I Love You More: A Novel (13 page)

“I need to go,” he said. He must have seen the confusion (and disappointment?) in Diana’s eyes, because he added, “Believe me, I don’t want to. But we’ve both had so much to drink. I want this to be right. The moment I saw you I knew you were the only woman for me.
I knew I would love you more than life itself
.”

In six months they were married.

Everyone said that was way too fast for marriage. Generally you should wait a year, get to know the person. Diana scoffed. She knew Oliver. All of Oliver. Their minds and bodies fit perfectly. They were in sync. Soul mates. They finished each other’s sentences, wanted the exact same things out of life, loved the same movies and food. Their eyes met every time they made love, and
when they did, she saw true love in his. She couldn’t mistake that look, could she?

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Jewels said. “I thought the exact same thing.
Eyes don’t lie
. One of the signs you’ve been in a relationship with a sociopath is that even after you know you’ve been burned, you still love him. And sociopaths are expert chameleons. Look at those women in Florida who were swindled out of their life savings. Police caught the guy, but none of them are pressing charges.”

“Sociopath?” Diana said. “Oliver may be a lot of things, but he’s not violent. He’s never so much as raised his voice to me.”

“Not all sociopaths are serial killers,” Jewels said.

“That’s true,” Bert said. “I read this book that said we’d be surprised how many lead normal lives.”

“Look up the characteristics, Diana,” Jewels said. “It’s all about winning and manipulation with Oliver.”

Jewels was thirty when she and Oliver met. Their relationship began with sex. Steamy, wanton, primal sex, the likes of which she hadn’t experienced before, that she’d only read about in novels or watched in X-rated movies. They had sex on the bedroom carpet, sex on the dining-room table and kitchen floor, sex in the shower and bathtub, sex on the sofa, sex on the cold, hard concrete of her townhome balcony, sex almost anywhere but in bed.

For the longest time, they saw each other only on Mondays. Their only communications outside their weekly trysts were through e-mail or at the gym. That was how they met. She’d noticed him in her building’s workout space. He spent most of his time working his wrapped knee on the leg-lift machine. She found him handsome—no, more than handsome,
alluring
. Was that the right word? There was just something about him. Though they’d never spoken, or even made eye contact, she felt an odd sensation of recognition, as if she’d known him always, as if they’d been intimate, powerfully so, as if she
knew
his touch and his smile and
would again, as if—dare she say—he was her destiny. Sometimes this sensation was immediate; she’d be concentrating on her run, would look up, and he was there, on his machine. When did he arrive? How long had he been there? Other times the sensation came over her slowly, like a wave flowing across her body, and within moments he’d enter the gym. When he wasn’t in the room, she insisted to herself that she felt nothing, and she’d scoff at the absurdity of her girlish crush. He was just a man she’d conjured into a silly fantasy to pass the time, to take up space in her lost, hollow heart. That was her state of mind the first time he spoke to her.

“I see you like goldens.” The voice came from behind her. She’d just gotten off the treadmill and gone to the drinking fountain.

She had heard it described as butterflies or nervous flutters, that warm yet dangerous feeling way down. Fear and desire combined. Up close, he was a bigger man than she had thought. More than six feet tall. Big arms. Broad shoulders.

She was taken aback. “Goldens?”

“I saw you with a golden retriever the other day.” He paused. “At the dog park? It was you, wasn’t it?”

She wasn’t exactly a regular at the dog park, she’d been there maybe twice in the last few months, but one of those times was fairly recent. Perhaps she should have asked
When?
Or,
Where exactly did you see me?
But her brain was working overtime to make sense of what was happening, and the rest of her was flattered, so all she said was “Yes.”

“Best dogs in the world,” he said. “My family had them when I was growing up.”

“Mine too,” she said.

“What’s his name?”

“Frank,” she said.

“Frank?”

“After Frank Lloyd Wright.”

“Commercial or residential?” He noticed her questioning glance. “You’re an architect, right?”

“Residential,” she said.

