About ten minutes later, John emerged from the house with two drinks in his hand. He came down the wooden stairs and set the drinks on the patio table nearest me. “Here,” he said. “I think you need this.”
I didn’t move. He sat down. “I’m sorry things have been a little tight lately, but I have been listening to you.”
I turned and silently glared at him.
“I’ve talked with my professor at Berkeley and worked out a deal with him to teach at UC Davis and Cal. I’ll even get paid and have it count toward my doctorate.”
I perked up. His words offered to dispel my misery. “You’ll actually be working again?”
“Three days a week at the Davis campus, and two days a week at the Berkeley campus. My thesis subject is in demand. My course will be about schizophrenia and the influence of electrical impulses on the brain.”
I stood and walked along the submerged bench in the pool, came up the steps, and sat at the table with John. “I haven’t signed the contract yet,” John said, handing me my drink. “I wanted to check it out with you first.”
“Go for it,” I said. “It’s about time.”
“Yeah, I know. I haven’t been the best provider. I love you for understanding, about my health, absent family and all.”
“Hold on, hasn’t the semester already started?”
John said it had, but this was considered a fill-in class and wouldn’t start for another month. He told me his checks would be automatically deposited into our checking account, to make it easier for me to pay the bills.
John struggled to his feet, walked over to me, took my right hand in his, and kissed it. My emotional seesaw moved me from bottom to top. John picked up the rubber duck and threw it into the pool for the dogs. Splash! Splash! I smiled and relaxed a little. We looked like a typical suburban family enjoying a Saturday afternoon by the pool. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Because I worked five days a week and John hadn’t started to teach, it was more convenient for him to coordinate the details of the second mortgage with Household Finance Corporation. The papers were consolidated and ready to be signed. Late in the afternoon during the first week of October, John and I walked into the HFC office in a strip mall near our house. A blond woman in her twenties was on the telephone. She gave us a smile and a wave to come and sit down at her desk until she was finished, and pushed a fat manila folder toward me. I opened it and started reviewing the forms. “Thanks for waiting,” Kirsten said as she hung up. “Would you like any coffee or tea?”
We both declined. I had too much acid in my stomach already. This was not a pleasurable event.
“Okay, let’s get down to business,” she said. Using her pen as a pointer, she commented on each section of the form—confirming the distribution of funds, the loan amount, annual interest, penalties. I followed along nervously. When she got to the section on life insurance, she paused and looked at John. He spoke. “Kirsten said we could get insurance that would pay off the loan if you die.”
“What?” His statement caught me off guard. We had never discussed life insurance. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You’re much older than I. If we take it out on anyone, it should be you.”
“Can’t,” John replied. “I’m an old fart, and it’s too expensive. If we take it out on you it’s only fifty dollars a month.”
“We don’t have an extra fifty dollars a month in our stretched budget,” I reminded him.
We talked back and forth for several minutes. I could not understand John’s insistence. He bombarded me with reasons. I resisted. I would not tolerate his nonsense, and I didn’t care if we were playing out this little drama in front of a stranger. “We can’t afford it and that’s that,” I scolded. “Please continue, Kirsten.”
“This is an equity loan. You can draw money against it. Do you want to require one or two signatures?” she asked, pushing a signature card toward us. “One,” John interjected immediately.
“Two,” I countered. “It’s safer that way.”
“Not really,” he returned. “What if you weren’t available and we needed money right away?”
“Nothing would be that urgent.”
John would not give up on this contentious point. He had lost the insurance issue, so he dug his heels in and would not surrender. His insistence wore me down. My head pounded. Butterflies danced in my stomach. I had begun to lose trust in John and was apprehensive about future financial abuse.
“If we approve one signature and change our minds, can we make it two?” I asked.
“The signature choice can be changed back to require two,” Kirsten confirmed.
“In that case, make it one . . . for now.”
After we signed the papers, I glared at John. “Remember, this is the
last
time we are doing this!”
The following morning, I sat at my desk at work, mentally and physically exhausted. I hadn’t slept well the night before, racked with anxiety. It appeared John would never rein in his spending, and in nine years he had shown no remorse for his extravagance. The constant confrontations over his behavior had chipped away at my sanity and eroded my trust.
Though I had agreed to only one signature for cash advances on the equity loan, it didn’t sit well with me. The nagging inner voice said that something was amiss. I listened, and reacted. I wanted to change our arrangement. I reached for the phone, but hesitated, feeling guilty for going behind John’s back. Both of our names were on the loan, so his one signature could wreak havoc. No, I had to change the permission to two signatures. I called Kirsten. “I’ve thought it over,” I said. “I want two signatures. I’ll feel more comfortable that way.”
“No problem,” Kirsten said. “I’ll mail you a new signature card. You can both sign it, and John can bring it in when the loan is funded.”
I hung up the phone, relieved that I’d had the courage to follow through on my convictions. Now I had to get John to sign the card. That might not be easy.
In the middle of a cold, wet day in November, the weather mirrored my dismal mood. It was time to pay the monthly bills. I was filled with dread as I sat down at my desk to sort through the stack and decide which ones would get paid and which would not. It was difficult to concentrate on the task. My world was spinning out of control, and I was having a hard time holding on. My father had passed away a week after John and I signed the HFC loan papers, but I was allowed little time to grieve. Work responsibilities intervened; two business trips called me away. John continued to spend beyond our means. I felt I was going crazy, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I should have found some solace in the fact that John was teaching now. Several days before my father passed away, I was visiting Dad when John bounded into my parents’ kitchen with a big grin. He said he had just come from his class orientation at Davis, and he pointed to the UC Davis name tag attached to his tweed sport jacket. It had PROFESSOR JOHN PERRY hand-printed on it. John also showed us the UC Davis stamp on the inside covers of the books he had laid on the table. My dad was too far gone to care, but I was impressed, only because I appreciated the true significance of the evidence. It was critical to bridging our financial abyss.
