STALKED

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A TRUE STORY OF OBSESSION

Kate Brennan

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PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

STALKED

Kate Brennan is an alias used to protect the author’s real identity. She has been a freelance writer (under her real name) for more than thirty years, with a focus on women’s issues. She has also taught English and Women’s Studies at a number of colleges in the USA, where she lives. Her stalker remains at large.

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A handful of people have lived through this story with me. While many people in my life either ignored what was happening to me or passed off the stalking as an exaggerated drama—a love that wouldn’t let go or something of my own making—a number of relatives and friends recognized it as a man’s rage turned to madness. They stood by me and did whatever they could to help me stay safe and sane. And when I decided that telling my story might help other women figure out how to stay safe, they encouraged me to weigh the risks, and then to write.

Acknowledging by name those still living could put them in danger, because some stalkers, like mine, are too sick and too arrogant to be afraid. So the following will have to do:

You know who you are.

To each of you, hand over heart, thank you.

I’ll never forget.

I’LL BE WATCHING YOU.

The Police

Prologue

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You seldom choose the circumstances that offer meaning to your life. Given a list of options, stalking isn’t one I’d ever pick. But once that was my reality, I saw two basic choices—walk straight through or shy away. My nature is to walk straight through the hard things—grief, sorrow, fear, doubt, anger, whatever presents itself. I’ve always believed in the power of the other side of pain, so I don’t allow myself to run from it.

Facing your demons, taking responsibility for your choices, learning from your mistakes: that’s the kind of person I respect and aspire to be. So being stalked by an ex‐lover requires me to examine how I managed to love such a man. My stalker may have picked me, but I picked him, too. I picked him, I lived with him, and when I left him, I intended to remember him in only the vaguest way, the way you recall a movie that didn’t live up to the hype.

I thought it would be a simple matter of walking away and taking stock: tuck back into myself, consider why I chose him, face my frailties and failings, and then, and only then, step into the future—wiser and more whole than the day I met him. That had always worked for me in the past.

Turns out, this time would be different. You can do all the psychic and physical separation you want, but there’s no getting away from someone who wants to remind you he can mess with your life anytime he wants. Paul isn’t a man who tolerates being left. His desire to control me didn’t vanish just because I tried to. In fact, the stalking has lasted far longer than our life together. So every choice I make, every moment of turning, is filtered through one simple fact: my stalker is still alive. Which is why you won’t know my real name. But you will know my psyche, for I intend to offer it bare as a licked bone.

Being stalked thrusts you into the muck of someone else’s life, which is how I felt when I was with him, so it was a surprise that I wasn’t, after all, free of him when I walked out his door. How could I know that leaving this man would give new meaning to the concept of afterlife? No matter what else happens, my life will always be divided into three parts: before him, with him, after him. Not my preferred life markers. But there it is. It’s what I got when I walked away.

I had forty‐one years before him, nearly three years with him, and it’s been more than thirteen years since I left him. It took me more than two years to see that leaving him was not the same as getting away from him, and that his harassment was, in fact, stalking.

Over the years, therapists have assured me that they, professionals who are paid to figure people out, were fooled, just as I was, by this man’s charms. I’m only somewhat consoled by such assurances, because they don’t erase the inevitable questions: How could I have loved someone so capable of residual hate? How did I allow myself to get sucked into his perversion? How did I manage to get away? How do I stay safe now? And most important of all: How do I keep sane, not ever knowing if the stalking is over?

The answers are complicated, but the truth is simple: it all flows from the currents of my past.

It took living with the man who became my stalker to realize that life with my family had left me with such a high tolerance for cruelty I couldn’t recognize perversion when I saw it. And when I did start to see it, I was so accustomed to thinking that sick people get well and that I could survive anything, I didn’t know when to quit hoping. I didn’t know when to quit being strong and patient and kind.

Some women are raised to believe men can become their best selves if they’re not left to their own limitations. We’re bred to believe in the power of redemption. It took time—too much time—for me to realize that picking someone who needs you, who’s less whole than you are, is the easiest way to keep from seeing yourself clearly. It offers ready distraction from your own damage.

