by Adam Klein
I remember my mother saying of her mother, ‘Too much water under the bridge.’ The water doesn’t move; it is mirror-still.
We pull up to the cottage and begin to crunch our way up the path.
‘Do you need me to take care of King while you’re gone?’ she asks, as we shake our boots off on the porch. ‘I’m good with dogs.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘My friend Gina’s going to do it.’
‘Gina who?’
‘The one you know. Or she knows you, at least.’
She looks into my eyes as she passes me in the doorway. ‘Did she tell you I worked for her?’ she asks, handing her coat to me.
‘I don’t remember. I don’t think so.’ I hang them, use the chance to look away from her.
‘I did it for a little while. It wasn’t really sex. But it wasn’t really massage either.’
‘Listen, Hannah.’ I turn on the lamp and remove some of the files from my couch. ‘You really don’t have to explain it to me because I’ve been there. I did all that shit in San Francisco. I don’t have an opinion about it one way or the other.’
But I do. I hate it, and she hears it. ‘I wouldn’t do it now,’ I say. ‘I don’t have it in me’ – the desperation, the numb body.
She sits down heavily on the couch. ‘I’ve thought of going back to it,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’ She picks up an unwashed teacup, looks it over. The way you look at things when you’re not thinking.
I wonder if she says this to upset me, or because she wants me to convince her of her faulty memory. She asked me not to treat her as a client, so I won’t tell her how confused she sounds to me. I imagine her holding that knife to her breast, but I won’t tell her how crazy it sounds. Things happen when you’re drunk. Isn’t that how Gina looks at it? I would have thought the same – less – just a few years ago. I would have stepped over a dead body to get a fix. I would have bent down and taken the jewelry to sell.
Funny how you come about caring. I think I started feeling in the dark – a few brief flashes fixed in my memory: My father carrying my mother to bed. Or Bill, when he sat on the edge of the window, watching me nod off. At night the lights were red and pink from the theaters in the Tenderloin. They’d flash for just a moment, then return to darkness. And there’s a desire to imagine these moments sustained – these surprising and comforting feelings – to watch them played out or extended indefinitely, but the darkness is the other side of our character, and the light is always resolved in it.
‘I finally seduced him. I went to his studio, dressed the way he had suggested, more like Ellen. I told him I wanted the three of us to get along, because Ellen was my closest friend, and she obviously cared about him.
‘I knew I looked gangly in that dress, and I’m sure my self-consciousness and my awkwardness – not that I looked more sexy or feminine – are what aroused him. He invited me in, and he lavished attention on me that I wasn’t stupid enough to trust, but that I liked anyway. I remembered how he ran his foot up and down my calf, so I felt it would work if I saw him alone. I thought he wanted to hurt Ellen, and I didn’t mind if he used me for that. I wanted to hurt her too. That’s how it started out – that touching him was a way of hurting her, and it didn’t matter whether she knew or not. Do you think some actions have an effect on the universe? At first it seemed like a small wrong, an irrational decision I made – but now it seems almost malignant, evil, what Stefan and I did.
‘I wanted to hurt her, but I didn’t want to lose her. I would say to her: I don’t think Stefan likes me. That was true, even after we’d had sex. And I’d tell her: I feel pushed out of your life, a third wheel. That’s why I think she invited me to Burlington with the both of them. To prove she cared about me; that she and Stefan and I could resolve our differences and get along. Also, she could take the pressure off introducing him to her parents. She knew she’d have a hard time calling him a friend. After all, there was undeniable sexual tension between them. He looked like a man who was cheating on his wife, and he was.’
Hannah and I are standing in the frame of the front window. I notice an owl perched in the tree, its head winding back and forth like a nervous watchman. I point him out to her. She stands admiring him with her face pressed against the glass, the long curtain tacked behind her shoulder. And though she’s interested, I know she is less comforted by his presence than I am.
