Obedience (11 page)

“And a few years later she was dead,” Elizabeth went on. “Cervical cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” Dennis said.

“Don’t be. If you had known her you wouldn’t have felt anything but a loss, like some sort of phantom pain. At her funeral, no one mentioned her years in San Francisco, those hippie parties. I never told anyone about what I had seen that night. It was just assumed that these things happen, you know. They happen. There is no randomness in the world. Everything falls into a certain pattern. My mother-she knew this. She called me once from the West Coast. She said, ‘Lizzie, I think I’ve been cursed.’ I didn’t say anything. I silently agreed with her, of course. She had been. Cursed with some sort of bitter disease. An obscene pleasure drive. An urge to
fuck
anything that moved. And it killed her. This is what I’ve inherited from her.”

Dennis said nothing. The fan turned and whirred above them. Some children passed in the hall, laughing deliriously. Someone’s telephone rang in another room.

“I was married before. Before I met Ed. I was studying at Cleveland State, working toward a master’s in psychology. My life was as good as it had ever been. I met this man who was unlike anyone I had ever met: sincere, loving. Magnificent. You would have liked him, Dennis.”

“Would I?” Dennis said, just to fill up the space with his own words.

“He was charming and sweet. Just like you. When he fucked me, it was for
my
pleasure, not just his. He didn’t want to come on my face or put his finger in my ass or watch me with another woman. He didn’t want to jerk off while I danced around in red leather. He was the type who spread roses over the bed. He took me to fancy restaurants all over Cleveland and introduced me to his friends at the office. I felt important, more than somebody’s
decoration.”

“Do you feel like a decoration when you’re with him?”
Him: it was their code for Dean Orman.

“Sometimes,” Elizabeth said, turning even farther away from Dennis. He couldn’t see her eyes anymore, just the back of her hair and the deep crease between her shoulders. He touched her there, wanting her to come back to him, at least so he could see her eyes, but she turned over onto her back and pulled the blanket up to her face. Now she was hidden completely.

“We were married in just a few weeks,” she said, her voice muffled in the blanket. “It was nothing, just a civil service with a justice of the peace. We thought our love was above marriage, that it was just something you do, a commitment that was expected by a petty society. Marriage was reserved for the weakhearted, the suspicious. Mike wore blue jeans and I wore a summer dress. My father was there, taking pictures with one of those disposable cameras. We were so happy.”

Mike, Dennis thought. He turned the name around in his mind, silently mouthed it.

“Then, as it goes, things changed. Mike started working all the time. He became consumed with this project at work. Months and months of work. My mother’s curse would burn inside me, mock me, and for a long time I was sickened with myself. Disgusted by my own body. I dropped out of school and fell into a depression. I hated the fact of my own lust, absolutely hated it. When Mike was home I would ravish him, take him in my mouth and suck out everything he was, leave him raw and bleeding. Afterward, I would apologize and feel guilty about what I had done. But something had changed between us. There was some rift there, some sort of divide.”

She turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were slick and wet. Yet something was in them, some hint of a deeper knowledge. What is she doing? Dennis wondered. What is this?

“The job got to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was under pressure all the time to finish a project of some sort. I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how important it must have been. Something to do with an animal project.”

“Animal project?” Dennis asked. “Like dog shows?”

“No, not like that. Mike was in advertising. Now I remember what it was: Pollyanna Pet Food. There was a girl in the advertisement, this pretty blonde, and she was feeding her cats. The problem, if I recall correctly, was that Mike didn’t like her. He wanted her to be older, more
set.
A professional type. He didn’t want this
bimbo
selling his product. He used that word, bimbo. Are you still listening?”

“Yes,” Dennis said. She had caught him drifting off.
Mike.
Even though it was a common name, he couldn’t stop tossing it around in his head. “Go on.”

“He talked about her so much, this actress, that of course I got suspicious. I thought he was fucking her. By that time I was alone all day with nothing to do, and my imagination was free to go wild. Of course I realized how ridiculous it was for me to castigate him for something that may not have even been true.

