Love Sick (11 page)

“You’re clinging to the idea that he’s in love with you.”

“No, I’m not!” I was starting to get angry now, too, in that way that happens when someone doesn’t see the humor in a situation.

“I can’t talk about this, Frances. I’m afraid for you. Talk about something else. How’s Daisy?”

So I backed off and told her about walking Daisy and her best friend, Hero, an inscrutable white Lab and one of my favorite dogs ever. That morning she had taken umbrage at a beagle named Bacchus and whipped me 180 degrees around in sheer fury. My left shoulder and arm were killing me. I was looking forward to starting to teach so my body could heal from six years of walking Labradors who lunged for invisible bread crumbs and sudden enemies. It had been six years of suppurating wounds, green bruises, stress fractures, lower back pain and more love than a single human being deserves.

“Bacchus,” she cooed. “I love that dog. When you see that dog again, tell him I’m gonna come suck his brains out his ears.” Bette knew every dog in the Heights and had walked most of them in her years as a much more successful walker than I had ever wanted to be.

“Daisy used to hate him, too,” I said. “One day I gave her a cookie to make her behave, and then I gave him the other half. They did the butt-sniff Maypole and have been friends ever since.”

“I’m gonna come suck
her
brains out, too. Make her do the Thing.”

It’s a slightly cruel trick I play on Daisy that tickles Bette into threats of further canine dining. I call out, “Hello? Hello?” as if someone is outside my door and Daisy starts barking her own greetings.

“She’s such a fluffer-nutter,” Bette said through the commotion. I sat down to comfort Daisy, who promptly flipped over for a belly rub, looking at me flirtatiously. “Who else are you talking to besides the so-called Danny Foster?”

“I’ve put profiles up on a bunch of different sites. I actually paid for eHarmony. What a rip-off. You take this big personality test and then they send you your potential dates. You don’t get to do any boy-shopping at all.”

“Who have they sent you?”

“A bunch of men whose most important accomplishments and favorite hobbies are their grandchildren.”

“And you paid them
money
for this?”

“It’s research, Bette. Tax write-off.”

“Sometimes I’m glad I’m married,” she said.

We said good-bye amiably, but I wondered why she didn’t trust that I knew there was a lot of fishiness in Danny’s stories.

• • •

A day or two later, I called my cell phone carrier so I could get transatlantic service. I knew it was going to be expensive calling Benin but I shrugged it off as another tax expense and gritted my teeth.

“It’s so hot here,” he complained. “I’m working twenty hours a day. I’ll send you pictures. Also, something else, for your eyes only. I can’t wait to come home to you.”

I sat in my kitchen and smoked as I eked this out of the crackle of the Atlantic as it warmed and readied for hurricane season. When I asked him where he was staying, he said his employers had chosen badly and he wanted to move hotels.

Within hours he sent attachments. There were photos of a lighthouse set among rocks and pine trees; a kitchen paneled in pale oak with a vase of sunflowers on the island counter; chalet-type interior with a bearskin over the upstairs balustrade.

A white white living room with a merry fire in the hearth.

Are there sunflowers in Benin? Pine trees? Wouldn’t merry puffs of air-conditioning be more appropriate?

And there was an Ecobank Benin draft made out to Danny Tommy Foster
*
for 5.5 million dollars. It looked suspiciously authentic.

It looked authentically suspicious.

“He either wants money, a green card or accommodation,” Bette sighed. “Those pictures were lifted from a website.”

I agreed and spent an eye-straining hour on Google Images trying phrases like “chocolate and white bedroom interior design” and “Danish modern dining table.”

Chocolate bed linens were no longer popular.

“Give the Florida school a call,” Bette challenged me. Hellie spent her early-June birthday alone and bereft of a cell phone, which she’d lost. Danny asked me to help her out but I answered with blithe firmness that, “I’m sure you could either give your credit card number to Hellie’s headmaster or call whatever carrier you’re with and arrange to have a phone sent to Hellie. If you can call me, you can certainly do that.”

Of course I knew there was no Hellie. I had no intention of spending the words trying to explain to the school why I was calling about her. And I wanted, badly, to see just how far he was going to go. Calling the school would end the experiment.

