Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  * * *

  •   •   •

  K continues to test me and I discover there is apparently no limit to what I will tolerate. One night he asks if he can take the car—a phrase I bristle at when angry with him because the car is my car, a used Subaru sedan, and I pay for all of its gas and maintenance; I’m still paying off the car itself—to an art opening his friend is hosting in San Francisco. At the time, my car is in the shop being repaired so I am driving a loaner from the dealership, a brand-new white Subaru Forrester that I’m terrified I’m going to somehow fuck up in the few days that I have it.

  Mmm, I say, like I sympathize. I would say yes, but that car is brand new, I’m afraid of something happening to it.

  Nothing’s going to happen to it, he says. Well, maybe now it will, since you jinxed it.

  Funny, I say. I don’t think you should.

  Then a beat of quiet, an emptiness too uncomfortable for me to handle. He really doesn’t have any other way to get there. Yes, but that’s not my responsibility. True, but it’s just one trip into the city.

  Isn’t there anyone you can get a ride with?

  Not really, everyone’s already in the city, he says, the implication hanging in the air that he would still live in the city, too, if he wasn’t here with me.

  If you have to, just please be careful, I say. The drag in my voice when I say the word “please”—in it lurks the knowledge that something will go wrong.

  He doesn’t come home that night. I watch seven or eight episodes of The Golden Girls in bed, my laptop baking my thighs. I text him a few times, a crescendoing string of unanswered blue message bubbles that culminates in my most loathed text, a standalone question mark. My thumb hovers over the send button but I do it. I hate myself. Each time I amble into the kitchen to refill my wineglass and my small bowl of pretzels, I walk into the kids’ room and stand there for a few moments, listening to their shifting and peaceful respiration. Their breathing always makes me think of this word, respire, which I learned in college can mean building back hope or strength after a difficult time like a war. The house is so still. I walk up to each of them, reach my hand to their foreheads, feeling the dewy heat of their sleep, and I imagine that maybe we are all gathering and building strength. This little army. We will grow strong enough, the three of us, to make a better life than this.

  In the morning, I am stirring syrup into oatmeal when K walks in the door, still drunk. I can tell by the delay in his movements. The ragged edge on his voice that he gets at the end of his high. His entrance lets in a patch of neon-white sky, cold sky, that imprints on my eyeballs when I look toward the doorway and I squint unhappily at it and at him. Am I late? he asks, which I assume is an attempt at humor, but I realize he might actually be proud of himself for bringing the car back in time for me to take the kids to school and daycare. K! the kids shout with joy, one right after the other. Every time he appears is like Christmas morning. That doesn’t help my mood. Hey, I say bluntly.

  I have good news and bad news, which do you want first? he says. He looks bloated with alcohol, his eyes slanted by substances and exhaustion. I wonder what in the fuck the good news could possibly be.

  Bad, I answer. Always the bad first.

  The car got broken into last night, I’m really sorry. His voice goes suddenly earnest on the words “really sorry” like a politician trying to connect with an audience, convince them of his humanity. I’m sorry, he says again. Tim left his bag in the back seat. I told him he should bring it but he was like it’ll be fine—

  I put a hand up to signal that I do not need the details, and begin to breathe like a dragon, a warm, seething, through-the-nose breathing that takes the place of speaking. The sensation of disappointment is as physical as a flu. I don’t wait for the good news. While the kids eat their oatmeal, I get dressed. I wash my face, put on sunscreen, moisturizer, concealer, foundation, bronzer. All quick, automatic. I make the two, perfect liquid-liner wings on my eyes, dot on a dusty-rose matte lipstick, my everyday lipstick. I stand in the bathroom and look at myself for a long time. I picture screaming until the mirror and then all of the glass in the house shatters, the force of my rage popping the rest of the windows in the new white car, and the rain-like balls of tempered glass hitting the pavement in a violent downpour. Many times, complaining to my girlfriends about K, I’ve said I don’t want to waste my “pretty years” in this relationship and be left with nothing. In the bathroom, I purse my lips and think: fuck him. I’m still pretty, there’s still time. But time for what—another man?

