Public Secrets Part 219

hair. "I won't leave you alone, Emma. You don't have to worry about

that."

By Christmas, she thought she was happy again. Drew took all the

details of day-today living out of her hands. He chose her clothes,

monitored her calls, took away all the business of handling her money.

All she had to do was tend the house, and him. Decisions were no longer

there to trouble her, to make her anxious. Her darkroom equipment and

camera were shut away. They no longer held any interest for her. When

she thought of her work, it brought on depression.

He bought her a diamond pendant in the shape of a huge teardrop for

Christmas. She didn't know why it made her want to cry.

She had a battery of fertility tests. When her most intimate troubles

were leaked to the press, she suffered her humiliations in silence, then

stopped reading the papers altogether. It hardly mattered to Emma what

went on in the outside world. Her world consisted of the seven rooms

overlooking Central Park.

When the doctors confirmed that there was no physical reason for her not

to conceive, she hesitantly suggested that Drew have some tests of his

own.

He knocked her unconscious and locked her in the bedroom for two days.

The nightmares continued, once, sometimes twice a week. Sometimes he

would be there to soothe and stroke until she calmed again. Other times

he would call her a fool, complain that she was disturbing his sleep,

and leave her to tremble in the dark.

When he was careless enough to leave the remote by the bedside and the

Abbey Road alb.u.m on the stereo, she was too tired to care.

Dimly, almost dispa.s.sionately, she began to realize what he was doing to

her. What he was making of her. The whirlwind ten weeks of the tour,

and the man she had fallen in love with, were like a fantasy she'd

created. There was no portion of him left in the man who kept her a

virtual prisoner in the apartment.

She thought of running away. He rarely left her alone for more than a

few hours, and was always with her when she went out. But sometimes,

when she lay in bed in the middle of the night, she thought of escape.

She would call Marianne, or Bev, or her father. They would help her.

Then the shame would take over, blistered by the doubts he'd so deeply

embedded in her mind.

He didn't use the belt on her again until the night of the American

Music Awards when he and his group were pa.s.sed over for record of the

year.

She didn't resist. She didn't object. As he pounded her with his

fists, she crawled inside herself, as she had once crawled under the

kitchen sink. And disappeared.

In his rage, he made a drastic error in judgment. He told her why he

had married her.

"What the h.e.l.l good are you?" As she lay on the floor, fighting to hide

from the pain, he rushed around the room, smas.h.i.+ng whatever came to

hand. "Do you think I wanted to get stuck with a spoiled, stupid,

s.e.xless b.i.t.c.h?"

He vented his frustration at having to sit, smiling, while someone else