“I’ve decided he’s for real,” I gasped as soon as Bette picked up. “But he’s a ventriloquist! He and Hellie can’t write me at the same time.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“C’mon, Bette. Laugh,” I wheedled. “All of these emails go into a folder named ‘Scam,’ you know. I’m not in love with this guy. I just want to know what his angle is.”

That night it was Bette’s turn to email me. “I’m sorry, Fran, but I feel Mr. Foster is not who he says he is. I won’t be commenting on him any more. I support you, though, as always.”

I whined to Daisy, “Well, that’s no fun.”

• • •

July and heat. Fifty freshman essays in piles on my desk. Other men I was seeing or talking to. There was a lull in communication with Danny, which I was not only grateful for but prolonged with a lie about having strep throat when he IM’d me with complaints about my end of the silence. He was sorely tried by the Beninese authorities as he tried to get his 5.5 million. He had to pay all the fees and taxes before he could withdraw it. He was eight thousand dollars short.

Somewhere near Cape Verde, I could feel the wind picking up.

I waited for him to ask for the money. He was cleverer than that. He’d lost both his phone and his Bible in a taxi. Would I send him a Bible?

Nice touch,
I thought.

“Do you want a rosary, too?” I wrote back.

“Send it by DHL or FedEx. It will take 72 hours. Of course I’d be happy to have a rosary.”

I sent him a link to the King James Bible online, to which he did not reply.

We definitely did not share a sense of irony.

An AT&T phone would be helpful, too, he added in instant messenger a few minutes later. He couldn’t call me without it.

“I can’t do that,” I replied. “You have to get it in your name and make decisions about things. I won’t put it in my name.”

“Send it to 72 Pharmacy Shegbeya, Cotonou, Benin. The hotel manager will receive it for me—Mr. Oladiti Ezekiel.”
*

I said I’d look into it and promptly didn’t.

I knew the combination of my recalcitrance and continued presence was acting like one of those fairy-tale irritants that made Rumplestiltskin tear himself in two. I also hoped to God that every other woman he was weaving this elaborate story for was as sadistic as I.

He cracked soon enough. Skipping like a stone across the waters of Benin’s banking and treasury rules, he said his Internet connection was tenuous and so “we’d” better get to the point. “I have 67,100$ [sic] to come up with and I have raised 18,600. I have a travelers [sic] check of 35,000 that I can process by Monday. All i need to raise now is 13.5k. I don’t mean to ask you this but I have tried all I could and [you are] all I am left with. Upon my arrival, I will REFUND it back, even with interest. I promise.”
*

I sat at my computer and laughed. “I don’t have anything like the money you need.”

“What do you have? I really need your help for the sake of US and our future, Hellie and Daisy.”

“I have nothing, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. But I am crying . . . !”

Like Paul, I was reminded of a joke. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

“Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark, all by myself . . .”

Coercing me to send the amount of taxes I myself owed the IRS turned to imperious demands for table scraps.

“Send $1250 by tomorrow. I am leaving as soon as I receive it. You can pick me up at the airport, then I can handle the rest. No argument. Just go and do it tomorrow.”

“Yeah, right,” I messaged back. “I have $1200 like I have a second head. This is not an argument. It’s ‘no,’ plain as that.”

It was tedious, this wheedling and guilt-tripping. I had the information I’d told Bette I wanted from him—he was out for money. I don’t know why I kept up the pretense, except, perhaps, because I wanted to see if I could shame the gasbag grifter.
I
wanted to apply the thumbscrews. One night, I asked for his American address. He excused himself from instant messenger to take a business call (on what cell phone, exactly??), then sent me a Pensacola address. Zillow listed it as being for sale. It was a mess of weeds and cheap wood paneling, no pool or herb borders to go barefoot around.

“There are a lot of holes in your story,” I emailed. “I don’t think you live in Florida or have a daughter at FLAIR and I think that you’ve set this up to get money. I wish that wasn’t true because despite how crappy it is that you’d do that, I quite enjoyed the fantasy.”

