Beyond Obsession (28 page)

There was one thing about Mike beyond school and the rock group. “Back then,” he says, “I used to smoke a lot of pot, and when I was really on, I was selling it. It was a really stupid thing to do. And one day out of nowhere the police showed up at my door and arrested me for dealing. Which was pretty much to be expected. But I never knew how they found out. So I thought I must have been pretty stupid about the whole thing. Then, after it all happened, Dennis told me that Karin told him she had gone to a pay phone and made an anonymous phone call about me and told the police that I had so much of this at such and such a place and told them everything, and fifteen minutes later they drove up to my house and I was arrested.”

Karin was sure, she told Dennis, she had done the right thing. Mike was selling drugs. That was a crime. Who knew to whom he was selling the pot? The temptation was there for anyone who wanted to experiment, and Mike's stash made it easy to give in to that temptation. She had even thought about it herself, and that scared her. So she had an obligation, to herself and everyone else, to turn him in, even if anonymously.

Dennis was furious. Mike was his friend, one of his closest friends. Mike played with him in the rock group. And Karin had turned him in. He wrote her:

… Where I come from a friend is the most important thing in the world and not something to abuse. Ask just about anyone our age or order and they'll say you are wrong. And if you're not wrong, why are you afraid of it getting around? If you had to do something you could've told a school administrator to look into it more carefully and if they found pot let them call the police. I understand your side of it and I know you tried to help—in your way, but you acted very rashly. Why not try to help Mike in his way, not your way. We won't talk about it no more. I'll love you forever.

Like most of their other disputes, this faded, too, for angry as he might become at something she did, he could never hold that anger, he forgave her anything, the anger giving way to increasing espousals of love and devotion and a torrent of more and more expensive gifts.

There was little doubt now who was the dominant force in their relationship. If Dennis had thought himself in the preeminent position when they met and began in the spring, if he had thought they had come into balance by mid-July, even he no longer had any doubts over who powered the engine. “I was hooked,” he says. “I lost all my friends. There was work, and there was Karin, and that was it; there wasn't any time for anything else.” He wrote to her constantly, even thought he was seeing her most days. He was fantasizing about the future, sketching plans for a large, lavish house on a hill that he would build for her and where they would live in paradise forever. Under unrelenting pressure from Karin and even from Joyce, he was reconsidering his decision to forgo college. Karin was at him all the time about it. He capitulated and wrote away for applications. Considering his far from outstanding scholastic record in high schools he knew there was no chance for the Ivy League, no chance probably at any of the better colleges. The thing to do, Karin said and he agreed, was go to a college nearby, make a good record there and then aim higher. The choice was Central Connecticut University, in New Britain, not far away; it would have the advantage, too, of keeping him close to Karin. He began to fill out those applications.

“It was like religious worshiping,” says a close friend of Dennis. “He alienated almost all his friends. You'd never see him out anymore. The only time you'd see him out was with Karin.”

It was a heady thing for Karin. All her life she had been the slave to Joyce's master, a reluctant, unwilling, resentful inmate to her warden, forced to do her mother's bidding, forced to abnegate herself, to have no will of her own. Now, for the first time, she was the master with a slave of her own, not a reluctant slave but a willing one. All she had to do was ask and he gave. There was nothing he would not do for her or give to her. And she was not slow to ask. Did she want flowers? Dennis bought them. Did she want jewelry? Dennis got it for her. Did she want expensive dinners out? Dennis took her. It was not Joyce who drove her down to Rowayton, a round trip of more than 130 miles, and then to Manhattan, another round trip of nearly 230 miles, for her violin lessons. Most times it was Dennis. “I'd drive her to Markov's in Rowayton on Friday night after work and after she finished school, and she'd have a lesson for an hour or an hour and a half, and I'd hang around, and then I'd drive her home,” he says. “And then at six-thirty on Saturday morning I'd pick her up and drive her down to New York for her lesson at the school there.”

