Victor finished reading my notes, laid them on the coffee table, and looked at me. "The fact remains," he said, his tone quite serious, "that you did lie to me—sometimes directly and other times by omission—and that you used and manipulated me. That I will not tolerate—no matter how worthy your goal might be. Nevertheless—I am prepared to forgive you—with the understanding that from now on, you will be utterly open and candid. There must never be a recurrence of this."
The relief that flooded me was as great as the tension and fear that had preceded it. "Then you're not going to kill me." I said, feeling that strange, faraway sensation, the one I had felt after seeing my car take out my cash register only a meter in front of me, the feeling that meant I was slipping into clinical shock. When death passes so close, one cannot help but be touched by the wind of her passing.
"I would not have killed you in any event. I am not unmindful of your condition. I would have exiled you, instead—found you a secure and pleasant dwelling, and sent you there. We never again would have lived as husband and wife, of course."
I laughed, but not because anything was particularly funny. This was the shrill, brittle laughter of hysteria. "Who is to say we will live as husband and wife again now?"
"I'm afraid I don't understand you, my dear." He said it so normally, as if the events of the last hour and a half were no more than an afternoon drive down a bad road in the wrong direction that had left us bickering with each other.
"I knew what you were, and I got involved with you anyway, "I said, a little wildly. "I remember a study—where they asked a group of people what they feared about the opposite sex. The women said they were afraid men would rape them, beat them, and murder them. The men said they were afraid women would laugh at them. That is exactly the gap we're looking at here."
I was going to be direct, and tell him why I was upset. My perception is that men do not like to be expected to read a woman's mind about what is wrong. "I don't feel safe with you anymore. I don't know how I can feel safe with you again." I said, quelling my hysteria.
"Joviana, I regret—." Victor began, but his tone of voice was not apologetic—it was chilly.
"Please, Victor, let me finish. I believed you when you said we were married. I believed you when you took my side against my mother, the other night, when you diagnosed her schizophrenia. When you told me I had a right to be angry, that when my family left me alone with her, when I had to take care of her, it was wrong—I would have sworn I loved the very rumor of your name—but it was all an illusion. It pleased you to say we were married, just as it pleased you to cultivate my love for you and make it grow—and then it pleased you to drag me around by my hair, take my mother's part, and threaten to kill me.
"I thought you were on my side—just as I was on yours—but it seems to me as if the only side you have ever been on is the side of Victor Von Doom. How can I find my way back to feeling safe with you again?" I paused for breath.
"Joviana—."
"Just a little longer, please. You have all the power in this relationship—monetarily, physically, you command the whole country—I felt safe for as long as I believed you would never do anything like this. And now—for all I know, then next words out of your mouth are going to be, 'Already you try to manipulate me again'—when I'm doing my best to be honest and direct."
"I give you my word I will never do this again. All shall be as it was." he said, confident that it would be enough.
But it wasn't. "I would like to believe that, but when you said we were married—when we worked out that I would promise to obey and you would promise to respect—that was giving your word—and then you broke it." His head jerked at that, but I gave him no space in which to reply, and pressed on. "What happens the next time you have suspicions of me? Will you rationalize what you do by thinking to yourself, 'She is not who I believed her to be, so therefore I need have no compunction about breaking my word to her?'"
"Ah, yes. I am vain, proud, stubborn, resentful, and inclined to be vicious, am I not?" He was getting mad again.
"Yes. And I'm insecure, needy, a really annoying know-it-all, shy, and I have low self-esteem. These things temper our better qualities—they don't negate them."
"Is it now my turn to speak?" he asked.
I nodded, feeling very tired, crumpled, and small.
"Thank you. I regret the harsh words and somewhat rough handling. I had believed I was deceived in you. I am glad your offense turned out to be no worse—that I could forgive it. I will concede that my response to this matter was disproportionate to the wrongs you had committed—but you had indeed duped me. You did not deny it and you could not deny it." He pointed a finger at me, with emphasis.
"But I did you good, not harm." I said.
"And so I forgive you. As for what I said—Perceiving myself injured, I spoke to inflict injury in return. I said things I did not mean. What I said before of your mother, of your family—that was the truth."
"It isn't whether it was the truth or not. It is that my feeling of safety, of certainty, is shattered."
"Do you mean to leave me, since you cannot feel safe with me?" He asked.
"How can I?" I asked in return. "You have all the power. I suppose I could call on someone to help—the Fantastic Four, the Avengers—but that would ruin everything I have done so far. I want people to stop acting like superheroes and super villains, not call on them for it."
"Do you want to leave me?" he asked.
"That's a much better question. No. I don't want to. I love you. But I don't know how I can stay—when I know that my freedom, my peace of mind, my life—can be taken away from me at any moment, on a whim. That's like trying to build a house of broken glass on thin ice."
"What do you want of me? That I should grovel, kneel, beg your forgiveness?" He was sounding angrier.
"No. That wouldn't fix anything, nor would it give me any pleasure or satisfaction. I just want what I had before—the sure confidence that you loved me too well to turn on me." I replied, looking at the coffee table, at my mother's overflowing ashtray, at the television remote, and the open comic books, showing Doctor Doom, over and over, posing dramatically as he declared, in various wordings, that Doom's plan could not fail…
"Then what?"
"I don't know." I rubbed my forehead. "If I did, I would tell you."
It was at that moment that we heard a key in the lock. The door opened, and my mother came in, trying to balance several bags of groceries. She saw us, and dropped them as she yelled, "Who are you people? What are you doing in my house?"
Victor did not falter. "It is not your house. The owner of record is your daughter Rhonette McKenna—." That was something that had always bothered me. She didn't even give me my own name. Rhonette was the diminutive of Rhonda. It was as if she was saying that no matter what I did, I was just a reduced version of her. "and we are here by her invitation."
"I don't believe that! She may be a lazy bitch, but she wouldn't go—hey, you're that Doctor Destruction guy! What are you doing here?"
"My name." he said, "is Victor Von Doom. I do not care to carry on this conversation any longer." He pulled out a device that fired a cloud of tranquilizing vapor, aimed it, and pulled the trigger. My mother folded up slowly, and fell to the ground amid her groceries.
"She will be unconscious for about an hour. We had best return these items to their hiding places." he told me.
"What about photographing them and scanning them?" I asked. "We hadn't even started."
"It is already finished." He tapped a lens on his mask. "They are built in."
It was a near thing, but we managed it. Before we left, I hastily grabbed a few mementos—the Christmas tree ornaments from the attic, my ancient and threadbare teddy—and a chipped porcelain saucer with a green border—Pickles' dish. The last thing I did before we left was to check on my mother, to make sure she was all right. Her breathing was normal. I left it at that.
It was not necessary for us to go back outside to return to our proper place and time—all Victor had to do was press a few buttons on the remote, and we were back on the platform of the time machine, in the cellars of Castle Doom—with an awful lot of things to resolve.
TBC….