Skin Deep

76

For days following Lila’s funeral he was anesthetized with grief.

Then that numbness passed into other expressions—the other predicted stages that he would later read about regarding the death of a loved one: denial, guilt, and anger.

Anger.

It was the final and most persistent expression. The one that nobody liked to admit, the one that would surface in time as something else like shame or self-contempt. The child who loses a mother will blame himself for her disappearance while at the same time feel rage at her for deserting him, for no longer gratifying his needs. Paradoxically, she becomes the object of love and craving as well as hate for his unbearable deprivation. Eventually that anger is supposed to pass with the grief, to cool into a numbed acceptance.

But not with him.

For years to come he felt its heat just beneath the skin of things. And no matter how thick the skin grew, it was always there, like the magma beneath the cap of a dormant volcano.

Lila’s remains were cremated according to her wishes, and he scattered her ashes in the sea. Because he was a minor, he moved in with his aunt and uncle in Fremont about fifteen miles away. That meant moving out of the neighborhood where he grew up. But since he was attending Markham Academy, a private school outside of Derry, he didn’t have to change schools. And the commute was about the same.

Throughout the rest of his high school years he did not date anyone.

He still saw Becky Tolland, who encouraged him to emerge from his self-inflicted anguish and get back into acting. He did, and on her insistence, he stayed with the Drama Club and performed in two more plays with her, A Streetcar Named Desire and My Fair Lady. Although they remained casual friends, he did not date Becky again. She was a young woman of the sexual revolution, before AIDS and after the pill—which meant she was sexually active. He wasn’t. So they went their separate ways.

As he grew older, his headaches got worse. So he was sent to a neurologist who conducted a battery of tests, concluding that he suffered minor temporal seizures as a result of the accident with Lila. Another piece of her legacy. Medication quelled the seizures as the years passed.

He attended college and did well. Throughout college he went to parties where he met women, even some with whom he had dinners. They made up a short “just friends” list. But he had no steady. Never had, and he knew classmates speculated that he might have been gay. He wasn’t. Isn’t. In the most pathetic of clichés, he could not find the right woman.

Looking back, he understood how she had affected his apprehension of other females. Lila’s physical beauty had become a supreme template that made other women seem gauche. Even golden Becky—Juliet-pretty Becky Tolland—the girl who made him the envy of other boys. He liked her, had fun with her, admired her fresh clean beauty. But inside he became distracted by her frizzy yellow hair, her pointy catlike face, the skinny legs, and flat chest.

It was Lila who did that. Because Lila was perfect.

She had been the source of his passion, and he had enshrined her in his soul. He knew his was an obsession that bordered on worship. In fact, at times, he felt so lucid a connection to her that he sensed her presence, even her possession of him. It was as if her spirit had crossed the mortal divide and taken up residence in his body. For a spell he would walk around having full conversations with her but taking both parts—himself and Lila. He had even gone so far as to assimilate from recall the tone and pitch of her voice and manner of expression.

Of course, in more rational moments he recognized the delusion for what it was. Yet when the spells passed, he felt both relief and abandonment.

He still had her photo albums, which he regarded as sacred icons to a religious supplicant. Hers was the most exquisite face he had ever seen. As Harry Dobbs once said, Lila had a face with no bad angles. It was stunningly perfect in proportions and structure. Her skin was clear and moist, and her eyes indigo starbursts. The world was a lesser place without her in it.

There were times over the succeeding years when in hopelessness he contemplated suicide. Lila had taken him to the kingdom and then abandoned him at the threshold. She had taught him hideous loss, then blamed it on him. She had left him with a tortured apprehension of women, a tunnel vision that rendered others inferior. And the only way he could conceive of expelling her from his soul was his own death.

Like a deep inflammation, that realization stayed with him until he met Diane.

Almost perfect Diane Hewson with the heart-shaped face and sunset hair.