Boyfriend from Hell (25 page)

“I guess you’re wondering where I come down on this, since I was in the chain of events.”

“Yes, I’d say I’m interested to know.”

“Could I possibly—and you can tell me no, and I’d respect that—could I read what you have so far?”

“What I have shouldn’t be relevant. If it’s good, it shouldn’t be a reason to go on and if it’s not good, it shouldn’t be a reason to quit.”

“I understand. It has to be a decision on the merits. Still, I’m very curious to see what you did.”

She gathered the pages she had printed out, a preface and then a chapter on the satanic possession epidemics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

“You’re going to take these with you?”

“No, Ronnie, I’m going to read them now, if it’s all right.”

“Oh.”

He thumbed through. “Forty-two pages. Won’t take that long.”

She withdrew to the bedroom and watched a reality television program about singles and she thought it didn’t have much to do with the reality of her single life. After a while he knocked on the bedroom door and she opened it for him. She sat back on the bed against the headboard and he sat on the bed near her.

“First of all, it’s great. The tone, the voice, slightly dubious but intrigued by the material. Perfect. Exactly what it should be, what I would expect from you.”

“I was wondering at one point about making it first person.”

“You’d lose that distance. It’s the right voice, otherwise Veronica Delaney is too much in the narrative.”

“That’s where I ended up.”

“Right. So the pages are great. Now, what you do? From my standpoint, if you decide not to go ahead with it, it will absolutely not matter to me. I have no vested interest. None. I brought you and Antoine together, if it worked out, fine, if it doesn’t, fine.”

“Really?”

“Really. He’s a big boy. He’s in business. This wouldn’t be the first book that didn’t happen for him. And don’t factor me into it. This is about you, what’s best for you. And if at this time, with this tension in your life, and your therapy—the thing about therapy, sometimes it brings out dormant feelings that are better left alone, but that’s another discussion—if the book’s not right for you, don’t do the book.”

“Thank you.”

“Having said that, my personal view is you’ve got a marvelous project going and it would be something of a loss if you didn’t go on with it. I don’t see this as the wrong book for you. I see you as the right person for, admittedly, not an easy book. But walk away, Antoine and I will still be pals, and so will we.”

“Okay!”

“Enough about your book, how about
my
book?” he said lightly.

“How goes it?”

“This cult seems to have gotten softer over the years, where they’re more about their community than their ideology. Not much so far that indicates any ritual abuse in their current history. I’m not sure yet of the past.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I am. Mainly write it in New York. We should look into some subscription series, music, theater, do the town.”

He was especially tender with her in bed, gently caressing her as though he understood she needed, in her emotional stress, to be held, and that is why he was there, it was what she needed, until another need came to the fore.

He left early in the morning for the shuttle back to Washington, en route to Maryland. Essentially, he had given her permission to terminate the project and yet he was exceedingly complimentary of the work she had done thus far. She made her decision. With the help of therapy, and willpower, the kind of willpower she had shown in being on her own, in choosing to be a freelancer in the first place, she was going ahead with the book. She would stare down the demons.

She sent Richard an e-mail:

Going ahead with the book. Seem to be possessed by the need to finish. Thanks for the support in whatever I would have done.


Later in the day she received an answer from him:

Sounds good. I certainly would have supported your ending it. But now the world is going to have a terrific book from you. Back in about a week. Can’t wait to see you.


He was away again, predictably, but she felt he had made a strongly supportive gesture by coming to New York. Eventually, he would be working there and they might indeed look into some traditional subscription series together, she speculated—theater, the Philharmonic. Autumn in New York.

She called Jenna Hawkins to say she was proceeding, the agent businesslike on the matter. Hawkins was not in the psychology business and didn’t explore the emotional ramifications with Ronnie, principally concerned with stop, go. And it was a go.

The decision was not accepted as smoothly by Nancy, who was back from a weekend visiting her family in Connecticut.

“I’m sticking with the book.”

“Why?”

