Enchanted Again (20 page)

Instead, she was, overall, amazingly content and deeply involved. Bill was in nearly all her thoughts. And for days—and sometimes even weeks—after each submission, she walked around in a state of more or less constant arousal. Bill’s presence was, for her, desire itself. She sometimes felt that she loved him too much, and desired him too much, too. She wanted him to an extent that frightened her. And when the fear became too much for her she compensated by finding ways to draw out his need to dominate her.

Marcie’s thoughts came back to the present. After just over a year with Bill one would think she would have gotten past those fears. Bill had proved to her time and again that she was the priority in his life. He had made it more than clear that he would be there for her always. And she did not doubt it, not really. But the fear always returned, out of the blue, and often with such ferocity that it alarmed her. On this night she had merely glanced at him from across the crowded room and all at once it was there. His beauty and strength struck her like a terrible blow, and she felt horribly afraid. The other women at the party seemed so much more beautiful than her. She wondered if Bill noticed this, too, and she could imagine the soft, fluttering beauties yielding to his incredible determination and strength.

Marcie knew that she had gone too far this time, completely yielding to her insecurities and fears. She wondered if she had crossed one of the lines that Bill had warned her about that first night that he had dominated her. She kept asking herself why, cringing over the details of her behavior as the memories returned to harass her. She recalled her improprieties of that night in vivid detail. She had gone way beyond merely flirting with another man. She had thrown all concern for Bill’s feelings aside in an effort to temporarily make herself feel more desirable. She had done everything she could think of to prove to herself that she was as attractive as the other women in the room, hardly caring if she hurt Bill in the process. She had publicly and brazenly taunted and humiliated him, leaving everyone who witnessed her performance with the impression that she would betray him. And what had he done to her? What had he done at all, besides simply being the devastatingly wonderful person that he was?

Marcie stole another glance in Bill’s direction. His steadfast calm and inherent goodness shamed her. She didn’t need him to tell her that she had crossed a line this time. She knew that she had. Had he treated her the way she’d treated him, even in retaliation after the fact, with one of the many beautiful women there, she could not have borne it. She would never have the strength to quietly endure such treatment from him.

She realized suddenly that it was Bill’s strength that was most appealing. It drew her to him like a magnet. When something needed to be done, he did it. It didn’t matter if it was unpleasant, difficult, painful or disturbing. He simply did it. He could always be relied upon. It was as if he was made of steel. His strength staggered her. And the tenderness that he was able to show for her, notwithstanding his overwhelming strength, made it all the more remarkable. With his strength he had managed to hold their relationship together without ever once allowing her to draw him into her own personal conflicts. He never lost track of his objective, always standing his ground and maintaining the control once he made the decision to take it.

But Marcie feared this time was different. She wondered how Bill would handle it. She felt that she ought to step up and admit that she was wrong without him having to point it out to her. But what if he rejected her anyway? It suddenly occurred to her that love wasn’t about saving face.

“Bill,” she began uncertainly, “I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” he said. He had calmed considerably since they had first gotten into the car. His anger was just about undetectable now. There wasn’t a trace of malice in his voice, only understanding.

“You must be angry,” she said.

“I am,” he agreed. She once again marveled over his control.

Suddenly she was terrified of losing him. “I was jealous of you,” she admitted. “Even if you never speak to me again, I want you to know that that other guy could have been a chair for all it mattered. I wanted to hurt you because I was jealous of you.” There was never a man in her life, before Bill, that she could have admitted this to. She felt that she could tell him anything.

“I figured it was something like that.” His voice was steady and thoughtful, but Marcie could not glean from it what he was feeling or how he felt about her now.

“I know I crossed a line tonight…” She could not go on. She waited for him.

“You certainly did, Marcie.” He pulled the car into their driveway. She was frantic to know where she stood.

“Is it over?” she asked. Tears filled her eyes.

Bill looked at her then. He raised his hand to her face, capturing a tear as it slowly crept down her cheek. “No.”

Marcie shut her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief, letting the tears spill freely down her face. She began to weep quietly, overwrought with emotion.

Bill leaned over the seat to comfort her, taking her face in his hands and kissing her tears away. “It’s okay, Marcie,” he reassured her.

“I didn’t mean to,” she wept.

“I know you didn’t.”

“I love you so much.”

“I know you do.” He smiled at her. “Come on,” he said after giving her time to pull herself together. “Let’s go in.”

