22

A crisis was approaching, the worst crisis of her life. She was going to abandon her mother’s most cherished dream, the fantasy that they had shared for more than a decade, since she was five. She knew now that it had always been nothing more than a delusion, a goal she could never reach. Hearing the other violinists at the Manhattan School, working at her lessons with Albert Markov, listening to Alex play, she understood at last that the small talent she had was not enough, that she would never play on the concert stage, that a career as a professional musician was closed to her. She would have to find something else. Worse, she would have to tell Joyce, sometime and in some way, and prepare herself to deal somehow with the inevitable reaction and consequence.

At first she held the decision to herself. Then she told Maria Bonaiuto, the school nurse who had become her adult confidante. “She was,” Bonaiuto says, “beginning to develop an idea for the future. She had felt so desperate so often I was truly worried that Karin felt she had no future and might commit suicide. Now she was really talking about college and becoming a psychologist. She said she only had to get through two years and then she would be in college and then she could get counseling and there would be no more problems once she was in college and away. She was beginning to sound much more adult and real. She seemed to have something she could hold on to.”

She revealed that crucial change of plans to Dennis as well. Deep inside, she explained, she had never really wanted to be a concert violinist, and she had known, really, that she didn’t have the talent or the drive to succeed. That actually had been her mother’s plan, her mother’s dream. She had used the fantasy and the violin to get what she wanted, which was now to be a psychologist.

Everyone else might accept Karin’s decision, might consider it admirable and mature, a sign that she was growing up and finally becoming independent, especially when she told Shannon and others that no matter how bad things got, she knew she only had to get through another two years and then would be free. Still, there were those two years, and at sixteen even a month can seem a very long time. And there was the question, How would Joyce take it? If the past is prelude, there was little doubt that Joyce would not take it well.

Karin says that she did tell Joyce, did discuss it with her not once but several times and that her mother’s response was to suggest that they both get psychological counseling. That is what Karin says. No one knows for certain.

And Karin maintains that from late May on, she and Joyce were actually getting along better than they ever had before. If so, the reason was Alex Markov. Joyce adored him, and Karin’s growing attachment to him was a source of enormous pleasure; even if Karin discussed abandoning the violin with her, it was always possible that the Markovs, Albert, the teacher and Joyce’s friend and Karin’s father figure, and especially Alex, the son and now Karin’s lover, could be a palpable influence in turning her back to that first dream, that first love.

But even as Karin’s affair with Alex blossomed and flourished, a crisis loomed there, too. Despite whatever protestations he might be making, the affair was only an interlude, a temporary thing. In August Alex was going to leave for an extended concert tour that would take him out of the country. It could not have been pleasant to look forward to the time with Joyce when both Alex and the violin were gone.

On June 26 Joyce was in Greenwich on business. She had driven Karin to the Markovs’, dropped her off and gone on her way. The plan was for her to retrieve Karin in the afternoon and drive her home. It was the anniversary of Karin’s first date with Dennis, and they were going out to celebrate. But on the way from Greenwich Joyce’s car was rear-ended. Karin was called at the Markovs’ and informed that Joyce was at Middlesex Memorial Hospital, that though she had not been seriously hurt, she would have to remain in the hospital at least overnight. Alex offered to drive Karin to the hospital. She accepted. Joyce greeted them, said she was in some pain and then told Alex to drive Karin back to the condo in Glastonbury, stay the night and drive her back to the hospital the next day. Alex agreed.

Knowing nothing about Joyce’s accident or the arrangements she had dictated, Dennis drove up from South Glastonbury to the Aparo condo early in the evening. “I went up to the back and knocked,” he says. “Karin opened the door, and I could hear the shower running in the bathroom. I asked her who was there, and she said Alex was taking a shower and I couldn’t come in. She said her mom had been in an accident and was in the hospital and Alex had driven her home and was staying over so he could drive her back in the morning. I asked her where he was going to sleep, and she said on the couch or in her mother’s room. She said, ‘Don’t worry, he isn’t going to sleep with me.’ I was on my little cloud, so I accepted it, but I didn’t like it, and I was upset by it.”

