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They had been together for two-and-a-half years. The last year they’d lived together, and it had been the worst, most harrowing time of Sophia’s life. He’d been so attentive when they met, so kind and thoughtful. He always remembered her birthday, what kind of flowers she liked, how she took her coffee. He always remembered what was on her calendar so he could remind her, he said.
But the truth was that little-by-little, he’d tried to own her. Knowing everything about her was like laying claim to her very soul. And the calendar thing? That was so he always knew what she was doing when she wasn’t nearby. She hadn’t even realized it until he began to question her about her business meetings.
“Thought maybe you could use this.” Darlene was back. She set a vodka gimlet in front of Sophia. “So who was that?”
“My ex.” She didn’t elaborate.
“Cute, but no social skills, huh?”
Sophia sighed. “You could say that, I guess.”
“So, does he want to get back together again?”
She shrugged.
“You thinking about it?”
The question, though innocent, set Sophia off. “I would rather eat ground glass,” she said. “And now I’m going to stop talking about him.”
“Wow, okay, touchy much?”
“Look, if talking about Phil is the price of this drink, you can keep it.” She shoved the glass at Darlene. “He made my life miserable. I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Jeez, okay, okay. Just keep the drink.” She got up and wandered off.
No one there knew her story. She hadn’t talked much about her life with Phil with anyone from work because it was embarrassing and not their business even though Phil’s behavior in that last year started to make it their business. He would obsess about her work life and what was going on in her office.
Sometimes he’d show up unexpectedly, to take her to lunch, he’d say. Or to bring her something she’d left at home (something he’d taken out of her purse when she wasn’t looking, she was sure of it.) Then he’d hang around and watch the people nearby. When she got home, he would grill her about the men in her office.
“Who’s the guy in the next cubicle?” he’d ask her. “What was his name? Erik? Has he ever tried to touch you? What about your boss? He’s never made a pass at you, has he? Has he ever tried to touch you?”
The touching thing was weird. At first she assumed he was perhaps being over-protective. She told herself that perhaps he had family or a friend who had been molested and he was sensitive to that kind of thing. But she began to realize that he obsessed about men trying to touch her. He’d told men in clubs to keep their distance from her, and once in an elevator, he’d gotten into a fight with a man who, he said, had been deliberately standing too close to Sophia so he could touch her. Predictably the man took offense and it came to blows. The police were called and Phil got arrested, but not until one of the cops had asked Sophia what she’d done to provoke the fight.
The unfairness of men sometimes boggled her mind, especially since Phil blamed her too. “You were leading him on,” he’d accused on the way home from the police station.
“I got in an elevator with him. Should I have waited for an empty one?” she’d asked.
“I’d have preferred it, since you’re always coming on to other guys.”
That night was the beginning of the end. Phil’s possessiveness grew worse as Sophia’s tolerance stretched to the limit and then broke. The day she left, she’d met him at the door with her coat on and her packed bags ready.
“I’m going to stay with my folks for a while,” she told him. “I can’t stand dealing with your jealousy and control anymore.”
He’d been angrier than she’d ever seen him, but when he stepped toward her with his hand raised, she was ready. She pulled a can of pepper spray out of her pocket and aimed it at his eyes.
“I won’t hesitate,” she told him.
“I will take that away from you and make you eat it.”
Somehow his anger made her calmer. “Phil, you may be able to hurt me, but believe me when I tell you that I will hurt you too. I’m prepared to kill you if I have to. I’ve thought about that a lot, and I know I can do it. I even put a knife in my pocket in case you forced me into defending myself. So you make your choice. I walk out of here now, or we will both end up injured.”
The thing about Phil: He was a coward. Something in her voice must have convinced him because he backed off. He shouted insults at her from the window as she got into her cab, but he never lifted a finger to her again.
That didn’t stop him from showing up unexpectedly, phoning her at odd times to ask her what she was doing or who she was with. He kept just enough distance that she found it difficult to explain to anyone why it upset her. It wasn’t technically stalking, at least not according to the police, but it felt like it.
It was all too much. She took a couple of gulps of the gimlet and got up to join a group of women on the dance floor who were bouncing around to Holding Out for a Hero. That’s how she felt sometimes. She thought she should be able to get rid of Phil on her own and not look for some outside agency to help her, but what could she do? He stayed on the sidelines of her life, pushed at the boundaries, but never actually did anything illegal or dangerous. He was always vaguely scary, but never more than that.
Where was Captain America when you needed him?
