“What you saw,” he said, “is who I am. I’m a businessman, yes I’m that. What you see in my businesses, at the Carson, at my office, is the truth. But the thug you saw is also me. Is also truth. I’m a thug too. I’ve been a thug all my life. It’s so deeply ingrained in me I don’t think it can come out of me.”
Roz needed more clarity. “What you’re telling me is that a man says something you don’t like, the way that man in your office did, and you’re take him to within an inch of his life? Are you telling me you’re that kind of man?”
“I’m telling you I am what I am. It’s not simple, Rosalind.”
“That was simple. What I saw in your office was simple. You didn’t like what that guy said and you nearly killed him! Who does that? What kind of rational human being does something like that?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he blared out. “What the fuck would you know about it? You never lived your life as a hunted man. You never had men stronger than strength itself depending on you because they see you as even stronger! And as soon as they see weakness; as soon as they see that slither of opening that they can slither through, you’re dead. Because the mystique is gone. Because they realize you’re no stronger than they are. You’re vulnerable. And vulnerable people never survive. Not in my world. Not ever.”
Mick said this with such feeling in his voice that Roz was mesmerized by the depth of those feelings. She continued to listen to him, to stare at him.
“Those were words to you,” Mick continued. “All you heard were words. But all I saw was that slither opening. All I saw was my absolute authority being questioned. All I saw was my own demise. I have to do it to them before they do it to me.”
On the one hand, this kind of talk was as foreign to Roz as a walk on the moon. You annihilate somebody on the off chance they might annihilate you? But on the other hand, on the hand that Mick held with tenderness, she understood every word. He undoubtedly came up on the rough side of that mountain. He had to kill or be killed. She couldn’t begin to know what that was like. But if she stood any chance whatsoever of making this work, she had to begin to find out. She had to get this highly intelligent, highly successful man to come out of his emotional hiding place, and tell her something. “Where does it come from?” she asked him. “Where does this sense of survival come from?”
Mick looked at her. She could see the pain in his eyes. But she also knew he wasn’t going to start telling his life story that easily. He was not that kind of man. The only way he was going to talk was if he had already reached the conclusion that having her in his life was worth it. Otherwise, Roz was convinced, he was going to shut this down now.
But he didn’t. He apparently wanted her around enough to answer her question. And answer it in that methodical, reasonable, intelligent way she was beginning to see as his way.
“To say I came from a dysfunctional family,” Mick said, “would be like saying Jeffrey Dahmer, to use the example I used when we first met, enjoyed a good meal. Because it wasn’t in the dysfunction, or in Dahmer enjoying a good meal, that proved the problem. It was in the kind of dysfunction, the kind of meal Dahmer enjoyed eating, that broke it wide open. That’s what creates the chasm. That’s what creates the belief that your life is so fucked up you may as well fuck up everybody else’s.”
Mick paused again, as if he could see that fucked up life as clearly as his bright eyes saw the day. “I was born in Maine,” he said. “Jericho, Maine. We weren’t what anybody would consider poor back then. We weren’t rich either, but we survived alright. My father was a drunk. My mother was a whore. But so what, right? No parents are perfect. Besides, my sister Sprig and I had Charles. He’s my big brother. He was everything our folks were not.”
Mick paused again. Roz could still see the difficulty he was having in going there with her. They had only known each other for a little less than a month. Who was she for him to confide in?
But apparently she was someone, because Mick continued to confide in her. “If my father was just a drunk, then that would be one thing. If my mother was just a whore who slept around, that would be one thing. But my mother was the town whore. She didn’t just sleep around, around slept with her. Every fucker from Jericho to Van Buren got a taste of that ass. Even my brother’s friends, my father’s friends, got their taste.”