Beyond Obsession (23 page)

Then he stopped, and Denise was the past. He explained to Karin Aparo:

One year later, I met Brenda.
The
most gorgeous perfect person I had ever known. I was a junior and she was a senior. Oh god … I fell in love with that girl. I was absolutely, and utterly hers. She went with me to my Junior Prom and quite honestly every guy there was in total envy. I had gotten the edge back. At last. I just may owe her my life.
Everything
in my life changed. All my friends I dropped. She, though, didn't want to have
that
much to do with it all. To put it shortly—we'll never talk again. My fault again. Now I had no friends. Except Kevin Miller. Not to be a fag, or anything, but I love that kid more than a lot of things. The thought of not seeing him again makes me just cry. Not much can do that. It's all over now, though. They're all gone forever. Well anyway, Kevin and I threw my party last August and about 300–400 people showed up. Even the most popular good looking girls in the class who are usually never to be seen. I was pleased and it
really
set up my senior year. This last took an upturn and now my life is good again. At last. Oh god, don't leave me. I've lost everything I've ever had, including myself. Please don't go. Ever.

16

Amid all the passion and hyperbole, in all the dramatics and overblown elaborate phraseology of that long autobiography written for Karin, in those letters, and lyrics written for Denise, in other letters to others, something was wrong.

All his life Dennis Coleman had been searching desperately, not for something he had once had and lost but for something that had never been his, an essential ingredient in the creation of a personality. Perhaps it was because of the friction and incompatibility in his home in his earliest years, perhaps it was because of something in his psyche, but psychiatrists later said that he had never bonded, not with his mother or his father. He had been a difficult baby, had been difficult all the time he was growing up, refusing what comfort his mother offered, refusing even to let her take care of him, turning aside all her attempts at solace, all her shows of affection and caring. After a time both his mother, with whom he lived, who tried as best she could to tend him and his brother, and his father, with whom he spent weekends, turned into pals rather than parents, trying to spend time and do things with him as equals. Though he refused affection and bonding from them, he craved them from someone, as all children, as all people, do. As his letters clearly demonstrate, when he grew into adolescence, the usual crushes became not puppy love soon shed but intense and clinging attachments that sent him into despair and depression when they ended.

He was what the renowned Viennese psychoanalyst and theorist Helen Deutsch described in a classic groundbreaking study in 1934: an “as if” personality.
*
Deutsch wrote:

The individual's whole relationship to life has something about it which is lacking in genuineness and yet outwardly runs along “as if” it were complete.…

The first impression these people make is of complete normality. They are intellectually intact, gifted, and bring great understanding to intellectual and emotional problems; but … without the slightest trace of originality. On closer observation, the same thing is seen in their affective relationships to the environment. These relationships are usually intense and bear all the earmarks of friendship, love, sympathy, and understanding.… but [i]t is soon clear that all these relationships are devoid of any trace of warmth, that all expressions of emotion are formal, that all inner experience is completely excluded. If is like the performance of an actor who is technically well trained but who lacks the necessary spark to make his impersonations true to life.…

Consequences of such a relation to life are completely passive attitude to the environment with a highly plastic readiness to pick up signals from the outer world and to mold oneself and one's behavior accordingly.…

The same emptiness and the same lack of individuality which are so evident in the emotional life appear also in the moral structure. Completely without character, wholly unprincipled in the literal meaning of the term, the morals of the “as if” individuals, their ideals, their convictions are simply reflections of another person, good or bad.… A second characteristic … is their suggestibility.… Thus it can come about that the individual can be seduced into asocial or criminal acts.

They matched. They fitted, Dennis Coleman and Karin Aparo. Each had what the other craved, what the other needed. It was not just the hidden yearnings and demands. There were all the surface things, too.

They both were smart, with IQs that put them into the special realm of the intellectually very superior, yet in school both were underachievers, doing adequately sometimes, poorly at others, nowhere near as well as they should have. Dennis, says one of his closest friends, “never did homework, never studied. He was the average student as far as grades went, but he never tried. He made out just because of his intelligence. Like, we had a
Newsweek
course, where the text was the magazine. Dennis never subscribed to the magazine, and I don't think he ever read it, but he aced the tests because he knew what was going on in the world. It was like, if he was interested in something, he was about the best, and if he didn't give a damn, he just kind of squeaked by.”

Dennis himself says, “When we moved back to Glastonbury, I was an outsider. My old friends remembered me, and they'd talk to me, but I wasn't part of that crowd anymore, and they were the guys who were at the top. I was just rebellious. I didn't like school or anything, so I never read anything. It was funny, the people I was trying to be accepted by, I resented them quite a bit at the same time. And then the college thing. I hadn't ruled out going to college. I always really wanted to go on to school. But by junior year this guy was going to Harvard and this guy to MIT or Yale, here and there, and I didn't think I could compete with them. I got turned off and disgusted with the whole societal thing.”

Karin, too, did well only in those things she cared about, even though she was aware that her mother demanded perfection and that if she didn't perform to those standards, it meant trouble. But sometimes performing to expectations was just too hard; sometimes it was a way of rebelling, one of the few ways she had. “So I just finished failing a geometry exam. No problem!” she wrote in a friend's yearbook at the end of a school term.

Karin and Dennis shared a love of animals. She had two cats, Godfrey and Winston; there had been cats in her house as long as she could remember; affection for them was a thing she and her mother shared. Dennis's pet was more exotic, a ferret he named Meegan, and she had become essential in his life, something to which he could talk and confide secrets as he could to nobody else.