  There isn’t time to tape a trash bag over the busted window and there isn’t any tape anyway. I drive the kids to school under the sharp LED light of the morning sky, with the wind blowing loudly through the gaping open space where the window was. When I look in the rearview mirror, I see my son’s face wincing against the almost comedically bitter wind, looking like he’s about to cry. Please roll it up! he shouts from the back seat and I can barely hear him because we’re on the freeway and the wind is blowing so strongly. I think about the cortisol pumping in my veins and wonder if he and his sister can feel from the back seat the stress and anger radiating from me like stink lines in a cartoon. Oh honey, I would if I could, I say. I’m so so sorry, it’ll just be another few minutes until we get to school, and Mommy will get it fixed today. The whole window broke, can you believe that?

  I tell my boss I need to work from home—car trouble—and I call around to auto glass places to see which one is cheapest. There’s one company that comes to your house and replaces the window right there; I had them do it last time my car got broken into and the kids watched the whole thing from the window, it was better than TV, but it’s more than I can afford now. Instead, I drive the brand-new Forrester to Alameda and sit in the courtesy area of an auto glass warehouse, staring at a microwave. A colorfully wrapped assortment of herbal tea bags has been shoved tightly into a Styrofoam cup. There’s a cup of dark brown plastic stirrers, too, beside a two-cup coffeemaker and an electric kettle. A wall-mounted television is playing The Ellen DeGeneres Show and I think Ellen would probably make me feel better but the volume is all the way down and there is no remote and no human. I brought a novel, but I am too helplessly angry to crack it. Instead I text Claire.

  ME: new glass to replace the busted-out window in the new loaner car: $300. knowing you’re responsible for a 40-year-old’s shitshow of a life: priceless

  CLAIRE: WHAT

  ME: he didn’t even get home til 7:30 this morning. i guess it’s good he’s not dead?

  CLAIRE: i don’t know how you manage to keep not killing him. where did he sleep?

  ME: what’s sleep

  i don’t think he did

  CLAIRE: god girl

  how much can you take?

  Not much more, I texted back, but who was I kidding. The window repair costs three hundred dollars—more than usual for a kind of glass they’d only just started using, of course—which I put on a credit card, as I did so often with all the little incidentals there was no real money for. With K, these had multiplied exponentially. When I get back into the car and reach down to bring the driver’s seat forward a little, a tube of lipstick rolls out from underneath it. A white tube bisected by a thin gold band like a wedding ring. The color is a menstrual brownish red with a metallic sheen, those tiny bits of sparkle in it. A color I would never wear, and when I twist up the lipstick it is shaped crudely, worn down completely differently from any of mine, and the foreignness of its shape makes it somehow more disgusting. My heart races as I twist the lipstick back down into its case and I resume, with noisy insistence, my dragon breathing.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  There are many ways to be with an addict, many different kinds of addicts to be with, and the disease has so many phases and degrees. For some people, it’s a secret—no one knows or even su
spects. For others, an open secret, like perverts in the church. And then there’s the obvious version, the train wreck, the spectacle, when it cannot be hidden that your person is an utter disaster, which is how it often was with me and K.

  I was a one-woman PR firm for him. My job, it came to seem, was to protect him from truths about himself and from others’ judgments, bar the door, batten down the hatches, take care of it myself. And then when I hated and resented him too much to bear it, I became the opposite: his opponent, a shrew. I broke our contract, told everyone everything. I told my friends the things he said when he was drunk, told them exactly how much money he’d spent. I told them about the barfing and the crying and the apologizing. I weaved a story wherein I was the victim. His addiction wasn’t a force preying on him; he was a force preying on me.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  Once we were fully moved into the new apartment, I decided to host a housewarming party. I was growing sick of feeling like K and I led entirely separate lives, that we had separate friends. Because our relationship began as a secret, I had rarely brought him out into the light. I thought a housewarming party would be an opportunity to meld our worlds, establish a sense of normalcy. I set about making a long playlist and cleaning by throwing piles of clothes and stacks of paper into closets and drawers. Claire came over and we strung lights around the living room windows and mixed a large floral enamel bowl full of fruity punch, two different flavors of the cheap tropical juices in plastic jugs from Trader Joe’s spiked with cheap vodka. I was uneasy about my social circle at that point: my graduate school friends knew I was on some kind of unspecified leave of absence. I was sheepish about having departed the halls of academia to take a corporate job in San Francisco to which I wore blazers and heels. Many of these grad school friends were quiet and well-mannered with small personalities—good, hardworking, honest people I selfishly imagined had lives that were distinctly non-disastrous. Furthermore, they had met my husband during our first and second years in the doctoral program and I feared they would be perplexed by his sudden replacement. Would they ask me what happened? Maybe we could all just avoid the particulars by drinking, cracking harmless jokes, and warming ourselves into a dreamy inebriation by the punch bowl. Do you want to invite any of your friends? I asked K when he came home from work late one night. I was watching a show on my laptop when I heard him pull up outside. I still thought about what I was wearing and the positioning of my body when his key began to turn in the door. I thought about the famous formulation by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey that women in film represented to-be-looked-at-ness. That was me. I wondered how I would look when he first walked in. At that point, I was aiming for something between seductive and domestic. I might be in lacy underwear and a T-shirt with a pastel face mask drying on my skin. A bare leg thrown over the quilted blanket. He came in and kissed me juicily, leaning over me on the couch, smelling faintly like other people’s cigarettes. He stood in the kitchen and drank a tall glass of water, wiped sweat from his forehead. I was thinking it would be fun to introduce some of our friends, I continued. Sure, he said. I guess I could invite Sam and Bill. I’ll invite a few people.

