Storymania - A Passel Of Plumeria by Robert Levin

A Passel Of Plumeria (1)
Robert Levin

This time the news was completely delivered in under a minute, but I caught it and it made me rise from my seat.

“Yes!” I heard myself say to the TV. “Yes! Of course!“

It was 1992 now, and while years had passed since Walter and Anna Marie were an object of media interest, I, for one, hadn’t forgotten this couple. I’d first become aware of them — and been as aghast at Walter’s actions as everyone else — on the evening of the incident, an evening in July of 1985, when national TV stations carried reports from their South Florida affiliates. It wasn’t until the fall though, when they made the wires again on the day Walter was sentenced, that they got a serious grip on my attention.

Indeed, learning that what transpired at the sentencing had triggered a major focus on Walter and Anna Marie in the Miami Herald and the Kendall Star (the journal representing the Miami suburb in which they lived), I became, for the next few mornings, a regular customer at an out-of-town newspaper store. As I’m prone to do, I was thinking about the breadth of human resourcefulness in response to the horrific knowledge of being mortal; about the variety of remedies, usually subconscious, often implausible and sometimes abhorrent, that we’ve fashioned for the mother of all anxieties. And albeit a strictly visceral reaction at this stage, I was, upon seeing the headlines, at odds with what these papers were making of the sentencing’s extraordinary events. In step with the newscasts I’d watched, the Herald referred to Walter and Anna Marie as the “Demented Duo,” and a piece in the Star was titled “The Twisted Psychology of a Victim.” Still, notwithstanding my quarrel with what struck me as limited vision, both the Star and the Herald published extensive articles that promised details, and details being what I wanted (and was gratified to discover — they would buttress my faith in my instincts) I read everything. I found the Star especially valuable. It ran interviews not only with Anna Marie, who recalled entire conversations with Walter almost verbatim, but with family members and others. And it printed numerous photographs, images of the incident site among them.

Twenty years old at the time, Walter was five-foot-nine and squarely built with unruly shoulder-length hair that shrouded much of his angular face but failed to wholly obscure a profusion of severe acne scars. Although he was not without friends, one of them a confidante who would be interviewed at length, his inclination was to keep to himself, and snapshots from his early childhood — he was the youngest of four boys — revealed that his dour countenance had been a lifelong characteristic. From the week following his high school graduation through to the incident date, Walter worked as an auto mechanic at a popular gas station where he was reputed to be indolent and less than tidy when it came to the simple tasks, but was also known as a talented problem solver. He’d procrastinate about the easy things, and leave a wrench in a gear shift or oil stains on a steering wheel when he was finally done. But in respect to a car’s more elusive issues he would engage and persevere until he’d produced the correct diagnosis and solution. His declared ambition was to eventually own a repair shop. His preoccupation, however, was Anna Marie.

Anna Marie was two months younger than Walter and an inch or two shorter. If she could claim prominent breasts and large green eyes with long and thick lashes, she was hardly, at least insofar as her appearance was concerned, a woman you’d expect a man to be obsessed with. Her nose was too big, her cheeks too fleshy, her chin too brief, her bottom too broad and her “dirty” blonde hair (which she wore at shoulder length or pulled into a ponytail) too stringy. A brother of Walter’s described her as “maybe a six.” Employed since high school as an assistant manager in a supermarket in Kendall’s largest shopping center, she lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother who was suffering from an abundance of ailments and essentially house-bound. It was the same apartment in which she’d been raised. Her father, a building construction worker, had died on her ninth birthday, not long after he was trapped in a fire ignited by a gas explosion. She was an only child.

Walter and Anna Marie met in their junior year of high school and that was when, as another of Walter’s brothers expressed it, the “simple teenage crush that just got crazy” commenced. Walter had apparently been smitten the instant he saw Anna Marie. They were in three of the same classes and in the opening weeks of the term he maneuvered to sit near her whenever he could. (He would lean towards her to capture her fragrance, to study her face and to watch for the bra straps that tended to slip below the short sleeves of her blouses.) But she showed no interest in him, never so much as glanced in his direction. And his natural shyness, exacerbated by the inflamed condition of his pimples in this period, it was beyond him to make a move on her.

Then, on a midweek morning in late October, she was passing his desk and tripped over his book bag which happened to be protruding into the aisle. She crashed against the desk in front of his and he heard her groan. Seizing the opportunity to help her, he felt the cool flesh of her arm in his hand and would “forever remember” the “electrical current” that charged through him when they made this first physical contact. As she composed herself, pressing her fingers to her forehead — she was in evident pain — she took a hard look at him and smiled.

