A Passel of Plumeria (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Walter was in all imaginable misery. What, he wanted to know, did she mean by "casual-like?" How could she be sure that he or she wouldn't get attached to someone else? And what about sex?

After Walter's sentencing, Anna Marie would tell her interviewer that all she'd wanted was to "have some fun." Her response at this moment was to erupt in a fit of giggles and, when that was done, to reach out and touch Walter's face. "The Acknomel's working great," she said. "That's good. We'll get some more." (In a separate article, her high school grade advisor was quoted as saying that although Anna Marie was "not stupid," she was "a bit of a space cadet with little or no self-awareness.")

Inasmuch as a life without Anna Marie was inconceivable to him now, and fearful of antagonizing her, Walter declined to challenge her proposal. He reminded himself that she still wanted him close, that she still needed him. It was only a phase she was going through. In no time at all things could revert to where they'd been. With the exception of him seeing other girls, which was out of the question, he agreed to the arrangement she asked for.

As it played out the arrangement would last nearly three years, years in which, and despite the fact that the routines of their relationship were not appreciably altered, Walter was obliged to live with a tension that varied in degree but never fully dissipated. Unable to feel that his place in her life was secure—she was his girl and she wasn't all at once—he was also burdened with a new and abiding apprehension about her physical and emotional well-being.

Anna Marie, who'd anticipate her dates with unabashed excitement and who spoke openly with Walter about them (as openly, he assumed, as she dared to since she consistently denied having sex), would be "indisposed" once or twice every couple of months. It was always with guys she referred to as the "devil-may-care ones" but who Walter regarded as "dangerous" or "sketchy." One was a drag-racer, another was into hang gliding. Most of these boys failed to sufficiently "share their passions" with her and were summarily dropped, while those who did include her in their activities, and in whom she sustained an interest, quickly cut her loose. In both cases, but principally the latter, which would initially induce periods of extreme elation, weeks of depression could follow. Never gloating or vindictive when she was down, Walter was, on the contrary, sympathetic and solicitous. He admitted to jealousy, but increasingly perceiving himself as her "guardian"—if the spells of melancholy weren't worrisome enough, her fervid descriptions of her adventures with the drag-racer and the hang gliding enthusiast, respectively chronicling near collisions and violently shifting wind currents, horrified him—he maintained that "all that really mattered" was Anna Marie's welfare. That she'd return from dates she labeled her "best" with a smarting cut or contusion "concerned" him, he imparted to his confidant, "more than anything else."

In the hope of dissuading her from pursuing "outside engagements," and reasoning that he would be with her should she be in jeopardy, Walter, at one point, and as inimical as it was for him, determined to emulate the boys Anna Marie was drawn to. Though he dreaded an affirmative reply, he offered to take her up on her Everglades idea. But it was too late. Her sense of him was already fixed. "Wally, you know you don't want to do that," she said, slowly shaking her head and cupping his cheek with her hand.

A few months after they'd graduated from high school, the month of his eighteenth birthday, Walter had left home and along with the purchase of his first vehicle—a pickup truck that he could use for work—he'd rented a furnished room in Anna Marie's immediate neighborhood. That room remained his place of residence until the day of the incident.

From his close proximity, and with his newly acquired wheels, Walter began to surreptitiously trail Anna Marie when she went on her dates. His purpose, he said, was to be there for her should she require his assistance. Pressed by his confidante, he conceded that he was also motivated by a need to see for himself "just what she was up to." As chance would have it, the proceedings Walter witnessed were confined to the stuff of ordinary dating. But while it never became necessary for him to go to Anna Marie's aid, what he observed was enough to cause him no small measure of grief.

Walter, generally at night, would find himself chain-smoking and sipping beer in the pickup outside a club or movie theater Anna Marie and her date had gone to. (He kept an empty gasoline can on the floor under the glove compartment to urinate in.) Clocking every couple in the crowds that emerged from the place he was monitoring—feeling his blood jump when he saw a girl wearing her colors—he would, once he'd spotted Anna Marie and the guy she was with for sure, start his motor and set out after them. Most of the time the guy would bring her directly back to her apartment house. In these circumstances, Walter would park as close as he could get to the house—sometimes recklessly close—and stick around to see what she did. Anna Marie, Walter was invariably relieved to note, took no one inside. But when she lingered too long in the car, or if there was a more than perfunctory kiss at the door, it would take all of his will not to shout to her to break it up. There were also nights, less frequent but well-nigh unbearable, when she'd go to the guy's digs. On those occasions, Walter would wait for as long as it took for her to rematerialize in the entranceway—in several instances hours elapsed—and to either be driven home by the guy or to hurry into a cab that had been ordered. Although she'd eventually buy a car of her own, Anna Marie rarely used it for her liaisons.

On nights Anna Marie was with someone else and Walter was, for one reason or another, unable to follow her, he would, beginning at eleven o'clock, call her on her personal line to see if she was home yet. If she answered he could go to bed. If she didn't answer he would call her at 15-minute intervals until she did. He couldn't sleep unless he knew she was home. When he heard Anna Marie's voice Walter would hang up without speaking and she never questioned him about the calls.

