Not Your Ordinary Housewife: How the man I loved led me into a world I had never imagined by Nikki Stern Page A

relationship had become compromised by his selfishness and what I could only describe as his craziness. His obsessions were spiralling out of control and I found them sickening because I’d always been well balanced and rational. As I struggled with this new phase of my life, I reluctantly had to admit that some of Dory’s misgivings had been well founded.
    Paul constantly made barbed comments about my lack of interest in sex, and took to masturbating with a vengeance. I would find the accoutrements—the baby oil, the magazines, the greasy tissues—in the morning. He never seemed able to dispose of his waste and I wondered whether, beyond his innate messiness, this was a way of sending me a subtle message.
    Paul’s stress levels rose in inverse proportion to his sales success, until finally he was let go. What had started as a promising career resulted in a financial deficit due to the purchase of a second car for his job.
    He began to talk obsessively about Francine. We learned that she’d organised a sham marriage to stay in Australia and he wanted to notify the Immigration Department. ‘You know she’s just after Dory’s money,’ he warned me. ‘That crazy old woman hates you—you’re fecund and she’s barren.’ He was convinced Dory was going to leave everything to Francine, because she was the daughter she wished she had. ‘Unfortunately adoption is like a lucky dip . . . and she got you .’
    I thought he was being ridiculous—Francine was just a friend of Dory’s.
    ‘Well, if she doesn’t leave her money to Francine, it’ll be to the cat home or some gay dancer’s fund,’ he forecast darkly. ‘You know that she’s a fag hag. Mark my words: it’ll be anybody but you, just to spite you.’
    It was true that Dory liked cats and she had a number of gay dancer friends from the Australian Ballet, but Paul’s lunatic talk was making me furious. ‘You’re crazy. Completely meshuggeneh ,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be talking about this—it’s tacky. I’ve never discussed money or inheritance with Dory, and I don’t intend to start now.’
    But Paul persisted, spending hours trying to calculate Dory’s net worth. He used as a starting point her comment that she had enough savings to fund a nurse for ten years. ‘So that means, if you work on a thirty-five-hour week and an annual salary of, say, $30,000 and three nurses, and a compound interest rate of . . .’
    I had always thought Paul and I had similar attitudes to money, but now I was finding out that he was unbelievably greedy. He was 21, living in a renowned architect-designed house and not paying a cent in rent—all thanks to Dory’s generosity. Repeatedly I demanded he stop with his comments.
    I was also starting to worry about his mental stability. His obsessions with Dory and Francine were verging on paranoia. Even though I had studied four years of psychology, this was way beyond my ken. I’d done mainly ‘rats and stats’, but this seemed like a serious behavioural problem. I told him I thought he should seek professional help.
    ‘The only professional I should see is a lawyer—to see if Dory can legally leave you out of her will,’ he snapped. But he refused to get help. He was spending our paltry income on buying dope and speed, and he had started growing marijuana with seeds he’d smuggled in from Holland. He became fixated on creating mutant polyploid plants using colchicine, and his quest to create a super dope plant bordered on maniacal. He applied an uncharacteristic anal compulsiveness to his experiments, documenting them with an almost-scientific rigour.
    His Dory obsession, however, also continued to dominate his waking hours. He would sit around drawing; but, instead of doing cartoons, he became preoccupied with designing extravagant extensions to the house—planning what he would do with Dory’s money.
    Distressing as it was, I learnt to ignore his rambling diatribes, which he seemed unable to control. I