He bent to take a sip from the fountain. She was so close to him that she could see the freckles on his neck and smell his sweat. She marveled at the scent; like him, the man she’d spied from a distance, she was certain she recognized it. He rose, lifted his T-shirt to wipe his mouth. His hands were large, his stomach lean but not hard.
Love handles
. Her hands cupped them in her mind.

“Hey?” he asked. “Do you want to get a drink after work tonight?” He smiled, a friendly smile. Deep dimples. Warm eyes. Boyish charm. “Come on. One drink? We could talk about all our childhood goldens.”

She felt immediately anxious. She knew she should say she was busy; that was what the book said to do. She’d bought it in New York after her five-year affair with her married boss ended.
Don’t say yes the first time. Make him chase you. Men love the chase
. She hadn’t played hard to get with Jonathan; she’d jumped whenever he called and look where that had gotten her. Would he think she was easy if she said yes? Would he see through her ruse if she asked for a rain check? Either way, he might lose interest. What would Cruel Jewels do?

Her nickname, Jewels, had been her father’s idea. Her parents had been trying for several years to have a child, so when she arrived he called her his precious jewels. Her mother preferred she use her given name, Julie, at school, but, as loners often are, she was the brunt of bullying and name-calling. Ghouly Julie was born in kindergarten. Granted, the name was somewhat warranted. As the only child of older parents, Jewels spent most of her time with her mother and father, or in the interior landscape of her mind. Barbie dolls were her best friends. Her large and assorted collection led a fascinating life filled with drama, love,
romance, marriage, more drama, children, and death by weird and extraordinary circumstances, such as Ken having the awful misfortune of falling asleep in an old car that was due to be crushed for scrap metal, or slipping while hiking and falling two hundred feet to his gory death. Ken died regularly and creatively. This allowed Barbie the opportunity to start all over again with drama, love, romance, marriage, more drama, children, and death by extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes, especially when she was nervous, the name Ghouly Julie and the embarrassing feelings that had gone with it popped into her head. To ward it off and keep control of situations, she’d adopted her own alter ego, Cruel Jewels. But Cruel Jewels didn’t help with Oliver. She was mush.

“Sure,” she said.

And so it began.

In the beginning, sex once a week with Oliver was okay with Jewels, but it wasn’t long before she wanted more from the object of her desire. They were at her apartment in Raleigh, a tastefully decorated two-story townhome with a small fenced-in yard for Frank. They’d just finished making love on her faux-bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. The scene, and the closeness she’d felt, couldn’t have been more storybook. Surely Oliver felt the magic of the moment as well.

“It seems silly that we only spend one day a week together,” Jewels said.

“What do you mean?” Oliver asked.

“It’s just that we’re so compatible,” she said. “It seems only natural that we’d want to see more of each other.”

“I didn’t realize our relationship had gotten to this point,” he said.

“What point?” she asked.

“The accountable point,” he said.

“I’m not asking for accountability,” she said. “I’m just asking to spend more time with you.”

“You’re lying to yourself,” he said. “You want our relationship to change from one way of interacting to another. You want more. Wanting more leads to wanting even more and sooner or later equals accountability. I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“Ready for a relationship,” he said.

“I’m not asking for a relationship.”

“Then what are you asking for?”

“I don’t think having sex once a week is fair to me,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to keep doing this if it’s all you want from me.”

“Okay then,” he said. “We won’t.”

Fear. She hadn’t meant to give him an ultimatum. “Shit!” she said. Her raised voice startled Frank. He lumbered over, nudged her hand.

“What?” Oliver asked.

“Damn!” She rose, started pacing. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“For what to happen?” He rubbed the top of Frank’s head.

“This,” she said. “Love. And I understand if you don’t want to go there. It was never part of our arrangement. I fucked up.”

Oliver’s face softened. “Who said I didn’t want to go there?” His voice was comforting. “When I said ‘we won’t,’ what I meant was, we won’t only see each other once a week. I love you too, Jewels.”