Today, as I sat in a state of inertia and dismay, I gazed at the photograph hanging on the wall above the desk, of my dad, mother, and me. I was holding a teddy bear, a lively five-year-old with black curly hair. My parents were young and smiling. It was a happy picture. I wished I could remember when it was taken.
Snap out of it, Barbara,
I told myself. Get to work. I reached for the bank statement and reconciled the checks that cleared. Next I analyzed the deposits and, to my dismay, discovered that the $920 weekly deposits for John’s university salary had been made at a teller machine in Berkeley, not as direct deposits. I made a mental note to ask John about it when he came in from Davis after his class.
Next I grabbed the bills and realized the MasterCard statements were missing. I checked John’s desk. No luck. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Dear God, help me. What is going on?
A sixth sense propelled me through the house, into the garage, and to the garbage can. I had never in my life considered rummaging through my garbage and felt I was operating by remote control. I pulled the trash out, piece by piece, and threw it on the ground, getting angrier and dirtier by the minute. Halfway down my persistence was rewarded. There were the missing statements, torn in half, buried where John believed they’d never be seen again.
Back inside, I cleaned them and taped them together as best I could. The first statement showed that on my first business trip after Dad passed away, John had charged $1,500 at a store in San Jose, on the same day he said he was in Davis, seventy miles away, giving one of his seminars. The next statement revealed that on my second business trip, John charged $1,000 for a hairpiece and $600 for his collectible David Winter cottages. I had put my foot down and said no more cottages. He already had more than $4,000 worth displayed in his office. We could no longer afford such indulgences, as if we ever could in the first place.
I stood up and paced, trying to keep a level head. Two more corners of the puzzle had appeared, and I began subconsciously to lay them out. If he had purchased those collectibles and they were not displayed in his office, where were they? I scurried from closet to closet and climbed into the attic over the living room, but found nothing. I looked in the liquor room, the garage cabinets, the pool house. No luck anywhere. There was only one place left: the attic above the bedrooms. I pulled the folding steps down and climbed up. I surveyed the darkness with a flashlight, back and forth, farther and farther. At the far corner, the light beam landed on a black garbage bag. I untied it, and there they were.
I grabbed the black garbage bag and set it in the entry hall, along with the taped credit card statements and deposit slips. About an hour later John sauntered in, professorially dressed, with his naval academy tie and brown tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbow, carrying his Hartmann briefcase. When he saw the accusatory pile, he froze. Unlike other altercations, this time I sat stoic on the living room couch; the book I had been reading lay in my lap.
Let him talk his way out of this one
, I thought.
And that’s just what he did. For each statement, for each question, he came up with a plausible explanation. He could sweet-talk the birds out of the trees, or in this case, an irate wife out of her anger. He was depressed when I went away on my business trips, so he bought compulsively. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. It was a sickness. His one class was canceled, so he went to San Jose. Once more I backed down. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was up against a seasoned psychopath who knew how to manipulate the conversation. There was no way I would ever win. But I gave it my best attempt.
“Look, we can work this out,” I pleaded, slipping back into my pattern. “But you have to help me. I can’t do it alone. You said you had a contract, but I’ve never seen it. Doesn’t it make sense that I would wonder?”
I believed that if I could see proof that John was teaching, everything would be okay. I wanted something tangible and wouldn’t let it go. John took me into his office and extracted a paper from his metal file cabinet.
“Here’s a copy of my contract,” he said.
I looked it over. It was a letter from the assistant vice chancellor, with the title DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY located under the UC Berkeley letterhead. It did indeed have a schedule of classes, a time limit, and a pay scale. What it didn’t have was the name of the assistant vice chancellor or his signature, nor the date the letter was written. I didn’t notice at the time that the word
Psychology
was of a different font and size. Another corner piece of the puzzle passed unnoticed. “The original is on file at the university,” John said when I questioned him about the signature and date.
I tried to believe him, but I yearned for more. The letter had not totally convinced me, so I came up with a plan. “I want to go with you to your next seminar,” I said. “I’d like to see my professor in action.”
“It’s a week from today, and you’ll be working.”
“No problem. I’ll use a vacation day. It will be fun.”
“Okay. Just hope you’re not disappointed,” he said. “Now let’s have a glass of wine.”
A week later, on the day of the seminar, John woke up complaining that he didn’t feel well. He lay in bed while I took my shower and dressed. “Come on. You just need to get up and get going,” I said.
He groaned and sat up on the edge of the bed. I jokingly grabbed his arm and pretended to pull him up. “You’ll feel fine once you take a shower.”
“I had a bad night. My head is pounding.”
“Some extra Motrin should do the trick. Plus you’ll get to rest on the way up to Davis. You have your own personal chauffeur today.”
He stood up and wobbled and almost fell down. “Since you’re ready,” he said weakly, “you may want to see the report I wrote for your brother’s doctor. It’s about your family. Look on my desk. Can you type it up for me so I can mail it?”
He straggled into the bathroom and I went into his office. The notes lay in plain sight. I read some of it. He had interviewed my sister from Washington. It was interesting, but his psychology jargon was hard for me to understand.
Twenty minutes later John came into the office, picked up his briefcase, and announced that he was ready to go. “I still don’t feel well,” he said as he wobbled to the top landing of the stairs. I followed right behind him. He stopped at the top of the stairs. “Help me,” he moaned. “I don’t think I can get down the stairs.” He leaned against the corner of the wall and extended his left arm toward me. “Let me lean on you.”
Normally I would have braced up against John and helped him as much as I could. But today, deep inside, my inner voice rallied and took control of my lips.