The Door to December

avert her eyes, but she shifted uneasily again. Her robe fell open to reveal one perfectly formed calf. A bruise the size of a half dollar marred the creamy flesh. Two smaller bruises were visible at the ankle.
     'I want you to talk about Willy.'
     'I won't.
     'I'm afraid you must.'
     She shook her head.
     'What was he doing with Dylan McCaffrey in Studio City?'
     'I'll never say a word against Willy. I don't care what you do to me. Throw me in jail if you want. I don't care. I don't care.' This was said quietly but with fierce emotion. 'Too many hard things have been said about poor Willy by people not good enough to lick his shoes.'
     Dan said, 'Regine, look at me.'
     She raised one hand to her mouth, put a knuckle to her teeth, and gently chewed on it.
     'Regine? Look at me, Regine.'
     Nervously sucking-chewing at that knuckle, she raised her head, but she didn't meet his eyes. She stared over his shoulder, past him.
     'Regine, he beat you up.'
     She said nothing.
     'He put you in hospital.'
     'I loved him,' she said, speaking around the knuckle upon which her attention was becoming increasingly fixated.
     'He used sophisticated brainwashing techniques on you, Regine. He somehow got in your mind, and he changed you, twisted you, and that is not the work of a sweet and wonderful man.'
     Tears sprang from her and streamed down her cheeks, and her face contorted in grief. 'I loved him so much.'
     The sleeve of Regine's robe slid up her arm when she brought her hand to her mouth. Dan saw a small bruise on the meaty part of her forearm — and what appeared to be rope abrasions on her wrist.
     She had told him that she hadn't seen Willy Hoffritz for a year, but someone had been playing bondage games with her, and recently.
     Dan studied the ornately framed photographs on the coffee table, the thin smile on the dead psychologist's face. The air suddenly seemed thick, oily, unclean. A desire for fresh air almost propelled him from the chair, almost sent him stumbling toward the door.
     He stayed where he was. 'But how could you love a man who hurt you so?'
     'He freed me.'
     'No, he enslaved you.'
     'He freed me to be ...'
     'To be what?'
     'What I was meant to be.'
     'And what were you meant to be?'
     'What I am.'
     And what is that?'
     'Whatever is wanted of me.'
     Her tears had stopped.
     A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth as she considered what she had said. 'Whatever is wanted of me.' And she shivered, as though the very thought of slavery and degradation sent a current of physical pleasure through her.
     With growing frustration and anger, he said, 'Are you telling me that you were born to be only what Willy Hoffritz wanted you to be, born to do anything he wanted you to do?'
     'Whatever is wanted,' Regine repeated, looking directly into his eyes now.
     He wished that she had continued staring into space beyond him, for he saw — or imagined that he saw — grave torment, self-loathing, and desperation of an intensity that made his heart clutch up. He glimpsed a soul in rags: a tattered, wrinkled, frayed, and soiled spirit. Within this woman's ripe, full, exquisitely sensuous body, and within the outwardly visible persona of the submissive child-woman, there was another Regine, a better Regine, trapped, buried alive, existing beyond whatever psychological blocks Hoffritz had implanted but unable to escape or even to imagine any hope of escape. In that brief moment of contact between them, Dan saw that the real woman, the woman who had existed before Hoffritz had come along, was like a withered straw doll, dried out by all these years of ceaseless abuse, now a juiceless, miserable creature who'd been transformed into kindling by a nightmare of humiliation and torture; she longed for the match that would ignite and, mercifully, extinguish her.
     Horrified, he could not look away.
     She lowered her eyes first.
     He was relieved. And sick.
     His lips were dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. 'Do you know what research Willy was doing after he was booted out of UCLA?'
     'No.'
     'What project were he and Dylan McCaffrey working on?'
     'I don't know.'
     'Did you ever