Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  Lucia came with us to Brooklyn that day. She sat speechless, wrapped in one of our mother’s oversized cardigan sweaters in the back seat as we gently lurched through stop-and-go traffic. A seeming world away in an ungentrified, unnamed pocket of the city, in the chilling vacancy of their bedroom, we gathered her boyfriend’s clothes. A dead person’s belongings seem both newly worthy of attention and also entirely devoid of meaning. I put his shoes into a garbage bag—they made a pointless, unwieldy weight not unlike that of a body—and dragged it down the stairs.

  On the grey drive home, a meek voice drifted up from the back seat. Lucia, saying blankly, I want a can of Coke and a Snickers bar. My father told her to say it louder, he couldn’t quite hear her, and she issued the request a second time. I want a Coke, she said dully at an awkwardly loud volume. And a Snickers bar. A strange, uncharacteristic desire that hung in the air. The sealed-in silence in the car grew even quieter as my father exited and pulled into a gas station. I closed my eyes while he went inside, and when he came back we drove on, windows up, listening to the rustle of the candy bar wrapper and the crack and fizz of the can opening. I imagined the weak enamel of my sister’s fingernail bending back as she pulled up the tab of the soda. There was soft gulping. My dad and I glanced at each other, a mutual acknowledgment of the sound of my sister eating and drinking—a sign of life!—and I noticed his eyes were wetly shining. What? I asked.

  What, Dad? my sister instinctively echoed from the back.

  That’s the first time you’ve said you wanted anything since Lorenzo died, he said, his face ashen. We had grown used to occasional tears from our mother—I felt her compunction about crying in front of me in particular was dwindling to near-nonexistence—but seeing our father’s face hover on the precipice of emotion, a loss of control, held us momentarily frozen in the car. He was descended from a long line of female criers, but I’d almost never seen him cry, not even when his own mother—a staunchly sentimental woman, head of the Ministry of Weeping—died after a long battle with cancer. I wondered what it would sound like if he really let go, if he began to sob, an ungoverned sea lion–like wail from somewhere deep. I wondered about the stories of people who might have seen their fathers really cry, what would have to happen to make a dad cry like that.

  I called K a couple times from the mustard-yellow kitchen, pulling the phone into the corner staircase up to my mom’s bedroom and sitting on one carpeted step while I let it ring, but I couldn’t reach him. Night in New Jersey was evening in California, and I guessed he was getting ready to head to work. I imagined him fixing his movie-star hair in the semi-frosted Art Deco rectangle of his bedroom mirror, devilishly raising an eyebrow as he met his gaze in the reflection. Could he see the vicious gleam in his own eye? A year before, he hadn’t even existed to me. California itself had been nothing, a palm tree in my mind. A hundred music videos: the flat, faded belt of highway, shimmering with heat. Now it was a real place, my place, and in it somewhere was a pile of my clothes, worn underwear still nestled into hastily stripped-off tights, half-read books beneath a water glass dotted with my DNA. In it was the pack of cigarettes, matches neatly tucked into its cellophane, that I had looked for when I got off the plane but realized I’d forgotten to take from the green glass ashtray on the mantelpiece. In it somewhere, cracking jokes, was a boy who smelled always ready for a date, like mint chewing gum and Irish Spring and sickly floral pomade. The pain I felt at home with my family seemed to mean nothing if he didn’t know about it, if it couldn’t be refracted through him, through some kind of “us.” Without that, I was only part of the “us” of my family. Was I supposed to endure them alone?