At 2 a.m. on one such night, and well into the arrangement's third year now, Anna Marie's phone rang two-dozen times with no response and Walter felt something he hadn't felt before, a fierce and consuming anger. He wished that Anna Marie had engaged in one of her foolhardy exploits and that an accident had resulted, a disfiguring accident that would make her repugnant to other boys. But merely allowing this thought to enter his mind made him as angry with himself as he was with her. It was so far removed from what love was supposed to be about. And he would never want Anna Marie to be his woman because she had no other options. He wanted to win Anna Marie. Indeed, in the circumscribed world of his fixation, a world that had narrowed more and more with the inception of the arrangement, nothing less than his very life depended upon her freely and fully giving herself to him. To claim her by default would kill him just as surely as losing her would. He recognized, of course, that the prospects for a positive outcome weren't good. The arrangement itself was ample evidence of that and if further signs were needed, whenever he tried to discuss a future together she changed the subject. The problem, his gut was telling him, was that he wasn't loving her enough. But what did that mean? How much more could he love her than he already did? He didn't know. He did know that she wasn't happy, not even with the arrangement. Not really. He'd begun to think of her—the perception bruised his heart—as some kind of pain junkie, and he viewed the boys she went out with as her dealers. They wanted a sexual score and she was, certainly now and then, trading her body for the hurt they promised. If they delivered she'd get high for awhile and then all raggedy and strung out when she got cut off. "It's just sports and games anyway," she'd said to him on one of her low days and after an especially vivid recurrence of that bad dream. "Most of the time it's no better than a scary movie. No souvenir afterwards to prove the point. You know what I'm saying?"

What she was saying had, like the reason for her chronic discontent itself, baffled him. And believing that her equanimity was his to secure, and that its achievement would assure her devotion to him, he'd continually—he was doing it now—ransacked his knowledge of her looking for clues to what he was missing. Thus far, however, his incessant brooding had yielded only frustration. But when he called her again, and she answered this time, which caused a wave of affection for her to flush through him, but also, and confusingly at first because his anger was gone, restored the notion of a maimed Anna Marie to the foreground of his mind, he had what amounted to an epiphany. He understood, and would convey to his confidant with a remark the astuteness of which astonished me, that "It isn't pain and injury Anna Marie gets off on, it's the feeling of surviving them." But that wasn't the whole of it. The rest, which he was careful not to disclose until a jailhouse exchange with his friend following the incident, was the realization that had arrived with his insight of what loving her enough meant and of what it might demand of him.

Shortly thereafter, on an afternoon he was at work and under the assumption that she was too, Walter received a call. "I'm still here," were the first words Anna Marie uttered. She was in an airfield phone booth twenty miles from Kendall. A boy she'd recently encountered and mentioned only in passing to Walter had taken her sky diving and once they'd landed remembered an "urgent matter he had to attend to." She was "busted up and stranded." Walter, doubly disturbed by her uncharacteristic omission of advance notice about the date, found her holding her wrist. "I tripped when I touched down," she said. "I tried to break the fall. I think I might have fractured something." He rushed her to an emergency room where the diagnosis was a simple sprain. In good spirits for a week, about as long as it took for her wrist to heal and for her to grasp that the boy had blown her off, she gradually became pensive and withdrawn. Then, in the midst of her despondency, the cycle was in motion again. A guy she'd met at work, another biker, had asked her out and she had accepted.

"I don't know," Walter said.

"I thought we had an understanding," Anna Marie said.

"I don't know," Walter said.

"Walter," she said, "what do you want from me?"

"I want you to be okay," he blurted. "To be okay and to love me."

"You are so sweet," she said, plainly moved by his statement and stepping towards him.

He readied himself for a passionate clinch but what he got was a kiss on the cheek.

Confronted by a parade of cars, all of which, and oddly, required new batteries, Walter was backed up with work and well on the far side of his regular hours. The minute he finished he climbed into the pickup and set out for Route 1, the highway that would take him the 150 miles to Key West. He'd been experiencing a turbulence in his chest the entire day and warring thoughts were roiling his brain. A long drive would maybe pull him together.

Once he was past Key Largo's garish strip of motels, fish shacks, hamburger stands and gift shops, the road opened to water on both sides and there were stretches in which no land could be seen. To be on this road in the middle of the ocean ordinarily blew his mind. But there was no thrill in it this time. This time what was happening in his mind shut out his surroundings. Holding the wheel steady against occasional squalls, he kept his eyes on the asphalt and the traffic in front of him. He wanted, right now, no wondrous seascapes or stunning sunsets, only the pickup's motion and the grind of its engine. He could just as well have been driving through a tunnel. He stopped solely for gas and to relieve himself, and never turned the radio on. Arriving at Key West in three hours, he drove half the length of the island where he made a right turn and then another right onto an avenue that led him directly back to Route 1. By the time he returned to Kendall, deep into the night, in a light rain and to streets empty and hushed, his heart was still beating too hard, but his head was clear.

(Continued in Part 3)