I thought that avoiding active alcoholics and working on my own frailties would be my salvation. I also thought if I understood enough about the man I loved and was a steady force of love for him, it would all come right in the end.

Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I startle awake. A gunshot? I hold my breath and strain to identify the noise in the ensuing silence. Nothing. Was it a car backfiring on the highway? A hunter downing a deer on the island? Maybe one or the other. Maybe something more ominous. I’m never sure which way to turn, toward the ordinary or the terrifying.

I lie still and focus on my surroundings, work my legs toward the edge of the bed and ease into position. I’ve taken to wearing sweats and a long‐sleeve T‐shirt to bed instead of pajamas in case I have to leave suddenly. Running or taken, either way, it makes me feel a little less vulnerable. I edge my arm from beneath the cool sheet, slide the cell phone from under the spare pillow. I practice the drill just in case: my fingers slide over the keys: 9‐1‐1. 9‐1‐1. I remind myself to breathe—slowly, silently. I remain as still as possible.

I lay my head back against the pillow to keep my neck from locking and play back the moments before going to bed. I see myself checking all the doors, the windows, the security system. Once. At least twice. Perhaps, like many nights, more than that. I visualize the routes I’ll take if someone comes through the front door, through the back door, through a window. I wait for another sound that will tell me which way to run.

I picture a face I’ve never seen before, the stranger he will have sent. I imagine the place I’ll be taken. Dirty, dark, remote, somewhere as foreign to me as my assailant. I remember to breathe. I strain for the next sound, hoping it will not come. But also wondering if it would be a relief from this endless vigilance.

I wait for the pink of morning to bleed into the night sky. Although I don’t believe the dawn cares for humans one way or the other, only at first light will I relax enough to fall back to sleep.

I feel safest in the light, but I am drawn to the cloak of invisibility darkness offers.

Going to bed, for a walk, to a movie—such ordinary things. Unless you’re being stalked. Then everything feels risky.

As I do in every public place, when I walk into a movie theater, I enter slowly, scanning the seats. Is he here? Is someone he knows here? Before I settle into the room, any room, I check my gut. Do I feel safe?

My favorite spot in movie theaters used to be two‐thirds back, on the right. Not too close to the screen, not too far away. Now I sit in the back row, so I can keep an eye on the room. And before I give myself over to the story on the screen, I make sure I know where the exit door is. If there’s only one door, I usually leave, and wait for the DVD.

When I do stay, I move in and out of the film to check for late arrivals, and minutes before the end, as the movie closes in on itself, I make my final descent from the screen story to my own. I plan my exit. How to be seen by the least number of people. How to get out the fastest. That’s the goal.

I pull my hat down over my eyes and focus on the exit door tucked behind the screen. In warm months, I feel more exposed. Midwesterners aren’t crazy about eccentrics. They’re most comfortable with conformity. And a woman wearing a hat in a movie theater when it’s above zero doesn’t fit their definition of normal. People tend to stare. So, like a child who believes she’s invisible when she covers her own eyes, I put on my large sunglasses and tell myself no one will recognize me.

As the credits begin to roll, I head for the front corner of the room. In seconds, everyone else will be moving in the opposite direction. The casual eye could assume I have something to hide. And actually, I do: myself. If I hadn’t learned how to hide, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.

I’m good at figuring things out. I’m good at figuring people out. And I’m good at trusting my gut. Years of being stalked have made me an expert at following my instincts, which isn’t easy, given that a stalker’s goal is to suck you into his vortex; when your world spins out of control, it’s easy to lose your balance. A constant state of readiness is the only way I know to right myself, again and again and again.

But it wears me out, and the possibility of despair is never more than an arm’s length away. That’s on good days. On bad days, despair sits on my shoulder waiting for the slightest sign of weakness so it can wrap me in its embrace.

Memories are closer still. They crawl around inside me, hookworms pleased at so much strength to sap.