He turned his room in his father's house in South Glastonbury into what he called “my Karin Shrine.” “You walked into his room,” remembers a friend, “and there were photos of Karin all over the walls and memorabilia she had given him everywhere. There were dead flowers; there was packaging from gifts he had given her, lots of photos, everything you could think of. Three of the four walls were papered from floor to ceiling, from the cracks in the corners, with pictures, all sizes, all different kinds, class photos, photos of her in a car, in this and that, snapshots, eight-by-tens. They were everywhere.”

20

All through the winter and into the spring Dennis was there for Karin whenever she needed him, whenever she wanted him. He wanted only her protestations of total love and commitment to him to the exclusion of anyone else.

That winter there were episodes of jealousy. In the Aparo living room in January Dennis listened as Joyce carried on about Michael Zaccaro: He was only twenty-nine and such a success, president of Athena and that was just the start; he owned his own home, ate his meals off Lenox china and sterling silver, drove a beautiful car, dressed in the latest fashions. And, she told Dennis and Karin, Zaccaro had expressed to her deep feelings toward Karin, had said he was going to wait for her to grow up and then marry her. Dennis sat and inwardly was racked with anguish, until Karin assured him in private that Zaccaro really didn't feel that way about her; besides, she loved Dennis.

He was jealous of any mention of Alasdair Neal, grew frantic with jealousy when Neal reappeared briefly at the beginning of January. In her diary Karin wrote that wearing a yellow sweater over a white shirt with red stripes, gray tweed slacks, gray socks and black shoes, Neal had arrived that day to conduct the orchestra in which she played. “He looked wonderful! My heart
still
can't believe it.” But there was a downside. She had to leave the rehearsal early because of a violin lesson, and she was on the verge of tears when she left. Still, Alasdair Neal “is so perfect in every way! Absolutely wonderful! I am so much more in love with him than I could ever be with the rest of the world! Ooohhh heavens.”

What she wrote in that diary she reported to Dennis, including her renewed love for Alasdair Neal. Dennis felt lost, abandoned, in deep depression. He pleaded with her:

I love you. You know a lot has happened between us lately, and so far we've come through it o.k. Not great, but o.k. Karin, I know that in some ways you
do
love me, but in others you don't. And it's usually easier for anyone (me in particular) to look at the bad half of things. I ask you to please understand that there's a lot in me. A lot of dreams, hopes and desires. They drive me and what I do. You also have your own, and part of that is how or with who you'll be happy with in the long run. There are a hundred things we could do to make each other happy—in the short run. But they all include some sort of compromise. We can't just keep giving up this and that forever. It won't work. I will compromise my dreams to be with, and stay with you. But understand, please, that I have sacrificed much of my self-esteem, and pride as well. I did not sacrifice my dignity—that you have, in effect, taken from me. As long as you still love Alasdair as much, if not
much more
than me, how can I have anything? How? Why must I live as an afterthought, or a second choice? How can I do those things and retain any dignity or self-worth, when, what you're asking me to do is give up those things to “better myself?” I'm sorry. All my life people have been asking me to compromise and to change. They have promised to help me and to stay behind me. And all those people (me included) they have let me down and cast me out, leaving me with the remnants of what I was. Leaving me, and making me put the pieces back together and each time, each person took more and more. Bit by bit until I became so bitter that I all but dropped out of school and decided to
ruin
my life as best I could and live in the bitterness. Survive despite the extravagance of my loss and the consequence of my choice. Become part of the terrible hate in me which fed upon itself. Not just give up and die. That was not the answer, that was too easy. No, I had to stay alive to punish myself for having given of myself too much. For having compromised my very moral fiber. I had to give in and give up. I had compromised too much.

Then came a girl named Karin Aparo. Of course I fell for her immediately. And again I found myself, somehow, willing to give more than I had ever given in my life. I told her I loved her—because I did. I gave her what I could—because I did. I resigned my life to the sharing of hers—because I did. I still do, and always will. But no matter how I feel, or what I do, it's happened again. Even as I have begun to give and compromise and try as hard as I could, her lover eyes have been looking beyond me. She loves another and doesn't want to be near me. Her eyes look beyond me. Yet I give—for her—because I do.

