Boundaries (12 page)

"You scared a
me
, Anne?"

She shakes her head quickly, glances at him, grins, looks away. "No, David. Just things. Most things."

"Scared how?"

She gives him a puzzled look, then it’s apparent that she understands. "David, I get nervous. I get scared, like . . . when we’re riding in the car and Dad’s driving too fast. Like that." A quick smile creases her lips, then as quickly is gone, as if she’s pleased with her analogy, but is also saddened by what it conveys.

David shakes his head. "But you’re not always
ridin
’ in the car, Annie."

She shakes her head, frowning. "You don’t understand—"

But suddenly, he does understand, and he’s embarrassed by his apparent
thickheadedness
. He nods quickly. "Yes I do. I know what you mean, I know what you mean." But he doesn’t elaborate on it; there is no need. He asks her, "Why, Annie?"

"I don’t know," she whispers. "And that scares me, too."

"Gee, there sure are a lot of things that scare you!" It is meant as a joke, but as soon as it comes out, David realizes that it’s cruel, so he apologizes quickly, and adds, "I wish I could help you, Sis. I can see when you’re scared. You look like you think someone’s gonna hit you."

"It’s how I feel, David."

"Yeah." He nods. "I know."
Know what?
he asks himself. "I know," he repeats, and pats her hand. Her fingers curl over his hand. A quivering smile comes to him. He says, "You’ll be okay, Sis. It’s just . . . growing up is all."

She says nothing. She grips his hand very tightly.

~ * ~

Christian Grieg sat alone in his house and wondered why Karen Duffy had fallen in love with him, and why he had let her do it. He thought that he could have stopped it. He thought that he knew the reasons why people fell in love, why she had fallen in love with him; and the fact was that she hadn’t. Not really. She thought she had. Everyone believed in love, in falling in love, in being in love, but it was no more real or reliable an emotion than superstition. (And, in a strange way, it was unnatural, too. Did animals "fall in love"? No. They mated. They produced babies. But they didn’t trip all over themselves about "falling in love.")

Karen loved him because she thought she understood him, she supposed that she saw a chink in his armor, a tear in his
façade
of strength and stability. So she wanted to mother him. She saw weakness in him and wanted to protect him from it—and, with her love and affection, soften the blows of a hurting and uncaring world (which, also seeing his weakness, would take advantage of it).

She probably even imagined that she knew him better than he knew himself. The newly-in-love always imagined such things, always supposed that they had been allowed a glimpse of real humanness, which is real weakness.

He took a drag of his cigarette. After five years, he had begun smoking again, and though he was repulsed by it, he accepted that he needed it, so he smoked with great satisfaction, drawing the smoke in very slowly and deeply and letting it out in great gray clouds through his nose and mouth. It had made him dizzy at first, but that had passed.

He knew that Karen hoped he was in love with her. It was obvious. No one says "I love you" without expecting reciprocation. So he’d said it. It was the kind thing to do.

He wished now, as he sat alone and smoked and remembered his kind deception, that he was not the person that he was. He wished he were younger, a child, when most of his decisions had been made for him, when he had not had to make the kinds of decisions that circumstances forced him to make now. He wished he were ten or twelve years old again. He was someone he liked, then. He hadn’t even thought about whether he liked himself or not. But he thought about it now, twenty-five years later, and he knew it was true. He had liked himself. And now he liked the child he had been. He guessed it was that way with everyone—with Karen, and even with David, who lay quietly dying. We become people we despise, Christian thought, because we grow into adulthood, and independence, and that changes us—necessarily and regretfully—into people who have to hurt other people in order to survive and remain independent.

Who can really love the grasping and desperate and hurtful adult?

Who can despise the guileless and dependent child?

He realized at once that Karen loved the child in him. He smiled. He enjoyed the revelation.

The cigarette he was holding had burned down to a nub that burned the insides of his fingers. He stared at the nub for a moment, aware of the hot pain it was causing, but slow to react to it. He thought briefly that there was importance in the fact of his slow reaction. He thought that some change was taking place inside him. A metamorphosis. It would be truly fascinating to witness.

He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray near his chair.

~ * ~

It is the morning of Anne’s murder. There is bright sun and warmth. Inside her house, Anne Case is humming. She’s unaware of it. Her humming is low and sweet sounding, though the tune is unrecognizable, borrowed from bits of this tune and that tune, until it becomes a tune of her own making.

She’s watering plants. She has
Dracena
, Boston Fern,
Diffenbachia
, Croton,
Sheffelliera
, and they are all around the house, several dozen of them within the house’s fourteen rooms, though there are now none in the third floor ballroom; the room has begun to make her very uncomfortable in the past couple of weeks. It is the room where the rape happened.

Anne is thinking about the rape as she hums. Not the rape itself, not the physical act of penetration and violence that the man perpetrated on her, but the surprise of finding him there, in that room. She keeps her house locked. She thought she knew the house, its moods, its movements; she thought that the house spoke to her in its way, and she was surprised when she saw the form in the corner, across the big room. The man waiting with his arms folded.