PART I

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1991–1994

Chapter 1

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It’s my last full day in Haworth. I get up early and rush through breakfast at the B and B, passing on a cooked meal, settling for coffee and toast with homemade marmalade. I want to be at the library as soon as the staff opens the doors. Running through the mental list of manuscripts I want to review this morning, I lean against the stone wall on the edge of the parking lot. Just beyond the Georgian parsonage, white cumulus clouds roll over the moors, casting shadows across the grass and heather. Before this trip I didn’t know that heather was an evergreen, its whorled leaves and waving petals so different from the spruce and pine and fir at home. From a distance the moors are a soft world of purples and browns and greens, but up close they reveal rough terrain and reservoirs full of water so cold it can kill.

“You’re here early,” says the head librarian as we pass through the shop on the way to the library. She looks the part. Somber dark suit. Serious glasses. Even her long mahogany hair is wrapped tight in a bun. But over the past two weeks, I’ve had a window into her evenings and weekends. Not so serious then. I like that— second impressions that pleasantly surprise.

It’s already hot and windy outside, but inside the library it’s dry and still and cool, to accommodate the manuscripts. Here dead people count more than the living. So each day I throw a sweater and pair of socks in my backpack on top of the notebooks and pencils. No pens allowed. I put on the cotton sweater now and reach for the white gloves I’d left on the long wooden table yesterday afternoon. The library, available to scholars by application, is housed in the part of the Brontë Parsonage that was once the kitchen where Emily reigned—when she wasn’t haunting the moors, probably trying to escape Charlotte’s hovering.

But it isn’t enigmatic Emily or stern Charlotte who brought me to this library. Rather it’s Anne, the least known, least favored, least published Brontë whose secrets I’m hoping to unlock. Charlotte painted her as shy and weak, but that doesn’t do justice to the woman who wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a telling story of alcohol and drug abuse, of rape and escape.

At the end of each afternoon these past two weeks, I’ve left a note detailing the materials I’d like to review the next day. A selection from last night’s list is neatly stacked on the end of the table. I pull on the gloves and pick up the first letter. I’m the only one in the room; the head librarian has gone to retrieve another manuscript I’ve requested, and the rest of the staff haven’t arrived yet.

I’m surrounded by books. The oldest and rarest are locked away for safekeeping, available only by written request, but at this stage of my research, I’ve had to adopt a strict system. I’m tempted to stay another week, but I’ve promised a friend I’ll be home in time for her fortieth anniversary party. So instead of diving headlong into each and every book, I make lists—of books and manuscripts, of copies I want made. I force myself to save the reading for home, or for my next trip here. But I do take a few moments to study the minute script of one letter. In April 1849, the month before she died, Anne wrote Ellen Nussey, a family friend:

I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect…. But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose….

This doesn’t sound like the “resigned” Anne that Charlotte would have the world believe in, a young woman “thankful for release from a suffering life.” Charlotte keeps to one line impossible for Anne to argue from the grave: a girl who “from her childhood seemed preparing for an early death.”

I don’t buy it. Ever since I came across a reference to the letter Charlotte wrote Anne’s publisher in response to his request to posthumously reprint The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I’ve suspected Charlotte manipulated her youngest sister’s image. I want to dig around to see if my hunch is correct. But Charlotte destroyed so many of her sister’s papers, the space between her portrayal and Anne’s own words has proven as wide and hard to navigate as the moors outside these doors.

Wildfell Hall “hardly appears to me desirable to preserve,” writes Charlotte to Anne’s publisher in 1850. She refers to a book that sold so well a second printing occurred six weeks after the first, and the publisher was requesting permission for a third.

The idea of contributing to the scholarship that could restore Anne’s literary reputation is thrilling. As a journalist, I’m known for my interviewing skills, but I prefer sorting through the secrets of the dead to tracking down those of the living. I’m most comfortable alone, researching and studying people who talk to me in their writing. Listening in person wears me out, I suppose because I have little patience for posturing, and evasion.