  You sound unsure, I said. He rolled his eyes dramatically.

  Really? Because I just said I would do it, he said.

  Okay, I said. I’m not trying to pressure you. Don’t you think we should? Are you worried your friends wouldn’t have fun or something?

  He walked over to the couch. I’m not worried about anything, he said definitively.

  I just think it would be nice for us to join our worlds a little bit, I said.

  His eyes sparkled as he looked into mine and said, deadpan, I want to join worlds with you, Nina.

  I’m serious! I said as he laid his sweaty body on top of mine.

  Oh, I’m serious, too, girl, he said in an extra-sleazy phony voice, grinding on top of me and kissing my neck as I giggled and screamed. Let’s fuckin’ join worlds. I’ve been trying to get you alone all day so we could join worlds. So many promises dissolved into laughter, into sex. I don’t know if he was even listening to anything I said.

  The following Friday, I made absentminded conversation as I tried on party outfits in our bedroom, stepping into and then out of half a dozen pairs of shoes. I had so many dresses that had seemed semi-appropriate for a young woman transitioning to motherhood, but were too slutty for a mother of two. No one here dressed up anyway. But as the hostess, I could get away with looking polished without having to endure the passive-aggressive singsong questioning I’d sometimes gotten on campus—Ooh, what are you so dressed up for? (A polite reformulation of the distinctly rhetorical question Who do you think you are?)

  Who do you think will show up tonight? I asked K, stepping into some old wedge sandals I found at the back of the closet; they looked smudged, maybe even slightly moldy? I should throw them out, I thought. I should throw all of this stuff out. K stood behind me—he so often spoke to my back because I was doing something and he was standing around watching me.

  I don’t know, he said coldly, who did you invite? He seemed exasperated at having to be swept up in my anxious preparatory energy. He stood in place and I glided by him three or four times on the way to the bathroom, which had a wider mirror and brighter lighting, raising my voice so he could hear me.

  No, I mean your friends, I specified loudly, smoothing the wrinkles of a skirt.

  Yeah, I don’t know, he said, and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall.

  Well, who did you invite? I called after him. He made his way toward the couch and sat down. I asked again. Did you invite people?

  My friends aren’t really into shit like this, he said, gesturing dismissively outward with a hand motion that was almost like the jerk-off motion—toward the entire house, the décor and hasty cleanliness, which now looked somewhat desperate, overreaching.

  Aren’t into shit like what? I asked. Inside my body, the familiar tingling heat that prickled in the wake of these humiliations. A shame that bloomed like a case of hives. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, as I always did when I didn’t want to cry. I heard my first question—Who do you think will show up tonight?—again in my mind and cringed at the booming, casual way I’d asked it, as though he cared how the night would play out. The presumption that we were in this, in anything, together. I sat down on the couch and looked at him.

  Christ, now we’re gonna get into a whole fucking thing? he said. Please don’t do this. Your friends are gonna be here soon, enjoy your party!