  We had been together only four months, but I missed K terribly. From the kitchen table, I wrote him a letter, summoning my best penmanship, my easiest cool-girl tone, leveraging the small store of inside jokes we had by then amassed together. He didn’t write back, but eventually, he called. My stomach leapt into my throat when I heard my mother say, Nina—K on the phone for you, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, maybe even mildly exasperating in its normalcy, like he called all the time or something. I loved her for making it sound regular and annoying like that. K and I spoke a few times in the weeks that followed, conversations I called “mildly strained” in my diary. It was my first time experiencing in a romantic context a feeling I would learn was an unremarkable part of life: it was the feeling of receding from a man’s mind because you were not physically occupying the space in front of him. He wasn’t unkind on the phone, but the softness he typically showed me was absent. I thought maybe he was watching a movie with the volume all the way down while we talked. Maybe the volume wasn’t even all the way down. I remembered the vaguely animal way his face lit up when we were actually together and realized, helplessly, that there was no way to replicate that chemistry, to incite that interest, that desire. Three thousand miles away, I had no hope of holding his attention. Not with tales of our family drama, not with jokes. I wasn’t there, where he was, wasn’t among the girls who smoked and giggled outside the bar where he worked the door, wasn’t a flesh-and-blood thing, whose smiling teeth could be seen sparkling under the streetlights, whose nervous shifting was plainly an invitation to be taken home and fucked.

  It felt suddenly obvious that someone else, more likely many someone elses, were occupying the space of his real life. Who did I think I was, expecting some special treatment? And really, who was I again, a sad teenager who brought him used paperbacks? I was sick with love. I had never felt like this before. Each time after we hung up, I buried myself beneath an avalanche of self-recrimination. We weren’t even dating exclusively. He was in his twenties and I was just a kid, my cheeks still flushed and dumpling-plump with youthful insecurity. In my absence, he was surely out with other girls, maybe even wining and dining a Real Grown-up Woman with a Real Job, someone poised and glamorous who threw her head back while she rode him. “Astride” was the word I always thought of when I pictured a woman on top, maybe because it sounded like Astroglide. She threw her head back while she was astride him, confidently experiencing the sexual pleasure to which she knew she was entitled.

  What had I expected from him? Calling me back—the girl who sent him that stupid letter, not the girl who got away but just a girl who went away for an unspecified length of time and so must be dropped from the rolls, from his dance card, as he himself would have put it—felt like something he was just checking off a mental list. If, in his casual, low-effort, hot-guy kingdom, he made such lists at all.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  I traveled back to San Francisco a couple months later and got back the head shop job. Tower Records was over. Lucia was at a residential treatment facility and sent letters. Rachel and Kat had been in close touch while I was gone and we reunited tearfully and happily. But it was hard for me to slide back into the life I’d pressed pause on in San Francisco. I had no experience doing such a thing, and the grief and worry I carried from home were near impossible to distract myself from. K picked me up from the airport and we spent my first night back together, but he was cagey. He’d been hard to pin down the whole time I’d been gone, and when we did manage to talk I never got the sense that he really cared what was going on with me. He always swung from affectionate to an almost frosty detachment. Now he was entirely frosty, making stilted conversation as though out of obligation, like I was an exchange student he was reluctantly hosting. Even his room felt different. I slept badly, unconsoled by being near him again and depressed at being unconsoled. I’d lain in bed in New Jersey for weeks imagining what it would be like to rest in the crook of his arm again, and now I was there, on his white T-shirt in the grey dark, watching a video play on his television, but it didn’t feel like anything. Where had it gone? Had our connection been so readily extinguished by a little distance and time? That was disconcerting to me—I was in love. Equally upsetting was his seeming disinterest in t
he experience I’d just survived. Didn’t this person who cared about me want to hear about what had just happened in my life? About Lucia’s keening, my crazy parents, the apartment, Lorenzo’s shoes, the feeling of springtime across the country in my homeland?

