Mickey tapped his ashes carefully into his eggs, making two gray nipples on the glistening yellow aureoles of the yokes, and looked sideways at Jeff. "What do you think? You're speechless? Personally, I think it's got everything, big analytic box office—sexual ambiguity, homoeroticism, explicit Oedipal scene. Everything except the cigar. She didn't actually go down on me or anything, I woke up before that. But the transvestite thing raises some interesting issues for me. Like, when I was twelve or thirteen I started dressing up as a girl so I could get into the clubs. No way could I look old enough as a guy, but I could always get in as a cute girl. I got in everywhere, the Milk Bar, Area—even the after-hours clubs, A.M. P.M., Save the Robots. Then I'd slip into the men's room and change back into a boy. Dr. T thinks it had to be more than a matter of convenience, of course, a cigar is never just a cigar in this fucking place, is it? He thinks my adventures in cross-dressing were deeply significant. So hey, I admit, sometimes I got into being a chick. Once in a while I forgot to change my clothes. My mom found my makeup kit one time. I was like fourteen by then. Want to know what she said?" He looked around the table, soliciting curiosity.
"I'll tell you. She didn't say a thing."
"You want a cigarette, Delia?" Having mangled a piece of toast he had painted with jam, Jeff felt entitled to light up.
She was still looking out the window. Jeff was about to repeat the question when she turned her head toward him and met his eyes. He tapped out another Marlboro and placed it between her full, chapped lips, smeared unevenly with red lipstick. He lit the cigarette from his lighter. Delia had not spoken in two weeks. Without really having known her, Jeff had seen her around for years. Born of hillbillies in Arkansas, she was a hot model in the early eighties. He would see her out all the time, and one of his favorite rock singers had been her consort for a year or two. She was only twenty-seven, and the life she had lived in Hotel Manhattan had seriously abraded her; she hadn't modeled in several years, and she'd been here about four months, having arrived after slitting her wrists at Minky Rijstaefel's party. Jeff seemed to recall having been there himself. Maybe. That line from Vile Bodies—"Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties." He didn't seem to remember much of the last year—-fortunately. Delia's medical bills were allegedly paid by her last patron, a wealthy and titled European. Even in this sanctuary for the twisted and the broken, Delia was considered deeply weird.
Mickey's cigarette hissed and died in his coffee cup. "It's been unreal," he said, standing up and reaching behind his head to touch his ponytail. It was a habit he had, as if he thought the fashionable appendage would disappear. Or maybe he did it for luck. People here were superstitious, readers of signs and omens, susceptible to peripheral visions and invisible currents of airborne malevolence. Standing beside the table, Mickey looked like a crooked little flagpole trailing a thin pennant of hair. He'd been on the cocaine diet for five years, freebasing his way to that slim boyish figure.
"See you at basket weaving."
Everybody smoked. They were all addictive personalities and this was the only permissible compulsion. In group or AA, you looked around the room and smoke was pouring from lips as if from internal conflagrations, everybody burning up inside. In group last week they'd set off the smoke alarm. Alarm shrieking, the dazed and confused looking more so, hunched in their chairs holding their hands over their ears.
It was like prison or the army, where you had so little control over your own destiny that you seized every opportunity to mark time in your own manner, to gratify yourself independently of the people who controlled the keys and the passes and the med cabinet. So you smoked.
Pale from detoxification, the dancing fool whose arrival Jeff had witnessed a few mornings before smoked Gauloises, from the blue package Robert Motherwell had stuck in that famous collage. Well, if you were going to die, why not get on with it, and the hell with low-tar sticks? After all, half the people in the room had tried to do it. Self-inflicted razor tracks trickling out from under shirt cuffs. The druggies did it on the installment plan, although they denied it at first.
While they all fired up their cigarettes, Beverly, the MSW, was asking the new guy to introduce himself. His name, he said, was Brad Balfour.
"Why are you here, Brad?"
