Free Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence by Judith Viorst

Josephine was about to answer. Josephine clamped her lips together and rode, without saying a word, back down to the lobby. The door opened, the woman left, the door closed, Josephine pushed the third-floor button and said, as we headed upward, “Because I promised my father and Dr. Foley.”
    “Promised them you wouldn’t hear Wally’s side of it?” I asked, as the elevator once again stopped at 3.
    A man and a woman, quarreling in low hissing tones, entered and pushed the lobby button. The four of us, them still hissing, rode down together. When they were gone and the car was again ascending, Josephine sighed and looked at me with moist eyes. “Mrs. Kovner,” she said imploringly, “I promised.”
    This time, when the elevator arrived at the third floor, Josephine was instantly out the door. “It’s funny,” I said to her T-shirted back, my finger pressed on Door Open,“but one of the things I never dreamed you were capable of doing was deliberately inflicting emotional pain.”
    Bingo! Josephine gasped. stood rigidly still, and then backed back into the elevator.
    We rode down to the lobby together in silence. In silence we walked together around the block. And a moment later Wally was buckling Josephine into the front seat of his car, after which he gave me a kiss, said, “Thanks a million, Mom,” and was heading his Chevy up Connecticut Avenue.
    Just before my confrontation with Josephine, I had handed Wally a Care package consisting of my homemade curried squash and apple soup, my pasta primavera, a gorgeous olive bread from Marvelous Market, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, and the box of condoms, “Just in case,” I explained, as he set the carton of goodies in the trunk of his car, “you were too distracted to plan ahead.” I had also made him swear that he wouldn’t take Josephine to Rehoboth against her will. In turn I had promised that I’d be in charge of informing Mr. Monti that his daughter was—though I couldn’t say where—in safe hands.
    •  •  •
    Remember the movie Raging Bull. It starred Robert De Niro, who gave a truly compelling performance as the brutish boxer Jake La Motta, a man whose violent . . . Well, you don’t have to remember the movie—the title itself quite. nicely describes how Mr. Monti took the news about Josephine. Which I bravely delivered in person, that day, at his office.
    When Mr. Monti stopped raging, he smoothed back his hair from his forehead and said, “So now your son is kidnapping my daughter.”
    “She went with him of her own free will and volition.”
    “Never!”
    “Yes she did.”
    “She went of her own volition with a person who stole money from her father?”
    “You know that’s not true about the money, Mr. Monti.”
    “You’re calling me a liar? Don’t you ever call me a liar. Don’t you ever ever ever call me a liar.”
    Mr. Monti was moving back into his Raging Bull mode, but I refused to be intimidated. “I’m not calling you a liar,” I told him. “I’m calling you a megalomaniacal sociopath with a severe narcissistic personality disorder and some heavy-duty unresolved Oedipal problems. You need help.”
    Mr. Monti flashed me a smile of the kind last seen on the nonhuman Star of Jaws, “And I’m going to get some help,” he said, as he reached for the telephone and dialed a number. He kept smiling his sharky smile as he waited impatiently until someone answered his call. “Hello,” he said. “This is Joseph Augustus Monti—and I want to report a kidnapping and a theft.”
    •  •  •
    Although my friend Carolyn’s taste in sexual partners is awesomely catholic, she still couldn’t understand why Joseph Monti had made my Definite Lovers list. Which, of course, he had done the moment I learned he was one of a pair of identical twins. Mr. Monti and I had seen each other a couple of times in the weeks shortly after our January dinner. Once, by accident, when we (with our spouses) ran into each other at