Cut Me

Tony wasn’t sure what he should do with Maggie’s body now that he had cut it into bite size pieces. He thought about frying it in hot Crisco oil or maybe setting a match to some charcoal and grilling it. Hers was the third body he had sliced today, not literally, of course, just in his mind. Tony’s mind was a mess and had been for years. His mental condition had something to do with being thrown into the trunk of a car and left there overnight when he was seven.
He was what some people might call a freak of nature. He looked like a boy but was old enough to be called a man. He had the hands of a woman. Not strong, manly ones that could drive an axe into a live oak tree, but delicate ones requiring only enough strength to squeeze the life out of his partners. Not literally, of course. Tony never took anyone’s physical life. He was much too shrew for that. He made sure his victims were mousey women who could tolerate being slowly squeezed.
Or suffocated. Tony loved suffocating his partners. He did it slowly. So slowly they rarely realized what he was doing until they were deep into the affair and too afraid to find an escape, knowing full well he would come after them, find them, and coax them into returning. After a few years, his women became weak, mere ghosts of their former selves. They were unrecognizable when they looked in a mirror. Friends and associates didn’t see the change, but the women did.
Death by cutting or suffocation was nothing compared to death by Tony’s love. He loved some of his victims to death. Not literally, of course, but in his mind. He had a way of taking the hate eating his innards and reinventing it as love. He had a head for violence because that’s what he was raised on. Not kindness or thoughtfulness or patience or nurturing, but violence. As a kid, he saw it every day. It was as much a part of him as his right arm. It was only natural he would equate violence towards women as a display of love. The first time he hit Maggie with her rolling pin, he assured her he loved her because if he didn’t, he would have used the butt of his shotgun. The second time he hit her, it was with his fist. Maggie knew the pain in her jaw was proof positive of Tony’s devotion.
The bizarre affair went on for years because Tony wouldn’t leave and Maggie was too much in love to desert him. After all, he needed her. He told her every day she was his life and everything to him. What would he do without her he would ask. Such words sent Maggie into romance heaven. Surely, he didn’t mean to be violent. Maggie hated that word. Tony wasn’t violent. He was just misunderstood. So she stayed. Then one day she came home from Christmas shopping and found Tony sitting on the couch with strings of colored lights wound around his wrists.
When she asked what he was doing he took his eyes from Fox News and looked at her. His smile was one she had often seen. It sent shivers down her arms and made her heart beat fast. Slowly he got up from the couch and without a word gently placed each hand on her shoulders. Then quietly he began to unwind the lights from his wrists and wind them around her neck. His movements were calm and deliberate. Maggie stood still as Tony talked in a soothing voice, telling her she was his Christmas tree. She didn’t feel pain until he tightened the strings and the sharp little lights dug into her flesh.
She asked him to stop when the pain increased, but his monotone reply assured her he was only playing. He wasn’t angry. There was no reason to be angry. She had spent her own money on gifts for his stepchildren. She hadn’t asked him for money because she knew he had none. Of course, Tony had no money because he had no job. She had purchased an expensive knife set for his son, the only present the kid wanted. Maggie was happy to buy the gift and a dozen others for relatives of Tony’s ex-wife. Maggie wasn’t jealous. She was pleased she could be useful.
When a little trickle of blood escaped from her neck, Tony traced it with his finger. Immediately he unwound the lights and handed Maggie a wet rag to wipe her neck clean. As her heartbeat slowed, she realized how sorry Tony was and in a comforting voice told him it was okay. No serious harm was done. No scars would appear to remind her of the Christmas he tried to choke her because, of course, he hadn’t. It was merely a game. He meant no harm.
The years passed and as in all long term love affairs, the ups and downs continued. There were good days and bad ones. Happy times when Maggie felt Tony’s love with each physical blow he administered and sad times when he hurt her through his silence. The physical pain was soon forgotten and the bruises, scratches, and cuts healed without a trace of ever having been. Although Maggie would never admit it, the mental pain Tony inflicted was much worse because it was invisible. If she complained, who would believe her?
Over his lifetime, he had perfected various techniques for emotional torture. The scars they left were unseen so they didn’t exist, at least not to Tony. He skipped through the years, and everyone who didn’t know him, loved him. He was a friend to all, quick to assist a neighbor with any task, and an all around great guy. In fact, a perfect guy until memories of that car trunk crept into his mind. Then Tony became a monster.
He was afraid of the dark, of being alone, and of women. He huffed and puffed during the day, but if Maggie wasn’t home when dark fell, he panicked. He turned on every light in the apartment. He turned on the television sets in each room, the radios, the stereo. When night came, so did the memories of his youth. Tony was a mistake, an oops in the dark during a moment of passion. Gert tried to abort him, but it didn’t work. Even as a tiny group of cells, he held to her for protection.
