Janelle had been putting up with him for far too long, so everyone said, particularly after the night we had them over for Frank's retirement party. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing our best silver and feeding her each bite, cutting it up into small pieces, open wide.
"Chew your food" wasn't all, there were more sublte humiliations like when he excused himself during her shaggy-dog joke, or less subtle humiliations like when he said, "That reminds me of the time Janelle lost her lunch in the Rocky Mountain foothills," or "Show everyone your gray hair, honey. She's been panicking over it for weeks..."
The dogged study of every last detail, starting with the ever present question: What are you thinking? Followed by, What are you thinking now? What are you thinking about right now? Why did you laugh just now? What are you thinking about? Did you have any dreams? Tell me your dreams.
He would take days off from the dry cleaners where he worked to follow her around, sit outside the cafe at lunch and take pictures, kept in a locked file cabinet in the garage, back wall, top shelf.
She carries around a little notebook to write down what she eats, dietary regimen to be diagnosed later, correlated with mood swings, sexual proclivity, sleep patterns, filed away along with copies of bank and tax records, grades from secondary schools, returned checks, reciepts arranged by zip code, in what is now a separate room in the garage, devoted to her.
They met at in the building where she works, co-ascending the elevator. First he he asked her what floor she wanted, and it led gradually to longer exchanges -- "Nice day isn't it?" -- and then to long extended foyer foot-shuffling pauses, lunch dates, and now marriage.
Each night before going to bed he presses record on a solid state recorder that is connected to software which scans for interruptions and comprehensible speech patterns, which are transcribed later into a dream log for use in future psychoanalysis -- everything adds up to an increase in surveillance productivity of 50%.
Further microphones are placed in her purse when she's in the bathroom, in the bathroom when she's out, in the floormats of her car, and on the inside of her winter cap. She said she doesn't mind wearing the special GPS anklet he had made by a jeweler in uptown, which, shiny and opal, triangulates her position according to a pair of geo-synchronous satellites launched by on an Indian rocket in the Fall of 2002.
He hires actors to pose as passers-by and tempt her with free tickets to talk shows, rants, and propositions of every conceivable indecency. He hired a psychic to predict and channel her inner demons, and then hired another psychic to make sure the first psychic was doing allright. He bought stock in the company where she works just so that he could have a vote at the semi-annual shareholder's meetings.
This is not to mention the security cameras placed throughout their home.
He wooed her parents with a series of complementary cruise trips, and truffles handmade by his latest intern. He offered her childhood friends jobs at an acquaintance's custom window manufacturing company, just to corner the market on childhood stories.
He started a neighborhood watch organization through their suburban townhome development homeowner's association, which he used to keep tabs on the comings and goings of strangers.
He made her pee into a cup, and finally Janelle said, "enough."
"I'd like a little space," she said. She might have gotten her way, too, if not for the ill-fated hunting trip to Canada, where he died pulling the cord on the 150 horse outboard, too small really for the job at hand.
