I was about to call K’s name again and ask where he was going, but when I heard that I froze, framed in the doorway. The porch light beamed down on me. The air outside was actually warmer than inside, even with all those people inside. Damp spring warmth. I wondered if I could pretend I was out there for a different reason, maybe to smoke, although other people were smoking out back and some were smoking weed inside, but then Sam noticed me. Hey! he said, surprised. Hey, I said. I must have worn the same humiliated expression I’d had earlier in the evening. I wouldn’t show it, I wouldn’t show any emotion at all. K smiled and played it off. Oh hey, he said, acting like I hadn’t heard him. He was practiced at playing it cool even when getting caught. I tried to smile. My mouth made a thin straight line. I’ll be back later, he called through the window as they drove away and a knot of shame settled in my throat. I tipped my chin up, a cool nod, no feeling.
The rest of the night is mostly a blank in my memory, like so many nights. K’s disregard like a can of paint kicked over, whiting out the rest of the party. Claire stayed until everyone was gone, helping me wash the guacamole dishes and all the glasses the guests had used, even though we’d left a hundred plastic cups by the booze. People always end up opening the cupboards and taking what they need. I loved doing the postgame wrap-up with Claire—she was the keenest observer I knew, attuned to the minutiae of social interactions, and she could be savage in her appraisal of others, especially fellow graduate students. She was also better at cleaning than I was. I kept catching myself leaning on the counter talking while she was gliding around with a wet sponge, absentmindedly adjusting objects, sprucing. She did better than help return things to normal after a gathering at my house—somehow, her busy tidying made them glisten. We had that bloodshot, dehydrated end-of-the-night look, my grape lipstick settled faintly into the creases of my mouth, and our voices had grown hushed and a little bit hoarse, but we didn’t want to separate yet. The house was still dirty and we kept making each other laugh. She stood pouring out the remaining beer bottles and putting them in the recycling as I swept the kitchen floor, which was sticky with spilled drinks and shoe prints and would have to be mopped in the morning.
So, not to—I don’t know, she started, then took in a sip of air sharply. Did he really just leave in the middle of the party?
Yes, he did! I said in a false chipper voice. I mean, what the fuck. He acted like he was into hosting a party together and then he told me tonight that it’s “not his thing.” Apparently, his friends aren’t into parties.
Ha—what could his friends possibly be into besides parties? Claire asked. Are they busy curing cancer or something? I know maybe it doesn’t bother you that much, but I think that’s really fucked up.
It does bother me, I said.
The man is fucking baffling, Nina. I just don’t understand. You know the weirdest thing? He was so nice at the beginning of the night, he stood around talking with me and Danielle and Marissa and her boyfriend and he was being so charming and funny and asking about their research. I was like, Damn, someone’s on his best behavior tonight.
Yeah, I said. He makes no sense. I stopped sweeping and stood with the broom in front of me like Cinderella, like I was about to slow dance with it, and opened my mouth to tell Claire what I’d heard him say to Sam, to tell her that it was even worse than just disappearing, he had called a friend to pick him up and get him out of here. The way he’d said that phrase—get me the fuck out of here—was still echoing. But I didn’t tell her, either because I was too embarrassed or because I convinced myself in the moment it was unimportant. She knew he’d left and she knew it was fucked up that it was the two of us, and not my boyfriend, washing and drying the dishes, taking the overfull bags of recycling out back to the grey bin.
* * *
• • •
Hell hath no fury like a woman who’s been taking care of a drunk. The Big Book calls alcoholism an illness that “engulfs all whose lives touch the sufferer’s. It brings misunderstanding, fierce resentment, financial insecurity, disgusted friends and employers, warped lives of blameless children, sad wives and parents.” In an undated memo, Lois Wilson succinctly described our plight: “Either we tried running things with too high a hand, weighted ourselves down with…guilt for another’s drinking, tried too hard to stop it, or we soothed deeply hurt feelings with luxurious baths of self-pity—none of it good. In our own way, though not as obviously, we were just as excessive as our compulsive drinkers were….Indulgence in hot anger, violent reproach, neurotic frustration, our attempt to retreat as completely as possible to avoid embarrassment or shame, was exactly as uncontrolled as our partner’s drinking. Whether we acknowledged it or not, ours was a disease too—a mental disorder we’d let ourselves fall into.”
In its early incarnation, AA and the auxiliary groups that came to be known as Al-Anon Family Groups promoted a view of the alcoholic marriage as dually flawed. In its honest reckoning with the financial, social, and emotional wreckage caused by alcoholism, the Big Book was downright radical, but many of its prescriptions were prim. A wife should refrain from nagging, lest she encourage her husband to drink. She should try to restrain herself from expressing disappointment or rage. Some wives had tried to be silent and serene in the face of their husbands’ drinking, only to realize that it made them brittle and hostile. Or they suffered headaches, backaches, or other physical ailments related to stress. Anger did have a place within the Al-Anon paradigm, but it was widely encouraged that catharsis be sought by rendering it productive.