Dennis couldn’t get it out of his mind. He worried it constantly, and the more he worried it, the more he became concerned that Karin was having an affair with Alex Markov. At the end of June he put the question to her.

Not an affair exactly, she said. She had gone to bed with Alex once, she told Dennis. “It was just a physical thing,” she said. “I had to get it out of my system. Now I’ve done it, and I don’t want to do it with him anymore.”

Dennis began to cry, sobbing bitterly, uncontrollably. But she was still seeing Alex, he protested.

Yes, she said, but it was purely platonic, and that was the way it was going to remain. She still loved Dennis.

He convinced himself that she was telling him the truth. Inside, he couldn’t really believe it, was filled with doubts and fears, but he tried as best he could to push them away. Still, the effect on him was apparent. He was nervous, edgy, had trouble concentrating, his stomach was acting up again, he wasn’t eating, he was losing weight, had lost perhaps ten pounds since the time they had gone “incommunicado” in May, was to lose another ten over the next month, and he could not afford to lose weight.

On July I Karin began a new diary. Over the next twenty-eight days she wrote regularly, filling the pages in a 7½- by 4½-inch book with a red plaid cover, on which appeared:

This book belongs to

Karin Aparo

Date

7–1–87

Each day when she finished writing, she put that diary into the drawer beside her bed, the drawer where she had kept the letters from Dennis Coleman that Joyce had found nearly a year before. The entries in this diary were a rambling compendium of the surface events of her days. At the center were Alex Markov and Dennis Coleman: Alex, strong, self-sufficient, talented, dominating, independent; Dennis, weak, dominated, clinging desperately, doing anything to hold on and easily manipulated. But for anyone who might have read Karin’s writings over the year previous, since her meeting with Dennis, there was something odd about this volume. There was little of the introspection that had filled the earlier pages, few of the recriminations, no attempts to relate and juxtapose the present with the past and so draw parallels and emerge with insights. Missing, too, was Joyce Aparo. The references to her were few, and those were in the blandest of terms.

Among other things in that first entry Karin noted that she was sixteen, a terrible violinist, in love with nobody, having an affair with Alex Markov, seeing Dennis casually and very fat and weight-conscious. She was planning to go away with Alex for a week to Woodstock, New York, to baby-sit for the children of his cousin. July 9 would be the anniversary of the first time she had slept with Dennis; she had slept with him eighty times since. He had just bought her some diamond earrings and a pearl necklace. Though she hadn’t spoken to Alex Markov in two days, they were in the midst of a wonderful affair and had slept together five times since that initial experience on June 20. She was very happy about this affair because she had gotten something she wanted badly and because she was the first girl he had ever had sex with. She thought he was very strong, and she died every time she saw his chest and arms and especially his back. Her marks had come from school, mainly A’s and B’s, except in chemistry, for which she got a C.

A day later she noted that she was listening to Alex play Paganini, at which he was brilliant, and though he had been trying to help her with her practice, she felt hopeless compared with him. She felt particularly hopeless because she had been working on a Bach gavotte that he had played as an encore at a concert he had given at New York’s 92d Street Y. Listening to his tapes, she felt frustrated, but, then, it didn’t really matter anymore because now she intended to become a psychiatrist anyway. She had bought Alex some posters of Led Zeppelin, had even found one to hang in her own room, and she was going to help Alex write up a patent he was hoping to get for an electric violin.

On July 4, she wrote, she and Dennis were supposed to watch the fireworks in Hartford but, instead, had driven down to Rowayton in the Spitfire with the top down and watched the fireworks at the beach there. Later they drove by the Markovs’ house and saw an American flag hanging from the porch. Dennis had barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs for them, and they went shopping and he bought her a pair of pink pants and white shoes, and then they watched some television and played with Dennis’s ferret, Meegan. She had a long talk with Alex, and they both were excited about the pending week in Woodstock.

