Possessed (3 page)

Buoyed by Stefan's support, Jackie became increasingly active in Native American events and organizations, including raising funds to finance a powwow featuring the Apache Fire Dancers in Gateway National Recreation Center. While her start in the city had been a lonely one, eventually Jackie settled into New York, putting down roots in the Native American community. When that happened, she began to think of the city as home, growing to love its bustle and endless opportunities.

Meanwhile at work, Stefan published his Merck research, this time on enzymes involved in the formation of testosterone and estradiol. In the evenings, he continued to drop in at the local bars, to socialize and have a few drinks on the way home. There he met Wall Street analysts and brokers, who educated him on finances and investing, one day making friends with the manager of a large hedge fund. With his scientific background, Stefan understood statistics and calculations, and he began reading and studying the markets.

Although it might have seemed that they were both
prospering in New York, four years after they arrived, in 1995, Jackie sensed that Stefan was unhappy. The long train commute wore on him, and he looked tired. Separated so much of the time, she didn't feel that they communicated as they once had, and before long, she realized that they'd drifted apart. They seemed to be living parallel yet separate lives.

“I've been offered a position in Dallas, at UT Southwestern,” he said to her one evening. He explained that the invitation came from a prominent chair at the school and that he saw the offer as a great opportunity. Merck hadn't turned out the way he'd once hoped, he confided, and he'd decided that perhaps he wasn't a good fit for the corporate world. In academia, his research was more esoteric, its goal to answer questions, and if it took time to evolve, that was understood. But at Merck, a company with investors to satisfy, he felt pressured to move quickly and pursue profits.

“What are you saying?” Jackie asked.

“I think it would be a good idea to move back to Dallas,” Stefan answered.

“After it took me so long to get where I am here?” Jackie said, astonished at the idea that the inroads she'd made could all be for naught. She thought about their lives, and the sense she had that they'd become more roommates than lovers. “You go to Dallas, and I'll commute,” she said, in her heart seeing the parting as a separation.

The marriage ended without fighting or angry words. “Stefan wasn't like that. He never yelled. He never fought,” she said. But to her mind, it seemed a natural progression since she believed Stefan was more preoccupied with his work and his career than their marriage. “I felt like I was a checklist item. I was unhappy.”

That same year, Stefan moved back to Dallas while Jackie stayed in New York. The following year, Jackie traveled to Dallas and asked Stefan for a divorce. She'd grown, her life had changed, and it wasn't in Dallas any longer. She'd made plans to continue her education. As much as she cared for
Stefan, their marriage no longer fit. “It was very sad,” she said. “It was hard.”

For both of them, it seemed, for Stefan's friends would say that the divorce devastated him, perhaps because he never understood why it had happened. “He couldn't make sense of it,” said one friend. “So he couldn't ever put it behind him.”

Through the years, Stefan kept one of his wedding reception invitations as a remembrance, and he talked of Jackie fondly and often, sometimes musing about what could have gone wrong. Always he carried her picture in his wallet. “I think the divorce totally messed him up,” said a close friend. “He was damaged by it. Stefan wanted a family. He wanted children and a home. But he never really believed he deserved it.”

T
o return to UTSW, Stefan accepted less money than he'd made at Merck, an $85,000 salary. As an associate professor, he had two responsibilities, the first running a lab funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, where he'd investigate the roles hormones and steroids play in pregnancy and premature births. His second task required him to lecture to the school's medical students and PhD candidates on his areas of expertise and his research.

Making his return to his pre–New York life a complete circle, Stefan leased an apartment, this time a corner unit near the pool, at The Village, which he began referring to with a smile and a laugh as “The Ghetto.” Whenever the weather permitted and he had spare time, he again became a familiar sight lounging around the pool, sunbathing and reading. It was there one afternoon that he met Mark Bouril, an engineer who lived in an adjacent apartment. Bouril had seen Stefan in the past, usually getting his mail, and thought that he seemed a bit gruff, but on that day, Stefan was reading a financial magazine, and the two men talked about the stock market and investments. Before long, Bouril, a runner, had Stefan jogging beside him on The Village paths.

In the evenings, Bouril and Stefan, both single, hung out together, going to dinner or sometimes watching Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Mel Brooks movies. Bouril appreciated the way Stefan dropped lines from
Blazing Saddles
or Monty Python into conversations. Particularly taken with German director Werner Herzog's movies, Stefan seemed drawn to his recurring theme of heroes who fought tremendous obstacles. Many of his favorite movies starred leading man Klaus Kinski. Stefan particularly admired the German actor's dead-eyed grimace, a look he copied, practicing before a mirror, then employing when forced to have his picture taken.

