“Okay, I got to get upstairs,” she said, grabbing her coffee cup. “Got a lot of work to do.”
The next day he asked if she was ready to head out for their afternoon excursion into oxygen and couple bonding.
“I have too much work to do,” she said. He didn’t bring it up again. And they never took a walk in the afternoon again. He went back to his solitary shopping and didn’t mind at all. It was easier. No one told him he was buying too much.
“Franklin’s coming over for the game,” he told her as he was making dinner and she stood behind him, grabbing onion and garlic clove peels as they fell to the cutting board in front of him.
“Got to clean up after you,” she said. “Cleanliness is next to … what do you mean Franklin’s coming over for the game?”
“Well, let me translate that for you,” Evan said, working to keep it light. “Franklin, my adopted brother, runs this little theatre I work with and tonight on the TV, that screen that glows in the living room …”
“He can’t come over tonight,” she said, her face hardening. “I have a lot of work to do. I can’t work with you two talking and watching a hockey game.”
“Put your radio on, you won’t hear a thing.”
“It’s a week night,” she said, suddenly seething. “It’s a work night. I can’t have anyone over here when I have to do radio tomorrow.”
“Go into the bedroom and close the door,” Evan said, trying to stay patient, ride it out, keep it from escalating to high anxiety.
“Work is more important than anything,” she said. “And I don’t want to go into the bedroom. It’s my house and my office …”
“It’s our house and your office should have a damn door on it so that I can live downstairs without you having panic attacks.”
“Why do you have to watch so much TV? Why don’t you have a TV in your office so you can close the door and I don’t have to hear it?”
“I maybe watch TV once a week if there’s a game on,” he said, dropping his precious $200 German chopping knife, the one she used to try and slice open the end of a toothpaste tube to excavate the remaining drop or two. “Why don’t you get a psychiatrist? Make your own fucking dinner.”
Work trumped life. Only after dinner and wine had finally sucked the last bit of energy from her, and after the kitchen had been returned to its pristine, glistening state, did she stop for a bit of a DVD or a chat on the sofa he finally bought or in the chairs in front of her sacred fireplace. Usually she lasted a half hour then went to collapse upstairs, read a page or two of a book and drift away. She was too tired for sex at nights and scrambled out of bed at 6 am for the dawn run. No matter the weather, no matter her health, no matter what was planned for that day. It was another obsession.
Fun was hard to come by. There could be an occasional five o’clock weekend film at a Cineplex, couldn’t be seven, couldn’t be three, and the films she insisted on were despairing and mordant, renditions of tragedy and hopelessness. Happy endings bored her. Pain and desperation entranced her, the torment on the screen instructive, she said, while Evan exited desperate for a warm bath and a razor blade.
She didn’t feel she deserved pleasure and couldn’t understand how he found joy in a cold Coke with lemon slices over ice on a hot summer day, a bagel fresh from the woodburning oven, a spicy Vietnamese soup, the trilliums on the mountain in spring. She couldn’t get it. Happiness was not only a commodity she had in short supply. She seemed to have no interest in it.
She chided Fritz almost daily because he too liked to eat. Muffins, or cheese, or scraps from the table.
“What else does he have in life?” Evan would say. “He’s a neutered cat.”
Maine Coons can grow as big as 40 pounds but Fritz seemed to be hanging in at around 18, much of it fur. “He’s going to get fat,” she said and kept trying to reduce his food intake.
If he was able to convince her to get out for Sunday brunch when he came back from the gym, a rarity, her indulgence was a single egg with burnt bacon. It seemed a trial for her most times so he stopped asking her. He ate what he wanted, where he wanted and his Sundays were stress free, as long as he stayed out of the house.
One Friday afternoon, maybe 5:30, he poured a drink over ice and turned on the news on the radio. She came running down the stairs screaming: “I’m working. I can’t have the radio that loud! What are you doing? Trying to provoke me?!” He was. He smiled to himself. He was sick of dodging bullets, jumping over bomb craters, negotiating minefields. She refused to compensate for her phobia by maybe wearing headphones or maybe moving her office into a closed space.