‘I don’t think I’m going to stay,’ she says after a while. ‘In Iowa City.’
‘Where will you go?’ I ask.
‘Maybe Madison,’ she says. ‘I need to get out of here. I’ve just made life hell for myself. You’ve no idea.’
‘Leaving won’t stop you from making bad decisions. Trust me,’ I say, more alarmed than I intended. ‘I’m always battling a part of myself that would rather bury everything and forget.’
She walks away from the window, back to the couch. She looks at me strangely, and I recognize the look as unwillingness. She is not interested in my warnings. She doesn’t want the wisdom I dispense at my job. If I’m truly with her, I shouldn’t be too unlike her.
‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ I say, following her onto the couch. ‘What happened when you went to Burlington?’
‘Well, you saw the picture.’ She puts both feet up, locks her hands around her knees.
‘You took that?’ I remember her holding it out to me, and the faces of Ellen and Stefan – a severity to their expressions, a stiffness that can come with fear, or with unexpressed rage, the features of people doomed to stay together until something intervenes.
‘Have you been to Burlington?’ she asks. When I tell her I haven’t been outside Iowa City, except for Cedar Rapids, she insists we should go. ‘I still love it there,’ she says.
‘Of course, Ellen’s house wasn’t how she’d described it. She made it sound like this stately mansion, and I just imagined her parents were tremendously successful. I was shocked when I went up there the first time.
‘The house was run-down, painted a dull yellow. I guess it was pretty in a simple, understated way. They rented it, which of course Ellen neglected to mention.
‘Her mother welcomed us from the front steps, wearing an apron. She had just what you’d imagine of an Iowa face; it was open and unadorned. She was beautiful in the same way that Ellen was beautiful. But she seemed tired, and I’m sure she’d been arguing with Ellen’s father. I could imagine how his belligerence must have worn her down over the years. God, the man was everything to Ellen. She talked him up as a genius – the man who’d brought the Burlington newspaper back to life with his vital, politically savvy editorials. I don’t know what I expected – some Marxist, intellectual journalist type. But the first time I met him, I saw a moody, opinionated man at the dinner table who seemed to take umbrage at every affectionate gesture his daughter made toward him. And that saddened me, to watch her try so hard. She could never reconcile her hopes for him with the person he was. You could see he was completely unsettled by her, by her pretense of innocence, her sort of dreamy idolatry of him. “Why don’t you grow up?” he’d ask her. You could hear the accumulation of bitterness in it – as though he’d been asking the same thing of her year after year. And of course it was something all of us had wanted to say to her. But he was so mean about it, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
‘The newspaper he worked on went belly-up, and it was never anything, a few free sheets of Republican jabber they circulated at the bars and stores. He’d been unemployed for years. Nothing was good enough for him, nothing Burlington could offer. And the truth is, he never had much to offer Burlington. Not much to offer his family, either.
‘And Ellen’s mom would try to defend her. She’d say, “You know, I was just like her when I was her age.” And you knew – if it was true – that the man she married had single-handedly wrung it out of her.
‘That night at dinner he asked Stefan, without looking at him, “So what’s really going on between you and my daughter?”
I laugh out loud. ‘Did he really say, “I think your daughter is talented”? That’s too funny.’
She looks at me closely. ‘I like talking to you,’ she says. It is an intimacy I’m both certain and uncertain of. I wonder if she loved Ellen, and how much that love scared her.
Did I envy Janine? Did I love her?
She got clean, and she possessed it; it was like a skill she could show off. She could step over the Poison Girl, torso lodged in algae, wearing a garland of seaweed. Janine was somehow able to convert dirty water into air. Perfectly clean air, the toxins siphoned off. But did I envy her after I got clean? I got clean – the first time – after the training I did for the state; and I could sense that everyone, Leslie especially, was waiting to see if I could keep it up. I walked back from the office to my hotel room during lunch hours. I sat at the window, watching the lines of people cashing their General Assistance checks. I never felt better than them. Never kidded myself about how close I was to standing in that line. Sometimes it was only the window glass that kept us apart, the fact that I’d paid for the week. The room was mine. Small, dirty, cramped, mine.
