Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 4: “Maggie”
MAGGIE
His heart should be ripped from his body!
-Salome, speaking to King Herod of John the Baptist
Maggie O’Brien was the Leslie Batson that Ben Bob could never have. She was a trophy, a cliché. She was Homecoming Queen; she was Miss Lafayette; she was a nurse with advanced degrees; the local paper had just named her as one of Lafayette’s ten most eligible bachelorettes; she was Salome minus the seven veils. She came after Ben Bob. He never had a chance.
In spite of everything, Ben had to shake his head and chuckle. “What a ride!” Pause… “What a dork!” He clicked the recorder on and dictated almost wistfully.
I heard from another doctor that Maggie O’Brien wanted to go out with me; I had to change my shorts! I mean, Miss Lafayette and Ben Bob Boyle? I wished Leslie Batson could see me now. I called and got her answering machine, but I wanted to talk to her pronto. I tracked her to the health club, and asked a trainer to go back to the women’s area to get her. She came out in a red leotard that had no wrinkles. She was tall, with green eyes and long blond hair that matched her complexion and eyebrows: she was a natural. Her nipples were visibly closer to me than any other part of her. I asked her to go out, and she didn’t laugh.
We had sex on our fourth or fifth date. The thoughts of the sexual failures I’d had with new women made my “friend” uncooperative. The little guy never did reach the state the books call a “throbbing member”, but Maggie’s persistence got the job done. She surprised me by saying that the intercourse alone had caused two orgasms. I was absolutely fascinated that I had found a woman who responded like the ones in the novels and movies. We had sex every time we were together, but she would never stay the whole night. She felt it would be insulting to her parents, since she was still living in their home. She was always multi-orgasmic, and I felt like a stud.
She was a Catholic, with 12 years of Catholic school to her credit. She’d never been married; I was a divorced Baptist with two children. Big problem, right? Not at all. Her parents were tight with the Bishop, and sure enough, the Bish’s thinking was that although Bonnie and I had been married for 12 years and produced two offspring, she had never made a true commitment to the marriage in the eyes of God, as evidenced by her abandonment of our home. Bada-bing!: religious annulment and big Catholic wedding! I’m not sure of the exact amount of money that the O’Briens donated to further the works of the church, but apparently God can be very flexible when approached properly.
He raised his injured left foot above the ottoman and rubbed its flesh. The message from the foot to his brain was a strange one: a mixture of numbness and hypersensitivity that was most unpleasant. He had reflex sympathetic dystrophy. It had been almost three years since the injury had disabled him, and though the current sensation was uncomfortable, it was such an improvement over the early months that the thought of complaint was an unwelcome intruder. Ben twirled the glass and held it up to the beams of light streaming into the room. The glass was half full–or half empty.
After the wedding, the daily sex stopped almost immediately. Maggie spent all the money she made as a nurse, and Ben Bob sent about half of his income to his children. Arguments over financial and sexual issues began, and they were to continue throughout the twenty-two years of marriage. Her first affair that Ben could document came about four years into the marriage. When she came back home, she brought a friend with her: vaginal condylomata, commonly known as venereal warts. She was too embarrassed to show her condition to her GYN, who was their personal friend, and Ben wanted her back, so he treated her himself.
He remembered a Sunday School lesson on forgiveness when he was a teenager: the wife had left the husband with the kids and run off with another man. Two years later she appeared at the front door, and the husband said, “Hello, Mary. We’ve been waiting for you to come home.” And nothing more was ever said about it. The idea was that to forgive is also to forget. When Ben first heard the story, he didn’t think he could have taken the woman back, but when the opportunity presented itself, he did.
But he didn’t forget.
Another sip, another tingle, and he resumed.