Many of the recommendations in “Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage” have to do with taking this sometimes murderous rage and putting it to use around the house or garden. “To get rid of my nasty feelings (anger gave me a lot of energy!) I would go out in the backyard and dig. I’d pretend I was digging a grave for my husband; I can’t tell you how often I buried him in the backyard! Eventually I had a nice big patch of ground dug up to plant things in.” This Al-Anon member grew flowers and vegetables. She continues, “All summer long I used to bring my resentments to Al-Anon meetings—in the form of bright bouquets!”
Another Al-Anon says, “You might feel like chopping somebody’s head off; chopping a bunch of vegetables for making relish gives you just as much satisfaction and a good bonus besides.” A third chimes in, “When you feel like ‘rubbing someone out,’ you can use that energy to scrub the floor or polish the furniture.” Another suggestion was to bake bread: you “pound and pummel” the dough, pick it up and slap it back down, “stretch it as though you were pulling somebody apart and the result is a batch of delicious, sweet-smelling homemade bread.”
chapter twenty-four
In dissolving my marriage, I had made things harder for myself, had indeed made them unreasonably difficult—that fact was never lost on me. But I had also negotiated for the most precious commodity on the marketplace of motherhood: time. I remember reading a comment from a Swedish feminist while I was in college. She said the only hope for achieving parity in the home was through divorce. That had begun to feel true. I pay in pain, but I am free.
On free nights, K and I go out. We turn my car stereo up and careen around the city with cans of spray paint rattling in the back seat, screaming along to old punk songs. We hit every green light on Grand Avenue and I belt loudly, “Oh yes, wait a minute, Mr. Postman.” One finger pointed skyward. When we were just becoming friends again, I used to wonder if I would ever be comfortable enough around K to sing in the car, really sing, the way I did when I was alone, and now I sip from a paper-bagged bottle of New Amsterdam vodka, which tastes like rubbing alcohol, and really go for it, a sassily off-key crooning that I can’t remember being too shy to share with him. We wear parkas and fingerless gloves to fight the bone-chilling cold of San Francisco nights. Through my weaker eye, rain on the car windows makes smears of the streetlights and I watch the wending drops carry the picture of the night down th
e panes. Walking down the street we take slugs off of a new pint of lukewarm vodka and order vodka sodas at the bar. The glasses milky with crosshatched scratches, the wear of a thousand hot dishwasher cycles. The soda is flat and the limes are rotten. We are full and happy and lifting off the ground, hot air balloons of hope and alcoholic grandiosity. We take a strip of pictures in the photo booth at Bender’s. In one, his hand is wrapped completely around my neck and the vein in my forehead is beginning to show. A pantomime of choking that is actual choking. In another one, we are making out, my jawbone cutting a stark line through the center of the frame. I can tell that my tongue is in his mouth. A patch of a memory of someplace else, where we sit under light that is dim and warm, reddish, and concentrated above the wooden tables at each of its booths. Orbs of light down the wall of the bar. I run my fingers over the scarlike splits in the ketchup-colored leatherette cushions, reading the carvings in the tabletop. Decades of bored inanity, somehow made vaguely entertaining by having been preserved. Each tiny graffito is someone’s charged night out, full of possibilities, jokes. There, I order vodka without ice and watch the bottle being upended, the liquid bubbling thinly as it is poured into the glass. I pay and start to drink. Its bite undiluted, every sip is a decision, and I pause just before swallowing to steady my focus. Like having a mouthful of semen: for a split second, a sort of primal panic—What do I do with this?—and then a deep breath and ulp. Swallow. Like medicine. While I smoke outside, I watch K order more drinks, take in his shoes and his coat, the hairline. My handsome guy, my old man. Does he look like an asshole? He is my asshole. I feel protective of him anytime I get even that much distance, a few feet and a window to watch him through.
These nights are like old New York nights, the bitter cold of early winter when the air smells so crisp, so freshly smoked it hurts to breathe, and the filthy piles of ice and snow at the edges of the streets look like clouds in a landscape painting, a dozen hues of white lined with a flat brush in twinkly mouse grey, then slate, then charcoal. At night in San Francisco, it’s cold enough that my body feels flushed, itchy from the inside, cold enough to suck in and breathe out a happy mouthful of mist. We stay out until 3:00 A.M., 4:00 A.M. People are mostly safe in their beds and I like not being among them. I like feeling grit like white sugar on my teeth, behind my eyes, feeling exhausted, loosened up in my haunches like a racehorse, like I’ve been running all night.
At home, we undress and lay in bed exhausted. He admires the curve of my ass, feels over and over again the rise of it as though it contains the answers to the mysteries of the universe. I lay on my stomach, smiling in a way that feels sexy even in the inside of my mouth—this is the way he makes me feel—as he runs his hand up the backs of my legs, from my ankles up over my knees and thighs and pauses at the very place where my legs stop and my ass begins. He does it again and again. What does he want to know? He touches me differently, without the usual tyrannical certainty. I feel the kind of substance-addled happiness that spreads from the inside like an oil spill. And then we fall asleep.