Now I think about it and wonder. I can't bear to think of what would happen to me when/if she leaves me with more pieces than ever. Shattered. Would it multiply my hate or drain everything out of me? Even that I do not know. Yet, amidst my present rage, there is love. The one remaining pinnacle of devotion to which I cling. Hanging for my life above a sea of images. Of hate, and envy, of power, and corruption, of disease and rage. Of emotions so strong they could consume my mind. And I recognize these images. They are the frail and poorly mended pieces and fragments of my life. The ones that had been broken so many times before. The sea which with each storm grows deeper. The sea into which she might cast me into, my own self breaking the surface and not returning up again for the air. The air I call love, life and happiness. Immersed, and surrounded by the broken pieces of my life … once again. And never again. Karin, oh Karin, I need you. Can't you hear me? Why don't you see? I'm sorry I am what I am. You ask so much. So much. Yet I shall always give for you. Forever, and ever and ever.

I know you love Alasdair and that you've had a “crush” on Rob [a boy from school] for some time. I know you're only 15. You can see other guys than me if you want to. Maybe it would be better. I ask only one thing. Please don't kiss him, or anyone. I've been struggling with that image now for days.
Please
dear. The one thing I ask, and not give. I love you gorgeous. Please understand me. I need you.

Alasdair Neal was soon gone after that concert, and Rob was put to the side, and Karin once more assured Dennis of her love and devotion. And so they resumed, Dennis more deeply dependent on her than ever.

She offered him a prize, a way in which she would make up for those hurts of January. Through the previous years Joyce had become increasingly friendly with Albert Markov, Karin's violin teacher. She had hinted to people at Athena that a romance was in progress, a romance not deterred by Markov's wife. From all evidence the romance was just another of Joyce's tales, though she and Markov had indeed become friends, drawn together by a mutual affection for stones and climbs. And as their friendship developed, she began to talk to him about joint ventures, about their becoming partners and opening a music school. At the beginning of February Joyce and Markov went off to Colorado for a week, to climb, to search for stones and to explore the possibility of forming a music school.

Karin was left home alone. She did not remain alone long. Hardly was Joyce out the door before Dennis was in. “We played husband and wife for that week,” Karin said. “We got up in the morning and I made breakfast, and when Dennis got home from work, we had dinner and watched movies on television.”

They also took a trip into Hartford and went shopping for a wedding dress. Her sixteenth birthday was approaching, and both of them thought it a fitting gift. They went to several stores, finally found one in a shop on Franklin Avenue, a formal gown. Karin tried it on. She wanted it. Dennis made a down payment. The dress would be ready in a few weeks. “We were planning to get married,” Dennis says, “but not in a couple of months or anything like that, not for years. She had school to finish, and I was going back to school and I had to finish, and then we had careers to think about. So it wouldn't happen for quite a while. Shopping for that wedding dress and putting money down on it was just part of our fantasy life.”

Sixteen, sweet sixteen, a pivotal year. It could not be ignored, nor could it be celebrated like any other birthday. They would have to do something special. Karin wanted to have dinner at Cavey's, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in their part of Connecticut. Dennis made the reservations. Karin wanted flowers. Dennis bought them. He bought her a costly piece of jewelry. He hired a limousine to drive them to the restaurant. Then Karin told him she wanted her best friend Shannon Dubois to be part of the celebration. Dennis did not demur. He changed the reservation from two people to three, and they all went out to dinner, a meal that cost him close to two hundred dollars.

“All Karin had to do,” says Shannon, “was ask Dennis for something and he'd get it for her. He was spending all his money on her.” In about six months he spent more than ten thousand dollars on jewelry, clothes, dinners and more on her.

Hardly was the birthday party over before Karin told Dennis that the whole idea of buying a wedding dress was ridiculous and she had canceled the order. He knew it had been a foolish fancy, but nevertheless, he was upset. “One day you ask me to buy you a wedding dress,” he wrote her, “the next day you ask me to let you grow up. Karin, all I ask is that you think. You decide, Karin, are you 16 or 23? You cannot be both. You ask too much. What you did, so you say, was play a game. My love, my life, my pride and everything we share are not a game and not something for you to play with. No games like that. What good is it?”