There was still some religion in my life, but not like the old Baptist days. Catholics have to go to church, and I went with Maggie. I could kneel and stand up at all the right times, but I never said any of the Catholic stuff. Maggie and her family liked to be seen at any event, but they really got off on attention from the Monsignor, so I gave money. When we adopted a daughter, I sent her to Catholic schools. I figured I had already screwed up my turn with children, so this one was for Maggie. If you’re not a Catholic and you never have tried to discuss religion with one, you’ve missed a treat. Charge over to Proverbs 22:6, and you’ll find, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it.” The Catholics take this to heart, and it works. Josef Stalin used the same technique to create a whole generation of loyal Communists, although his penances were a little stiffer. Needless to say, Maggie and I did not discuss concepts of the universe.
It was Ben’s fault, not hers, that he loved Maggie so. She was a woman like those who had always laughed at him or said no, but she had said yes. A sex therapist told him that men have relationships so they can have sex, and women have sex so they can have relationships. Maggie was more powerful for him than sex; she was pride. The fact that she didn’t really love him, lied about things as glibly as she told the truth, was never reluctant to use infidelity to assuage her ego, had no interest in important discussions, and spent money without limit were swept under the rug. She had the appearance of a beautiful and devoted wife. Ben assigned to her the qualities he wanted her to have, and then he loved the creature he had created.
Ben’s surgical field was very specialized, and in that small pond, he was a big fish worldwide. So long as he was famous and the money was rolling in, Maggie was accommodating. When things leveled off, she began to look for better climes. Once she had traveled on a friend’s Gulfstream-V, she was never to be happy with tourist class.
Ben had paused and was about to take a sip. His psychotherapist had encouraged him not only to avoid denying that there were good times and shared love with Maggie, but also to emphasize these positive memories. Only then, she said, can healing begin to occur. He concluded that the healing process apparently had not yet kicked in.
When Maggie first began sleeping with Ben at his house, at least until she got up to go home each night near dawn, his furnishings were comprised of a mattress on the floor, covered with designer sheets; a state-of-the-art stereo system in the living room; and a Samsonite folding card table with stacked wooden Pepsi crates for stools in the breakfast room. In a marriage, Ben later would find, you do everything else, and then if there’s any time left over, you may have sex. When dating Maggie, they had sex, and if there was any time leftover, they did the other things. The house was furnished adequately for the times.
The first clue that things were not as they appeared came one evening after sex, at about nine o’clock. Maggie rolled off the mattress and began dressing. “I can’t stay tonight because I’ve got something I’ve got to do.” Ben had known her for about a month, too little time to be versed in the subtleties of her mannerisms. He tried to get her to expand on her reason for leaving, but she would say only that it was some “girl stuff.” She waved and blew kisses as she drove off in her aqua-colored Mazda RX-7. She had been gone about half an hour when Ben decided that the tone of her voice didn’t quite sit right. He got in his car.
When Ben met Maggie, she was fresh out of a relationship with an ex Viet-Nam helicopter pilot. Marcel had been married to a wealthy woman. When the divorce came, the family paid him handsomely to go away quietly. He let his money do all the work after that, and he was considered one of the hot catches by the women of Lafayette. After a year of dating, imagining the time had come for some commitment, he told Maggie that he wanted to see other women. No boyfriend had ever broken up with Maggie; she was always the dumpor, never the dumpee. When she was seen around town with Ben, Marcel wanted her back, as Maggie knew he would. Maggie told Ben that Marcel was filling her voice mail and leaving notes on her car, but she was ignoring him. Ben knew where Marcel lived, and he turned his car in that direction.
Marcel was a sportsman; his Mercedes roadster and his toys left no extra room in his two-car garage. Parked just in front of the garage was an aqua-colored Mazda RX-7.
In Ben’s courtship and marriage with Bonnie, infidelity was never a plausible consideration for either of them. As Ben drove back to his house, he was overcome with the realization that Maggie might be Leslie Batson, but she was worthless. Back home, he found the new Scrabble game that Maggie had given him earlier in the evening, for those rare occasions when there might be extra time after sex. He penned an ugly note full of vinegar, the gist being that he wanted nothing further to do with Maggie, and he taped it to the game. He drove to the O’Brien residence. It was now around midnight. There was no Mazda. He laid the game and its note at the front door and left. His anger kept him awake until time for morning hospital rounds.