  When he fell out of communication again for about a week, I grew sullen and stopped calling, too. I loafed around our apartment when I wasn’t working, drinking Old Grand-Dad out of the bottle for the buzz and because it felt cool, and listening to the bands I’d discovered through the mixtape K had made me. I was filled with dread. Eventually, we met for a cup of coffee at a crepe place, though he didn’t drink coffee, and while I gnawed on the end of a plastic stirrer, he told me cavalierly he’d gotten back together with his ex, Tammy. I’d seen a stack of photo booth pictures of the two of them in his room before; she looked beautiful in the flashbulb contrast. As soon as he said they’d gotten back together, I wondered whether Tammy had ever really departed the scene. They’d had a significant relationship. She was his age. Was she the mature older woman I’d imagined, the reason his attention sometimes dropped away entirely? I pictured her the way she appeared frozen in the black-and-white photo booth images: little pixie face, her perfect lipstick looking almost black, framing a rack of perfectly straight, sparkling white teeth. How did he know so many girls who were so pretty, all with shiny dark hair, straight bangs, and perfect makeup, perky Seventeen magazine faces? It was like he was living in a different San Francisco, one crawling with Bettie Pages.

  K didn’t say the words, “I’m sorry.” He said, to fill the silence, It’s not like we’re never going to speak again. I’m sure we’ll see each other around.

  Yeah, I’m sure we will, I said. So that’s it? Really? A waiter cleared plates of crepe scraps and wilted salad from the next table over, and I shrank from the feeling of exposure it gave me to be doing this in public, at an oily wooden table in full view of the crawling carnival of Haight Street.

  Come on, what did you think was going to happen? he said. I’m sure you’ve got other things going on, too. Isn’t that your whole thing? Being a little minx, a man-eater?

  Was that true? Maybe it was. In trying to seem cool, trying not to be vulnerable and get my heart broken, had I given him the impression that I didn’t care?

  I’m not dating anyone else. I want to be with you, I said.

  I’m not going to put myself in the way of that and get hurt, he said. Face it, you have more killing to do, Pimentoloaf.

  More killing to do? I repeated slowly. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

  More hearts to break. You’ve got a lot to figure out, kiddo. And I know you have a lot of family stuff going on. But—he sat up a little straighter to deliver the kicker—I know this much: you’re going to be an amazing woman someday, he told me. One final, patronizing flourish. My eyes narrowed in hurt, disbelief, and rage. So I wasn’t even a woman yet. Or I was woman enough to have sex with, but not to take seriously. Me and my “family stuff,” we were too complicated, but maybe someday we’d be cool.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  I couldn’t get comfortable in California after that. The rain had abated and summer was coming. That’s what the sunshine suggested, although it was rarely warm and never hot, and the chill still crawled outward toward my fingertips from the moment I got out of bed in the morning. So, I started getting out of bed less. When I did, everywhere I went, I had a cardigan on, another sweater stashed in a bag, and a fleece-lined jacket tucked over my arm. There were more boys, more parties, more day trips, more nights out, but I was doleful, distant, awful to be around. I’d left my heart in New Jersey.

  Every day for a couple months, I called and got an update from my mom. The phone call was a checkpoint I had to pass through in order to continue on with my day. She needed it, but I needed it, too. When I asked “How are you,” she answered with a report on Lucia or her boyfriend, Jim, who was also intermittently in recovery. No, how are you, I wanted to say, but I thought the distinction would be lost on her.

  The heartbreak I felt over K was the sort that never heals—it informs, instructs, shapes the remainder of one’s romantic career. He had assumed the kind of symbolic importance that endures, and it cast a shadow over my subsequent relationships. He was the original, the stencil that gets duplicated in the mimeograph machine. The string of men who followed were frequently referred to by Rachel and Kat as K wannabes. Guys with tattoos and dark, greased-back hair. For a long time, I didn’t stray too far from that template.

  After some time had passed, I didn’t think of the real K as often, even though I always kept a jar of Tres Flores pomade among my toiletries and sometimes used it to slick back a tight ponytail. Those were days when the thick, floral, old-fashioned smell of him lingered around my head, and I felt swooning rushes of nostalgia. I found it romantic to keep a candle burning for him in that one small, secret way.