She was certain, as certain as she was that she ran an eight-minute mile, that she saw love in his eyes. “You do?”

He came to her, held her, whispered in her ear,
“I love you more than life itself.”

With this, Frank barked, and Jewels took that as a sign of his approval. Jewels had been having “sex” with Oliver for five months. They made love only once before he asked her to marry him. In the beginning, to Jewels, only Barbie and Ken, at the direction
of her creative mind, could have done romance better, and then only slightly. Oliver was utterly perfect. There were flowers, extravagant dinners, real jewels, and rides through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the new bright blue Porsche Carrera he’d bought her. But then daily life set in, and it wasn’t long before Jewels realized there was something wrong. Cruel Jewels was no fool. Oliver’s out-of-town schedule was just way too predictable.

Bert told a similar story. She and Oliver had met in the bookstore where she worked. She was twenty-four at the time. She’d just completed her PhD in English at Appalachian State. He was looking for a specific book, and she’d walked him to the mythology section. That day she’d left him there. He returned a week later, and this time asked whether she knew of any book clubs that met on Wednesday night. He loved to read, but his schedule was tight.

“My book club meets on Wednesdays,” Bert said.

A relationship was the furthest thing from Bert’s mind. It wasn’t that she didn’t find Oliver attractive, quite the contrary, but at barely five foot three and one hundred and forty-five pounds, not to mention her straggly brown hair and plain features, Bert had never considered herself pretty, especially to the opposite sex. When Oliver began showing that kind of attention toward her, she was skeptical. She’d grown up in Baltimore, the oldest and the only girl of seven children. Because both her parents worked, she’d raised her brothers. Caretaking and poverty were all that Bert ever knew. Nothing had come easy, so why would love? She got the job at the bookstore when she was in undergraduate school and worked her way up to manager. Always financially responsible, she saved enough money for a down payment on a house, took in a few stray cats, and prepared herself for a life of spinsterhood. When Oliver said the words
I love you more than life itself
to her, it was more than a total surprise. It was a gift. Though she knew she should be happy, by all accounts
Oliver was a doting and generous husband, a sense of dread had always plagued her. When Jewels showed up on her doorstep, her worst fear was realized.

Jewels summed up our experiences as evidence that Oliver was a predator. “Believe me, he did his homework.” She didn’t know how, but she insisted that Oliver knew Diana would be in that martini bar that night, that Jewels worked out at that gym, and that Bert’s book club met on Wednesdays.

“But I’d never seen him there before,” Diana said.

“That’s because he didn’t want you to see him,” Jewels said. “He hadn’t completed his homework.”

It was Jewels, of course, who had discovered Oliver’s ways. She followed him one day, and though she’d hoped against hope that she wouldn’t find what she did, her visions of a perfect Barbie-doll life were shattered. Of all of us, Jewels had been the most romantic in her outlook on love, and thus it could be argued that her heart was the most fragile, its break the loudest, its pieces the sharpest. She thought about hiring a private investigator but decided against it, and not because she cared what people thought but because of a nagging fear she couldn’t quite place. Not a fear of Oliver. What she was yet to understand was that deep inside her, the seeds of Oliver’s fate had already begun to sprout. By the time she showed up on Diana’s doorstep, and then Bert’s, they were as insidious as kudzu.

“Oh my, look at the time,” Diana said. “Oliver is expecting me home for supper. I’m making fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, his favorite—”

She stopped; she’d forgotten that two of us wouldn’t be preparing dinner for our husbands that night.

“Next month?” Jewels asked.

And so we would reunite in a month’s time, and then another month’s time, and so on, until we were strong enough to recognize that fear, not one another, was our nemesis. Until we were
honest enough to admit that we couldn’t imagine a world without Oliver, that even the thought of losing him was so painful, so frightening that we would rather sacrifice ourselves than change our situation. Until we were resigned enough to accept what we considered the grim reality of our futures: losing Oliver would destroy us; loving Oliver would destroy us.