“Because it could be something substantial, maybe even a breakthrough for me.”

“You’ve broken through. Editors know who you are. You were getting work.”

“I mean in book publishing.”

“Ronnie, this book is giving you nightmares.”

“Not the book per se, the nightmares are from a deeper place, apparently.”

“You have a major therapist telling you to drop it because the book makes everything worse.”

“I’m not a quitter. And it’s clear to me, nothing I’m going through started with this book.”

“Except it’s where you are now. Blacking out. And those drawings. It’s Spook-o-rama around here. This is what happens when Richard shows up. You’re going ahead with a book you shouldn’t be writing.”

“He was very even about it, nonjudgmental. Basically said if I wanted to drop it, it was fine with him, no vested interest.”

“That’s all he said?”

“By and large. If the book worked out, fine. If it didn’t, fine. I did show him some pages.”

“And he loved them, I’ll bet.”

“He did.”

“But that didn’t matter to him. If it worked out, fine. If it didn’t, fine.”

“Exactly.”

“Only he let you
know
he loved them. I’m beginning to see it the way Bob does. This was very manipulative because you end up doing the book a really smart therapist says you should get out of your life. And by the way, it accrues to his buddy’s benefit.”

“I can’t believe that’s his motivation.”

“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s what Bob said, that he wants his women messed up.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“So he rushed into town to aid a damsel in distress. Let me guess. Did he rush out again?”

“He’s doing some research.”

“In town, out of town, here, gone. He
is
dangling you like a puppet on a string. And now you’re going ahead with a book that’s bad for you. Really neat that he dropped in. This guy is the boyfriend from hell.”

Martha Kaufman sat at the dining room table with her husband of thirty-five years, Elliot Kaufman, an orthopedist in his early sixties. Ronnie had informed Martha during her most recent session about continuing with the book, the therapist offering a last argument against doing it, which Ronnie rejected. Martha gave her husband background on Ronnie and the reasons she recommended Ronnie withdraw from the project.

“It’s like watching the proverbial train wreck about to happen,” Kaufman told him.

“I don’t know what you can do. If she wants to go ahead—”

“She’s sassy. One of those sassy young women today and that’s wonderful. Imagine going into a satanic cult and doing an article about it. And she’s being sassy by wanting to continue with this.”

“She has some protection. She’s seeing
you.”

“If she keeps seeing me. She probably thinks I crossed a line. For all her sass, she’s very vulnerable, no family, a couple of nice friends, which is good, and someone she’s having an affair with, and that may not be so good.
He
wrote a book on Satan and is probably doing one on satanic ritual abuse, as if she didn’t have enough Satan references in her life. Apparently, he’s very good-looking, worldly, but it seems he read her first pages, liked them, and the next I hear from her, she’s going forward. Doesn’t make me a particular fan of his.”

“Possibly she’ll be able to manage and it will work out.”

“It will eat her up.”

“Martha, that’s very theatrical.”

“Her dreams, the drawings, they’re too intense. It’s already eating her up.”

“A
S YOU WANDER ON
through life, brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”

A
Daily News
writer invoked the old legend from the wall of the long-departed Mayflower Coffee Shop on Park Avenue to enliven the reportage on a story already percolating in the tabloids. Felipe Ruiz, part owner of Fresh Donuts on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street, attempted to murder his partner, Angel Santos, by driving by and shooting him, hoping to make it look like a drive-by of drug dealers. He dropped a packet of cocaine in the doorway, waited in his car for his partner to appear for work, and drove past and fired at him. The bullets missed, shattering the window. The less-than-cool would-be killer, in appraising his handiwork, hit a bus stop pole, was knocked senseless, and found with the gun at his side.

THE DONUT MAN WHO COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT
was the Story in the
Daily News,
while
DONUT WAR!
was featured in the
New York Post.