“Is this your way of flirting?” She said.

Walter, taken aback, his face hot, had no answer. He only gaped at her.

“The book bag,” she said, still smiling. “Well, it worked. My name’s Anna Marie. What’s yours?” She held out her hand and he noticed a welt beginning to form over one of her eyes. “I could have croaked,” she said. “But I’m still here.”

Dating by the weekend, Walter and Anna Marie were “going steady” in a matter of days and they defined their relationship that way for a full year. “Sixteen! The best year of my life,” Walter would say. Much of their time was spent in Anna Marie’s room. Down a long hallway from her mother’s, and largely unchanged since her girlhood, the capacious room was painted pink and all but consumed by a collection of gargantuan rag dolls and oversized, multi-colored pillows strewn on the bed and the floor. They’d talk spiritedly there for hours at a stretch.

As a rule, Walter had little to say about himself and spoke mainly about cars. He could name the make, model and year of every car on the road. But on one evening he told Anna Marie that he’d never felt “wholeheartedly loved” by his parents. Walter’s parents owned a modest one-story house a short bus ride from Anna Marie and Walter shared a bedroom with his second-youngest brother — which accounted for why Anna Marie seldom reciprocated his visits. His father was a mid-level executive at an auto parts company and his mother a part-time bookkeeper. They were depicted by the Herald as “intensely private people” and few in the community were personally acquainted with them. “Don’t get me wrong,” Walter said. “They’re okay. They’ve done what they were supposed to. They haven’t abused me or anything like that. But I never get the strokes my brothers get. I think — my mother mostly — they didn’t want another kid, definitely not another boy, and that I probably wasn’t supposed to happen.”

In turn Anna Marie, who was enamored of horror films and would chatter about their plots in every detail, abandoned her favorite topic to tell Walter about her father in the ICU after the fire. “He was in godawful pain,” she said. “Even though he was taking morphine the pain just overwhelmed it. He was in agony and couldn’t move ’cause they had him strapped down. Then he breathed funny and passed away, just like that. All that pain, it was for nothing. What’s the point of pain if you don’t live through it? If it had been something he had to feel to stay alive, that would be one thing. But then he died. I still dream about it.”

They also made out a lot. The both of them still virgins, they brought each other to climax with their hands.

In their first year Walter would experience facets of Anna Marie that served to markedly enhance his feelings for her. She’d privately shop for acne ointments and then apply them to his face herself. Walking next to him on the street, she’d suddenly, for no particular reason, grab and embrace him. But she was not without some troubling aspects.

Given to a seemingly willful carelessness, she’d often march across streets against the light and in total disregard of flowing traffic. And habitually leaving her opened handbag on a restaurant table or chair when she went to the ladies’ room or was engrossed in conversation with someone, she was twice a victim of theft. (When he heard of the second event, Walter took to holding her bag when he was out with her.)

What’s more, there were stretches that could last for several days in which she’d become listless and distant. The loss of her attentiveness upset Walter. But her unhappiness bothered him more. He couldn’t stand to see her in distress. He wanted her to feel good. He needed her to feel good. “What happens to her happens to me,” he said to the friend in whom he confided. “It’s like my nerves are soldered to her nerves.”

For Anna Marie, what was most impressive about Walter in this beginning year was his “gentle nature” and the “incredible generosity” — the steady flow of presents and flowers — that accompanied it. But vying for top spot with those distinctions was his “slovenliness.” His schoolwork notes were such “an unholy mess” that she had to spend whole days organizing them for him. And his “indifference to personal care” was “almost a joke.” He’d wear the same shirt for a week. His sneakers had holes in them. Though she loved his long hair it was “insistently unkempt” and she wished he would “style it more.” Sometimes his “seedy” appearance was “seriously aggravating.” Just as often though, it was “endearing.”

They had their first real sex when they were seventeen. Walter deemed the milestone near to spiritual. Anna Marie thought it was “good,” but that something was missing. “Do you have to treat me so delicately?” She asked the next time “Why don’t you push me around a little?” But he couldn’t do that. Hurting her was the last thing he could do. She frowned at him and he felt chastened and inadequate.

And it was during the year they turned seventeen, and not long after she’d asked Walter to take her kayaking in the Everglades and he’d exclaimed — Are you kidding? With the alligators?” — that Anna Marie remarked to a friend: “Walter’s pusillanimous.”

“Pusill-what?” the friend said.

“Funny word, huh?” Anna Marie said. “It came up in a crossword. It means he’s chickenshit. He’s so sweet to me, which I cherish. But sometimes he’s too timid. It’s all sugar and no spice.”

