A Passel of Plumeria (Part 1)

This time the news was completely delivered in under a minute, but I caught it and it made me rise from my seat.

“Yes!” I heard myself say to the TV. “Yes! Of course!”

It was 1992 now and while years had passed since Walter and Anna Marie were an object of media interest I, for one, hadn’t forgotten this couple. I'd first become aware of them—and been as aghast at Walter's actions as everyone else—on the evening of the incident, an evening in July of 1985, when New York TV stations carried reports from their South Florida affiliates. It wasn’t until the fall though, when they made the wires again on the day Walter was sentenced, that they got a serious grip on my attention.

What transpired at the sentencing had also triggered a major focus on Walter and Anna Marie in the Miami Herald and the Kendall Star, the journal representing the Miami suburb in which they lived, and I was, for the next few mornings, a regular customer at the out-of-town newspaper store on Broadway and 72nd Street. As I'm prone to do, I was thinking about the breadth of human resourcefulness in response to the horrific knowledge of being mortal, about the variety of remedies, usually subconscious, often implausible and sometimes abhorrent, that we've fashioned for the mother of all anxieties. And albeit a strictly visceral reaction at this stage, I was, upon seeing the headlines, at odds with what these papers were making of the extraordinary events at the sentencing. In step with the newscasts I'd watched, the Herald referred to Walter and Anna Marie as the "Demented Duo" and a piece in the Star was titled "The Twisted Psychology of a Victim." But notwithstanding my quarrel with what struck me as limited vision, both the Star and the Herald published extensive articles that promised details, and details being what I wanted (and was gratified to discover—they would buttress my faith in my instincts) I read everything. I found the Star especially valuable. It ran interviews not only with Anna Marie, who recalled entire conversations with Walter almost verbatim, but with family members and others. And it printed numerous photographs, images of the incident site among them.

Twenty years old at the time, Walter was five nine and squarely built with unruly shoulder-length hair that shrouded much of his angular face but failed to wholly obscure a profusion of severe acne scars. Although he had his share of friends, one of them a confidante who was interviewed at length, his inclination was to keep to himself, and snapshots from his early childhood—he was the youngest of four boys—revealed that his perpetually dour countenance had been a lifelong characteristic. From the week following his high school graduation through to the incident date, Walter worked as an auto mechanic at a popular gas station where he was reputed to be indolent and less than tidy when it came to the simple tasks but was also known as a talented problem solver. He'd procrastinate about the easy things, and leave a wrench in a gear shift or oil stains on a steering wheel when he was finally done. But in respect to a car's more elusive issues he would engage and persevere until he'd produced the correct diagnosis and solution. His declared ambition was to eventually own a repair shop. His preoccupation, however, was Anna Marie.

Anna Marie was two months younger than Walter and a full head shorter. If she could claim prominent breasts and large green eyes with long and thick lashes, she was hardly, at least insofar as her appearance was concerned, a woman you'd expect a man to be obsessed with. Her nose was too big, her cheeks too fleshy, her chin too brief, her bottom too broad and her "dirty" blonde hair (which she wore at shoulder length or pulled into a ponytail) too stringy. A brother of Walter's described her as "maybe a six." Employed since high school as an assistant manager in a supermarket in Kendall's largest shopping center, she lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother who was suffering from an abundance of ailments and essentially house-bound. It was the same apartment in which she'd been raised. Her father, a building construction worker, had died on her ninth birthday, not long after he was trapped in a fire ignited by a gas explosion. She was an only child.

Walter and Anna Marie met in their junior year of high school and that was when, as another of Walter's brothers expressed it, the "simple teenage crush that just got crazy" commenced. Walter had apparently been love-struck the instant he saw Anna Marie. They were in three of the same classes and in the opening weeks of the term he maneuvered to sit near her whenever he could. (He would lean towards her to capture her fragrance, to study her face and to watch for the bra straps that tended to slip below the short sleeves of her blouses.) But she showed no interest in him, never so much as glanced in his direction, and his natural shyness exacerbated by the inflamed condition of his pimples in this period, it was beyond him to make a move on her.

Then, on a midweek morning in late October, she was passing his desk and tripped over his book bag which happened to be protruding into the aisle. She crashed against the desk in front of his and he heard her groan. Seizing the opportunity to help her, he felt the cool flesh of her arm in his hand and would "forever remember" the "electrical current" that charged through him when they made this first physical contact. As she composed herself, pressing her fingers to her forehead—she was in evident pain—she took a hard look at him and smiled.

"Is this your way of flirting?" She said.

Walter, taken aback, his face hot, had no answer. He only gaped at her.

"The book bag," she said, still smiling. "Well, it worked. My name's Anna Marie. What's yours?" She held out her hand and he noticed a welt beginning to form over one of her eyes. "I could have croaked," she said. "But I'm still here."