She couldn’t wait to be alone with him in their bedroom. Once inside she waited for him on the bed with growing anticipation. When he joined her she melted in his arms. But he did no more than hold her close to him.

“Aren’t you going to…punish me?” she wondered.

“Nope.”

She squirmed against him, signaling to him that she wanted to make love.

“Stop that,” he said, still keeping her close.

“You’re still angry with me?”

“Yes. And disappointed, too. Now go to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” she told him.

“Then you can read or watch TV and I’ll sleep.” He loosened his hold on her when he said this, but when she didn’t move away he tightened it again.

She paused, frustrated and uncertain. “Bill.”

“Mmm?” His voice reflected his steady temperament and soothed her soul.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

He laughed, but immediately afterward turned serious. “Despite what you might think, Marcie, I’m only human. The truth is, I don’t know what to do at the moment. One thing I know for sure that I’m
not
going to do is to punish you or make love to you, because I know you want me to do those things.”

“That never stopped you before,” she pointed out.

“True, but you never crossed this line before. Everything else I can accept from you, but this I can’t. Maybe next time you think about pulling something like this you’ll remember that it didn’t get you what you wanted and it certainly didn’t bring us closer together. I really hope you do remember it, because I don’t see myself putting up with that again.”

Marcie thought about what he said. “Well, maybe this time I should be the strong one. Maybe this time I should take care of you.”

“You did already, in the car,” he told her, tightening his hold on her.

And suddenly everything was exactly as it should be. For her, there was nothing else that existed outside of her life here with Bill. She could be herself here, and that gave her a tremendous sense of self-worth. All the second-guessing and worry, all the insecurities and fears, were a waste of time. This was her life to live as she wished. She had found a place for herself with Bill.

Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet,
eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
who sat down beside her,
and frightened Miss Muffet away.

The world was surely a frightening place. Danger seemed to lie in wait for its victims, often where they least expected it. In the humdrum monotony of her life, Jessica pondered this as she read that day’s news.

It had been a while since the last murder, but the papers still reminisced, counting the days and weeks and even months that passed like anniversaries. Six Months Since Last Victim Found in Park read the headline, and the caption below it asked,
Could the killer have found a new dumping ground?
Jessica shook her head, incredulous, and looked out her window toward the very same park mentioned in the newspaper. The reporters, much like the killer they spoke of, seemed impatient for their next victim.

The park was teaming with people on this warm and clear Saturday morning. It was difficult to imagine anything sinister happening there with the trees filtering warm, bright sunlight through their leafy limbs and people flooding the area with life. In fact, the murders themselves had taken place somewhere else; the park had simply been the victims’ final destination. Why the bodies were brought here remained a mystery, along with the other troubling aspects of the murders, like why the victims were all women, and what, besides that and their deaths, they had shared in common. Most confounding of all were the markings left on the victims’ bodies by the killer. They each bore the formidable image of a spider that had been crudely but carefully carved into their soft, delicate flesh just alongside the curve of their right shoulders.

Even though the murders had not actually taken place in the park, it alarmed Jessica to think that any aspect of the gruesome events had managed to drift so close to her home. It was frightening to think of such evil lurking right outside her door. What did the monster responsible for these horrors look like? How did such a person blend in with the rest of society?

Looking out over the park from her fourth-floor apartment at that moment it was hard to believe anything had happened at all. A shudder ran through her in spite of the cheery view. Suddenly, her own troubles seemed strangely insignificant. It occurred to her that this might be why people were still so interested in reading about the murders, even though there was nothing new to tell. One couldn’t help feeling better about their own situation by comparison.

Jessica was disrupted from her thoughts by the shrill ringing of the telephone. She picked up the receiver, immediately recognizing the number on her caller ID as she answered.

“Your timing is impeccable,” she said. She remained looking out over the park as she greeted her best friend, Linda.

“Is he gone then?” Linda inquired.

“Of course. He’s probably on the third hole by now.” Jessica allowed all her bitterness to come out through her tone of voice. It was a relief to be able to express it freely.

“So…?” her friend prompted.

“So…nothing,” she replied with a tired sigh. “As usual, Steve managed to dodge the issue completely.”

“I told you he would! Pushing him too hard is just going to push him away.” Linda spoke with authority. “Men need to be handled with subtlety. You have to make him think the commitment is his idea.” She was on her third marriage, so Jessica thought perhaps she knew what she was talking about.