Some days in Haworth I don’t even break for lunch. Others I come out of myself enough to join one of the librarians for a walk through the narrow town built around steep, uneven cobbled streets, and a quick lunch or tea. Sometimes I do it just because I know it’s good for me. But not on my last day, when I step outside at noon and settle in with an apple on a wood‐slatted bench in front of the parsonage. I imagine the Brontë sisters, dark wool hems swishing against the wide stone steps, coming and going, to church, the village, the moors. I’ve spent so much time with these women in my head, I can almost see them. Back inside, I work through the afternoon, until the staff is ready to leave, then pack up all the papers I’ve gathered and say my good‐byes. On my way through the shop, I buy several copies of Poems by the Brontë Sisters, gifts for a fund‐raising event I’m helping plan back home: Claire Bloom giving a dramatic reading of Jane Eyre.

The benign morning sky has been invaded by a dark bank of threatening clouds. But to the east, it’s completely sunny. I stop in my room before I set out for my last walk on the moors. Polly, who owns the B and B, and I plan to go as far as the reservoir today, so I pick up my day pack, already stuffed with a rain jacket, bottle of water, and ordinance map. I’m prepared for a change of weather. The books and movies don’t lie about the moors. It’s easy to get lost, to disappear.

In London the next day, I take the tube to Charing Cross and walk up St. Martin’s Place to the National Portrait Gallery. My goal is to see the only portrait that exists of the three Brontë sisters together. It hangs in a second‐story room along with portraits of other British writers, the Brownings, George Eliot, Tennyson. Although the canvas is about two and a half by three feet, it’s smaller than I’d imagined. I think I expected them to be life‐size. It’s often that way: we expect the physical reality of a found object to be equal to the emotional impact, and yet it seldom is.

The sisters all wear white collars over dark dresses. On one side are Anne and Emily, to the right is Charlotte. All three wear grave expressions, though they were only in their teens when they sat for the portrait. Charlotte’s image is the most clearly defined; she seems to be in a spotlight, consigning Emily and Anne to the shadows. It’s as if Branwell had studied his older sister more carefully. Or perhaps had simply known her better.

The plane makes a wide loop over the city as it prepares to land. At this point, the Mississippi flows west to east, like a snake whose lazy midsection rested before dropping south. I look down to see if I can spot my apartment building. I live on the edge of one of the city’s many lakes, all of which are easy landmarks from the sky. Mine, the one shaped like a bald head with a bump on the crown, is tucked between a bean‐shaped lake to the south and one shaped like a kid on a skateboard to the north.

I arrive home midafternoon, with plenty of time to shower and change for Jen and Doug’s anniversary party, which is being held at the home of their oldest daughter. Since they moved in across the hall several years ago, they’ve become like family, especially Jen. She’s the aunt every woman wants to have: intensely interested in my life without being overbearing. Her extraverted life, full of news about her family and harmless gossip about neighbors, is the perfect antidote when deadlines keep me at my desk.

It’s as hot and muggy as London was. I dress in the coolest and most comfortable clothes I find in my closet: white silk blouse, white linen jacket, blue silk skirt, and sandals. No skimpy dresses for me; I have such sensitive skin I burn even in early evening. Even more pale than usual because I’m tired, I swipe SoHo on my lips: the cool raspberry color intensifies the steel‐blue of my eyes. I can hear my mother’s voice: When you’re tired or sad, put on something bright—but not too bright or it’ll wash you out. The color of her blouse or freshly applied lipstick was always a clue to whether she was having a hard time of it.

I reach the party just as evening—and, thank God, the humidity— is beginning to fall. The lawn is freshly cut and watered, damp but not wet. Dotting the backyard are green‐and‐white‐canopied tables, covered with white linen cloths, in turn anchored by vases full of fresh flowers and candles waiting to be lit. This is a well‐manicured suburban family.

Typical of most midwestern parties, nearly everyone here is paired. I’m comfortable being single except at gatherings such as this, where I feel my difference. I’m sitting with good friends of Jen and Doug’s, two couples who recently moved into our building. One of the men is asking if I’d be interested in editing a family history he’s just finished writing. We’ve agreed to meet the next day over coffee so I can see what he’s got.

Not long after I arrive, Jen comes to the table and leads me to where her brother Roger stands. He’s perfectly pressed, summer slacks, white shirt, navy blazer, all worn like a uniform. He’s flown into town especially for the party; years earlier he’d moved out to the Southwest. Jen has two brothers and no sisters. All I know about the other brother is that his plane went down somewhere in France during World War II and his body was never recovered. I’ve heard a bit about Roger: the cruises, guest houses, five‐star hotels, and Zagat‐rated restaurants, always his treat. But it sounds as if his hospitality comes with hooks. I’m not disposed to like him.

