Beyond Obsession (31 page)

Despite her explanations, Dennis was not happy. He was, both he and Karin agree, extremely upset. “He said he was getting tired of my going away so much and spending so much time with Alex,” she says. Still, she insisted that she still loved him and this whole thing was just temporary and they would soon be back together again.

He felt he had no choice but to accept. While she was away, he said, he would call her often. And one of the reasons he would call her was not simply that he missed her and wanted to be in constant touch, to hear her voice. “She told me,” he says, “that when we came back on the Fourth, her mother was suspicious that we hadn't really gone down to Rowayton but had gone to my house. She said her mother was yelling at her, that she'd been yelling at her for a while, that things were really starting up again with her mother. She said she had to get away from her mother.”

On July 7 Karin and Alex Markov went to Woodstock. That night in her diary she wrote that listening to him play Paganini caprices made her realize that she was passionately in love with the man who played that music, not necessarily Alex Markov, but the Alex Markov who was playing the violin. Doing that, he was different, more sophisticated, more giving, incredibly tender.

The next day, she wrote, she went shopping, bought Joyce a kaleidoscope and saw a diamond ring she wanted. She talked to Dennis on the phone and told him about it, and he agreed to buy it for her.

On July 9 she noted that it was the anniversary of the day she had slept with Dennis for the first time. The total for the year was still eighty, and that was all right with her because there was no need for any more or any less. While she was writing, Alex was in the shower, but when he emerged, he was going to throw her out of his room so he could sit on the floor, stare at a candle and meditate. She and Alex had made love twice that day, “concerts” she called the experience.

On July 10 she and Alex made love again. Dennis called to tell her that he was going sailing and that he had sent a money order off to the store in Woodstock for the diamond ring. Hearing the call, Alex Markov flew into a rage, told her that he was extremely jealous and that she was being unfair and ruining their vacation, which, she noted, were just about the same words Dennis had used to her. Alex told her that this might be their last week together because once school started, she wouldn't be able to spend so much time in Rowayton, and besides, he would be gone; he had a concert in Binghamton, New York, at the beginning of August, and then he was going on tour, first to Wisconsin and then to Vienna.

On July 10 Karin and Alex made love twice more. Dennis called her, and, she wrote, she was very happy to hear from him.

During that week Dennis tried to keep himself occupied. He had his job at Tallwoods to fill part of the day. He called Karin often. During one of those calls she mentioned that she had seen a diamond ring at the Jewelry Store in Woodstock she loved and wanted very much to have. It was only $327. Dennis sent off a money order that day.

And Joyce Aparo helped fill the empty hours. As Karin's affair with Alex Markov intensified, Joyce began to pay increasing attention to Dennis; it became almost a courtship. She called him several times and asked if he would go with her to the supermarket and help bring the groceries home. She called him and asked him to go to the movies with her. She invited him to have dinner with her, once at Blacksmith's Tavern. “It wasn't like with the mothers of other girls,” he said a long time later. “She'd invite me over and I'd get there and she'd be in the shower, and then she'd come out wrapped in a towel, and she'd just walk out into the living room. She was like that. Then after a while she'd get dressed.”

Asked if he thought she might be trying to seduce him or, perhaps, entice him into making a move toward her, something that would give her a weapon he could never deflect with which she could end his relationship with Karin, he looked shocked and surprised. “She never made advances or anything like that,” he says. “But right on the edge of things. But she was the mother of the girl I was in love with, so I never even thought anything like that. Besides, I thought she was a nice person. There were things about her that I didn't like, but she was also a nice person, at least to me.”

During their evenings together and during their dinner at Blacksmith's Tavern she talked much about Karin, about her hopes and dreams for her daughter, telling Dennis that she wanted only the best for Karin and that nothing should come in the way of her realizing that ambition to become a great concert violinist. He did not mention that he knew Karin no longer had such ambitions, that she was aiming in a different direction now. And, he says, “I never got the impression that she was warning me off. According to Karin, she was trying to break us up, but she never said anything to me face-to-face about it. Maybe once or twice she told me we should cool it, but that was all.”