“I understand you are thinking negative about me because I told you about my financial problem. Well sorry if I inconvinent you and I don’t need your help in my situation,” he snapped back.

“I want to see a scan of your passport,” I replied. “I want to talk to Hellie. I want a scan of your driver’s license. I know this is a scam, Danny.”

“If you have someone else, just open up to me,” he lamented. He wasn’t good at this but I believe he’d studied up on Stockholm Syndrome. “When you see a scam, you will not know because they do things perfect and am not perfect because I am not a scammer. I [can] afford to feed you and your entire family for [the] next 20 year with what I have made in [Benin].”

Whatever. I sighed and went back to marking essays.

He tried once more, in August, to suck me in, with a complicated business in which I would be his beneficiary for funds transferred to my bank account. Instead of saying no, I made the mistake of saying it would have to be done through lawyers, which prolonged what was now simple tedium. After a few days of wrangling, he gave up. I breathed a sigh of relief that he’d tried me as far as he could and had gone away. I told Bette I’d finally scared him off. It was the first time she’d let me talk about him in two months.

“Congratulations,” she said flatly and changed the subject to the weather, which was a heavy mass of sullen humidity along the eastern seaboard.

We finished dew points off in fifteen seconds and the discomfort of what she considered my Benin lunacy scratched to be brought up again.

“One of my students is Nigerian. I told him about Benin Boy. He said the problem is that there is an educated group of young people and no work for them to do. So they scam.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, now you know. How’s it going with the dating sites? Match, Zoosk—what else?”

I started laughing. “You’ll love this. I got my daily matches from eHarmony the other day. Guess who one of them was? Eric! In a photo
I
took of him!”

“Good God,” she said.

“You know he wants to write a book about sexual networking, right? Building some sort of orgiastic cult, I think, culled from the Net and strip joints.” I laughed with as much genuine amusement as an executioner whetting his axe. “The only sex happening on eHarmony was his photo. I took it right after we’d had sex on his living room floor.”

“Did you contact him?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But I didn’t delete it, either.”

“Do you
look
for trouble or does it just come to you, like dog hair?”

“Right now I’m open to what happens, as long as it doesn’t cost me any more money than a membership fee or a good date. But consider the irony, Bette. I posted a profile on Ashley Madison to one-up him and received his profile on marriage-minded eHarmony. Maybe we
were
meant for each other.”

“Fran—”

“Just kidding. Besides, I one-upped him in the kinky sex department years ago. That’s how I met Dar.”

• • •

The thing about Romeo scammers is that as long as they have access to your email address, they will never go away. I took one demented misstep in my dealings with the Benin Bamboozler when I let him have my home address. One morning two weeks after Bette and I could relax and talk about anything again, I received a lovely, anonymous bouquet. I called the florist, who told me they were from Dan Foster but had no other information. I emailed my thanks and the next day he wrote to say a package was coming to my house, that it had a gift in it for me but that I should send the other contents on to him.

The first package arrived from a mail-order linen company. He had expensive taste. I was almost amused at the thought of a skinny black guy living in a Third World ghetto prancing around in his organic Turkish cotton, 400 grams per square meter weight bathrobe, air drying after a shower and an initial dry-off with his even heavier towel set. Total cost of freshening up: $353.90.

“I will give you the details to mail it when I get the shipping address,” he responded to my notice of its arrival.

Five days later a big box came from Zappos, addressed care of Frances Kuffel.

I was pissed off. The Bat Cave is tiny. It cannot hold one thing more. The volume of those towels was equal to a couch and now I had a box to contend with.

“You gotta call the companies right
now
,” Bette said. “He definitely used a stolen credit card and you are now holding stolen property. That’s a felony, Frances.” She sighed in exasperation. “Don’t make me lose my respect for you.”

An icy sweat broke out under my breasts and on my palms. “I didn’t know I was endangering your respect.”

“Just call the companies this shit came from, okay?”

Zappos confirmed it was a phony credit card and had UPS pick up the box the next day. I didn’t open it; I had no interest in repacking stolen goods. The linen store said the charge had gone through without a problem.