Tony’s first childhood recollection, prior to the trunk business, was watching Gert fry fish in a pan of hot oil. He was three or four when the accident happened. Of course it was an accident. Everyone said so. Tony simply got too close to the pan and it tipped. While he recovered from the burns, his mother sat at his hospital bedside. She wasn’t like other mothers, Tony knew that but he didn’t know she was a free spirit and Tony’s father was her third or fourth husband. He didn’t know that either until he was older. He learned something else when he was a teenager. He learned, quite by accident, the man he called dad wasn’t his or anyone’s. He was just some bum Gert picked up when Tony’s father packed his bags and left.
But Tony didn’t know all this when he was recuperating. He only knew the woman sitting on the chair next to his hospital bed had hurt him. He knew it, but he couldn’t tell anyone. So Tony kept quiet and learned a valuable lesson at a very early age. Keeping secrets to yourself is the best way to survive or avoid punishment. When he was well enough to return home, he never went near the kitchen when Gert was frying fish in a pan of boiling oil.
Maggie learned, quite by accident, that Tony liked to cut things. One afternoon, nine years into the affair, she came home and found him sitting on the couch watching a crime show and cutting her favorite dress into tiny pieces. The pieces were falling into a cardboard box brimming with other items of clothing from her closet and bureau drawers.
She recognized pieces of skirts and underwear, gloves and hats, nightgowns and knee socks, and various other articles that had gone missing over the years. Of course Maggie dared not express alarm or anger. She turned her back to Tony and pretended she hadn’t seen what he was doing, thus giving him time to stuff the dress into the box and carry it to another room. When he returned, his body crushed hers against the kitchen sink. Just before Maggie passed out, Tony released her and returned to his couch.
Life passed as life always does and everything remained the same except for the inward changes no one sees. Tony’s favorite show was City Confidential. Sometimes Maggie watched it with him if it wasn’t too violent. She still hated that word, but occasionally it crept into her vocabulary. Tony also enjoyed watching the Playboy channel, not for the naked women, of course, but for the interesting interviews from which he learned having intercourse twice a day helped prevent testicular cancer. Once Tony learned this, there was no stopping him. Regardless of her fatigue or disgust, Maggie surrendered twice a day, every day.
When Tony took Maggie it wasn’t her he was thinking about nor was it the healing of any potential sickness in his body. The image in his mind was that of Gert and the man he called dad. It was their naked, sweaty bodies he saw, for he had often watched them the summer he turned seven. Jake caught him peeking through the slightly open door and ignored him. Every morning Tony slipped quietly down the hall to his mother’s bedroom. By the time he was eight, he had learned to service himself while watching Jake service Gert. Tony’s entertainment continued until one morning his mother saw him peeking through the open door.
This time there was no pot of boiling oil to teach him a lesson and no car trunk to lock him in, but there was something much more sinister called isolation. From that morning on, Tony lived in an isolated world created by his mother. She ignored him. Yes, she fed and watered him much as one does cattle. Yes, she bought him clothes and shoes much as one buys a doggie sweater and boots for Rover when winter comes. She spoke to him when speech was necessary, and when he turned sixteen, she shipped him off to his biological father, a man who was a stranger to Tony. A man who didn’t want him any more than Gert did.
Maggie knew some of his deepest secrets because Tony told her things he never had shared with other women. She stayed because she pitied him, loved him, wanted to heal him. Not change him, of course, for she knew that was impossible. Maggie just wanted to protect him from anything hurtful. She told him many times she would never leave him.
But as we all know, there’s always a way to leave someone and it has nothing to do with a physical move. In his own, misbegotten way, Tony loved Maggie. So each day he sat on his couch, watched Fox News or City Confidential or Who the Bleep Did I Marry and continued to cut her clothes into tiny pieces. It was the only way he knew how to show his love. As he neared the age of seventy-five, his panic increased and his mind became more confused. Reality and fantasy blurred, crossed lines, and traded places. Tony realized he didn’t know the difference between the two and that scared him more than anything.
One spring day Maggie sat next to him and reached for the remote. She was tired of listening to the constant drone of news commentators. She wasn’t interested in politics, only game shows. She thought Tony was asleep when she switched channels. When Pat Sajak asked Vanna to touch the letters, Tony jerked awake. In his confusion, he thought Maggie was asking him to touch the letters he had been dreaming about: LOSER. It only took him a minute to wrap his hands around her neck and press his thumbs into her throat. It only took her a minute to reach for the razor sharp scissors on the end table. While he choked, she stabbed. When he realized what he was doing and felt the sharp jab in his side, he released his hold at which time Maggie withdrew the scissors. They never spoke of the incident.
Eventually Tony stopped demanding intercourse and Maggie stopped talking. They watched television deep into the night. Occasionally Maggie heated Crisco oil to the boiling point and fried fish. Tony always avoided the kitchen when the oil was hot. In their little apartment above a textile shop, the lights burned day and night and chased away loneliness, abandonment, and anything as bizarre as love.
And so they lived for the rest of their lives. A sad, weary couple each dependent upon the other. Each too fearful to start anew. Each hoping the other would leave or die or just disappear into some nameless void and never be heard from again. But Maggie learned life isn’t like that. She learned it tends to drag on and on like an elastic band with enough stretch and endurance to last forever.