The light on him was suggestive—light from the window, from the spot lamp on the front of the house. Light that was reflected and refracted up from below, through the window, off a mirror, and then in a narrow rectangle onto the man’s crotch, which was what she focused on first. Not his face. Because she knew he intended rape. She knew him, and she knew that it was what he wanted—to violate her. To give her fear and pain.

She realizes that she’s humming as she remembers. She stops humming. The humming offends her. It’s an impropriety. Like laughing at a graveside.

The morning’s light and warmth has begun to heat her house up. Reluctantly, she goes to a window nearby to open it. She finds that it’s unlocked. She tries to remember if she locked it and tells herself that of course she locked it because she locks all the windows in her house and she keeps them locked. But she could have unlocked it. The day before she could have unlocked it because it was hot then, as it promises to be today. But she does not remember unlocking it.

It occurs to her all at once that there is someone else in the house, that the house is talking to her and telling her that there’s an intruder. She chooses to believe this but not to act upon it. Acting upon it would be an admission of trouble this bright warm morning and she does not want to admit there is trouble until she has real proof.

She’s a tall, thin woman, graceful and pleasant looking, and the man watching her thinks that she is deserving of rape simply because she is so pleasant looking, so graceful, so nearly ethereal. People aren’t supposed to be that way. People are clods. People are clumsy. People snort and belch and fall down. That is the way God intended them to be. And it is not the way this woman is. People were not meant to be like the animals—graceful and ethereal. Animals never thought about themselves or about their place in the universe. They simply were. They simply existed. And they obeyed the dictates of their genetic predispositions.

Just as he is doing.

Anne begins to hum again. She’s downstairs, near the locked door to the cellar, which is just off the expansive and well-furnished kitchen. She’s aware of the smell of olive oil from the butcher block table in the center of the kitchen, left over from a meal the night before that she shared with her brother. She’s very aware of smells; all her senses are keen. ("
Sometimes, David
," she said a long time ago to her brother, as if in awe, "
I think that I hear too well, and that I see too well. And it’s like I’m being . . . bombarded by the world around me
." She gave him a quizzical look. "
Do you understand that?
")

("
Sure, Annie
," he answered, though it was not entirely the truth—he understood only her words; it would be years before he understood their importance.)

And now she smells something else lingering beneath the smell of olive oil. She smells nervous sweat.

To her right and left a hallway leads—right—to the library, which is filled, floor to ceiling, with books that are often picked over; and—left—to the huge living room, where a grandfather clock strikes the quarter hour. There’s a boot closet ten feet from her. It’s from this closet that the man watches. He has the door opened a crack, though he’s unconcerned, now, whether she sees him.

He has been in the house throughout the night. He’s picked over some of the books in the library, and returned them to the shelves (upbringing). He has prepared a light breakfast of
Wheaties
and orange juice and has put his dishes in the dishwasher afterwards (upbringing). He has stood silently in Anne Case’s bedroom and watched her sleep, her face illuminated softly by the spot lamp on the wall below her bedroom. He has thought desperately of pulling her blankets down as she sleeps (lust).

But he needs to do violence to her and that is far more powerful within him than his lust. He wants to overcome her, to overcome her beauty, her serenity, her security here in her big house. He wants to show her that he has power and that she is powerless in the face of it.

He pushes the boot-closet door open.

She does not react. Her head stays down. She’s intent on a
Dracena
, she seems to be examining one of its leaves as she hums. The leaf is brown at the edges.

He reaches and pushes the open door hard so it slams against the wall. He sees her flinch, but that is all. She does not look up.

He whispers to her—in a voice that hisses and carries the promise of violence in it—"Hello, Anne." He pauses only a short moment. "I think you were expecting me."

She does not react. Her attention apparently remains fixed on the
Dracena’s
dying leaf. This confuses him. He watches her a moment. Has she gone deaf in the last week? he wonders. No. She
flinched
! She
did
hear him.

He pushes the closet door again. And again it slams against the wall. She does not flinch.

He has a small knife in his pocket and he pulls it out and holds it up in front of his face. The knife has a blade that’s dull from too much polishing so it looks like pewter. But he conjures up the idea that the knife glistens in the morning sunlight slanting through a nearby window.

He tells her, again in his hissing, violent whisper, "I have a knife, Anne."

She does not react.

His confusion is giving way to anger. He believes that she’s playing a game with him.

"You’re toying with me, my sweet," he says. She does not react. Her attention apparently remains fixed on the
Dracena
and its heavy dying leaf. He growls, "Don’t toy with me!"

She turns a little, so her back is to him. She’s dressed in a long gray dress that hangs nicely on her.

He steps out of the closet, still holding his small dull knife in front of him. He stops after a few steps. His breathing is very heavy and quick, though from anger and confusion rather than anticipation. He wants to speak to her but he isn’t sure what to say. He wants her acknowledgment, wants proof of her fear and of his mastery of her, because he’s certain she’s toying with him.