“But it swelled and built. Blossomed inside me. The hate for this girl I had never seen. The possibilities ran through my mind like a snuff film. Mike on top of her, Mike behind her, Mike in her mouth. It was eating me from the inside out.

“Finally, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. When he got home one night I interrogated him about it. ‘I know you’ve been screwing that girl,’ I said. ‘What girl?’ he asked. ‘That actress, that bitch.’ He was flattened. He told me to calm down. Things escalated. He was hurt, I mean really hurt, by what I’d said. And his pain made my anger swell more, so that I was berating him and berating
myself
at the same time. His fake lust was my real lust, and I was scorning it, screaming at it to stop, to leave me be.

“‘You should calm down right now,’ Mike said to me. At some point he changed, became abrasive. But I couldn’t calm down. I was crazed, maniacal. My mother, my sex drive, the girl in the commercial-everything was coming to a head and I was powerless to stop it. ‘Calm down,’ he said again. And when I wouldn’t, he smacked me. It wasn’t hard. It was just a smack, just a light smack in the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed afterward. We sat on the couch together, and he cried, and I cried, knowing that it was over between us. The artifice of who I was trying to be in our marriage had been broken, and he had discovered my awful curse.”

“What did you do then?” Dennis asked. But he already knew. He had already beaten her to that point. Another graduate school, another husband, and now this. Now here, him, Dennis Flaherty, in the Kingsley.

She said, “I went back to Cincinnati. My father was waiting for me that night, watching television. He held me and I went to sleep, and at some point he must have carried me to bed. I woke up the next morning and decided to change things, to change my life. I went to a therapist. The therapist urged me to go back to school, and I did. That’s how I ended up at Winchester studying behavioral psychology, and in my second semester here I had a class under Ed. The rest, of course-well, you know the rest.”

It took all of Dennis’s strength not to say a word. He wasn’t even sure what he should say, but he knew there was more there. He knew that Elizabeth would go on if he wanted her to. But he just lay there silently, eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him that it was finally over.

Afterward, she drove him back to the Tau house. It was early evening, a muddy twilight spreading across the campus. The Dekes were marching to the dining hall, the Sigs were out on the yard in their suits and ties, dates on their arms in glittering formal dresses, and the art kilns down the hill at the edge of Up Campus were glowing as they did every night at this time. She dropped him off at the corner of Winchester and Crane, so that the Taus would not see them together. She did not say good-bye; she didn’t need to. There was nothing more that needed to be said between them. It was just something that had happened, and now it was over.

When he was back in the room, he thought about all she had said. Mike. Pollyanna Pet Foods. Her father waiting for her when she got home, and how he had carried her to bed. The way she had told him her story, as if she were…as if she had rehearsed part of it. As if it were somehow an act.

Dennis opened Word and began to type. He had a theory about Polly, one that had been given to him by Elizabeth Orman. It was really indubitable: he would be ready for Professor Williams.

Mary was thinking about Professor Williams’s teeth. They were yellowed and crooked and too short. She hadn’t noticed them when she was close to him, or rather she hadn’t acknowledged it if she had, but now those teeth were all she could think about. How he had grinned at her.
Stay.
Not so much a request as it was a command. His eyes amused and knowing. Testing her.

In
City of Glass,
Quinn was sitting outside the old hotel by then, watching and waiting for Stillman to come out. It was the dawn of his obsession. He was about to lose control, Professor Kiseley had told them in class that week. Things were about to go off the deep end for Quinn.

But what about Mary? How was she doing? She wasn’t about to go off the deep end like Quinn, but she…she wasn’t doing well. Because of her insatiable need to figure the thing out, to understand Williams and his methods, she had allowed herself to become-what had he said about that scientist, Milgram, that day in class? She had allowed herself to lose herself in the class. She couldn’t go out without wondering if she was missing something. She couldn’t do anything without thinking of Williams. He could do anything now, bend the rules any way he wanted, and she would follow the game.