Recount this scenario to a hundred adults, then ask each what Maggie was doing that night. There will be a hundred identical answers. But Maggie had a different answer. And Ben believed it. He not only believed it, but he was so relieved by his capacity to believe it that he felt like Lazarus, raised from the dead. Maggie was back in his bed the next night, and every night until the wedding. A message had been sent to Ben about his future with Maggie, and indeed, about Maggie herself, but when Ben opened the message, he read something that wasn’t there. Ben continued to read that imaginary message throughout their marriage. Indeed, he wanted to read it again at the end, but on that occasion, Maggie penned the final verse.
Ben’s office manager approached him at the close of an office day, twenty-one years into his marriage. Her name was Martha. Although she was ten years his senior, and they had worked as a close team for over twenty-five years, she always called him “Dr. Boyle.”
“Dr. Boyle, Mrs. Boyle’s cell phone bill is really unusual this month. I wonder if you’d take a look at it before I pay it to see whether you think someone might have charged some calls to her number.” Ben paid for all the phones out of his office account, and none of the bills ever went to his house. As far as he knew, Maggie probably had never seen a bill for her phone, and almost certainly was unaware that each call was listed by number, date, time, and duration. All local calls were included in the monthly plan, but long-distance was extra. This bill was full of long-distance calls.
“How about making me copies of these sheets, Martha, and I’ll see if Maggie knows anything about them.” When Martha returned, Ben put the bill in his coat pocket and headed home. It never crossed his mind again until after supper, when he noticed it as he went to hang up the coat.
“Maggie, would you take a look at these long-distance calls charged to your phone and see if they’re legit?” It was only later, retrospectively, that he realized she balked a bit. Other than that, she was right on beat.
She seemed to study the list. “Nope, I don’t have any idea what they could be. Certainly not anybody I called.” She was looking directly into Ben Bob’s eyes as she gave a little shrug and handed back the list.
“Well, I’ll get Martha to have them credited tomorrow. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who can get her own way with the phone company.” He laid the papers on the kitchen island, and headed for the master suite. It wasn’t Thursday, so he knew there would be no sex.
That would have been the end of it, but for Ben Bob’s affinity for the Internet. As he was checking his email, he decided to get one step ahead of the telephone company, and see if he could come up with some identities to match the calls. Some of the questionable calls were to the same number, in the New Orleans area. He logged on to an Internet phone book and reverse-traced the number to a law firm in Metairie, accounting for nine of the calls. The source for phone listings identified some of the numbers as cell phones, and for those, the site had no owner information. Then Ben Bob noticed something he had overlooked earlier. Some of the cell phone numbers were calls to Maggie’s number, as well as from it. Ben had a habit of thinking in actual sentences, as if talking to himself. “Okay,” he thought, “I can see how the calls from Maggie’s number could have been a mistake or fraud, but what about the calls to her number? They can’t be wrong numbers, because some of the conversations go on for fifty minutes.” His curiosity was truly piqued. He removed his bifocals and put on stronger reading glasses to aid with the small print on the bill. Some of the calls were at one or two in the morning. He looked at other recurring numbers next; most were to or from Maggie’s friends. There was one local number that was not, and he traced it to another law firm, this time in Lafayette.
He pushed back for a moment and thought about it. He moved forward and Googled the local law firm. They had a Web site. He opened the site and clicked on a button labeled “Our Attorneys”. Three names came up: two were local attorneys whom Ben Bob knew. The third was an itinerant family-law attorney who used the office to see Lafayette clients once a week. He was from Metairie. His name was Warren Shaw. Typing rapidly now, Ben Googled the original Metairie law firm he had traced. It was Shaw and Picard, Attorneys at Law. The “Shaw” was Warren Shaw.