“Call me crazy, but I would prefer to settle down with a man who actually
wants
to settle down with me,” she said bitterly. This was a well-worn conversation spanning many relationships come and gone over years of friendship between the women.

“That’s part of your problem,” Linda told her. “A man never
wants
to settle down. A man has to be
made to think
he wants to settle down.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Well, I am really sorry about that, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Your expectations are way too high. Men are little better than animals that need to be trained.”

Jessica laughed in spite of her distaste for what she was hearing. “I’m just not the sort of person to play the manipulative games required to train them,” she said. But a sick feeling twisted in her gut. She couldn’t deny that the women who did play games seemed to get everything they wanted.

“Don’t think of it as games,” said Linda, taking no offense whatsoever from the implication. “Think of it as coaching. We
encourage
them to want to do the right thing.”

“Go team!” cried Jessica sarcastically.

“Exactly!” exclaimed Linda triumphantly, ignoring the sarcasm.

Jessica sighed. After years of dating in the same unsuccessful way, she doubted she had the stamina to change. She seemed to possess only enough willpower to complain about it. “I’m just so sick of trying,” she whined.

“So
stop
trying! Back off and let Steve put forth a little effort.”

“I’m not good at backing off,” she admitted.

“It’s not that hard. Just stop giving so much. You give way too much of yourself for a girl who’s just dating. Then you get pissed when the relationship doesn’t move forward. Think about it. You’re actually taking away his incentive to move forward. Why should he? You’re giving him everything you’ve got, right up front. He doesn’t have to
do
anything at all.”

“I know,” Jessica conceded with another sigh. “I just don’t know how to change things. It’s always the same old story. I give and give while all this resentment builds up and then I explode, and then it’s on to the next guy. I can already feel the anger building.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“Nothing, really. We never got past ‘I want to talk,’ when all of a sudden we were arguing about why we can’t ever talk. Last night his excuse was that he had to go to bed early so that he could get up for an early tee off—again. If he was half as committed to me as he is to avoiding these conversations—or to playing golf even—we would be married by now.”

“You have to back off.”

This frightened Jessica too much to think about. She hated to admit it but she needed someone to love. “I can’t,” she said. She wondered how other women did it.

“You have to. Otherwise it’s going to end like all the other ones did.”

“It’s so hard!” But she was actually thinking about it this time.

“Find someone else to help you through the tough times.”

Jessica blanched. “I could never…God, if he thought I had anything to do with another man he would never speak to me again.”

“I don’t see a ring on your finger. What do you really owe him?”

“Yes, but we agreed not to see other people.”

“So, break it. It obviously doesn’t mean anything. Your so-called agreement is simply you being loyal to him while he decides what he wants to do. You were stupid to make the agreement before he showed his intentions. Now you have no choice but to shake the sugar tree.” Linda loved quoting euphemisms for prescribing behavior, her reasoning being that years of use and endurance had proved them to be tried and true. She had an endless supply of them at her disposal. This was the first time Jessica heard her use “shake the sugar tree,” and she couldn’t suppress a laugh.

“Did you actually
like
your husband before he married you?” Jessica asked her.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” Linda said, nonplussed. “But I knew I wouldn’t be able to tolerate just being his booty call. I knew if that happened I would become bitter and push him away in the end anyway, just like you’re doing with Steve. You do have a say in what happens in your own life, you know. You don’t have to give away your freedom to every man who happens to want to borrow it for a while.”

“I just wish I knew what he was thinking. I feel like if he really loved me he would want to make it permanent. His reluctance to do that makes me think he is holding out for something better.”

“You do realize that you go through this with every guy you date, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. Just so long as you know what you’re doing.”

Later, while waiting for Steve to find time for her between golf, his friends and anything else he wished to do, Jessica found herself wandering the crowded park outside her apartment. She strolled among the throng of people, clinging stubbornly to a mood of resentment and self-pity. The warm sun and cheerful people actually enhanced her melancholy, giving it a bittersweet quality. She felt obscured from the crowd behind a pair of dark sunglasses. She sat on a park bench and was actually savoring her discontent when the man approached her.

He was older looking and disheveled, obviously unfortunate of circumstance, and her first thought was to wonder why he chose her for a point of contact. Perhaps it was simply her location on a bench that had another vacancy. At any rate, he sat down beside her.

“Lovely day,” he said.

