Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  Sometimes when I see that tattoo I feel sad, my son tells me when he is eight years old. Not gingerly, but matter-of-factly, the way children who’ve been raised with permission tend to speak about their feelings, announcing them baldly like a weather report. When you’re driving and we’re in the back sometimes we can see it and we hold hands because it makes us sad. I brace for more but he stops. That’s all he wants to say.

  It makes me sad sometimes, too, I offer. You know, I thought maybe I should cover it up with a different tattoo, but I think that would actually be even more sad.

  He agrees. For a moment, we hold each other’s gaze, our big, matching eyes telegraphing twin pain. He is too much like me.

  I want to keep it because your daddy and I will always be family, I remind him. I love him very much. And we both love you like crazy.

  He gives me the pursed-lip-line of an agreeable half-smile, a gesture I’ve come to think includes a modicum of pity for me.

  The idea of my children holding hands to weather that sadness makes me feel, actually, like I’d like to sit down on the floor and wail for a couple hours. But navigating the untimely demise of my marriage has meant growing the capacity to take in my children’s occasional expressions of anguish peacefully, responding to them calmly and lovingly, validating their pain without showing too much of my own. They think the tattoo is sad? I think about the hardbound album of wedding photos that they’ve never seen and make a mental note to make sure the book is hidden in a place they won’t find it until—when? Until I deem them ready? This is a sad truth for them, that the love that forged them preceded them, that they can’t capture more of it. It’s like a fairy tale they can hear that becomes familiar, but never real.

  There are moments of your childhood that stay with you forever, moments that for some reason imprint themselves on your consciousness. I wonder what those moments will be for my kids, and how many of them have already transpired. I imagine them, those memories, stacked in manila file folders like the ones that used to sit on my father’s desk. I wonder how many are piled in the attics of their minds.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  K stays sober and his entire being is altered: He stands taller, his voice has lost its murkiness and sounds as sonorous and warm as when we’d first met, those nights in the nineties when I twirled the telephone cord around my finger and tried to draw out his buttery laughter. He is funnier, more handsome. His jokes make me double over. His kindness feels like a miracle.

  One day, because he has been sober long enough, because I am beginning to trust him almost reflexively, to take trusting him for granted, I ask him to pick up the kids from school so I can stay at my office a bit later. He’s never done this errand alone before, and he accepts the request with enthusiasm. Moi? Really? I’d be honored, he says. I overexplain the details of the mission, where he can park and how to sign them out of the after-school program, and he cuts me off to say, I got it, I got it, I know exactly what to do, I’ve been with you to pick them up a hundred times.

  From my desk, I watch the clock and when I think they’re likely to be back at the house, I send K a text asking how it went.

  Fine, they’re great, we’re all at home, he replies.

  Thank you! It’s a new day, I write back, with the sunshine emoji and the praying hands. A few minutes later, I bring my notebook and pen into the office conference room and sit distractedly among my colleagues as we discuss the monthly traffic to our website. I should be listening, but briefly, I allow myself to bask in the pleasure of this moment. I have a boyfriend, a partner, as Bay Area denizens are careful to say, who can help me. Maybe none of this has to be complicated anymore. Maybe he could start picking up the kids regularly a day or two a week.

  But when I get home, I discover that he is gone, or rather, that he is that other person, the one I hadn’t had to see for months. Mommy! say the kids as they wrap their tentacles around me and I kiss them hello. Baby! he greets me, but he looks cockeyed, his face somehow askew. He smells rancid, like sweat and alcohol, like carpet in an old saloon. How was your day? he asks, and his voice bears that undeniable inflection as if it is out in front of itself, getting away from him a bit.

  My day was fine, I say. The warmth has drained from me already but for the kids’ sake I keep my voice chipper as I utter one more line: Can I speak to you in the kitchen? As I walk through the living room to get there, I catch the beginning of K rolling his eyes in the periphery of my gaze. I swivel around to confront him as soon as he’s over the threshold of the kitchen and accuse him of being drunk, my voice quiet but drenched with hostility.