And Janine wouldn’t think much of my efforts, but why should she? Rule of the survivor: some don’t. Don’t reach out to someone struggling. They’ll drag you out, drown you. Don’t ask yourself: ‘Why did I make it, and why can’t they do the same?’ Especially not when you smell the ocean from your window, like she did. I couldn’t open my window – the pigeon shit and soot were like a hard glue. I could smell the Indian food in the Patels’ hotel – five dollars for each guest who visits after 8 P.M. – and the constant squabbling at the gate, voices calling up to the windows at all hours. But I didn’t envy her, because I’d always wanted a real life, and that meant something precarious and painful. The rest was wonderland. Janine had been removed from the hotels and dealers. She had the choice to forget. It was human to want to. Human and unwise.
The room I ended up in reminded me of the one I shared with Bill. Possibly it was the same, but now it was my responsibility to pay the rent on it. I sat behind the desk and counseled ‘hard-to-place’ clients during the day in order to keep it. I felt as uncomfortable in that office as they did. I wanted to walk out with them, give up trying to stay clean and get back to the life I was familiar with. But I just bit my lip, waited it out. Then I’d return to my room down the airless, dim hall. Behind every door were the people I counseled, their rooms paid for by benefits I authorized. But there’s some imperceptible quality that separates the hopeful from the hopeless, the survivor from the one who doesn’t. So subtle it’s no wonder most people don’t experience it. If I can just stay clean, I’d tell myself, something might change. You believe you can convert your experience, learn something from your own struggle. You believe you might be able to use it somehow, but you don’t know why. You’re a closed system awaiting the paradox of hope. There’s some faint sense that you’re larger than your trials, and that you’ll live past them.
‘I could break your father out. It’s not impossible if you have some money.’
‘Yeah, right.’ I looked out over my body, floating like a pale piece of balsa wood, notches on the insides of my arms. Like a lamp I’d seen in one of the hotels, balsa like a collapsed skeleton, notches painted black and blue.
‘I know people all over, Carrie. I know all about how they run a prison. I could break him out.’ Vic talked crazy after he hit himself. Big ideas.
I reached for the syringe on the ledge of the tub. Now we were just using coke, saving the heroin for the last hit of the night. I shot up in the bathtub, everything open, everything receptive. And the coke kicked my gut; I heaved forward.
‘Man, look at you,’ he said when I stood up, asking for a towel. ‘You’re so pale.’
The abscesses happened despite my cleanliness, as though the skin retaliated – would spite itself – when I pressed the point to it. The skin rebelled by dying.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t look at me.’
He kissed me. ‘You’re so pale,’ he repeated, this time whispering. ‘You’re like a ghost.’
We didn’t have sex. We fought and made up over the framed picture we cut the drugs on. We cut coke on the one picture I had of my dad, on the glass that sometimes held the glare like a halo around his face. I felt a little guilty doing that. Every day I’m creating my fate, I told myself. An affirmation turned sour.
‘You’re just fucking with me. You can’t get him out.’ Disgusted, because I wanted to believe him. I imagined us as outlaws, but our life lacked even the heroics of cab driving.
‘Yes, I can,’ Vic said. ‘All we need is a little money.’ And I sat there staring down into my dad’s face, practically nothing left of the lines we’d cut.