He had finally agreed with the therapist, accommodating every obsession was chewing away at his soul.
No one is one thing, he told himself. Parts of her were remarkable, Evan felt. He loved the story of her flying in the back seat of an F18, her laughing that she only threw up twice. Or the time she was almost taken by white slavers doing a book on Colombia and was saved by a gun-toting bartender. Good stories, but in the end not that many of them. And he loved the way she looked in jeans and a white shirt, a not-too-frequent variation of her grey trousers and nun’s shoes. And he loved the way she would talk or sing to the cats when she was happy or grab his crotch when they were in bed or sometimes not in bed.
Living with her was like being a golf addict. The times she could be playful as a puppy were like the one great shot a golfer gets over the course of 18 holes that hooks him for the next 18.
“You have to leave her,” Franklin told him one night at their favourite Italian restaurant. The theatre sent patrons there and the restaurant reciprocated by treating them especially well.
They had had a bottle of wine and a couple of martinis and were now downing the restaurant’s gift of a few shots of grappa. His head was swimming, but Evan felt good. Franklin listened well, the drinks were generous and he had the theatre pick up the tab ‘cause they always found time to discuss work.
“The woman is fucking crazy,” he said. “She’ll kill you. You know I left my wife, man, and didn’t have a dime or a pot. Took a room with these three chicks in a big place like you used to get in town for a song. I had nothing. But I was away.”
“How old were you?”
“I was … I don’t know, 38 or something,” he said. “And one of the chicks, Lucy or I don’t even fucking remember, would come into my room almost every night. It was a good deal. You don’t need to stay with Annie.”
“I’m 55. I don’t want a room with three strangers and besides, I’m not giving up,” Evan said. “She says she’ll go for therapy if I go, too.”
“She thinks if you go to therapy with her she’ll become sane?” Franklin asked.
“I love her and she’s sick and needs help.”
“You stay with her and you’re the one who needs help. Fuck! You need help now.”
“That’s why I’m getting drunk with you,” Evan said. “Can you handle another grappa?
“I want to make you happy,” she’d say over and over again. “You’re the only man I’ve ever really loved, the only man I ever wanted to spend my life with.” He was sure she meant it.
In those moments, he thought as long as there were moments, he could contend with the hours when there was no singing, when the only melody was the hum of her electric stress that vibrated through him and made him long for the highway, any highway. Or the dingy motel room where he could close the door and be away from her, far, far away from her.
Were you supposed to sleep on the hard wood slabs of the cell’s floor? He no longer had his sweater to use as a cushion, they’d taken it from him fearing he’d hang himself with it. There was a woman calling out helplessly every few minutes from somewhere down the line. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” A man’s voice seemed to be calling him from a cell or two over but he was in no mood for a jailhouse confab. And what was he doing here? And why had no one asked him what the hell had happened? Why was he guilty without being allowed to say a word, make a
statement? His right was to make a phone call or have them make a phone call for him, if he happened to know the number. But it was five to five and Christmas had just passed and New Years was coming fast and who the hell would be in the office this late? And trying to find his lawyer’s home number, well that wasn’t possible. You might have a right to a phone call, but not to a phone book. They had taken his possessions, his rights, his freedom, his sanity. He lay his head against the wall and told himself to stay calm. Just breathe. This would pass. How long could they hold him? The bigger question was: “By what right were they holding him?”
The legacy of an alcoholic is a long one. At least a generation. And if odds hold up, the adult child of an alcoholic will become an alcoholic, too, and it goes on and on. And, of course, he read, they had problems with intimate relationships. No kidding.
Annie never spoke of the others. There had been hundreds or so it seemed, but they were never mentioned … her sexual past cloaked in vague references.