Dating by the weekend, Walter and Anna Marie were "going steady" in a matter of days and they defined their relationship that way for a full year. "Sixteen! The best year of my life," Walter would say. Much of their time was spent in Anna Marie's room. Down a long hallway from her mother's and largely unchanged since her girlhood, the capacious room was painted pink and all but consumed by a collection of gargantuan ragdolls and oversized, multi-colored pillows strewn on the bed and the floor, and they'd talk spiritedly there for hours at a stretch.

As a rule Walter had little to say about himself and spoke mainly about cars. He could name the make, model and year of every car on the road. But on one evening he told Anna Marie that he'd never felt "wholeheartedly loved" by his parents. Walter's parents owned a modest one-story house a short bus ride from Anna Marie and Walter shared a bedroom with his second-youngest brother—which accounted for why Anna Marie seldom reciprocated his visits. His father was a mid-level executive at an auto parts company and his mother a part-time bookkeeper. They were depicted by the Herald as "intensely private people" and few in the community were personally acquainted with them. "Don't get me wrong," Walter said. "They're okay. They've done what they were supposed to. They haven't abused me or anything like that. But I never get the strokes my brothers get. I think—my mother mostly—they didn't want another kid, definitely not another boy, and that I probably wasn't supposed to happen."

In turn Anna Marie, who was enamored of horror films and would chatter about their plots in every detail, abandoned her favorite topic to tell Walter about her father in the ICU after the fire. "He was in God-awful pain," she said. "Even though he was taking morphine the pain just overwhelmed it. He was in agony and couldn't move 'cause they had him strapped down. Then he breathed funny and passed away, just like that. All that pain, it was for nothing. What's the point of pain if you don't live through it? If it had been something he had to feel to stay alive, that would be one thing. But then he died. I still dream about it. And about dying like that myself."

They also made out a lot. The both of them still virgins, they brought each other to climax with their hands.

In their first year Walter would experience facets of Anna Marie that served to strengthen his feelings for her. She'd shop for acne ointments and then apply them to his face herself. Walking next to him on the street, she'd suddenly, for no particular reason, grab and embrace him. But she was not without some troubling aspects.

Given to a seemingly willful carelessness, she'd often march across streets against the light and in total disregard of flowing traffic. And habitually leaving her opened handbag on a restaurant table or chair when she went to the ladies room or was engrossed in conversation, she was time and again a victim of theft. (After one such event in Walter's company, he took to holding her bag when he was out with her.)

What's more, there were stretches that could last for several days in which she'd become listless and distant. The loss of her attentiveness upset Walter. But so did her unhappiness. He couldn't stand to see her in distress. He wanted her to feel good. He needed her to feel good. "What happens to her happens to me," he said to the friend in whom he confided. "It's like my nerves are soldered to her nerves."

For Anna Marie, what was most impressive about Walter in this beginning year was his "gentle nature" and the "incredible generosity"—the steady flow of presents and flowers—that accompanied it. But vying for top spot with those distinctions was his "slovenliness." His schoolwork notes were such "an unholy mess" that she had to spend entire days organizing them for him. And his "indifference to personal care" was "almost a joke." He'd wear the same shirt for a week. His sneakers had holes in them. Though she loved his long hair it was "insistently unkempt" and she wished he would "style it more." Sometimes his "seedy" appearance was "seriously aggravating." More often than not it was "endearing."

They had their first real sex when they were seventeen. Walter deemed the milestone near to spiritual. Anna Marie thought it was "good," but that something was missing. "Do you have to treat me so delicately?" She asked the next time they slept together "Why don't you push me around a little?" But he couldn't do that. Hurting her was the last thing he could do. She frowned at him and he felt chastened and inadequate.

And it was during the year they turned seventeen, and not long after she'd asked Walter to take her kayaking in the Everglades and he'd exclaimed—"Are you kidding? With the alligators?"—that Anna Marie remarked to a friend: "Walter's pusillanimous."

"Pusill-what?" the friend said.

"Funny word, huh?" Anna Marie said. "It came up in a crossword. It means he's chickenshit. He's so sweet to me, which I cherish. But sometimes he's too timid. It's all sugar and no spice."

It was also in that year that a shift occurred in their relationship.

A new reality began, Walter soon realized, on the day an older boy gave Anna Marie a ride on his motorcycle. When Walter connected with her later she was wearing a heavy bandage on her ankle. "It still stings," she said breathlessly. "We skidded on a slick patch and we actually grazed the ground before he got the bike upright again." She lifted the bandage to show him the burn. "Do you think it'll leave a scar?" He saw her eyes widen at the prospect. "It was scary," she went on, "especially when I felt the scrape. But now I feel terrific, like indestructible—is there anything better?"

A few days after that she broached the idea of an "open relationship." She would date other boys and he could see other girls. "From time to time and just, you know, casual-like," she said.

In a voice he didn't recognize as his own, Walter said, "You're my girl."

"It won't be so different," Anna Marie said. "We'll still be together. Most everything will be the same. There'll just be times when one or the other of us will be...indisposed."

(Continued in Part 2)