For Dennis that Fourth of July was not such a pleasant day. He remembers the drive to the beach at Rowayton. “All the way down,” he says, “she was being very clinical and asking a lot of questions. ‘How does it feel? What would you do if I did this, like sleep with Alex again?’ She was trying to get me to explain what was going through my head. I just kept telling her I didn’t really understand it myself. I used the term ‘territorial’; that was how I felt about her. But I didn’t really understand it. I was getting very hurt by what she was doing, and she just kept pushing buttons, acting like the little psychologist she wanted to be.”

One of the things that they talked about, that Karin pressed him about, was her impending week in Woodstock. She had agreed, she said, as she had told him a few days before, to go to Woodstock with Alex Markov. They would be leaving on July 7 and would be gone until July 14. The reason was simply that Alex had been asked to baby-sit for his cousin’s children, and Alex knew absolutely nothing about children, so she was going along to do more than help, to do the actual work. She was not, she insisted, going to be sleeping with Alex during that week. She was just going to baby-sit.

Despite her explanations, Dennis was not happy. He was, both he and Karin agree, extremely upset. “He said he was getting tired of my going away so much and spending so much time with Alex,” she says. Still, she insisted that she still loved him and this whole thing was just temporary and they would soon be back together again.

He felt he had no choice but to accept. While she was away, he said, he would call her often. And one of the reasons he would call her was not simply that he missed her and wanted to be in constant touch, to hear her voice. “She told me,” he says, “that when we came back on the Fourth, her mother was suspicious that we hadn’t really gone down to Rowayton but had gone to my house. She said her mother was yelling at her, that she’d been yelling at her for a while, that things were really starting up again with her mother. She said she had to get away from her mother.”

On July 7 Karin and Alex Markov went to Woodstock. That night in her diary she wrote that listening to him play Paganini caprices made her realize that she was passionately in love with the man who played that music, not necessarily Alex Markov, but the Alex Markov who was playing the violin. Doing that, he was different, more sophisticated, more giving, incredibly tender.

The next day, she wrote, she went shopping, bought Joyce a kaleidoscope and saw a diamond ring she wanted. She talked to Dennis on the phone and told him about it, and he agreed to buy it for her.

On July 9 she noted that it was the anniversary of the day she had slept with Dennis for the first time. The total for the year was still eighty, and that was all right with her because there was no need for any more or any less. While she was writing, Alex was in the shower, but when he emerged, he was going to throw her out of his room so he could sit on the floor, stare at a candle and meditate. She and Alex had made love twice that day, “concerts” she called the experience.

On July 10 she and Alex made love again. Dennis called to tell her that he was going sailing and that he had sent a money order off to the store in Woodstock for the diamond ring. Hearing the call, Alex Markov flew into a rage, told her that he was extremely jealous and that she was being unfair and ruining their vacation, which, she noted, were just about the same words Dennis had used to her. Alex told her that this might be their last week together because once school started, she wouldn’t be able to spend so much time in Rowayton, and besides, he would be gone; he had a concert in Binghamton, New York, at the beginning of August, and then he was going on tour, first to Wisconsin and then to Vienna.

On July 10 Karin and Alex made love twice more. Dennis called her, and, she wrote, she was very happy to hear from him.

During that week Dennis tried to keep himself occupied. He had his job at Tallwoods to fill part of the day. He called Karin often. During one of those calls she mentioned that she had seen a diamond ring at the Jewelry Store in Woodstock she loved and wanted very much to have. It was only $327. Dennis sent off a money order that day.