What was really on his mind in those days was the future, a good future that was soon to arrive, he was certain. “All I could think of was that she was going to be going back to school pretty soon, and I was going to be at school again, and we were going to get back together really again and have time, and I couldn't wait until the day school started.”

On July 15 Karin was back in Glastonbury, at the desk in her own room once more. She was extremely glad to be back, she wrote in her diary. She and Alex had made love once more before he drove her home; it was either the thirteenth or fourteenth time, she wasn't positive, and it had been a wonderful experience. They had talked about her staying over in Rowayton, but the elder Markovs' being home she felt ruled out the possibilities. The ring Dennis had bought for her had arrived, and she was ecstatic about that.

Her next entry in the diary was four days later, July 19. She had been to Rowayton with Shannon on Sunday, had seen Alex that day. She had also been with him the previous one, and over the weekend they had made love six times, bringing the total, she wrote, to twenty. Michael Zaccaro had been to the condo for dinner that evening, and she had cooked a herbed fennel lamb and corn sage cakes, which were wonderful. “So much to think of & to do!” she wrote at the end of that page.

Karin went to Rowayton that Sunday not only with Shannon but with Joyce as well, in Joyce's car. Shannon remembers it clearly. “We had gone to the beach for the day and to meet Alex,” she says. “On the ride back we got into the car when we were in the Markovs' driveway and Mrs. Aparo noticed that there was no gas, or the gas gauge was on empty. She had told Karin to fill up the tank, and she got angry, and she yelled and screamed at Karin for not getting the gas when she had been told to. But she got the car started, and we found a gas station and filled up. On the way back, Karin reached back and grabbed my hand and held it very tightly because she was afraid of her mother and what her mother might do when we got home.”

Joyce did nothing, perhaps because Michael Zaccaro came to dinner. And that night Shannon slept over, taking Karin's room while Karin slept with Joyce. “During the night,” Shannon says, “I heard laughing and talking between them, and I thought it was strange because Mrs. Aparo had been so angry earlier and now she seemed happy.”

The next evening Karin and Shannon went to the movies together. They talked about Joyce's response to the empty gas tank the previous day, about her unreasonable rage. “Gee, Karin,” Shannon said, “she treated you so awful I just wanted to push her out of the car and drive away.”

Karin said, “Well, I think I can deal with it. There's no more physical abuse. I think I can make it for two more years, and then it's off to college and I'll be okay. Things are getting better.”

At least that's what Karin told her best friend. But she was saying something else to Dennis Coleman. According to him, soon after her return from Woodstock, relations between mother and daughter turned even worse, as bad as they had ever been, and they were going downhill. “I asked her right after she got back, ‘Are you all right?' She just sort of freaked out. She turned around and said it was bad. And she started to push.” For the first time in nearly a year she began to talk about killing Joyce. The situation in the Aparo house was intolerable, she said. Joyce was forcing her to stay in Rowayton more and more often, she told him, and she didn't want to but had no choice. And the violin was becoming an increasing source of tension, Joyce putting ever more pressure on her about it, forcing her to practice longer and longer hours, criticizing with ever more severity. “She told me the situation was desperate,” he says. Her only hope of escape, the only hope she and Dennis had to be together again as they had been, she told him, was for Joyce to die. “I told her this was not a good idea. But she kept at it. She didn't stop.”

It became, in those weeks toward the end of July, a ritual incantation, recited with fervor whenever Karin and Dennis were together: Joyce was coming between them; Joyce was trying to break them up; Joyce was forcing her to go to Rowayton and be with the Markovs when all she really wanted was to be with Dennis; Joyce was trying to force her to sleep with Alex. Escape, freedom, the only chance for them to be together again was for Joyce to die.