I suppose if you have only one brother left, you hang on, regardless. I know how awful this sounds, but having five myself, I tend to feel they’re all expendable. As far as Roger is concerned, I’m always ready to be wrong, so I plan to greet him with an open mind. “I want you to meet my friend,” Jen says, offering my name as if it were a gift. “I’ve told you so much about her.”

The minute she begins the introduction, he shifts his focus beyond me. I know his type, a barrel chest full of bravado, always looking for someone more important than the person in front of him. I plan to do the polite thing, extend my hand, put on a cordial face, and tell him I’m happy to meet him.

But as my well‐intended hand drifts toward him, I look into his pale blue eyes, as flat and cold as I’ve ever seen. I swiftly withdraw my hand and slip it into my jacket pocket. Startled by my own reaction, I manage to mouth a truncated version of the words I’d prepared. “Nice to meet you. I know how fond Jen is of you.”

“Yes,” he says, still looking past me. He appears practiced at letting others know how insignificant he considers them. And yet, I’m surprised by his lack of pretense in front of his sister.

After dinner, and many toasts, I mill around, searching out the handful of people I know. This brings me to a table where Doug and Jen’s second son is sitting. Jack greets me warmly, then turns to the man sitting next to him and introduces me to his cousin, Paul, Roger’s only child.

In a sea of other men in summer suits and light blazers, Paul stands out. He’s wearing white linen trousers and a short‐sleeved, bright‐blue silk shirt; we could be mistaken for a matched pair. He’s good‐looking in a Hemingway hero sort of way—sturdy, worldly, athletic‐looking. He has his father’s square face, but Paul’s is softened by wavy reddish hair—the kind of red that fades to strawberry blond on its way to gray. His pale blue eyes are accentuated by the color of his shirt.

Sitting next to him is a woman I judge to be a few years younger than me. She’s got short, reddish‐brown hair and is wearing a simple sundress that sets off her tan. She looks fit. Paul is bringing a friend, not a date, Jen had told me earlier. I wondered, but didn’t ask, the point of telling me this. Perhaps it was simply conversation. She clearly adores her only nephew. Everything Jen has told me about Paul runs along two lines: his exciting life of travel and his difficult relationship with his father. She describes a man who can’t break loose from a father whose psyche depends on belittling his child. It’s the only flaw Jen ascribes to her brother, and the one detail I remember.

As I slide into a seat next to Jack, he asks about my trip to England. I’m delighted to be talking about my research; I don’t expect people to be interested in such an obscure literary puzzle. Paul is also attentive, and his questions reveal he’s as passionate about travel as I am. He’s a freelance photographer; I know from Jen that he’s got family money and doesn’t have to work, so I’m impressed. Jack names a glossy international magazine and prods Paul to talk about his photo shoots in Africa, Asia, and South America. Jack leads Paul to his favorite: a winding road in the Colombian jungle. An ambush, guns pointed at their approach. Someone in the jeep has a gun, too, but Paul’s quick thinking and fearless driving ensures they don’t have to use it.

Already I can tell he has a knack for putting himself in the center of the story. Part of my brain registers desire. I’m primed for this particular model of man. I grew up on adventure stories— real ones, as well as fictional.

The woman with Paul grows quieter the longer we talk. It occurs to me, in spite of Jen’s comment, that his “friend” considers herself his date. From time to time, mentioning one family party after another, he asks why we haven’t met before. My response doesn’t vary: “I don’t know. I was there. So were you.” It’s true that I never noticed him, but I also say it to balance out the charm he knows he exudes. It’s subtle, but it’s there, in the insouciant way he sits, the way he holds his head. He bears himself like a man used to being remembered.

Jen reappears at the table and whisks Paul away to say hello to family friends. I talk to Jack for a while longer, then start my round of good‐byes. After thanking Jen, I turn to Paul. “I’m happy we met,” I say.

