The Killer (Part 1)

Emerging from the john with her coat draped over her arm and carrying her overnight bag, Sharon tossed a gift-wrapped box onto the living room couch where I was reclining and half-asleep.

“I would have given you this tonight,” she said. “Happy fucking birthday, Roy. You’ve traveled around the sun thirty-five times now and you still haven’t seen the fucking light. Enjoy the rest of the fucking weekend.”

And then, slamming the apartment door behind her with a force that knocked a picture from the wall, she was gone.

For minutes afterwards I stayed put on the couch, processing what was clearly her permanent departure. Yes, it disturbed me that her decampment had come on the afternoon of this particular birthday. And I did experience an uneasiness about the void her absence from my life would leave. (Although we’d maintained separate Greenwich Village residences, she’d been my steady girlfriend for nearly six months and slept at my bigger place a lot.) But these concerns were quickly dissolved in a wash of relief; a relief succeeded by apathy.

Not to say that I’d stopped liking Sharon. I still had an affection for her. The issue was that I couldn’t really love her. And her persistent demands, especially in the last weeks, to move in, to marry, to have a baby, had become oppressive. (She was just months younger than me and the alarm on that biological clock had been sounding long before our hookup.) Of course, the strain I’d been made to feel in this period wasn’t all about Sharon specifically. It was rooted in the fact that the depth of emotion required to respond to such entreaties had always been off my spectrum. I was more than capable of lust. But love, certainly of the kind she wanted, was something alien to me.

Indeed, what transpired with Sharon had merely perpetuated a lifelong pattern. In one way or another, it had happened in all of my “serious” relationships with women.

What I’m referring to would invariably begin in the early stages of routine intimacy. And it didn’t take much to trigger it. I’d hear the sounds they made in the bathroom, or notice a simple mole or dimpled hollow on a breast, and instantly suffer a spasm of revulsion that was accompanied by a heart jolt of fear — it was as though I’d caught a glimpse of the grave itself. If the intensity of that reflex passed quickly there was an insidious aftereffect. An emotional distancing would be left in its wake, a distancing that was beyond me to bridge. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake my perception of women’s bodies for what they were, an atrocious and ephemeral concoction of pipes, wiring and nasty liquids that nature had fiendishly devised and then camouflaged by, at best, a pretty face or figure. Any ardor I may initially have felt would fade, and sex would become obligatory and mechanical. In the aftermath of the ensuing split-up, that could take place anywhere from weeks to months later, I would feel only a listlessness in the company of any new women I met. My torpor would last until my libido necessarily reawakened — it represented, after all, a biological imperative. Then, not counting one-nighters that were over too fast for me to find cause to recoil, I would once again enter a familiar scenario.

Sharon had identified my resistance to her wishes as “commitment phobia” and I should acknowledge that I’d given her mixed signals, which undoubtedly shaped her reading of me. But if I’d led her on a little it had nothing to do with an ambivalence about marriage or monogamy per se. It was because I was experiencing a conflict of a very different kind. I was approaching my middle years with no significant couplings to show for it, and given that she was comely, personable and intelligent, and that I would soon age past the quality options she signified, I thought I ought to want her. As a result, I couldn’t bring myself to thoroughly discourage her aspirations. Despite her constant complaints about the noise that extended into the early morning hours from the nightclub across the street and just four floors below — I barely noticed it myself — she’d remained adamant about taking occupancy (with getting hitched and becoming a mother to quickly follow). And I had intimated that, when I turned thirty-five, I might be ready. If, all along, I knew that my readiness wasn’t likely, I did hope that something would rescue me from my condition. But when the time came nothing had changed.

“So, are you prepared to take the next steps?” She’d asked me in bed that morning, snuggling behind me.

“Shit,” I grunted. “I’m not.”

My mother told me once that when I was born the obstetrician had remarked that I was “high-strung.” Since no further details were recalled by her, I can only imagine that I evacuated the womb trembling with terror. When I think of this, I’m reminded of another ghastly aspect of women’s bodies. This one involves nature’s design of the female anatomy and it makes perfect sense of my trepidation. A freshman at Pratt would know better than to locate the portal to the world in such close proximity to the anus. This ungodly configuration made the moment of one’s birth comparable to exiting a subway station in pre-gentrified Jersey City.

I’m not trying to be funny. As it occurred to me later, the doctor’s comment had predicted a handicap to which I’d been sentenced. If my ignorance as an infant hadn’t shielded me from too much clarity, as an adult the capacity to indulge in illusions and mental manipulations that mute too keen an awareness of the uglier realities of existence would be glaringly absent.

And the consequences of this circumstance were hardly limited to my inability to deeply connect with the women in my life. I was also, and even more grievously, afflicted with a hyperconsciousness of my own physical composition and fate (which I suppose the women simply mirrored). The sinister underside of nature being in all ways evident to me, I lived with a dread that would fluctuate from high to low, but which was constantly there. The horror that awaited everything corporeal and that I knew their beauty was intended to distract us from, a bright spring day or magnificent sunset were not, for example, phenomena to rejoice in, but ominous and disquieting. (If you want to know what nature is, watch those shows on the animal channels for a demonstration. See how it doesn’t give an antelope’s ass about the destruction of life, but just makes more.)

My mental state, however, was a secret that I never revealed, not to anyone. More than a little self-conscious about my deficiency, and my socializing being minimal anyway (I had friends but none with whom I was very tight), I was loath to talk about it. And inasmuch as I was functional, decent looking, educated and with a well-paying, if humdrum job, no one I came into contact with would suspect that something might be wrong. To my knowledge, the most negative thing ever expressed about me was that I tended to be “sullen.”

“Sullen.” I could summon no argument against that description. Veiled as my inner wretchedness may have been by a determination to appear as together as possible, I was still, and much too often, solemn and visibly ill at ease.

Sharon’s parting critique of me, let it be said, had been off by 180 degrees. My problem wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the light but — I’ll say it once again — that I’d seen too clearly what it exposed.

(And speaking of Sharon — and, while we’re at it, “illusions” and “mental manipulations”  — what is romantic love if not a method used to transform the body from a source of apprehension into something quite the opposite — a vessel of transcendent and seemingly eternal pleasure? The brutal return to a simple perishable body is probably the fundamental reason the termination of a romantic attachment is so shattering for so many people.)

As I’ve noted, I hoped that something would happen to deliver me from my situation. Well one evening, and out of nowhere, something did happen; something at once trivial and seismic, and that I could not have foreseen.

A bitterly cold midwinter month of dragging myself through the rounds of my days had passed since Sharon took off and I was walking to the laundry room in my building’s basement when I felt a hard crunch under my foot. Looking down I saw that I’d stepped on a large water bug and that its crushed remains were oozing from under my shoe. In the same instant I also saw a second bug right next to my shoe. Apparently in reaction to the event, it had jumped some six inches straight up and, upon landing, scurried away. I felt no disgust or remorse over what I’d done. But I wasn’t indifferent either. No, what I felt was something like a thrill that made me want to repeat the experience. Compelled to chase after the companion bug, I cornered it behind a trash can where I dug my heel into it and watched it break apart, its lifeless tentacles still gently waving. With this action I felt a full-blown thrill akin to the rush from a line or two of cocaine or speed. But this one was joined by a revelation that had the impact of an epiphany.

 I could end my consuming difficulty with nature by becoming one with its monstrousness!

Before I was back upstairs I knew what I had to do and, given the size of my difficulty, what the commensurate scale of it needed to be.

CONTINUED IN PART 2https://www.abctales.com/story/robert-levin/killer-part-2