Now the danger, the adventure she had been craving when the class started was beginning to wear on her. She knew she had to find a way to scale it back, to tone it down, to chill out, as her mother would say. Or…

Or what? Or she might turn out like Paul Auster’s Quinn? Or she might lose herself completely to Williams and become so obsessed with solving his puzzle that she would be able to do nothing else? Because that’s what it was about, wasn’t it? The need to solve it, to figure it out. To rest her mind.

Just like Dennis. She had gotten the single room not because of trust issues, she knew now. No, she had gotten the single room because she needed that time alone to maybe understand why he had dumped her. It was hard for her to be around anyone except for Summer these days.

And now, two whole years later, she was right back in the same state of mind with Williams and Polly. Frazzled, hurt-but still desperately trying to come up with answers that would put her mind at ease.
It’s not you, Mary,
everyone had told her. It had nothing to do with you. Move on. Life goes on. This, too, shall pass.

Or would it?

What if you were always just stuck in one place, your mind spinning and unable to go forward like tires clenched in mud, because the answers wouldn’t reveal themselves to you? The mind needed answers to satisfy itself. Mary’s did. After all, she deserved them. What had she done to bring this on? Accepted a boy’s invitation to dinner, signed up for a stupid class? It wasn’t enough. She didn’t deserve this-what was it? Torment. Yes, that’s exactly what it was. With Dennis and now again with Williams. Torment. Torture. She didn’t deserve it.

Mary had believed that Summer McCoy meant something in that picture, but she did not. The photos were only points of reference. How had she gone so far off track? How had she lost herself? It was such a stupid mistake, to think that what she was doing existed in the real world. It was an exercise. Nothing more, nothing less. Polly was as real as Quinn; that was to say not at all. Her fate was just as important, in the scope of things, as Quinn’s survival.

But still. Still. Mary felt that what she was doing was important. She felt Polly-viscerally
felt her.
That meant something. It meant that she was beginning to see Polly as a real person, not just an apparition in Williams’s game. Here was a girl who’d been mistreated, wronged by this boy, this Mike. And here was Mary, who’d been similarly mistreated by Dennis. They were two of a kind. Mary felt as if she owed something to Polly. She felt as if she had no choice but to continue in the game until it was finished.

And yet Mary knew that if she got too close to the situation she would lose herself again in it, be embarrassed by Williams and the rest of the class. She had to keep a considerable distance away, she knew now, yet still find Polly.

Find Polly with the understanding that Polly was, alas, not real.

Find Polly.

She logged on to her account and read the latest e-mail from Williams.

Circumstance

Now you know where Polly was on the last night she was seen. And you know who threw the party for her: the brutish yet kind Pig, who was a father figure to Polly. You know that she returned home to her father, watched television, and went to sleep early on the morning of August 2. In fact, you have already been told about the circumstances of Polly’s disappearance. But what about
Polly’s
circumstance: the facts of her life that may or may not play a part in her disappearance and potential murder?

First, we know that Polly was going away to college. She was planning to major in nursing at Grady Technical College in Piercetown, which is forty miles away from where Polly grew up. The college sits out at the end of a road and overlooks Interstate 64; she had already put some of her things in the U-Stor-It storage facility that was beside campus. She had secured an apartment, where she would be staying with her friend Nicole. For the last two weeks, Polly and Nicole had driven to Piercetown to survey the campus. They partied with some people there and had a good time. Polly was looking forward to going to school, to finally getting started with her life. Nicole dated a man named Lawrence Tripp. Everyone called him Trippy, for short, because he was always high on something. Polly didn’t trust him, but she didn’t worry about Trippy too much because he and Nicole had been on the outs recently, and Polly was fairly confident that once they moved to Piercetown, Trippy would disappear.

There was also the circumstance of Polly’s mother: for the first time in a long while Polly’s mother was back in the picture. Her mother had been gone for almost a year, having left for San Francisco with a lithographer. Now her mother was calling again and Polly was afraid that her mother was going to return and, like she always did, ruin things for her.