Ben Bob felt both excitement and dread. He had backed away from many things he had not wanted to recognize about Maggie, but he had never done it consciously. The thought of stopping his efforts at this point never occurred to him. He found a site that guaranteed to identify cell phone numbers, for a price. It used encryption and claimed to be safe for credit card transactions. He entered his Amex number, and the information he sought popped up. The long conversations and the late night calls were to and from a cell phone registered to Warren Shaw.
His first thought was that Maggie must be in some sort of legal trouble that she wanted to keep secret. He was Ben Bob Boyle, the midget school newspaper editor, and Maggie was his Leslie Batson. He had to start with the most acceptable options. But he couldn’t get past the knowledge that not much legitimate legal consultation goes on at two in the morning. He began to look at the patterns of the calls more closely. There was one from Maggie’s cell to Shaw’s cell on a Friday evening at eight for twelve minutes. Immediately, there followed a call from Maggie’s cell to the O’Brien residence for three minutes. There were no more calls until Sunday afternoon, when there was another short call from Maggie’s cell to the O’Brien residence. He looked at the date. It was the weekend he had gone fishing at the camp in Bayou du Large with some dentist buddies. Later, Ben would have Martha pull out an earlier cell bill. It would show calls to Shaw’s phone on the weekend that Maggie went on a “girl’s trip” to New Orleans with her friends.
Ben postponed the inevitable confrontation with Maggie for a few days, constructing the most complete picture he could with the information he had gathered. He discovered that the “Picard” of Shaw and Picard was Nancy Picard, the wife of Warren Shaw. They had two children. Ben thought back to the forgive-and-forget sermon about the man who welcomed back his philandering wife after two years. Ben had done it before and survived. This was a messy situation, involving two families with children. Maybe he hadn’t been meeting Maggie’s emotional needs, and she was trying to get his attention. Perhaps Maggie would welcome being caught, as an opportunity to reaffirm her love for him and her faith in their relationship. After all, she had stayed with him when he had no furniture. Maybe there was a perfectly harmless explanation.
He decided to play his hand one card at a time, and let Maggie’s responses guide his actions.
Ben suggested to Maggie that their daughter spend the night with the O’Briens, exactly as Ben knew Maggie had done to get away on the weekend of Ben’s fishing trip. Ben grilled some steaks, Maggie tossed a salad, and afterward, Ben popped a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. He poured the bubbly liquid into Waterford champagne flutes that Maggie had selected as their wedding pattern. He had to pause several times to keep the bubbles from escaping over the rims of the glasses. There was no tension in the air whatever. He looked directly into Maggie’s green eyes and smiled, and she smiled back. He had decided that throughout the conversation, wherever it led, he would look into her eyes, and try to read her soul. He spoke.
“I’ve got some follow-up on those mysterious phone numbers that Martha noticed on your cell bill.” There was no change in Maggie’s demeanor.
“Really?” She spoke evenly, and took a sip of champagne. “Did she find the culprit and get it straightened out?” No clue yet.
“Well, yes and no,” Ben said in an off-hand way, looking at her eyes. “The culprit is known, but the problem isn’t completely resolved.”
Maggie swirled her glass. “Is there anything I can do to help?” She didn’t seem any different than in any other casual conversation they had had.
Ben leaned forward ever so slightly, narrowing the space between them. “Actually, there is. It seems that these are legitimate calls made on your phone, to and from New Orleans. Could they involve a friend that you forgot about or maybe calls arranging a surprise that you wanted to keep secret?” He shifted back to give her the suggestion of an opening.
“No, definitely not. That’s really weird. I wonder who could be on the other end?” Not much concern at all showed in her voice.
He continued the eye contact. “Well, Martha says it’s a lawyer in New Orleans.”
Maggie shifted her legs, but Ben honestly couldn’t detect any sign of tension. “Why would someone call a New Orleans lawyer on my phone?” She phrased it as an innocent question, to all appearances.
“And vice versa,” Ben reminded.
“Yeah, how could that be? I haven’t gotten any calls from a lawyer in New Orleans.” Another calm sip of the bubbly.