They shared—perhaps as important as anything, for it dominated their lives—a passion for music. His, though, was not for the classics. He had little use or appreciation for them, as she had little for anything but, although he tried to win her to what he liked. He was a trombonist in the school orchestra; he also played bass and was part of a rock group with some friends that played a few gigs here and there. “I never had a lesson,” he says. “I taught myself. I could pick up the trombone, most instruments, and be able to play.” He had a dream. He would be a rock star, a composer and performer. As their attachment deepened and became more intimate, as they began to look to the future, he wrote Karin:

I have a dream of being famous like a rock star. I really want that for me, but I'm not sure you do. To begin with, it would mean extensive travel for me and a pretty hectic life. Most of the hard part will be while you're still in college. Hard meaning travel, low budget, cruddy living, etc. You know, struggling band stuff. But if all works out o.k., then the band will be at midlife and at peak forte by the time we get married in 7–9 years. I will be about 26 or 27 then and about 9 months out of every two years would be spent “on the road.” That's 9 months straight through—then 18 for rest and recording. I dream of living that way, but there's no way I could ask you to live out
my
dream. You must live out dreams of your own. You have an incredible future for yourself. Don't follow my half-assed, fluke-of-a-life future when you've got so much more. By the time I'm 30, or 35, my career should be waning, or at an end, and I'll be rich enough to make us happy forever. Millions, Karin. What scares the hell out of me is, what if this doesn't work out?

Still, he wrote poems to her, lyrics, perhaps, for the rock songs he would compose:

You are my fantasy

You are my friend

Together we will be
.

Beyond the end

You are my love

You are my life

You are my density

You will be my wife (ha ha)

We'll always be special

We'll always be right

But oh how I wish

You were with me tonight

I love you gorgeous
.…

Classical music was her world, and in her dream she would be the star of the concert halls as Dennis would be of the rock arenas. But these were impossible dreams, fantasies, and both their lives were dominated by fantasies.

“Karin,” her first teacher said a long time later, “was not as good as I first thought she would be. There was something blocking her talent and development as she got older. She did not live up to expectations. She became an average student, and she should have been a very good one.”

As for Dennis, “His intelligence took over,” a friend who played in a group with him says. “He could literally hear a song once he'd never heard before and follow along the rest of the song. I don't think I could do that, and I've been a musician all my life, both my parents are musicians. Playing with Dennis was really easy. He could just pick up out of nowhere. I'd play off the top of my head and he'd pick up. I play bass on and off, but I could never do what he did. But his intelligence took over, so it was no secret that he wasn't the greatest bass player ever.”

That was, indeed, what he feared, for he realized it was true. “Where do I get a job and with what qualifications?” he wrote to Karin. “There's always the very strong possibility that I may take the safer, though probably not quite so lucrative, path that I'm on now. Give up my dreams for assured happiness with you. I
still
love you, my Karin. Still and always will.” Giving up that dream, sooner or later, was something he knew he would have to do. “It was frustrating,” he says. “I knew what I wanted to do, how I wanted to play, but there was a wall surrounding me and there was no way I could get through that wall. Almost everything I ever wanted to do, I wanted to reach out for, there was that wall surrounding me. So I knew I'd never make it in music.”

They were sure, in these early summer days of 1986, that what they felt for each other was different from anything they had experienced in the past. This, they became convinced, was love, real love, true love. “I've always been more of an analytical person, covering my emotions,” Dennis says. “Karin opened me. I never felt that before. She made me a complete person for the first time in my life.”

Dennis had a job by then, a full-time one. He had worked at a supermarket since the time he was old enough, earning enough money to support his car, that MG, and have some to spend on what he wanted. But that wasn't the kind of job he wanted once he graduated from high school. College might lie somewhere in the future, but not now. He would pass it up for the moment and get a job that would make use of his skills with the computer and would earn him some money. He might have gone to work for his father's computer consulting firm, for which he had done work over the summers in the past. He decided to pass up that chance. At some time in the future he could always go to work there, just as he was sure he could also decide to go on to college if he ever wanted. Now he got a job with an insurance company, Aetna Life and Casualty, and he was earning $375 a week. It was enough money to buy anything Karin might want or anything he might want to give her.

Late one Saturday afternoon in mid-June they drove into Hartford and had what Dennis called a picnic. It turned into a momentous day in their relationship. “Not in a very long time have I enjoyed another person's company as much,” Dennis wrote. “We
do
get along wonderfully. Our picnic turned out to be a sign stealing fest and secretly I was amazed and amused by her brazen talent, and iron nerves for this. What a good day.”

Remembering the same escapade, Karin wrote that they wandered all over Hartford, having a wonderful time, particularly stealing signs off the fences and walls of the Civic Center, the parking lot by the State Capitol and elsewhere.

With the stolen signs in the trunk of Dennis's MG, they were unwilling just to drive back home, say good-bye, and go their own ways for the rest of the evening. They went to a movie.

According to Karin, all they did was hold hands.

Dennis had fuller memories, as he confided to his diary:

By interpreting what she said after the movie, we weren't gonna go home right away and she wasn't hungry. At my best guess, we ended up down at the Meadows. It made me happy to find her so overwhelmed by the area which I managed, for so long, to take for granted. Again I was amazed and amused and even grateful of her appreciation. It was a beautiful night. Now, in all honesty, what progressed in the car went
far
beyond my most aggressive feelings. Without getting intently graphic, I might say that what happened did so
very
fast. Never were my intentions
that
. Not on a “first date.”

In Karin's diary she wrote that once they left the movie theater they drove down to a field at the edge of the Connecticut River. There Dennis kissed her for the first time. “Very interesting,” she wrote. It was after two in the morning by the time they reached the condos on Butternut Drive. Joyce was waiting up. She was furious. She lashed out at Karin with all her vitriol. But to Karin's surprise and delight, Joyce did not declare Dennis off limits; indeed, she said that Karin could even see him again the next day.