He aims his pale blue eyes directly into mine. “I’ll see you again,” he says. As he extends his hand for our first good‐bye, I feel a jolt of certainty: my life will never be the same. Off balance, I reply, “I imagine you will.” I hadn’t meant to say this aloud, but I’ve already suspected he won’t be able to resist pursuing someone who hasn’t noticed him before and tells him so.

We don’t need to trade phone numbers. He knows where I live.

Chapter 2

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One afternoon the next week, Doug calls to tell me Paul has dropped by their apartment and wonders if he can come over.

I’m organizing the documents I brought back from England. I’ll be presenting a paper at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in a few months, and I want it to be as loaded with facts as possible.

“Now?” I ask.

“Yes,” Doug says.

“Sure,” I say. One of the advantages of working at home is the ease of folding personal time into work. I don’t have plans this evening, so I know I can finish the project later. Doug tells Paul it’s okay. In the background, I hear Jen saying good‐bye, then the door closing. Just before Doug hangs up, he laughs. “He never comes to visit us,” he tells me. “He stopped here only to see you.”

By the time I’ve put down the phone, Paul is at my door. He looks relaxed, freshly tanned, as if he’s just walked off a sailboat, or a golf course. He’s wearing khakis and a bright red polo shirt. His lightweight hiking boots seem out of place on this hot afternoon. He looks ready for an impromptu hike, but in the city?

I pour glasses of iced tea, and we sit in the living room on the white couch that faces a wall of windows. The first time I walked into this sixteenth‐floor apartment thirteen years ago, I knew I wanted to live here. It was smaller than I had hoped for, but the southern window of the living room looked out upon a four‐hundred‐acre city lake, and stepping onto the cerulean‐blue carpet made me forget the room was bound by concrete and glass. On one wall is a birthday gift from my parents: an oil painting of waves rising like clouds from a rocky lakeshore. I’ve positioned the painting so the trumpeter swans are racing toward the lake outside my window. In the corner of the room is a round walnut table, piled high with books and folders. Paul asks how my research is going. I give him a brief preview of my talk, then steer the conversation his way. I don’t have to ask many questions to get him to pick up where we left off at the anniversary party.

Despite the drama of his stories, Paul’s manner is gentle. He is reserved yet engaged, an interesting combination. And he’s witty. My second impression of this man corresponds to my first: he seems a welcome departure from the usual model of midwest manhood, all business and sports and God. Nothing against any of those in general, but as a package I find them limiting, boring even. And there’s something else I see. Try as he might to hide behind a relaxed and confident manner, his charm doesn’t mask a vulnerability.

As much as I’m drawn to him, I have a bad romantic track record, so I’m wary. The men I’ve dated aren’t bad people, just garden‐variety insecure or selfish men who don’t want to relinquish first place in their personal lives; they aren’t looking for a partner so much as a second in command. And as the eldest daughter in a large family, I’ve had my fill of mothering, so the idea of a man as a means of securing a family of my own has never particularly appealed to me. Hard as I try, I can’t fix on a picture of myself in a lasting pair.

Even as a child I was most content when left alone, to read a book, to daydream, or to listen to the birds, trying to identify them by their songs. It was the first time I realized you could like the way a thing looks but wish it would keep its mouth shut. Take blue jays: if only they sounded as beautiful as they looked. Sitting alone in the small woods behind our house, with a book in my lap, I realized I liked it best when animals, and people, didn’t reveal unpleasant surprises when they opened their mouths.

Once a relationship hits the inevitable point at which I realize I can salvage it only by diminishing myself, I prepare to leave. It’s simple, really. I’m eager to encourage another’s dreams. I just won’t sacrifice my own. So, at the age of forty‐one, I’ve decided that instead of taking another lover I’ll enjoy deep friendships and develop an even richer interior life.

But then I meet Paul, and I can’t think of a solid reason to turn him away.

Before he leaves my apartment for the first time, he tells me he’s going on a vacation, hiking in the mountains, he says, though when I ask where, he’s not specific. He asks if I’d like to go out when he gets back in early September. At the door, he turns and almost shyly leans my way. “I’d like to hug you good‐bye,” he says. “May I?” I’ve never met a man who asks for permission like this. I find it formal, which he isn’t, and odd. I haven’t decided whether I like it or not, or what it says about him. The hug lingers just long enough to be remembered but not so long that it leads to anything else. Yet I know this moment is the start of something.