Ben turned it up a notch. “Oh, I forgot. Some of the calls were to and from that same lawyer’s Lafayette office.”
There was a tiny, but noticeable, squirm this time. “Really! What’s that all about?” She looked into Ben’s eyes with a sincerely quizzical expression.
Ben took a sip himself, but he kept his eyes focused on hers. The bubbles tickled his throat and sent warmth into his nasal passages, but he didn’t allow the sensory experience to distract him. “I wondered the same thing myself.” He paused, as if that might be the end of his thought. He swirled the champagne, and put his nose slightly into the glass, hoping to set Maggie at ease. Then he continued, “So I called his cell phone from yours yesterday while you were in the shower.” That did it. Her pupils enlarged and she looked shaken.
“What!”
“Yeah. A guy named Warren Shaw answered by saying, ‘Hey Maggie, what’s up?’” Ben was uncharacteristically calm. He was usually all over Maggie when he knew he was in the right. This mood was one of resignation, tempered by the knowledge that her responses meant there would be no good outcome. And then Maggie struck.
“Look, I’m soooo sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you. I didn’t think you’d ever know about the calls. Debbie made me swear not to tell.” Maggie looked really upset now, and a tear was forming in her left eye. She was leaning forward with her shoulders rolled together, making herself into a smaller form. Her arms dropped straight down, and her knees clutched her hands together tightly, in the perfect portrayal of penitence. “She got into credit card problems again and she’s seeing this Shaw guy to try to get it worked out. Apparently he helped one of her New Orleans buds get out of a similar jam. She’s using me as a go-between because she’s afraid Bert might find out about the calls. Shaw gives me the information and I pass it along to Debbie; Debbie gives me questions, and I pass them along to Shaw. You know Bert said he was going to kill her if this ever happened again.” She covered her face and picked at the wet eye with a perfectly manicured finger.
This is really good, Ben thought. Way better than she could come up with on the spur of the moment. She knows I’d believe anything about Debbie and money problems. She was thinking way ahead.
Ben no longer had any sympathy for Maggie’s situation, as she had looked him straight in the eyes all evening and spoken nothing but lies. He played his next card.
“Did I mention that the time of day and duration of each call is on the bill?” Her hands came down from her face. “What sort of information for Debbie was Warren Shaw passing along to you for fifty minutes at two o’clock in the morning?”
According to Maggie’s plan, if ever she was caught, the conversation was to be essentially over after her story about Debbie’s problems. She had no plan for this next step, so she winged it. “He was just interesting to talk to. It made me feel attractive when he called during the night. I never actually met him. I don’t even know what he looks like.” The tears were gone. This was now a negotiation.
Ben raised his voice somewhat. “Your mom says that on the weekend I went fishing, the kid stayed at her house. According to the phone records, you called your mom right after you spoke to Shaw on Friday. So, where were you all weekend?”
Maggie switched to aggressive. “Debbie and I went to Baton Rouge and out to some clubs. Her mother gave us a place to stay. Why should I be stuck here alone?”
Ben stood and looked down at her. “I wonder if Nancy Picard could add any information to this story?”
That was the right button. Maggie stood as well. “Don’t involve that poor woman. She had nothing to do with this and doesn’t deserve to be hurt.” Throughout their marriage, Maggie was the passive one. Only rarely could she be lured into arguments or even to raise her voice. Her family believed that it was unwise to talk when you were upset; just sleep on it. But she was talking now, and loudly. “Yeah, I had a fling! It’s good to know that men find me attractive!”
It seemed to Ben that this conversation had been rehearsed, perhaps years in coming.
“You know, looking down the road, you and I don’t have enough going for us to sustain a marriage. You’ve alienated everyone around you, and I’ve always stood by you. Well, now you’ve alienated me, and I think you should move out!” In over twenty years, her voice was the loudest she had ever used with Ben. Because normally she was so non-confrontational, her powerful offense on this night made a good defense. It almost seemed like she was right.
All Ben said was, “I’ll start looking for a place tomorrow.”
