Authors: William Hutchison
As she approached the spot, her phone rang twice and shut off.
That was the signal.
Randy had centered her in the frame of his telephoto lens and messaged her to start her act.
Charlene pulled the car to the side and put on her emergency blinkers.
Then she waited.
She looked in the mirror and shook her head to jostle her hair again; making sure everything was in its place.
She was gorgeous, and she knew it.
Stephanie Polluck, forty-five, was a very successful plastic surgeon. She had re-sculptured many of the A-list Hollywood stars and her practice was growing steadily even though she didn’t advertise.
She didn’t need to.
Referral work was her cash cow.
In one single day, it's rumored that she did a nip-tuck on a famous female lawyer and liposuction on the mayor of Los Angeles. He was extremely vain and thought he needed a better physique, so he had minor surgery on his buttocks—implants they say. After that, Stephanie removed two moles from Scarlett Johansson’ lower back and still had time to make it to the premiere of “Frozen”, that Disney animated feature that was a box office hit.
Stephanie had it all. She had an excellent practice, a handsome husband, who was a very successful lawyer, and a modest $5 million home on the beach in the Malibu colony, which they purchased for cash.
She had hit her stride. All the years of working as an understudy to one of the most successful surgeons in Westwood had finally paid off.
She had enough money in the bank to retire and was not only wealthy, but she had also been blessed with great genetics from her mother who was 100% Romanian and had married a very wealthy Southerner. And like her mother, Stephanie was also naturally beautiful. She never once went under the knife to maintain her Mila Jovovich-like attractiveness. It came naturally to her and to the disdain of all her female friends. And, as she saw it, she was perfect and didn’t need to change for anyone.
“Why mess with perfection?” she would often quip when other women her age asked who had worked on her to keep her face wrinkle-free and radiant.
Stephanie (God forbid that you call her Steph) grew up in Prague and attended medical school in London. As a result of her royal upbringing and good genetics, Stephanie had a very high opinion of herself -- or so it seemed to most people who thought they knew her.
Actually, she suffered from a deep-seated psychological problem known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which is akin to Bipolar Personality Disorder (manic-depressive) and a close cousin to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
All three of these psychological maladies make dealing with people who have them very, very trying and exasperating because you never know what will set them off or what mood they are in at any given time.
All these disorders are still being studied, but to date, the causal link amongst them has not been discovered. Suffice it to say, Stephanie could be nice as nice could be one moment (those moments when everything was going her way), and extremely trying (or bitchy), if they were not. She was also known to defy logic whenever facts were presented to her that were incongruent with her perception of what was occurring. Those “facts” which might prove her wrong would be summarily shunted aside in favor of her own definition of reality.
She lived in her own world. Some would say (those close, but not so close to her) said she lived in “Stephanie’s world.”
This world was fictional and self-defined to reinforce a severely injured self-image, which masked itself in self-grandeur. And, although the world she lived in had some resemblance to reality, it was difficult, nay, impossible for other people to understand it. All subjective observers (those without a card in the game) said the world she lived in was “all F__’D up and would summarily write her off as a loser, not to be dealt with. They would be the ones who would say behind her back that “her life is a short, sad story” and give advice to simply “Stay away from the Bitch,” and offer little more, letting you figure it out on your own which parts of the interaction with Stephanie to avoid. Their minds were made up, and no amount of questioning was going to change their opinion of her.
To them, Stephanie was certifiably insane and not to be dealt with on any occasion, but to be avoided at all costs on all occasions.
It was her self-delusion and feeling she was better than the people around her that drove her to the plastic surgery practice in the first place. What better calling for one so beautiful, and in her opinion, altruistic, which could be no further from the truth than brains are from the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
She wanted to make her clients’ lives perfect by re-sculpting their bodies and faces, removing even the slightest imperfections so they could be perfect, like she was.
That's also the reason her gardener had to come three days a week to keep the lawn trimmed to her exact specifications. His job was to make sure that not a blade of grass grew over the sidewalk and not one rose, which lined her porch, had a blemished bloom. That's why her kitchen sink shone like the mirror used on the Hubble telescope – a perfect reflector. The sink would never have a drop of water on it for more than two minutes before she wiped it clean so it shown radiantly. You see, everything in Stephanie’s life should be orderly. Nothing should be out of place. Everything was always as it should be. That’s what her personal motto was ‘it’s as it should be.’
Boy was she a piece of work…but not many people knew it.
Her husband, John Polluck, did. He knew it all too well. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder drove him insane. But because of their lifestyle, the money she earned and the fact he didn't have to see her more than four or five hours a week, he put up with it.
“I guess it's better than being married to someone who was a hoarder,” he chided himself when Stephanie’s rages got to be too much to bear and her cleanliness became an abstraction. In hoarders’ homes, every square inch of space is covered with something and there are rows and rows of pathways through the clutter strewn around. These are only additional reminders of their self-focus. Hoarders don’t’ see the problem because if they saw it for what it was, it would destroy their self-image of always being in control, yet it is the opposite. It is a sign of being out of control.
Stephanie and John’s home was more like a museum than a home.
But obsessive-compulsive hoarding and obsessive cleaning are just two sides of the same coin, both signs of something gone wrong in the brain.
Stephanie managed to keep her obsessive-compulsive disorder under control without medication, by using a combination of meditation and acupuncture. But the day that she turned 30, her life started to unravel. She found she had little tolerance for anything that wasn’t in order. And on the eve of her 30th birthday, she began to question why she even married John Pollock -- who in her mind she had recently given the nickname Fred Flintstone -- because of his Neanderthal ways. His lack of cleanliness and inattention to detail, which were charming when they were dating, had lost their appeal after years of marriage, just as her obsessive-compulsive cleaning disorder had started to drive him mad as well.