  We were going back to the East Coast to start college, but I didn’t stay to drive the U-Haul from California with Kat and Rachel—I felt the pull of home. I missed my family too much. Instead, I flew to Newark and my dad picked me up in the minivan.

  chapter seven

  After thirty days of inpatient rehab, Lucia moved to a halfway house and my mother and I drove three hours there on weekends to visit her. There was a fugitive quality to these missions. Me at the wheel of my mother’s car, hugging the curves of the Eastern seaboard as walls of rock dripping with water streaked brownly by. She in the passenger’s seat, dispensing our neurotic hippie snacks—rice cakes, raisins, Granny Smith apples—and adjusting the temperature and volume knobs. She bought Twizzlers when we stopped and peeled them apart, dividing them for us to share with her short, blunt nails as we talked, unobserved, for hours inside the capsule of the car. This was our private high. It wasn’t like the interviews my father conducted with curious passivity from the driver’s seat. This kind of talking was a Jewish mother-daughter bonding exercise. It was spirited discussion, disputation, with little breath taken between sentences. We excavated every possible reason for what had happened, every bit of family history that might have informed it, stretching back the couple generations we knew. We engaged in this genealogical gossip for a time—why was my father the way he was? Because of his parents, and their parents before them—and then we dropped the family and moved on to friends. Everyone’s relationships, everyone’s questionable choices. My mother was funny; we laughed a lot. We went through every character in our lives and dissected them, as though working through a phone book. No stone unturned. No life unexamined. Like armchair anthropologists, except in a car.

  The halfway house was situated in a western Pennsylvania town that was swimming in heroin. We’d heard about a police raid on the news. Everything related to addiction feels Sisyphean but this seemed absurd. A relapse would take no planning at all. You could probably just walk out the front door to the curb and make it happen, if you even had to go that far. The inside was shabby, carpeted, decorated in the particularly sad style that could be called Mass-Market Feminine Hope. On battered dusty-rose couches sat sateen and floral pillows bordered by aggressive ruffles like the extravagant frills of certain fish fins. On the wall were the Twelve Steps, looking dire and joyless printed in bold black type on large white scrolls, and inspirational posters. A few women mingled in the kitchen, drawing slices of processed white bread from tall, generic loaves and slathering them with creamy peanut butter and industrial purple jelly. We knew from my sister that one of them had shot at her ex with a sawed-off shotgun, a fact that should not have been funny but that was so ridiculous it made me eject a loud sharp laugh when I first heard it. No, my mama’s baby didn’t belong there. At least that’s what I could feel my mama thinking. I watched her register every detail, shift a bit in her shoes beneath the cheaply framed embroidered messages of self-love. But there we were. We signed Lucia out and drove to a Cheesecake Factory, where
we picked the bits of fried noodles out of Chinese chicken salads and drank Diet Cokes with our sunglasses still on. You look really good, my mother told my sister, clutching her hand across the table, and a round of tears snaked down our cheeks from behind mammoth black mall frames. You’re doing this, she said. I see your hard work. I’m so proud of you. You are doing it. It was an observation—Lucia did have that precious clear-eyed look, a look of healing—but it was also a command: oh—you are fucking doing this. There were only three outcomes: sobriety, a life lost to addiction, early death. We would not accept the second or third.

  My mother says she never had the kind of moments of resignation that I later experienced with K, that she experienced with her own disappearing act of a boyfriend. Did she ever think of kicking my sister out, changing the locks, “detaching with love,” as we were advised in Al-Anon? It’s different when it’s your child, she says when I call and ask her. I’ve heard her say this a million times.

  There was never a single moment when you lost hope? I press.

  No, she says. Every day was a new day to turn the situation around. I remember walking through the neighborhood with her and Daddy and Sadie—our lumbering Labrador—and thinking “I want her to live. I want her to experience life.” There was no other option. When you’re a parent, she says, you start to hear—or you maybe pay more attention to—stories of children dying. In every town, or every school, there are a few of those tragic stories, and I just knew that I couldn’t be one. My mother told me that when Lucia’s addiction was threatening her life, she would hear these stories and think, I cannot be that mother. Someone else has to be that mother. Because I can’t. I can’t.