Every once in a while the song changed, a change that ripped through Dennis and sent him reeling into a nightmare world. They went for a long ride one afternoon. “I asked her if she was in love with Alex, and she didn't say anything, and I asked her again, and she said yes, and the bottom sort of dropped put of me. I dropped her off at her house and drove away, and then I drove back, and I sat outside her bedroom window and cried for about five hours, and she didn't know I was there, or she pretended she didn't know. She didn't come to the window.”

Writing in her diary on July 26, Karin noted that she and Dennis had driven up to Boston the morning of the previous Saturday, had lunch, bought a lot of clothes, taken one of those old-fashioned tintype photographs and just had fun. After Dennis had dropped her off at home, she drove down to Rowayton. She stayed the night and slept with Alex for the twenty-first time. When she told Joyce that she was staying over, Joyce wanted to know whether the Markovs were going to be there. Karin told her they were. Joyce said that was fine, then, because if it were just Alex and Karin alone in the house, Karin would look like a slut. There had been a good party for Alex, but Karin had to leave early because she had Joyce's car and Joyce wanted it. Joyce had seen her wearing the ring Dennis had ordered from Woodstock, had said she didn't like it, and she didn't like the one from Thunder Hole he had bought for her a year earlier, and she told Karin to take them off.

The last entry in the diary was written on July 28. The first item she thought worthy of mention was that she had slept with Alex again, for the twenty-fourth time, which, she noted, added up to once for each year of his life. This particular session, though, had been special; he had held on to her when they were through as though he really cared for her. Still, she had promised him that she wouldn't get attached to him. Then she turned to Dennis, writing that he was desperate and on the verge of suicide; that was too bad, but she wasn't really sorry for him. He might have a lot of problems, but she couldn't understand why he had let her bother him so much. Perhaps Alex had given her a false sense of security. Her car had died and was beyond repair. But she didn't really mind because she could just ride her bike whenever she wanted to go somewhere or even walk; besides, they were about to buy a new Volkswagen Fox. She was looking forward to the trip to Binghamton over the weekend for Alex's concert, particularly because she would get to wear a special white dress when she went to receptions with him. They had made love three more times that day.

The pressure on Dennis was mounting; it was unbearable, and he felt unable to resist. He was not sleeping or eating. He was still losing weight. He was too pale, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted. He didn't know what to do, and he felt he knew all too well what she expected him to do.

On July 28 they took another ride. As they were returning to her house, Karin says she asked, “What would you do if I told you I'd slept with Alex twenty times and not just once?”

“I'd drive off the road and kill us both,” he said.

“No,” she said, “it was only that one time.” Later she said, “I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn't because I was afraid he was really going to drive off the road and kill us.”

23

July 28–August 5, 1987: Karin Aparo's Story

She loved Dennis, and she loved Alex. Alex was going away, and so she was going to lose him. But she would still have Dennis, and she wanted him. She wanted and expected everything to be as it had been before. “We would have the rest of the summer together, and that was what I wanted,” she said.

And, she says, she loved her mother, and “we were getting along good. She approved of my relationship with Alex. We weren't having any trouble.”

After Dennis's suicidal threat in the car, she worried more and more about him. On Thursday night, July 30, she was packing for the trip to Binghamton. It was a trip she was looking forward to. It was to be her last time that summer with Alex Markov, and she intended to make the most of it.

Dennis appeared outside her window. He was distraught. She moved about the room, taking her things from drawers and putting them into suitcases, talking to him all the while. She and Joyce would be leaving in the morning, she said, driving to Greenwich for an anniversary party at a nursing home that evening. From Greenwich they would travel to Binghamton for Alex's concert, and they intended to be back home in Glastonbury on Tuesday morning.

“I don't want to go,” she told him, “but I have to. Mom's making me go, and I don't want to.”

“Then don't go,” he said.

“I have to. Mom says I have to. But you don't have to worry. This is the last time I'll have to be with Alex. Then that's over, and we'll have the rest of the summer for us.”