It was also in that year that a shift occurred in their relationship.

The change commenced on the day an older boy gave Anna Marie a ride on his motorcycle. When Walter connected with her later she was wearing a heavy bandage on her ankle. “It still stings,” she said breathlessly. “We skidded on a slick patch and we actually grazed the ground before he got the bike upright again.” She lifted the bandage to show him the burn. “Do you think it’ll leave a scar?” He saw her eyes widen at the prospect. “It was scary,” she went on, “especially when I felt the scrape. But now I feel terrific, like indestructible — is there anything better?”

Not long after that she broached the idea of an “open relationship.” She would date other boys and he could see other girls. “From time to time and just, you know, casual-like,” she said.

In a voice he didn’t recognize as his own, Walter said, “You’re my girl.”

“It won’t be so different,” Anna Marie said. “We’ll still be together. Most everything will be the same. There’ll just be times when one or the other of us will be…indisposed.”

Walter was in all imaginable misery. What, he wanted to know, did she mean by “casual-like?” How could she be sure that he or she wouldn’t get attached to someone else? And what about sex?

After Walter’s sentencing, Anna Marie would tell her interviewer that all she’d wanted was to “have some fun.” Her response at this moment was to erupt in a fit of giggles and, when that was done, to reach out and touch Walter’s face. “The Acknomel’s working great,” she said. “That’s good. We’ll get some more.” (In a separate article, her high school grade advisor was quoted as saying that although Anna Marie was “not stupid,” she was “a bit of a space cadet with little or no self-awareness.”)

Inasmuch as a life without Anna Marie was inconceivable to him now, and fearful of antagonizing her, Walter declined to challenge her proposal. He reminded himself that she still wanted him close, that she still needed him. It was only a phase she was going through. In no time at all things could revert to where they’d been. With the exception of him seeing other girls, which was out of the question, he agreed to the arrangement she asked for.

As it played out the arrangement would last nearly three years, years in which, and despite the fact that the routines of their relationship were not appreciably altered (they continued to see each other almost every day and still had sex, if less frequently), Walter was left to live with a tension that varied in degree but never fully dissipated. Unable to feel that his place in her life was secure — she was his girl and she wasn’t all at once — he was also burdened with a new and abiding apprehension about her physical and emotional well-being.

Anna Marie, who’d anticipate her extracurricular activities with unabashed excitement and who spoke openly with Walter about them (as openly, he assumed, as she dared to since she consistently denied having sex), would be “indisposed” once or twice every couple of months. It was always with guys she referred to as the “devil-may-care ones,” but who Walter regarded as “ “sketchy.” One was a drag-racer, another was into hang gliding. still another was a bungee jumper. All of the boys dropped her after one or two dates. When that happened, her initial elation would rapidly devolve into depression, a depression that might last for weeks. Never gloating or vindictive when she was down, Walter was, on the contrary, sympathetic and solicitous. He admitted to jealousy, but he increasingly perceived himself as her “guardian.” If the spells of melancholy weren’t worrisome enough, her fervid descriptions of her adventures with the drag-racer and the hang-gliding enthusiast, respectively chronicling near collisions and violently shifting wind currents, horrified him — he maintained that “all that really mattered” was Anna Marie’s welfare. That she’d return from dates she labeled her “best” with a smarting cut or contusion “concerned” him, he imparted to his confidant, “more than anything else.”

In the hope of dissuading her from pursuing “outside engagements,” and reasoning that he would be with her should she be in jeopardy, Walter, at one point, and as inimical as it was for him, determined to emulate the boys Anna Marie was drawn to. Though half of him dreaded an affirmative reply, he offered to take her up on her Everglades idea. But it was too late. Her sense of him was already fixed. “Wally, you know you don’t want to do that,” she said, slowly shaking her head and cupping his cheek with her hand.

A few months after they graduated from high school, the month of his eighteenth birthday, Walter left home and along with the purchase of his first vehicle — a pickup truck that he could use for work — rented a furnished room in Anna Marie’s immediate neighborhood. That room remained his place of residence until the day of the incident.

From his close proximity, and with his newly acquired wheels, Walter began to surreptitiously trail Anna Marie when she went on her dates. His purpose, he said, was to be there for her should she require his assistance. Pressed by his confidante, he conceded that he was also motivated by a need to see for himself “just what she was up to.” Ironically, the proceedings Walter would witness were all confined to the stuff of ordinary dating. But while it never became necessary for him to go to Anna Marie’s aid, what he observed was enough to cause him no small measure of grief.

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