Years ago I fell in love with a man I’d met while working at a law firm. Jim’s parents died when he was in his early twenties, and he was an only child. I actually enjoyed his orphan status; I liked that loving him didn’t mean having to fit into another whole family. What I can’t love about Jim is his grasp of ethics when it comes to business. Too loose for my comfort.

Even though we stopped being a couple several years ago, the relationship remains open‐ended. Every time Jim asks me to marry him, I tell him my answer has to be no as long as his business practices remain the same. But he never quits asking. And I’ve come to depend on his long‐distance adoration. He now lives in California, so it’s easy to keep the fantasy of our eventual coming together alive. “When we’re old,” he says, “we’ll be together.” I believe it. I’m comforted by his unwillingness to let me go completely, because his passion, or attachment at least, is not threatening. He simply calls once every several months to see if my answer has changed. In between the proposals, he has broken three engagements. I flatter myself that this has something to do with me. At least that’s what he tells me.

Although I keep saying no, I hang on to the idea of us together. Still, I try to be open to more immediate love.

August ushers in a trio of deaths, and one marriage. I prefer family funerals to weddings. For one thing, I don’t feel conflicted at funerals. When people die, you’re sad in direct proportion to how much you loved them.

Weddings are another matter. When you come from a long line of alcoholics, if you’re not genetically wired to be one yourself, your odds of marrying one are depressingly high. When someone marries, you’re meant to feel joy. But when you watch siblings and cousins marry people who are clearly drunks, or, worse yet, are drunks themselves, well, your instinct is to grieve, which is inconvenient when you’re expected to wear a big smile.

Fortunately, my family is gaining a certain degree of sobriety. So when the third of my five brothers gets married shortly after my return from England, I don’t dread the event as much as usual. Still, I don’t look forward to these times with my family. I prefer the quieter gatherings, when only a few of us get together rather than the whole bunch; we tend to act like civilized adults then. But put more than a handful of us in a banquet room, or someone’s living room, or anywhere for that matter (all we need is a critical mass), and a primitive gang mentality kicks in. We don’t make much room for introverts—much less loners—and standing apart is translated as contrariness, and differences of opinion often escalate into personal attacks. It’s a shaky form of love, not really love at all. Just an unrelenting tie that won’t release its hold.

I no sooner rest up from this dose of family togetherness than I’m on a plane. My mother’s last surviving aunt has died, so most of us go to Chicago for the funeral. I’m gone for several days, and when I call home to check for messages, I’m pleased to find there’s one from Paul. He says he’ll call again when he gets back to town.

Chapter 3

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About a week after I get home from Chicago, Jen knocks on my door. It’s early, a few minutes before eight. I’ve just made coffee but haven’t had time to drink it yet. I’m still in my robe, but so is she: a plush terry‐cloth robe with a medallion on the breast pocket. Her thick, short gray hair is matted against her head. That alone tells me something’s wrong; Jen is always pulled together. Her eyes are red, her tanned face puffy. She looks as if she hasn’t slept.

I hook my arm through hers and pull her into the apartment. Jen is tall and solid in a singularly American country‐club sort of way. This morning, there’s nothing hearty about her: she looks lost.

She slumps down onto the couch. She’s crying so hard, I can hardly understand what she’s saying. Bit by bit she gets it all out. The police called early that morning. She expels the next sentence as if the words alone are fatal. “Roger’s dead.” They found her brother yesterday afternoon. He didn’t show up for a golf game, and he didn’t answer his phone when his friends called. They got worried and notified the police.

“My God, Jen, I’m so sorry.” We’re sitting next to each other. I’m holding her hand, stroking it the way I do to calm my nieces and nephews when they cry. “Was it his heart?” I assume so. He’d had a heart transplant several years earlier, I recall.