  Oh, I’m not doing this again, says K, putting his hands up as though to physically block my words from reaching him. I’m not doing this with you. He is already exasperated, growing irate; it’s as though I’ve been accusing him of being drunk every day for the past year. He laughs a little to emphasize how ridiculous he finds this suggestion.

  You’re saying you’re not drunk, I offer rhetorically, my voice breaking from the effort to remain calm.

  That’s what I’m saying, yes, he spits back. And I’m saying that you are obsessed with tearing me down. Nothing I ever fucking do is good enough for you—

  Please keep your voice down, I interject, but I should know he finds my near-whisper particularly maddening, and he raises his own voice to say that I would do this, I would call the one good thing he has accomplished into question.

  If you are about to say your sobriety, you can stop there, I say and I can feel the blood rise in my cheeks, the heat spreading through my body. The idea that we’ve been laboring under these past months—that we are at peace, reconciled, that the iceberg of resentment is melting—is exposed in this split second as an utter delusion as my old rage comes flooding back. How stupid do you think I am? begins my tirade. I strain not to yell but my voice warbles as I tell him that I actually trusted him, believed he wanted to do me a favor, and he endangered my children. It is one thing to fuck with me, lie to me, let me down, but now that he has driven with the kids, slurring drunk, there is no apology in the world that will make a difference. Drunk with my children in the fucking car! Were you drunk when you got them or did you get drunk afterward? I yell, but I don’t wait for an answer. I put my head in my hands and say, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! I can’t. An incantation meant to carry him away, out of my sight. Do you hear me? I cannot do this, I thunder. I cannot fucking do this for one more second. I have been waiting and waiting for the thing that will finally make me say this and mean it. I lift my head up and look right into his eyes and shout, Get. The fuck. Out. Of my life, at a volume the kids and the neighbors can certainly hear.

  I can’t fucking wait, he snaps back, shaking the frame of the house when he pulls the door shut behind him.

  chapter twenty-eight

  On a bright sunny morning, I go for a run instead of lingering in my apartment, now creepily quiet when the kids are with their dad. If I stay inside too long in the mornings, I’ll end up watching television or crying. On Pleasant Valley, I turn to start the steep jag, a hill that marks the triumphant threshold of three miles and means I’m halfway home. The windows of a shitty Honda are rolled down and inside two junkies are either sleeping or dead. There’s a high-hat and another drum bag in the back seat. They’re collapsed unnaturally, like corpses. The woman folded sideways and back, the man with his head bent forward, his chin almost touching his chest. I take in the scene as I jog past them, up to the top of the hill, feeling a wave of sadness and disgust, and then guilt, my familiar friend.

  At the top of the hill I turn around and run back down to see if they’re okay. I crouch by the window and watch the woman to see if she’s breathing, to see if her breath is moving the strawberry blond wisps hanging in front of her face. It is. Inside the car is an entire world. The man is sitting in the driver’s seat, slumped over. A bit of foamy white sal
iva is gathered in one corner of his mouth.

  Hey, I say. You okay? Then again, louder. Hey, you guys okay? Just making sure you’re alive. I knock a couple times on the car door.

  In my purse at home, I have NARCAN, the overdose-reversing drug. The man is roused and mumbles, Yeah yeah, we are, we are. And I run as if spring-loaded, bounding back up the hill nearly tearful with gratitude, away from the man’s dirty, bloated sausage fingers lying gently on the steering wheel, feeling his way into wakefulness as if blind, as the very, very opiate-high do, the little Chihuahua curled in the crook of the passed-out woman’s waist like a hairy growth, wriggling almost imperceptibly to nestle more deeply into her creases, the smell of metal and cigarette smoke baked into the hot upholstery.