‘Ellen suspected something between Stefan and me. After dinner, her father called her downstairs for a talk. Stefan and I were standing in her room, still decorated like a little girl’s room. I never had that kind of a childhood. My parents didn’t encourage my playing. When I was young, my father had a car accident that crippled him. He was drinking, taking my mother home from a party, and he wrapped the car around a tree. His side of the car folded in and trapped his torso and legs, and he never could walk again, never had control of his body functions. So I was like a young nurse growing up. And when I wasn’t nursing my father’s injuries, I was trying to heal their relationship. Because my mother hated him after that. You could feel it. And when they argued, they’d send me outside the room, and I’d just listen from outside the door. She felt stuck with him. And he didn’t stop drinking right away, either. He drank to antagonize her and to forget that he couldn’t do much else for her. But that’s another story. Except that when Stefan mentioned that I could be pretty if I were only more girlish, I thought of how hard I’d worked to compensate for my father, for his weaknesses. And that’s what made Ellen so alien and fascinating to me; she had an entirely different set of options to pursue.
‘But I also knew how futile it was for me to try to engage the same fantasies she had. Her bedroom was proof of that. I’d somehow managed to pull Stefan from her world of playacting into mine. And mine was always about consequences. I was looking at her shelves and he was close behind me. We were both whispering, as though we were thieves or something. I reached up and put my finger underneath the skirt of one of Ellen’s dolls, pretending I was arranging it and acting like I wasn’t noticing him doing the same to me. I liked the idea of defiling that room. That’s when she walked in. She found us both startled, and she knew what was going on.
‘But she’d been crying already. Her father wanted us to leave the next day. He didn’t like Stefan. Stefan was only a few years younger than he was. Ellen’s dad was a curmudgeon but not a fool. So we never even unpacked the suitcases. We left early the following morning, and Stefan slept on the couch downstairs. When Ellen and I were alone in her room, she didn’t ask why Stefan and I were so nervous when she walked in, or why he was touching me. And I started to think – at least, I wanted to believe – that she hadn’t noticed.
‘But I remember sleeping with her that night, and how stiff she got when our bodies brushed accidentally. We were talking about her dad, and I had told her that sometimes we can’t win the love or approval of our parents, no matter how hard we try. But this horrible feeling came over me while we were pretending to sleep – this horrible revelation – that she’d love Stefan with the persistence with which she
loved her father, regardless of his cruelty. And that’s just what happened.
‘I knew that I’d betrayed her, and yet I couldn’t ask her to forgive me. And I think then, the whole need to connect with others seemed confusing and futile. I didn’t have the honesty for it. All the things my mother warned me about – the cruelties of other people – were inside me. I couldn’t help but act out of these feelings of exclusion I’d been raised with. And I wondered if I were pregnant. Ellen had something that all of us wanted – we thought it was innocence, but I realize now that it was loyalty. It was innate to her, and foreign to Stefan and me.’
Hannah and I find our way to the floor and stretch out on the brown, fake fur rug that has a brittle softness to it. I’ve lit the fire, and there’s a comfort between us amid these confidences that would chill anybody else. Hannah rolls over on her back, locks her hands together on her stomach.
‘The next day we went to the cemetery. We got up really early, before Ellen’s father woke up, and went out for breakfast. We were prepared to go to the cemetery and then drive back to Iowa City. “We’ll have fun anyway,” I said. “Why don’t we just drive and check out thrift shops?”
‘“I’m not going,” Ellen said. “You guys can go.” And at that point Stefan and I were pretty certain she knew what we were up to. But I still can’t figure out why she stayed in Burlington. She said she was seeing a therapist there. That’s what she later told Stefan. But we never believed she actually saw one, because she came back to Iowa City and broke into his studio, and then wrote these lengthy letters about how she missed him and wanted him back.
‘Anyway, we stood there sort of stunned by her decision not to return with us. We both took stabs at what was wrong. She answered with a disgust we couldn’t figure out even in that brightness, even in the glare of our own guilt, our own knowledge of what we’d done to her. Stefan kept asking, “Are you sure you’re all right?” and she answered, “I need to spend some time on my own.” She turned to him and started rummaging in her purse for a few dollars. “This is for gas,” she said, and you could see how humiliated he was. He’d rather have her picking coins out of his pocket while he was still sleeping.