On another afternoon, Stefan bumped into Ran Holcomb, a CPA who lived in his complex. Soon Holcomb was giving Stefan financial advice and doing his taxes, and Bouril, Stefan, Holcomb, and other friends from The Village sometimes dropped in at happy hours at half a dozen of the nearby restaurants and bars, from the microbrewery Humperdinck's, where Stefan ate the barbecue and burgers, to a place called Two Rows, where he always ordered fish. After he was pulled over in his car one night when he'd been drinking, Stefan narrowed his restaurants down to those in walking distance of his apartment, so he didn't have to worry about imbibing and driving. “He was practical,” said a friend. “He liked to drink, and this way it wasn't a problem.”

Making something of a game of it, one night on their way home, Stefan with a group of hungry friends walked through the drive-thru at a Wendy's restaurant, with cars in front of and behind them, laughing as they put in their orders and carried their sacks of burgers home.

As much fun as Stefan had in Dallas, there were those times around the pool or on their nights out, when the conversations became serious. Many of his friends simply called Stefan “the scientist.” And as Jackie had before them, they felt drawn to him for the conversations, his thoughts on the world. Always reading, he enjoyed discussing theories on life

While the others gave him a moniker reflecting his profession, Stefan sometimes called himself a nickname based on his beliefs. Like many scientists who are trained to accept as true only what they can see, touch, and calculate, Stefan
was a secular man, an atheist, in his words, “the heathen from Sweden.” While his atheism put him at odds with religious friends he made in Texas, it never became an obstacle. “He always treated our beliefs with respect,” said one such friend. “It wasn't like he ever told us we were wrong, but rather that he held a different view.”

One day, the conversation with Bouril turned serious, and Stefan talked about his opinions on life and death. “We're here for a brief time. So much happens that are accidents. When we can help each other, we should,” he said. Then he went on to voice his concept of death, that when a person dies, they simply stop existing, “as if they'd never been born.”

While some may have found his viewpoint sad, Stefan saw it simply as the reality of a living organism never intended to live forever.

At the restaurants, in the bars, Stefan struck up conversations with those seated around him, asking about their jobs and their histories. In the end, the people he invited into his life were those he said were “shooting from the hip,” said a friend. “There were only two things Stefan couldn't abide, dishonesty and people who judged others more harshly than they judged themselves.”

While he'd cobbled together a family of sorts out of his Dallas friends, Stefan still ached for a wife and children. Two years after his divorce from Jackie, he hadn't given up on the prospect of love. As in his career, he used his analytic skills to assess the possibilities and decided that the best way to meet and court a woman was on the dance floor. At a Dallas dance school, he signed up for lessons. As with everything else, he studied and practiced. On the floor, Stefan was graceful and intense, and he entered competitions. In love, however, it was a disappointment. Around that time, he did start a new relationship, but it was with a married woman, one who appeared to want him for what he could buy her. She borrowed $70,000 from Stefan to invest in a business and never repaid him.

Although not earning enough at UTSW to afford such things, Stefan had found some success in the financial markets. Each day, he rose early, checking the stats on the foreign exchanges before New York opened. He then put in his buy and sell orders, and left for work, checking off and on to see how his stocks performed.

Settled into his life in the U.S., Stefan returned to Sweden once a year, to ride in the annual summer-solstice bike trip he'd helped found while in college. While there, he visited family and friends. Yet Dallas had become his home, and he loved his life in the United States, leading him to, in the mid-nineties, become a U.S. citizen. He saw his future in America, one he hoped would someday include a wife and a family. “Stefan always said he was looking for the right woman,” said a friend.

The Stefan Andersson his friends knew was a social person, who needed other people. At night, in the clubs, if seated at the bar alone, he talked to the bartender or other patrons. At his apartment, he left his television on, to hear the voices. “Stefan just loved people, being around people. He craved contact. And he loved women.”

Not far from The Village, Stefan became a regular at Henk's European Deli and Black Forest Bakery. A little piece of his homeland, it offered herring, Wiener schnitzel, bratwurst, liverwurst, and sauerbraten. On Thursday and Saturday evenings, he claimed a table, and before long became friends with the staff, asking about their families, talking about their lives, giving the younger ones advice, including “always have a Plan B, because Plan A doesn't always work out.”

Everyone at Henk's knew that Stefan had a crush on one of the waitresses, a tall blonde. Although she was married, he indulged in an innocent flirtation, one neither let go further. At the restaurant, he stayed late, talking to the waiters while they cleaned up and set the tables for the next day. Over the years, they all became close. “It was kind of like he was one of us,” said one of the waitresses.

One evening, he gave the woman he clearly coveted a ride home. As she got into the car, she wondered if he would make a pass or do anything she'd have to reject. But he didn't. He simply drove her home, then waited for her to open her front door and disappear inside. “Very much the gentleman,” she said.