Loving K is physical, a combat sport. Every day a different flavor. He is the butcher and I am the meat. Some days, I take to it earnestly like a kind of training, the way a freshly heartbroken person takes to kickboxing, reveling in beads of determined, purposeful sweat. Other days I’m aflutter, nervous and new, like I don’t even know what sex is. I am living a fantasy of my own deflowering. On still others I’m afraid—in a curious ecstatic agony, witnessing mutely the shooting and darting and surging of real, bodily pain. Ethereal, glittering pain like the ice-hard bloom of crystal inside of a geode. The kind of pain I haven’t felt since giving birth except it’s good for a metaphor, not beyond metaphor, beyond language the way birth is. It moves through my body like lasers. Drags like scalpels. Knocks me out like a two by four. “[A]re there not certain circumstances where humiliation is not just horror, but is a route, a passageway, toward something else, something tranquilizing?” Wayne Koestenbaum asks in his volume on humiliation. We struggle, wrestle, hate fuck, we laugh and laugh and we fuck and then I cry and we fuck more. He slaps me, spits in my mouth, closes his meaty hand around my throat until my vision dims at its edges. “Split me like timber…beat me like egg yolks,” Cate Le Bon sings on the song “I Can’t Help You.” I am a kitten he can carry by the scruff—numbed by helplessness. For blow jobs, he likes me backed up against a wall, not comfortably or even in any of the positions in which I think the act is customarily performed, but sort of crouched, squatting asymmetrically—one knee out wide to the side, the other tilting downward, wanting to kneel—and the full weight of my body bearing down on my chicken-bone ankles.
He squeezes my face so hard that for a week afterward I can see in the mirror the bruise of his thumbprint on my cheek, an imperfect little oval the color of grape drink. On a lunch break, I buy a bag of red licorice laces and a lighter shade of foundation, the cheap cakey kind, to cover it up. An excuse for a long trip to the women’s room, where I suck up the sweet shoestrings like spaghetti while dabbing at the bruise with my own concealer, then some of the foundation, and then powder on top. It is fairly well camouflaged—the makeup is thick and too peachy, so it looks like a concealed imperfection, but at least it doesn’t look like what it is. Each morning until it is gone I take great care with this new ritual—scrubbing my face, applying my usual arsenal of creams, and then the three-layer cover up. A couple times I put my hand right where his had been, squeezing my face as he had. My skin has the give of an overripe plum.
Fucking him is like a “session,” like a whole thing, and afterward I leave the apartment and ride the train in the pleasant waking coma of the freshly traumatized—an exquisite removal, outside of time, like in the cartoons when a halo of stars and tiny birds circle one’s head. I hum with a peculiar combination of satiety and wonder, an almost-angry perplexity. Like the visitors to the inside of John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, who are spit out after their fifteen minutes inside his mind. Rudely ejected back into the world, exhausted and disoriented. Dropped into a ditch by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
* * *
• • •
So bound was K to some idea that he was connected to every other lowlife in the world that he walked the city streets with the swagger of a 1970s hustler, looking for trouble. Not even necessarily to get into it himself, just to prove that he would, just to nod knowingly in its direction, as if to say, I recognize you. Scarcity, beggary, filth: I recognize you. Vandalism, gangsterism, hooliganism, smut and grime and crime and darkness? I know you. I see you, and I am not afraid. It was part of his shtick. This was one of the ways that he compensated for his crippling vulnerability to drink and drugs; he spoke some international language of the underworld, and that made the city feel more his than mine. Walking past the dirty homeless, the greasy, wiry junkies mid-nod on others’ stairs, the hookers on crank fixing their hair, fingering the grimy lace of their shorts, K would hold his chin high, and sometimes raise it an inch in their direction. A greeting. They didn’t fuck with him either.
It wasn’t all shtick, though. His experience with addiction had given him a window into deep, nonsensical suffering, and he approached the issue with surprising empathy. When a friend who had been trying his best to stay clean went to jail, K wrote a letter to the judge, attesting to the friend’s character. Though he rarely had extra money, he always laced the bums on the corner with a dollar or two. Don’t waste it on food, he’d say, which made them cackle.
To say that there was anything glamorous in his addiction would be simply wrong. I know addiction better than that. There was nothing glamorous, but to me, there was something compelling. A politics of disavowal I could see as punk rock. A cynicism so genuine it could be inspiring. Junkiedom has become so pharmaceuticalized in the past generation that it’s hard to remember it was ever connected to any politics or aesthetics, to a more stylized nihilism. To any creative production, or anyt
hing remotely cool, like literature or jazz. There’s something about getting your fix at CVS that really takes the rock ’n’ roll out of it all.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 22