“What was the longest, Annie? Who did you spend the most time with?”
“I told you. Kevin. Seven years.”
“You were 21, opened a restaurant with him.”
Annie said nothing. She was looking at Evan, but he couldn’t interpret the look. Was it fear? Embarrassment? Feeling cornered?
“Annie, he was the guy you opened a restaurant with?” “A café. A shit hole. I knew it wouldn’t work but he insisted and I did all the work, waited tables, cooked in back …”
“But you can’t cook.”
“I can cook some stuff. I mean we weren’t three stars in the Michelin Guide.”
“What happened with Kevin? How’d it end?”
“I went shopping for canned tomatoes for the sauce I made, put it just about on every damn thing. He left a note. ‘See you on the other side.’ He was gone.”
“Just gone.”
“Never saw him again, never found out where he went.”
“And later, older …?”
“I was busy,” she said, and started arranging things on the table. “François, I went out with him for three years. He got a job in New York and left and we decided long distance wouldn’t work. My life was here.”
“Stay in touch?”
“I ran into him at the Café Cherrier about two months later. The job didn’t work out, he said. He was working in Montreal, had a place. Was with a woman. I told him to call me but he never did. I found out he never went to New York. He had met another woman and had been living with her, even when he told me he was moving to New York he had already moved in with her. Some suburban ticky tacky rat hole, I heard. She was a nurse or something like that, cleaning bedpans.”
“Two guys, you’re 50 and you’ve gone out with two guys?”
“No, I dated lots of guys …”
“I don’t mean getting laid on a Saturday night.”
“There’s nothing wrong with getting laid on a Saturday night.”
“I mean guys you spent some real time with.”
“Sure, there was André … We went out for about I don’t know, two years, maybe a year and a half actually. He just ended it. Said we weren’t going anywhere. I said where the fuck you want to go, tell me? Africa, England, the North Pole? He was an asshole, always bragging about the books he was writing or the talk shows he was on. He couldn’t stand the fact I had a show and was writing, too. A woman doing better than him, pissed him off, hard on his ego. Guys … They want a woman to say ‘Aren’t you the best, baby? A champ in and out of bed, you’re never wrong, darling. Let me make you a nice drink and get on my knees and blow you.’”
“I’d like a scotch with three ice cubes and… And the guy you said left you for a woman ‘cause he needed a mother.”
“That was André, died of cancer … I helped nurse him through it with her, the woman he dumped me for, Joanne. They lived up north in Saint Sauveur.”
“Joanne in Saint Sauveur? I know a Joanne in Saint Sauveur.”
“There might be more than one.”
“She’s English. Jewish?”
“Yeah, so?”
“She’s a friend of Peter’s … You know Peter in Saint Sauveur, makes boots.”
“Everybody knows Peter in Sauveur,” Annie said, starting to rearrange things on the table, wiping it with her bare hand, moving glasses an inch here and an inch there.
“The Joanne I know owns an Italian restaurant.”
“Yeah, that’s her. Evan, promise me you’ll never let me go … Promise me.”
He stared at her moving tableware for no purpose, remembering that Joanne was not a mothering type at all. She was a hard-working business woman, had a successful, white tablecloth restaurant and a staff of about 30. André left Annie for her but not because Joanne was a mother figure. Evan knew her and she wasn’t his idea of anyone’s mother. She was sexy and charming and Evan felt a chill. If he had the choice, he would do the same thing. He wondered what Joanne was up to these days.
“I promise, Annie. I promise.”
A box of her new book arrived at the door UPS. She tore it open and took a couple out and handed him one. The cover was glossy and smelled of fresh ink.
“We got to celebrate,” Evan said. “Congratulations.” He tried to kiss her but she turned away.
“I told them I didn’t want this shade of blue. I wanted it darker.” She was angry. “It looks like hell.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Evan said. “It looks great. Let’s open a bottle of bubbly.”