For the detectives of the Twenty-sixth Precinct it was not the “coffee dunk” case the
Daily News
referred to—Felipe Ruiz would not confess, insisting the drive-by shooters drove past
him
and tossed the gun through the window of his car. He claimed the tossed gun caused him to crash. His fingerprints on the gun were the result, he said, of his picking it up out of curiosity.

Investigative work by the precinct detectives revealed a longstanding feud between the partners. The two had engaged in a punching match outside the store. Bystanders broke it up before the police were summoned. That episode was called in to the
West Side News,
a community weekly, and an item ran in the paper, according to information given to one of the detectives by the newsstand dealer next door to the shop.

Co-owners, Angel Santos and Felipe Ruiz, battled it out in front of their Fresh Donuts shop on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street yesterday. Punches were thrown. No arrests were made. What was the dispute, too much glaze?

The item was located by a detective going through back copies. He intended to confront Ruiz with the widely known antipathy between the men when Rourke leaned in to say that Ruiz’s lawyer was talking about a deal. Gomez picked up the newspaper and was browsing through it when a photo caught his attention. The caption: “Winners of the Zip-Ade 5 K Run in Central Park, Bob Fox on the men’s side and Veronica Delaney for the women.”

“Look at this, will you?”

“So?” Santini said.

“You don’t win a race by being a weak little thing.”

“Please.”

“Humor me.”

Ronnie was at her computer working and answered the intercom to hear the unwanted voice of Detective Gomez.

“We need a few minutes of your time, ma’am.”

“I’m working.”

“Well, we’re working, too.”

They all stood in the small foyer to the apartment.

“We wanted to show you this,” Gomez said, and offered the page of the newspaper. “How many women would you say were in the race?”

“I have no idea.”

“Fifty-one, the company told us. Fifty-one women and you came in first.”

“Good for me.”

“How many races have you won?” Santini asked.

“One.”

“This was the first time you ever won a race?”

“Yes.”

“And how have you done in other races?” Gomez said.

“I haven’t run other races.”

Her palms began to sweat and she felt a trickling of sweat in her armpits. They were dead-on one of her unconscious moments and the strain showed in her face as she bit her lip.

“You all right, ma’am? Talking about this make you uncomfortable?” Gomez said with an edge.

“Detectives coming to my apartment in the middle of my workday makes me uncomfortable.”

“No doubt. So I’m going to go back to my Ron Guidry-Mariano Rivera deal, that you can’t tell someone’s physical capabilities just by looking at them. Looking at your frame I wouldn’t guess you could run faster than fifty-one women.”

“Would you say that about Joan Benoit? Won the marathon in Los Angeles, a person same size as me.”

“I’d say she was a strong woman, despite her physical frame. And you must be too, despite your physical frame, a strong woman.”

“I am strong. I freelance. Takes some strength,” she said with an edge of her own.

“I don’t mean that kind of strong; running fast over a distance strong, lung capacity strong, athletic strong.”

“Detective, I didn’t kill Randall Cummings. I may have killed him in print, and that, retrospectively, may not have been the greatest thing I ever did in my life, but I didn’t kill him. Now I’ve seen enough crime shows to know, if you want to book me for his murder, then book me. And I’ll get a lawyer and we’ll go from there. But this is becoming police harassment.”

“You can’t live a life with a secret, Ms. Delaney,” he said, as the detectives turned to go. “Eventually it comes out.”

“No doubt.”

She closed the door after them and pressed her forehead against it, seeing herself again bewildered at the finish line with no memory of having run the race.

She forced herself to get back to work, writing material on some of the important exorcists through the years. She printed hard copies of her last pages, made herself a cup of tea, and then returned to her desk to read the pages she had just printed. On the top sheet in the upper right-hand corner was a drawing, elegantly rendered: Satan, the humanlike face, grinning mischievously, an expression she read as saying, Look where I showed up, I peek out of corners, you can’t get away from me. She felt nauseous and tried to throw up. It was dry heaving. She went back to look at the page, perhaps she imagined it, but the drawing was still there and she couldn’t remember drawing it.