Sleep No More

hotel and stare at each other? We danced to a piano and bass. It was poignant, because I really thought that was the end of it all, and I was proud of her for leaving. Soon we were the only two people left in the place. The pianist played ‘As Time Goes By,’ and Mallory reminded me how we saw Casablanca together at the Hoka in Oxford, and how the first person you see Casablanca with is supposed to be the person you’re going to marry, and…shit, you can guess the rest.”

“When did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“She called from Dallas six weeks later. I can’t even describe how I felt, the talks we had, but the bottom line was, I told her I couldn’t marry her. It would have been insane after all we’d been through. And she’d told me she was on the pill, for God’s sake, though I admit I was stupid to believe her.”

“Take it easy, John.”

“She agreed to have the abortion, but only if I would go out to Dallas and be with her. This will show you the real Mallory, Penn. She had no car out there, right? No way to get around, make arrangements. So what does she do? She sleeps with some poor college kid, then tells him he got her pregnant.”

“You’re kidding.”

“God’s truth. She told me this herself. So this kid hauls her around the city, doing whatever she needs done. Then she tells him he’s finished, that her brother is coming into town to be with her during the procedure.”

Penn took a Mont Blanc from a drawer and made a note on his desk pad. “I’m starting to understand your fear of her. Was that experience like the time in Memphis?”

“No. It wasn’t corporate sterile with five doctors and fifty girls waiting. It was a little house with two nurses and one old doctor. They brought me into the examining room as soon as the procedure was over, and they left me there. Mallory’s lying on a table, crying and shivering. I held her hand, but she wouldn’t look at me. So I look to my right, and there’s this damn stainless-steel machine. And inside that machine is what’s left of our baby. I know it without anybody telling me. That’s where the vacuum hose hooks up. There’s the vent for the motor. It was the most unnatural feeling I’d ever had in my life. That metal machine was absolutely against nature, created in opposition to nature. I’m not religious or anything, but I felt like the hose that had sucked up that fetus could suck up the entire world, that the whole universe could be sucked into the black maw of that vacuum pump. And when I realized that thing had been inside Mallory two times…I started to understand her insanity. And I started to cry. The whole situation was beyond belief. I feel like an asshole telling it to you now.”

Penn nodded. “Try to keep yourself in the present. Sum up the rest, if you can. From then until Mallory’s death.”

“She never got over it. Any of it. Ever. And I never got free of her. She dated other people, but it was all an act. Even after she got married and had kids, she never stopped trying to contact me. I eventually had to get a restraining order. She still found ways to threaten me. I would walk out of a store when I thought she was two hundred miles away, and there she’d be, waiting for me, looking at me with this haunted face.”

“What did she want from you?”

“I think she never really gave up on us having a child together. But the way she put it, she just wanted to be together, any way that I would. She tried to use sex that way. ‘Let’s go somewhere. I know you want me. We can do it in the car.’ I was in San Francisco once for a meeting, and she turned up there. How the hell did she know I’d be there? She must have been paying detectives to tell her everything about my life. All the time.”

“She may well have been. How much of this did you tell Lily?”

“As little as possible.”

“She knew Mallory was dangerous, though?”

“Yes. I told her it was a Fatal Attraction kind of thing. Everybody thinks they’ve had a similar experience, so it made Lily take it seriously, but not too seriously. You know? I told her that if Mallory ever suddenly appeared at the house, or came around her anywhere, she should call the police and get the hell away from her.”

Penn stretched his arms, then reached into a cooler and brought out two bottles of water. He handed one across the desk to Waters.

“I know it took a lot out of you to tell me all this.”

“It’s a relief to tell some of it, honestly.”

Penn took a long sip of water, then set his bottle aside. “John, do you think it was the abortion that caused all Mallory’s problems? Or was it something from much farther back?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Remember when I told you she’d shown me the darkest corners of her personality? That’s not completely true. I don’t think I ever saw the darkest corner. There was something buried so deep in there I could never get to it. And I don’t think she could either. What it was…I don’t know.”

“Sexual abuse, maybe?”

Waters thought about it. “Maybe. Once, during a really bad spell, she told me her father had sexually abused her.”

“Did you believe her?”

“Do you know what a ‘cutter’ is, Penn?”

“You’re not talking about a surgeon?”

“No. I’m talking about people who cut themselves in secret. Girls, mostly.”

Penn’s eyes went wide. “You mean self-mutilators?”

Waters nodded.

“Caitlin told me about them. It’s somehow related to bulimia and anorexia, isn’t it?”

“It can be. I know a lot about it now, but twenty years ago I knew nothing.”

“Mallory cut herself?”

“Yes. I didn’t know for a long time. Cutters cut places where they can see the blood but others can’t. But eventually I caught her. After that, she did it in front of me.”

“Is self-mutilation caused by sexual abuse?”

“It can be. The immediate pain of the cutting is used to distract the victim from chronic inner pain that she can’t escape. That could be sexual abuse. Mallory sometimes scratched and cut herself during sex. Sometimes she wanted me to do it.”

Penn shook his head. “So, did you believe her when she told you she was sexually abused?”

“No. I’m not sure why. I just…didn’t feel in my gut that it was true. That could be male stupidity, of course.”

“If her real problem wasn’t sexual abuse, then what?”

“I think Mallory had undiagnosed clinical depression. And no one really knows what causes that. I had a class under Willie Morris at Ole Miss. He had William Styron speak to our class. I read Lie Down in Darkness for that, and I remember thinking Mallory was a bit like Peyton Loftis, when she went mad in New York. Peyton wound up killing herself, I think.”

Penn nodded. “She did.”

“Styron himself was later a victim of suicidal depression, though he managed not to kill himself. I think Mallory may have been bipolar. Manic depressive. Not like Styron or my wife, who both had major depressive disorder. Nowadays this stuff is no big deal. I mean, half the people we know are on Zoloft or Paxil. There are ninth-grade girls taking it out at St. Stephens, for Christ’s sake. But back in 1980, there was still a heavy stigma. And you knew the Candler family. You think they’d send their little princess to a shrink?”

“Not in a million years,” Penn agreed.

“I feel like I’ve told you nothing but bad things about Mallory.”

“I remember the good things,” Penn assured him. “What she did for the Children’s Hospital when she was Miss Mississippi. And the Protestant Home, and the Women’s Shelter. I remember when her father tried to use her crown to get himself reelected to the legislature. Mallory wouldn’t have any of it. Ben Candler damn near disowned her over that. I also know that her mother’s a first-class bitch hiding behind a smiley face she paints on for the world. It’s a miracle Mallory turned out as well as she did.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Penn said, getting to his feet. “I’m tired of being under a roof.”

Waters stood too. His muscles felt tight, his joints creaky, and he was glad to follow Penn through the door to