  I blinked back the hurt and looked into the kitchen. I’d bought handles of vodka and whiskey, even one of rum, at least half a dozen bottles of wine. A stick of Nag Champa incense sent a thin, dank spiral of heavy smoke into the space above the coffee table. Unopened family-sized bags of tortilla chips lay fatly like blimps on the granite counter, to be adorned with jarred salsa and the guacamole Claire and I had made, which was Saran-wrapped and perspiring in the fridge. During the week, I had imagined what an encounter between my friends and his friends might look like, and in my mind, it had gone both ways. Enough punch to lube the silences, the room dark enough and music loud enough to make people feel loosened up and friendly. Or maybe it would be like a bad school dance, our people segregated into clusters. I hated the first uncomfortable moments of a party when the house feels too clean, too unmussed and falsely freshened. All of the effort that went into its presentation so painfully conspicuous, the first guests arriving and mingling mutedly in the kitchen. But now it would be neither. It all felt suddenly stupid. That we were doing this at all seemed stupid. There was no we. I had been the one who suggested we host a party. He’d never mentioned anything of the sort. He hadn’t helped straighten or decorate the house. He didn’t chip in for any of the supplies. And the one thing I had asked—that he invite some of his friends—he said he would do and then neglected to do, and he felt nothing a
t all. He yes-ed me and then did exactly as he pleased.

  These moments illuminated the breathtaking scope of his disregard for me. There was no chance that he would ever apologize in the moment for something like this—would ever say, I’m sorry, I knew you wanted me to invite people, too, but I’m just not comfortable or that doesn’t actually sound fun to me. (I was so good at thinking of the exact thing he could have said that he never said. I wanted to feed him lines from a teleprompter, I just wanted so badly for him to be how I wanted him to be.) He was emotionally gone. Closed for business. The evening stretched out before me, a span of hours during which I would not be able to access him, draw any kind of clarity or affection from him. I would host a party alone. He would be awkward, make people uncomfortable, possibly recede into the bedroom after a while to watch a movie on the computer.

  I thought about my husband, who was so confident and comfortable in social settings, so portable, so translatable. We could drop ourselves neatly into any scenario. I thought about his office Christmas party, the one we went to the first year we lived in California, an ostentatious early-tech-money affair, how we’d dressed up and smiled broadly at his new colleagues, made conversation about real estate prices, a topic that meant nothing at all to us. We drank the company’s liquor, ate oysters, and cracked each other up talking shit about the scene. But we looked good. We looked like a wedding cake topper.

  The party was in full swing within about an hour, grad students getting loose, becoming slightly less painfully awkward, and texting their friends, who brought more friends, mildly standoffish, smart-looking people in itchy sweaters who locked up fixed-gear bikes and mussed asymmetrical haircuts as they entered, smiling, flat-lipped and guardedly. The house filled up, the speakers strained, the punch bowl was emptied ladleful by ladleful and then when I looked over was a third full again, a new concoction made from the Santa Cruz lemonade someone had found in the fridge and vodka, I presumed. With slight panic, I looked around for K. I wanted to have one of those moments at a party when you check in with your person and make that brief spark of connection, the eye contact and rhetorical how are you doing that serves no purpose except to confirm that of all the people occupying this space, you two belong most to each other. I had seen him in the kitchen at the beginning of the evening, but now I couldn’t find him. I walked through each room leisurely, but with my eyes peeled. I met your new guy, said my friend Olivia in a high, teasing voice as I edged past her toward the bathroom. He’s hot, she added, raising her eyebrows saucily. Thaaanks, I said, raising mine in return and smiling, although I was distractedly in pursuit of my hot new guy. I felt a chill. My extremities were cold. I batted away my most reliably recurring Bay Area thought—Why must it always be cold?! Even in the caramel light of a jam-packed living room at my own indoor party? Freezing. Just then, through the shadowy throng of guests, I caught sight of him at the other end of the apartment, opening the front door. K! I called his name, but he didn’t turn around. The music was loud. I maneuvered through the haze of smoke, heard snatches of the conversation taking place around the coffee table as I followed him, turning the knob a moment after he’d closed the door behind him. When I opened it, he was walking away from the din of the party into the quiet of the night, toward a cream-colored sedan. His friend Sam got out of the car and walked around it to greet K, who hugged him, patting him roughly on the back. Hey man, Sam said, grinning. They pulled back from their embrace. Duuude, said K, laughing. Get me the fuck out of here.