corridor. Later, that night, as we performed our dutiful sex act, I would smell vestiges of the disinfectant in the curls.

Albert’s suite (Mrs. Jones, the matronly administrator, used this word—
suite
—six times when originally describing to us the accommodations) was nicely, if practically, furnished. No glass, no hard angles, lightbulbs secured behind metal cages, all furniture securely bolted to the floor. On one visit, before entering Albert’s room, we stood in the doorway and watched as our son interacted with Jack, his suitemate (another selection from Mrs. Jones’s argot).

“Albert, Albert, did you hear what I said to you? I said, good day, sunshine.”

Albert, sitting on his bed, uncrossed and then recrossed his legs. He rocked back and forth.

“Albert,” Jack said, “did you hear what I said? I called you sunshine!”

Albert continued to rock back and forth, but Jack was insistent. “I called you sunshine! Albert! Albert!”

Albert rocked even faster yet; he grunted and smoothed his hands over his hair. Classic signs of Albert’s growing agitation. He yelled at Jack. “Leave Albert alone! Jack, leave Albert alone!”

Jack apparently recognized the danger in Albert’s voice. He skulked past me and Rachel, muttering to anyone who might care, “Jeez, all I did was call you sunshine.”

Albert saw his parents watching him. He jumped from the bed and ran to us. “Mommy, Daddy! Albert did bad wrong. Albert did bad wrong.”
Bad wrong
was Albert’s newest catch-phrase. He used it whenever he saw us. Apparently, Albert had decided that his sentence at the institution was the result of his wrongdoing. And he was right.

Our visits grew less frequent. Albert aged physically. He grew into something of a hulk. A mostly silent giant who looked like neither me nor Rachel. At one point, there was talk of a group home for Albert. As Mrs. Jones described it, a group home is a noninstitutional setting for those with developmental disabilities similar to Albert’s. A group home is staffed with workers called houseparents. Living in a group home was apparently a great advantage. The list of applicants was long, but Albert was considered a prime candidate. The group home would offer something that Albert would find at no institution no matter how advanced its therapies. It would offer him normalization. Mrs. Jones used this word—
normalization
—in our meetings. Over and over, she repeated the word as though it obtained some magical quality when spoken aloud.
Normalization. Normalization. Normalization. Your son is now normal.

Or perhaps the magic the word wove was on Rachel and me.
With a wave of the bureaucratic wand, your son no longer lives in a barren institution. You are now free from guilt. Please return to your former lives. Your son now lives in a normal home, just like you. You can visit him there, just as you would visit a son who was normal. You can return to your normal lives. Everything is normal now.

A month before he was to move to the group home, Albert killed his suitemate, Jack, in a dispute over a pair of socks. We never heard the word
normalization
again. Albert did move, however. He was transferred to a larger facility called the Hendrix Institute, where he is given daily doses of Mellaril, Haldol, and Ativan. The few times we have visited him there, he has been only semiconscious. His clothes were soiled with fecal matter, drool slicked his unshaved chin, and scratches covered his face—self-inflicted from his ragged, broken fingernails. Neither Rachel nor I have ever spoken of objecting to this heavy regimen of antipsychotics and sedatives. Why would we?

After sex, Rachel sleeps. Content. My semen her trophy. Stolen from me and locked secretly away inside. She has me. She will never let me go.

I learned long ago that to deny Rachel her trophy is to risk anything, everything. She will grow suspicious. Become moody. She will smoke incessant cigarettes. Her sleep, if it comes at all, will be broken and restless. I must consent to her rape or suffer the consequences. She will pick fights. Demean my manhood. She will cry, say that I do not love her, never have. Her fingers will seek out her hair, coiling clumps of it. Twirl. Twirl. Twirl. Strands will loosen. Twirl. Bald spots appear. Twirl. Scabs grow. Twirl. I give in. She has won.