  Later that day, I drive to the San Francisco airport to pick up Lucia and my mother, who still come in a pair. They visit California together a couple times a year, usually once for Halloween, which is today. Their Brooklyn apartments are a few long avenue blocks apart and they talk every day. Their relationship is no longer as one-sided as it was years ago. Lucia is now my mother’s emergency contact, too. They go for manicures together. Lucia helps move heavy things and meets my mom for coffee at the nice pastry place on her block. My mom loans Lucia her car when she wants to get out of the city, and the two brave Whole Foods together to shop for Thanksgiving dinner, which Lucia has started hosting at her place in Gowanus. They have a kind of symbiotic relationship—my mother still sometimes answers the question “How are you?” with “Lucia had a date last night”—but I no longer find it grating. Their bond has only grown more beautiful. They always looked the most alike in our family—Anya and I bear more of a resemblance to our father’s side—and now they have grown into a vibrant kind of sisterhood built on the thrill of Lucia’s survival. They make each other howl with laughter. They laugh in the retelling of stories and sometimes one has to finish the tale while the other catches her breath.

  Lucia’s path has not been easy, but she has prevailed in a most inspiring way. She has built a career working for artists and is a performance artist in her own right. She’s gained a following for an oeuvre that focuses on many of her harrowing experiences. We bond over the fact that we both continue to iterate on the same themes, on the same traumatic material: drugs, death, and what she calls “the calamity of being female.”

  On this visit, my mother regales me with a story of driving out to a Lowe’s to buy bags of soil with Lucia because she was burying herself alive for a performance. It’s one of those stories that’s so ridiculous it makes my mother laugh and shake her head in the telling. It’s the happy version of the incredulity of many years ago. She even shows me a photo on her phone of Lucia looking pretty in a white tank top, floral skirt, aviator sunglasses, and Pumas, holding a shovel. Behind her, my mother’s trunk is piled high with forty-pound bags of dirt.

  Did you watch the performance? I ask.

  No! says my mother. I draw the line there—you know I support your work, she says, turning to Lucia, but I draw a line at watching my own daughter bury herself.

  Well, it’s kind of your fault, Mom, I say. You’re the one who showed us all the crazy art in the first place. And you know what you always told us—

  She finishes my thought, reciting the well-known Carrie Fisher quote: Take your broken heart, make it into art.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  It’s been a while now since the night my sisters expressed their fears for me, and my own life has settled into a quasi-suburban normalcy. Lucia is nonjudgmental and loving about my breakup with K, perhaps more than anyone else in my life, but she also doesn’t hide her relief. I know how painful this is, she says. But you had to do it, she adds gingerly. He gave you no choice. And now look at you.

  Look at what? I ask flatly, unimpressed with myself.

  You’ve taken back the narrative of your own life.

  Years earlier, I had worried about introducing Lucia to K. I felt jealous thinking they’d share some dark understanding, a commonality that would crowd me out and make me feel like a little sister to them both. And they did get along well, though they never spent much time together. Sometimes, irrationally, superstitiously, I’d thought of Lucia and K as being on a kind of pull-cord—if one of them was doing well, it meant the other couldn’t be. Now K was gone again, and Lucia was clean, successful, merry as ever.

  At night after we put the kids to bed, a round-robin of stories and snuggles and kisses that finally settles them after the gleeful family day and a night of trick-or-treating, Lucia and I lie on my couch, feet to feet, and pick through the pillowcases full of Halloween candy. I tell her it struck me as ghastly, then sad, that when K left he took the old, funny, black-and-white photograph of his father out of the small silver frame on the mantelpiece. Then I noticed he took the photo of himself, too, off of the refrigerator. A handsome young one, also black-and-white, mostly of the back of his head as he screamed into a microphone, his hair sweaty and slick as a seal. And the photo of our hands clasped together, Instagram faux-faded, where you can see his tattoo that reads Promises. Though he said he would, he didn’t move his things out. He didn’t leave his key. But he took these few photographs, to help him draw a through line, to continue his life’s project of crafting and sustaining a persona, to double down on the antihero shtick, to save for the next woman (“girls,” he still calls them) the crumb trail of his life. This is my father. This is me when I went on tour thirty years ago. This is a girl I loved and lost because I’m bad bad bad and unreformed, unrepentant, unfixable. I know you think you can fix me, new girl, but you can’t. You shouldn’t even bother to try. This girl here in this photo, with the baby-blue manicure and long fingers clasped happily, desperately, around the Promises tattoo: you should see what happened to her.