M
eanwhile, in 1997 in Lund, Sweden, a young woman named Annika Lindqvist was working on her PhD in cellular molecular biology when her faculty advisor asked her, “Where do you see your future?”

“I'd like to move to the U.S.,” Lindqvist said, basing her decision on reports she'd heard of good salaries and important research.

Musing over the possibilities, her advisor mentioned a friend, a former colleague, Stefan Andersson. “He's in Dallas.”

“Is it warm there?” Lindqvist asked. As Stefan once had, Annika, with dark blond hair, glasses, and a wide smile, dreamed of an escape from Sweden's long, dreary winters.

“I think so. I'll contact him for you,” the woman offered.

A short time later on her way to a camping vacation in the Grand Canyon, Annika stopped in Dallas. Getting off the plane, she encountered a clear, blue Texas sky and felt the warmth of sunlight caressing her skin. Outside the terminal, Stefan waited in the white Toyota Camry he'd had for years. “You see this dent?” he asked, rather gruffly. When she said she did, he asked, “Do you think women won't date me because of the dent?”

“Well, if they don't date you because of the dent, you don't want to date them,” she answered, and Stefan looked at her, considered her response, and laughed. That afternoon, he gave her a tour of the lab, then out to dinner with his tight group of friends. First impressions can shape relationships, but Annika's of Stefan would be a passing one, as she sized him up as rather a crusty older man. At forty-three, his hair was prematurely greying, and he'd developed a slight stoop,
perhaps from leaning over computers and microscopes, which made him look somewhat older than his years.

Stefan

(Courtesy of Annika Lindqvist)

When she returned to Dallas two years later, after her graduation, Annika joined Stefan, working for him in his lab, renting an apartment near his in The Village. As a housewarming gift, one afternoon he gave her all of his pots, pans, and kitchen utensils. “I never cook,” he announced, and before long she realized it was true. When she visited his apartment with friends, she found his cupboards and refrigerator bare, except for a carton of eggs and one small pot to boil them in.

As she looked around, she noticed a cabinet filled with prescription medicines, ones Stefan had stockpiled for years. As she grew to know him she'd realize that Stefan was something of a hypochondriac, continually asking his doctors for medicines but rarely taking them. Still, with a master's degree in pharmacy, he had a respect for pills and rarely if ever threw any out.

Seamlessly, Annika entered Stefan's life, working at the lab, joining his friends on their evening forays into Dallas nightlife. There were Sunday afternoons spent leisurely brunching at the Intercontinental Hotel, drinking mimosas and listening to jazz, and Friday evening happy hours at a local Mexican restaurant with a large outdoor deck and goblet-size margaritas.

Working with Stefan, Annika judged him to be rational
and highly analytical. Discussing possibilities, at work or over drinks, his mind filled with ideas not only for their research but for that of others at UTSW. Yet less than organized, at times he found focusing difficult, something Annika did exceptionally well. Quickly, they became a team, she implementing and organizing his ideas, while he moved forward on the research's bigger picture, investigating the effects of high blood pressure during pregnancy and the molecular mechanisms involved in premature births.

Over the years, Stefan grew to rely on Annika at work, and she realized that, but still her feelings were hurt the day she called in sick and he pushed to know when she'd be back, saying not that she needed to take care of herself but that he had work waiting for her. When she returned, however, coworkers surrounded her, asking about her health. “Stefan was so worried,” more than one told her. “He was talking about getting a doctor for you.”

A
long with the others, Stan Rich lived in The Village and became a member of Stefan's circle of friends, going out many evenings. Rich was raised in Northern Europe, and he and Stefan had much in common. Like Mark Bouril, when Rich had first noticed Stefan at the complex, he had a scowl on his face, one Rich later recognized meant his new friend was deep in thought.

In the bars and restaurants, they laughed and joked, happy to be together. At times, Stefan suggested an evening at a north Dallas club, where he sashayed on the floor, deep into the tango or the flamenco. There one night, he spoke Russian to a woman while they danced. When she asked him what he did, Stefan stared at her, his face blank, and said, “I'm working for the KGB.”

Shocked, the woman dropped her hands and walked away, stalking out of the club, leading Rich and the others to share a boisterous laugh.

After Annika joined, the group became even more of
a family, celebrating holidays at her apartment, including traditional Swedish Christmas Eves with pickled herring, salmon, and ham. At such occasions, colleagues with children attended, and Annika grew used to seeing Stefan, who so wanted a child of his own, ignoring the adults, instead sitting on the floor, playing with the youngsters. The same thing happened at a home with a dog. Drawn to the animal, Stefan stroked and talked to it. Before long, off and on he mused about adopting a black German shepherd, a breed he'd researched extensively on the Internet, impressed with the reports of their intelligence.