John and Stephanie dated in college. He was an aspiring lawyer. She was a pre-med student. They were part of the in-crowd. Back in the late 70’s they had done their share of drugs and their share of other people. But they had a common connection: they loved money and the things it could buy.
Their wedding, as a result, was nothing less than spectacular. They had to prove to their friends that they were on their way up, so they invited over 400 guests. Because their friends knew, the couple was up and coming, they wanted to be seen at the wedding to potentially better their chances at having similar success. Word spread and in the end, over 500 guests actually came.
In fact, it was written up in the local paper as one of the most widely attended events of the year in Redondo Beach, California, one of the many cities in the Los Angeles basin and the not-so-glitzy stepchild of Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach. Hermosa Beach in the 70s was a biker haven. Manhattan Beach was and still is a somewhat upscale beachfront community.
Both Manhattan and Hermosa had charm.
Redondo was a wannabe city, which started out in the 1920s as a shining port in Los Angeles. It was the premiere city back then. But it slowly had fallen from favor over time. Its only claim to fame now is the Redondo Beach Pier, a place where scores of inner city dwellers flock like lemmings when the inland temperatures rise in the summer.
Those inner city visitors, although contributing to the city’s economy, take away from the destination vacation mystique those other South Bay Beach Cities have with their clean white beaches and million dollar homes lining the bluffs and the sand.
Stephanie’s mother moved from Europe as a child with her parents who left during World War II during the Nazi scourge. They settled in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her mother had never worked a day in her life because her husband took their wealth with them from Romania. Stephanie's father leveraged his fortune to become one of the original shareholders in Delta Airlines and had been retired for nearly 25 years when John met Stephanie. Although it was Stephanie’s beauty, which attracted John initially, it was the chance to be part of a huge inheritance that kept him around when Stephanie demonstrated her true narcissistic nature to him.
Stephanie’s parents’ marriage ceremony was more modest than hers was, as her Grandfather, Alex, was somewhat of a Scrooge.
Nevertheless, Stephanie Polluck had come from money.
And she not only liked it, but she was also obsessed with it.
John, on the other hand, came for more stark upbringings. He was the son of an Air Force officer. He had moved around his entire life and had become a chameleon of sorts. Given the fact that he had been in five elementary schools before he reached sixth grade, he had learned how to adapt. His adaptation and his ability to blend in with any and all was, in his mind, his great strength, and others would agree.
He was affable when affability was called for.
He was studious when that was needed.
He could also be very crude when he would hang with his friends, some of whom were of less than sterling character. He was good-natured, and he never picked up his father’s militaristic traits.
He wasn’t demanding or intolerant like his father. Nor was he fastidious like his mother, a fact not lost on Stephanie. In fact, he was not like his parents at all.
He was a free spirit and did what he wanted when he wanted. He wouldn’t judge, nor be judged by the state of his room, house, or car, each of which was always in some state of disorder. They weren’t cluttered mind you. But they certainly weren’t up to his parent’s standards nor those of Stephanie.
In fact, when John was growing up, the state of his room was always a cause of disagreement with his father. At that time, in the 70s, some would call his room a mess. He called it “functional and lived-in.” His mother and father didn’t quite agree, but because of his cheerful demeanor and ability to keep a positive attitude, they overlooked this small shortcoming.
It was fine with him because he did have a free spirit and a brilliant mind and really didn’t like cleaning up his messes, choosing instead to spend his time reading or enjoying sports. His curiosity and intelligence drew him into the practice of law. You see, lawyers, in his mind, never actually dealt with absolutes. They always dealt with what might be or what could be. He had a sterling intellect, an IQ of over 160, and an inquisitive mind.
In fact, he thrived on dealing with uncertainty. It kept his mind busy and, being a problem solver by nature, gave him countless hours of satisfaction as he examined an issue from multiple sides until finally making a decision.
His intellect and good nature made him the perfect cocktail party guest. What he didn't know, he was able to fake because of his prolific reading. Or when he wasn't reading, he was listening to National Public Radio or talk radio to find out what the latest trends were. They stuck in his mind like glue and he could unglue the appropriate comment at the appropriate moment to impress his friends, especially if he had had too much to drink. It seemed to him his ability to unlock his own psyche was driven by alcohol. It unleashed his inner intellect, or so he thought.
Regardless, the fact that he was entirely opposite of Stephanie was what attracted her to him and him to her. But both of them, being brought up in somewhat restrictive environments were exceedingly selfish.
They did share the trait of wanting the freedom to be who they were, not who their parents wanted them to be.
They both became selfish as a result.
That selfishness is what ultimately led them to where they were today.
Today they were going to buy a new 50-foot sailboat, even though neither one of them knew how to sail. They were going to take a sabbatical from their jobs and reconnect even if it was going to be difficult to do so.
They desperately needed to get their love rekindled or they both knew it was going to end. This was fine with Stephanie because in her mind John had crossed her more than enough times to be written off.
But John had a bigger dog in the hunt.
He wanted, no needed, the opportunity to collect on his personal investment in time and tolerance for having to put up with his wife for so many years by getting his share of Stephanie’s’ parents’ wealth. By the look of it, that money would be coming to him very soon given the fragile state of his in-laws. Both suffered from advanced Alzheimers, but not before appointing him as the executor of their estate, in spite of the fact Stephanie pitched a royal fit on hearing their decision. (Even Stephanie’s parents knew she was crazier than a three-balled tomcat on crack cocaine and had suffered for years while they dealt with Stephanie’s narcissistic rages throughout the years. Appointing John was sending a very clear message to their daughter that she needed to change, even if that message would be delivered from the grave.