“He’s been murdered,” she says, sitting up straight. And as if I might not have heard the word the first time, she repeats herself, “They say he’s been murdered.” She spills out the rest of the story in a rush, as if she’s eager to be rid of it. The police found him at home, in his bedroom—strangled. It took them several hours to reach Paul.

“Paul says he was home, just not answering his phone,” she says. “Why wouldn’t he answer his phone?” she asks, as if I might know. “It took them hours to reach him.” Her gaze drifts away to the view outside my window. Suddenly she shifts back to me. “Why wouldn’t he answer his phone?” Again, as if I might know.

I want to comfort her. Over the years we’ve been neighbors, we’ve grown to love each other in that realm between family and friendship. I murmur words of comfort, but I know nothing will ward off the days and months of pain that have barely begun.

Within a few minutes, she reverts to the pragmatic self I know best and tells me their plans. Now that everyone in the family has been contacted, she, Doug, and Paul will fly out to Albuquerque this afternoon to meet with the police. Paul insists on seeing his father’s body, Jen says, even though the police recommend against it. “It’s the strangling,” she adds, launching into a gruesome explanation of how it distorts a person’s face. As she does so, her own face relaxes, as if the clinical details cancel out the reality. “But Paul insists,” she repeats, as she gets up from the couch. “I don’t understand.”

At the door, I wrap my arms around her and hold her, my right hand rubbing her back, the way a mother comforts a child. I can think of nothing to say, except to assure her that I’ll be here whenever she needs me. As I stand in my doorway and watch her walk down the hall, it occurs to me that her life will never be the same.

This is her first brush with a violent crime, but not mine. More than twenty years ago, one of my mother’s cousins was found beaten to death in his Chicago apartment. They never found the murderer, which had, I always thought, everything to do with the fact that John, a man who always brought laughter to a room, was homosexual. The police speculated he’d met his murderer in a bar and either my cousin invited him home or his killer followed him. I was eighteen, old enough to gather from the phone calls my mother received that the police hadn’t tried very hard to solve the crime.

I suspect Roger’s murderer will be more vigorously pursued, even though Roger, too, I suspect, was a closeted homosexual. It always seemed obvious to me from Jen’s stories that all the young men Roger put through college or helped set up in business were lovers he snared with money. But curiously, Jen never once acknowledged the possibility that these relationships were sexual. It’s as if she had a blind spot.

Though I have no feelings for this man I’d met only briefly, I’m worried about my friend, for no matter the precise circumstances, no matter the motive, even the few details I know of Roger’s death horrify me. I can’t help but think the facts that emerge in the murder investigation will force her to accept a truer picture of her idealized brother, and add an extra layer of grief.

The next time I see Paul is at his father’s memorial service. The vigorous man I remember has disappeared. He’s dressed in a dark suit, expensive and well cut, but too large by at least a size; perhaps it’s his father’s. I observe this like a reporter. It isn’t something you can ever completely turn off, but at moments like this, my compassionate self wants to reprimand the cool mental note taker.

I arrive at the service a few minutes late and slip into a pew toward the back of the large modern church with clerestory windows. No casket, not even an urn. The police haven’t released the body yet. The church is crowded even though Roger moved from this city years ago. I plan to stay only long enough to greet Jen and Doug. They’ll be busy talking to the people they haven’t seen since Roger’s death. Besides, I hardly know Paul. When I tell Jen I’ll see her at home, though, she insists I go talk to her nephew. “He asked if you’d be here,” she says, nodding in his direction.

I follow her eyes. He’s surrounded by several people, most of them women. One is the woman from the party. I tell Jen he looks busy.

“I don’t recognize most of them,” she says. She leans in closer. “I sometimes wonder how many real friends he has. With all that money.” She quickly downshifts into a smile when Paul looks up at us. “Go talk to him,” she says.

“Warn me. Are any of them his ex‐wife?”

“No,” she says, “but I recognize a few ex‐girlfriends.”

Great, I think. A harem. Jen draws my attention to the woman standing to Paul’s left. She has teased blond hair and heavy makeup and a body that looks as if it sees a lot of gym time. She was his first girlfriend, Jen confides, adding, “Paul says they’re just friends now, but…” She drops the thought, but I can tell she wants me to finish it.