“No one’s going to even see it in this colour,” she said. throwing the book back in the box. “It’s horrible. It’ll never sell.”
“Knock it off, Annie, it’s your new book. Let’s go have a drink and a toast.”
“I can’t go have a drink,” she said. “You know how much I have in my bank account? Beside if I have a drink on an empty stomach, it’ll go right to my head and if I eat anything it’ll ruin my dinner and … I got a lot of work to do.” Having a drink, despite her life-long experience doing it, involved a certain alignment of the stars, her appetite, her mood, bank balance and elements he could only guess at. When others were involved, the façade of free and easy conviviality was hoisted and she reverted to her “normal public” self. Having a 5 à 7 at one of the dozen terrasses on the boulevard was a perfectly civilized cap to the day. In their private couple, it took planning on the scale of the invasion of Normandy.
She was a born critic and her own worst critic. For every TV show, film, play, director, actor, script, lighting guy, bottle of wine, plate of food, article, travel book, art director, costume designer, print job, she had an instant opinion. There were so many incompetent people out there. If only they did it like she would do it. Except when she did do it, she was miserable with the result. Evan was exhausted. Part of his life was enduring her criticism of him, part was trying to salve her criticism of herself. Another part was devoted to ignoring her critiques of others.
Soon, whatever he was enjoying, person, play or film, he would wait for her critique to kill his pleasure and the cortisol to drip drip drip into his bloodstream.
She had tried therapy. And gave up. He wanted to love her. He did love her. So he stayed in therapy, on the sofa, next to the plants, listening to tough love, hearing that Annie was highly neurotic, her actions sometimes incomprehensible, but usually manifestations of her need to dominate.
“She’ll never be well,” the therapist told him. “But she could learn to modify some of her behaviours.”
So he would mount a rescue effort. He’d be the model partner. He’d understand, he’d accommodate, bend, take a few shots for the team — them. He would put himself, his needs, second. In the name of love.
One day as they walked down Mont Royal, Evan again had to work to avoid stepping on the back of her feet. It was a challenge for her to walk beside him. She had a tendency to cross over and walk in front of him. “Why should women always follow?” she would say.
Once she was again beside him,
her hand in his, he said: “I’m sacrificing myself for you. I seem to be sublimating my needs for yours.”
“I know,” she said. And they left it at that. It was not raised again.
“Evan,” the therapist said. “No amount of abuse is acceptable. Allowing yourself to be abused, physically and verbally, will hurt you much more than the physical and emotional pain of the punches or the words. You have to understand that. You have to stop accommodating.”
He had his own hell growing up and had needs, too. His mother had been the poster girl for Valium. Prone to temper tantrums and anxiety attacks, his memories of her were of ranting and raving and locking herself in her bedroom. She slapped, she threw things, she insulted. The past seemed not too different than the present.
Valium calmed her. The hysteria declined but it not only led to life-long lethargy and depression and a cupboard full of early generation anti-depressants. It killed her. The pills mixed with booze delivered by he knew not whom, had her near comatose every night. Her other vice was cigarettes, torched with a big Zippo.
“When I was a teenager, she would pop her quotient of sleeping pills late at night, mixed with whatever else she was consuming, wait for them to work and then try and make it to the bedroom,” he told Annie one night in bed. “When her timing was off, she fell, the dog barked, and I picked her off the floor and dragged her to bed. My father heard nothing. He was deaf. After I left, I often visited and would find her face bruised and cut, her arms a rainbow of purple and yellow and black. Funny thing, wasn’t till I was in therapy that I discovered my childhood really sucked.”
Years later, mired in pills and alcohol, Evan’s mother dropped her Zippo on the cheap synthetic dressing gown she lived in and went up in flames like a protesting Buddhist. She lived six weeks in the burn unit at the Hotel Dieu one block from Evan’s house. His father had retreated into the TV. Evan finally realized he had been an orphan with parents.
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