  It occurred to me that I had given almost a decade of my life to a man who would always prize his family photos over mine, who would scarcely linger over a black-and-white photograph of my beautiful mother, my beautiful grandmother, the cluster of immigrant relatives in fur coats and heels on a cement stoop in Brooklyn, my uncles swimming, my grandfather looking like Tony Soprano playing big band music. The things he found bewitching on TV and in movies—in real life he doesn’t care that way. We hadn’t joined our worlds the way lovers, families, are meant to. He took back the bits of himself, right out of the frame, when he left.

  In the morning, Lucia gets up with the kids before I do, and by the time I rise and shuffle toward coffee, she’s sitting, hugging her knees in the middle of a circle of stuffed animals. Home in New York, she regularly spends time with Anya’s kids, inviting them over individually for takeout and sleepovers, but my kids don’t often get to see her, so when she and my mother are in town they rise at dawn. Lucia has that same magic quality she did when we were kids. It’s the same thing K had, the thing that made you feel you couldn’t get enough of him. And like him, she is willing to really play with my kids, to submit to any game or charade or to sit and talk deeply about anything that’s on their minds. Sometimes when my son is upset, he’ll say, I want to talk to Lucia, and disappear into his room with my phone.

  This morning, she hops up as I enter the living room, grumbling myself awake, and says, Sit, I’ll get you coffee, pointing to the couch.

  My mother makes a move from her seat on the couch, too. I’ll do it, Lucia, she says.

  No, no, sit! Lucia insists.

  Jesus, what are you on this morning? I ask, amazed at her energy.

  Just high on life, she replies, smiling back.

  chapter twenty-nine

  It took me two months to make a Tinder profile. First, I made playlists, and careened down the freeway crying and belting out the songs that reminded me of him, and the songs I’d collected while angry at him or lonely or longing or hopeless or exhausted. I coasted, singing, along the Bay Bridge, holding long wavering notes like a wou
nded wolverine. When it felt like I couldn’t cry anymore, I uploaded five little thumbnail images of myself in which I thought I looked young-ish, vaguely normal, and vaguely cool, and went in search of oblivion in the form of a stranger, a new man on whom I would hang no hopes at all.

  I need a palate cleanser, I told friends, trying to sound cavalier, and stayed up nights fielding messages from men who wanted to meet me or text me or show me their dicks. Confirming my own relevance—or the timelessness of men’s urges—made me feel desirable in a way I hadn’t realized I’d been longing for. I had a marriage, two kids, and the catastrophe of K behind me, but I was not damaged goods! Or perhaps no goods are too damaged to repel male desire. No matter. I was still likable. Hot, even. My phone vibrated through the night.

  But compared with the barreling ease of my texting with K, most of the communication I had with this new crop of potential mates lay along a sad spectrum from stale to horrifying. Some were scarcely literate and seemed to have learned to spell correctly only the words for body parts; others seemed to cope with the discomfort of phone-flirting by performing a strange formality: How does the evening find you, madam? Others acted like self-satisfied sleuths confidently pacing an interrogation room: Well well well, tell me, Nina, what’s a girl like you doing here? What is anyone doing on a dating app? It all made me cringe with embarrassment. I hated my own tone, too. It felt like it had been a lifetime since I’d been engaged in that kind of casual self-presentation, and I didn’t like squirming under my own microscope, rereading my messages to see how I’d played a particular question, assessing the extent to which I’d mastered affecting a cool-girl air. While I was waiting for them to text back, there was nothing to do but read over the conversations I was in the middle of having and judge them. I tried to come off as busy and independent. I had an arsenal of self-deprecating, semi-serious ways to say that I had just emerged from a disastrous relationship—lol—and was looking for fun but not commitment.