And Joyce Aparo helped fill the empty hours. As Karin’s affair with Alex Markov intensified, Joyce began to pay increasing attention to Dennis; it became almost a courtship. She called him several times and asked if he would go with her to the supermarket and help bring the groceries home. She called him and asked him to go to the movies with her. She invited him to have dinner with her, once at Blacksmith’s Tavern. “It wasn’t like with the mothers of other girls,” he said a long time later. “She’d invite me over and I’d get there and she’d be in the shower, and then she’d come out wrapped in a towel, and she’d just walk out into the living room. She was like that. Then after a while she’d get dressed.”

Asked if he thought she might be trying to seduce him or, perhaps, entice him into making a move toward her, something that would give her a weapon he could never deflect with which she could end his relationship with Karin, he looked shocked and surprised. “She never made advances or anything like that,” he says. “But right on the edge of things. But she was the mother of the girl I was in love with, so I never even thought anything like that. Besides, I thought she was a nice person. There were things about her that I didn’t like, but she was also a nice person, at least to me.”

During their evenings together and during their dinner at Blacksmith’s Tavern she talked much about Karin, about her hopes and dreams for her daughter, telling Dennis that she wanted only the best for Karin and that nothing should come in the way of her realizing that ambition to become a great concert violinist. He did not mention that he knew Karin no longer had such ambitions, that she was aiming in a different direction now. And, he says, “I never got the impression that she was warning me off. According to Karin, she was trying to break us up, but she never said anything to me face-to-face about it. Maybe once or twice she told me we should cool it, but that was all.”

What was really on his mind in those days was the future, a good future that was soon to arrive, he was certain. “All I could think of was that she was going to be going back to school pretty soon, and I was going to be at school again, and we were going to get back together really again and have time, and I couldn’t wait until the day school started.”

On July 15 Karin was back in Glastonbury, at the desk in her own room once more. She was extremely glad to be back, she wrote in her diary. She and Alex had made love once more before he drove her home; it was either the thirteenth or fourteenth time, she wasn’t positive, and it had been a wonderful experience. They had talked about her staying over in Rowayton, but the elder Markovs’ being home she felt ruled out the possibilities. The ring Dennis had bought for her had arrived, and she was ecstatic about that.

Her next entry in the diary was four days later, July 19. She had been to Rowayton with Shannon on Sunday, had seen Alex that day. She had also been with him the previous one, and over the weekend they had made love six times, bringing the total, she wrote, to twenty. Michael Zaccaro had been to the condo for dinner that evening, and she had cooked a herbed fennel lamb and corn sage cakes, which were wonderful. “So much to think of & to do!” she wrote at the end of that page.

Karin went to Rowayton that Sunday not only with Shannon but with Joyce as well, in Joyce’s car. Shannon remembers it clearly. “We had gone to the beach for the day and to meet Alex,” she says. “On the ride back we got into the car when we were in the Markovs’ driveway and Mrs. Aparo noticed that there was no gas, or the gas gauge was on empty. She had told Karin to fill up the tank, and she got angry, and she yelled and screamed at Karin for not getting the gas when she had been told to. But she got the car started, and we found a gas station and filled up. On the way back, Karin reached back and grabbed my hand and held it very tightly because she was afraid of her mother and what her mother might do when we got home.”

Joyce did nothing, perhaps because Michael Zaccaro came to dinner. And that night Shannon slept over, taking Karin’s room while Karin slept with Joyce. “During the night,” Shannon says, “I heard laughing and talking between them, and I thought it was strange because Mrs. Aparo had been so angry earlier and now she seemed happy.”

The next evening Karin and Shannon went to the movies together. They talked about Joyce’s response to the empty gas tank the previous day, about her unreasonable rage. “Gee, Karin,” Shannon said, “she treated you so awful I just wanted to push her out of the car and drive away.”

Karin said, “Well, I think I can deal with it. There’s no more physical abuse. I think I can make it for two more years, and then it’s off to college and I’ll be okay. Things are getting better.”