Ordinarily she would have ignored the man, especially given the circumstances of the park in months past, but her current frame of mind made her more receptive to wretchedness; the more wretched, in fact, the better.

“Yes, it is,” she replied.

“You seem down in the dumps,” he observed. She did not turn her head toward him, but cast her eyes in his direction from behind her dark glasses. He was not as old as she first imagined. He was more ragged than aged. She felt slightly irked by this, but more so by his comment. It was always, she thought, the most hopeless who wanted to offer encouragement to others.

“Just thinking,” she said with a stiff, mind-your-own-business kind of smile. She was beginning to despise him already. She had hoped for lighthearted banter or perhaps could have even tolerated a harangue of complaints detailing the abundant problems the man quite obviously suffered with. But she could not abide strangers who became too intimate too quickly. Their lack of boundaries frightened her. She turned her face abruptly away from him.

“Having a bad day?” he asked. She silently fumed. She had been actually enjoying her misery until he came along.

“I
really
don’t feel like talking about it,” she said with emphasis.

“Ah, come on,” he persisted. “It’ll make you feel better to talk about it.”

Why couldn’t a man ever just give a woman what she asked for instead of everything but? That is what she was wondering, but she said, “I don’t have anything to talk about with you.”

The man laughed mockingly. She turned to watch him, focusing on his teeth, which were either rotted or missing. How ironic, she thought, unable to suppress a small smile in spite of her annoyance, that such a wreck of a man was actually mocking her. She couldn’t help wondering how that was possible. She was beginning to think she might be cursed.
What the hell’s so funny?
she wondered with a slight twist of her head.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, turning serious. “I was only trying to be nice.”

She stared at him, amazed. The fact that someone who hadn’t bathed in a week or so had the ability to make her feel bad was disturbing. “Look,” she explained slowly, her voice rising ever so slightly. “I just don’t feel like telling my life story to a total stranger, okay?” And she wondered,
Why am I explaining myself to this loser?
And then she thought,
Why do I do any of the things that I do?

“Well, if you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to talk,” he replied, stating the obvious as if he were revealing a hidden truth.

“Excuse me,” came a third voice from behind them. Both turned and Jessica saw that the voice came from an attractive-looking middle-aged man. She stared up at him. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said with a slight grin. “I was just trying to remember…aren’t you…weren’t you…” He turned his head sideways and squinted his eyes as he acted out the part of the long-lost acquaintance to perfection.

Jessica stood up and struggled to bury her sudden mirth behind her own imitation of trying to remember. “Yes,” she agreed with conviction. “It was…at the party…I remember…you were with…” She had walked around the bench as she went through this pretense and he kept it going by taking her hand in his for a firm handshake while simultaneously leading her away.

“Nice to see you again,” he said smoothly. His smile was perhaps a little too perfect.

“Thanks,” she said, laughing heartily now that they were out of earshot of the scruffy man who had been sitting next to her. “So stupid really…I couldn’t seem to extricate myself from the conversation.”

“That’s because you’re too nice,” he said.

“Is that why you went to the trouble of pretending you recognized me, instead of just telling him to get lost?”

“That was part of it, sure,” he said. “I figured it wouldn’t impress you to see another guy acting like a jerk.”

“And the other part of it?” she asked him, curious. She had forgotten all about her earlier depression, along with her wish to be alone.

“I wanted to see if you had a sense of humor,” he admitted. “I wasn’t sure you would play along. And besides that, you had the look of a woman who might really prefer to be left alone.” He watched her face as he spoke to her, and she felt inordinately flattered. She was much more vulnerable to kindness when it was presented so eloquently and by someone with all of his teeth.

“That was my original plan,” she confessed.

“Well, if you decide you would like to return to that plan, just say the word. I won’t be offended. I come here to be alone a lot myself. Somehow, it feels more private when it’s crowded like this.” That was exactly how she felt about it, too. She admired his manner, at once so confident and correct. With impressive perception, he had picked up on her insinuation that she may have changed her mind about being alone, but he did it in such an unassuming way that she could not help but be impressed.

They had continued to walk throughout this exchange and ended up on a paved path that meandered all around the park for walkers and joggers.

“I’m Jessica,” she said.

“I’m Derrick. It’s nice to meet you.”

They walked on in silence for a moment. Jessica breathed deeply as she took in the beautiful surroundings. A jogger came up behind them and Derrick moved closer to her so the jogger could pass by.