Sleep No More

it. Resigned or was fired, I’m not sure which. He basically flipped out when Mallory dumped him. He stalked her, the whole nine yards. I also later learned she was lying about the sex. They hadn’t done all that experimentation. She’d got him to tell her all the exotic things he wanted to do to her, and what he wanted her to do for him, but she didn’t do those things with him. She basically tortured the guy, I think.”

“But she did those things with you.”

“Yes. And that’s where the problem began. I was the first person she ever really took off her mask for. She gave herself to me totally. Showed me the darkest corners of her personality…and there were some dark ones. And once you do that with somebody, and they reject you…”

“What happens?” asked Penn.

An image of Mallory’s face, desolate and cold, filled Waters’s mind. “I once saw an Oprah show where these distraught parents were talking about their college kids, kids who couldn’t get over a romantic relationship. Some had committed suicide, others simply couldn’t move forward with their lives. Their parents couldn’t help or even reach them. And they couldn’t understand why parental love couldn’t alleviate some of the suffering of these kids. These are healthy families I’m talking about.”

“That made you think of Mallory?”

“Some of those parents were describing Mallory perfectly. But I already knew the answer they couldn’t seem to see. Not even the shrink on the show. When a young woman gives herself completely to a man-sexually and every other way-she shows him parts of her personality that her parents have never seen and never will. The guy knows everything about her, things she may have seen as shameful for her whole life, but he loves her in spite of these things. Or maybe because of them. But if he then leaves her, if he stops loving her, the rejection is absolute. You know? There’s no way parental love can console the girl, because her parents don’t really know her. ‘If they really knew me like he does,’ she thinks, ‘they wouldn’t love me either.’ That’s what takes her to the brink of suicide.”

Penn seemed intrigued by this theory. “And you rejected Mallory?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“She got pregnant.”

“When?”

“My sophomore year. She was a junior.”

“How long had you been together?”

“Six months.”

“She terminated the pregnancy?”

Waters nodded.

“Jackson? Memphis?”

“Memphis.”

“Did she want the abortion?”

“I don’t think any woman really wants an abortion.”

“Point taken. But she agreed to its necessity?”

“She went through with it.”

Penn mulled this over. “You talked her into it.”

“I don’t like thinking about it, and maybe I didn’t admit it to myself for a long time. But yes, I basically made her do it.”

Penn nodded with understanding, if not sympathy. “You went with her for the procedure? Stayed through it, before and after, all that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it. What do you remember most?”

Waters didn’t have to think. “You couldn’t just go get it and be done. You had to go for counseling first. This huge impersonal building on Union Avenue, like an office building. The waiting room was full of girls. We could hear them talking. Some were there for second or third abortions. We couldn’t believe it. We felt so stupid for letting ourselves get into that situation even once. These women were talking like it was an alternative form of birth control. Mallory felt sleazy just being there. She hated it.”

“Go on.”

“They show us into this room with an older woman in a wheelchair. She starts questioning us. Why were we having sex? Did we understand the implications of having sex? It was surreal. Then she starts asking why we want to abort the baby. Why can’t we get married and have it?”

“Is that what Mallory wanted?”

“Penn, do you remember what Ole Miss was like when we were there?”

“Sure. Reagan in the White House. Young Republicans on campus. Conformity was the school religion. The de rigueur uniform was Izod shirt, Levi’s rolled at the ankles, and white canvas Nikes with the baby-blue stripe. I think of the early eighties at Ole Miss as a sort of superrich version of the nineteen-fifties.”

“Exactly. We grew up in the seventies, with dope and sex and rock and roll, but all the old double standards were still very much in force in Oxford. Especially for the girls. The good-girl/slut dichotomy still applied.”

“Sorority girls didn’t have babies and stay in school.”

“No,” Waters agreed. “Not Chi Os anyway.”

“Did Mallory want the baby, but know deep down that she couldn’t keep it?”

“That’s pretty close, I think. I don’t think she could have handled disappointing her parents to that degree, even though she hated her father at some level. But she wanted me to want the baby. You know?”

“Yes.”

“So the counselor starts in on adoption. Mallory didn’t want to do that, and neither did I. We couldn’t deal with the idea that part of us would exist in the world, and we wouldn’t know where. I’m sure that’s a callous, selfish way to think, but that was the only thing we agreed on.”

“And after the counseling?”

“They made you wait seven days to have the procedure. Agonizing reappraisal time. Those seven days were hell. Mallory stopped going to class. Her face showed nothing, but she was barely keeping it together. One day she wanted the abortion, the next she wanted us to run off to Canada, have the baby, and live like Bohemians.”

“Why did she finally agree to the procedure?”

Waters looked back at the window, wishing he did not have to speak this truth. “I made a devil’s bargain. She made me promise her-in the dark of the night, parked on Sorority Row-she made me promise that if she got rid of that baby, I would never leave her. Ever. And she meant it.”

“And you promised that?”

“Yes.”

Penn sighed heavily. “Go on.”

“A week later, we were back in Memphis. Mallory was so tense, I didn’t think she could handle it. This was all supposed to be secret, right? But when she checked in, they asked for her parents’ phone numbers, everything. They said if anything went wrong, if she started to hemorrhage or something, they had to notify next of kin.” Waters could still smell the hotel-like scent of the place. “Mallory gave the numbers. They checked her in and told me it would be a minimum of two hours before I saw her again.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to sit in that waiting room, this sterile room full of women-only two guys there besides me-and I started to lose it. I couldn’t believe I was there, or what was about to happen to Mallory. I got into the elevator, rode down ten floors to the ground, and walked out into the daylight. That’s when I first realized that terrible things happened in the light of day. That things like the Holocaust happened while the sun was shining and people were having picnics. Anyway, there was a Burger King outside this building. I walked over there and ordered a cheeseburger, then sat there without eating it. I knew what Mallory was going through up there-the counselor had made sure of that-and I felt sick. I was growing up, I guess, learning that actions have real consequences.”

Penn listened like a patient priest, his eyes alert for the smallest clues to motivation. “Go on.”

“I was positive something terrible was going to happen. She was going to start hemorrhaging, maybe even die. There was this awful certainty in my gut that things were going to go very wrong.”