At least that’s what Karin told her best friend. But she was saying something else to Dennis Coleman. According to him, soon after her return from Woodstock, relations between mother and daughter turned even worse, as bad as they had ever been, and they were going downhill. “I asked her right after she got back, ‘Are you all right?’ She just sort of freaked out. She turned around and said it was bad. And she started to push.” For the first time in nearly a year she began to talk about killing Joyce. The situation in the Aparo house was intolerable, she said. Joyce was forcing her to stay in Rowayton more and more often, she told him, and she didn’t want to but had no choice. And the violin was becoming an increasing source of tension, Joyce putting ever more pressure on her about it, forcing her to practice longer and longer hours, criticizing with ever more severity. “She told me the situation was desperate,” he says. Her only hope of escape, the only hope she and Dennis had to be together again as they had been, she told him, was for Joyce to die. “I told her this was not a good idea. But she kept at it. She didn’t stop.”

It became, in those weeks toward the end of July, a ritual incantation, recited with fervor whenever Karin and Dennis were together: Joyce was coming between them; Joyce was trying to break them up; Joyce was forcing her to go to Rowayton and be with the Markovs when all she really wanted was to be with Dennis; Joyce was trying to force her to sleep with Alex. Escape, freedom, the only chance for them to be together again was for Joyce to die.

Every once in a while the song changed, a change that ripped through Dennis and sent him reeling into a nightmare world. They went for a long ride one afternoon. “I asked her if she was in love with Alex, and she didn’t say anything, and I asked her again, and she said yes, and the bottom sort of dropped put of me. I dropped her off at her house and drove away, and then I drove back, and I sat outside her bedroom window and cried for about five hours, and she didn’t know I was there, or she pretended she didn’t know. She didn’t come to the window.”

Writing in her diary on July 26, Karin noted that she and Dennis had driven up to Boston the morning of the previous Saturday, had lunch, bought a lot of clothes, taken one of those old-fashioned tintype photographs and just had fun. After Dennis had dropped her off at home, she drove down to Rowayton. She stayed the night and slept with Alex for the twenty-first time. When she told Joyce that she was staying over, Joyce wanted to know whether the Markovs were going to be there. Karin told her they were. Joyce said that was fine, then, because if it were just Alex and Karin alone in the house, Karin would look like a slut. There had been a good party for Alex, but Karin had to leave early because she had Joyce’s car and Joyce wanted it. Joyce had seen her wearing the ring Dennis had ordered from Woodstock, had said she didn’t like it, and she didn’t like the one from Thunder Hole he had bought for her a year earlier, and she told Karin to take them off.

The last entry in the diary was written on July 28. The first item she thought worthy of mention was that she had slept with Alex again, for the twenty-fourth time, which, she noted, added up to once for each year of his life. This particular session, though, had been special; he had held on to her when they were through as though he really cared for her. Still, she had promised him that she wouldn’t get attached to him. Then she turned to Dennis, writing that he was desperate and on the verge of suicide; that was too bad, but she wasn’t really sorry for him. He might have a lot of problems, but she couldn’t understand why he had let her bother him so much. Perhaps Alex had given her a false sense of security. Her car had died and was beyond repair. But she didn’t really mind because she could just ride her bike whenever she wanted to go somewhere or even walk; besides, they were about to buy a new Volkswagen Fox. She was looking forward to the trip to Binghamton over the weekend for Alex’s concert, particularly because she would get to wear a special white dress when she went to receptions with him. They had made love three more times that day.

The pressure on Dennis was mounting; it was unbearable, and he felt unable to resist. He was not sleeping or eating. He was still losing weight. He was too pale, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted. He didn’t know what to do, and he felt he knew all too well what she expected him to do.

On July 28 they took another ride. As they were returning to her house, Karin says she asked, “What would you do if I told you I’d slept with Alex twenty times and not just once?”

“I’d drive off the road and kill us both,” he said.

“No,” she said, “it was only that one time.” Later she said, “I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn’t because I was afraid he was really going to drive off the road and kill us.”