"I've always wanted to visit Connecticut. "
"Tell us a little about yourself. "
"I'm a venture capitalist from New York City, capital capital of the world."
"Anything else?"
"Five-eleven, one-fifty, blue eyes, and yes—I'm single."
"What else?"
He exhaled a cloud of smoke that would have done a blast furnace proud, looked out the window and sighed archly. Jeff wondered how he could possibly be so feisty after detox, and decided, a little scornfully, that the guy had a minor coke habit. For all his insouciance, though, his hands trembled and his eyes were ringed with the unflattering mascara of sleep deprivation.
"I'm a drug addict."
"Good." She nodded and let him off with this admission.
"Jeff, do you want to talk today?"
"Not really," he said.
"I've got a problem with that," said Fran, the alcoholic editor whose magazine, Woman Today, had published, as threatened, an unflattering profile of him after he turned down its request for an interview. Jeff didn't know if she had anything to do with this sordid transaction, but he disliked her instinctively and suspected her of being here to research an article.
"Why don't you tell us about that?" said Beverly.
"It's like, Jeff has this superior attitude. He doesn't share with us. He thinks he's too famous or something."
Beverly swiveled her head to Jeff. "What do think about that?"
"When I can think of something intelligent to say I'll share it with you."
"See? It's like he's saying the rest of us aren't intelligent."
"I don't think Jeff means that, do you, Jeff?"
Jeff sucked a big ball of smoke into his lungs and blew it out. "I keep seeing this glossy magazine page with an article by Fran called 'How to Get the Most out of Rehab.' "
"That's not very kind, Jeff."
"Or maybe, 'GroupSpeak: How to Sound Smart (and Look Good) in Therapy.' "
Beverly frowned. "I think Fran has a valid point here, Jeff. Perhaps you should reexamine your attitude toward the group."
In arts and crafts Delia stenciled pink bells on the handle of a basket as her special nurse, who was charged to stay within arm's length, stood by and watched. It was her fourth basket. They were manufactured elsewhere and the hospital bought them in bulk. Woodworking entailed sharp tools—clearly out of the question. Old Evelyn Salmon dithered past, supported by her cane on one side and a nurse on the other, followed closely by blue-haired Babs Osterlick.
"That's a lovely basket, dear."
Delia continued to paint.
"She's such a pretty girl," said Babs, puffing as she came to a stop beside her friend, her coif shining bluely like a polished sapphire.
"Lovely, but so thin," said Evelyn. "It would be all right if she just had a little more up top." Evelyn herself was endowed with a massive outcrop of bust, to which she often alluded in the presence of the younger men at the institution. Evelyn and Babs were approaching seventy. There was nothing particularly wrong with them—a touch of geriatric flakiness—but both had become lonely when their husbands died. Both husbands leaving behind piles of money, they had decided to spend their latter days here rather than in a nursing home, making generous contributions to the capital fund and paying full hospital rates for their lodging. The company amused them. They referred to detox patients as "the drunks" and the rest as "the loonies."
"Why bells, Evie?"
"Probably wedding bells. Poor girl's cooped up here while all the other little girls are getting a jump on the nice young men."
"If she puts on a little weight and buys a padded bra she'll do fine."<
br />
"Ding dong," said Babs, her upper body moving metronomically as she tottered away, shifting from her good leg to her stiff one. Making no sign that she was aware of them, Delia continued to paint.
"So how are we feeling today, Mr. Pierce? ..."
The shrink's professional shtick was the genial, fatherly manner tinged with authority. Bejowled, he had a fleshy bulldog face that reminded Jeff of the late Dylan Thomas, a nearly comic juxtaposition of appearance and reality. Dr. Taylor wore cardigans and brown brogues that appeared to be made out of some petroleum-based synthetic, and he somehow conveyed the impression of smoking a pipe, though he did not. His office was immaculate, like the model unit of a condominium complex. Issues of the Journal of Psychopharmacology formed a perfect fan across the coffee table.
"Like shit. " Jeff lifted his right foot and disheveled the arrangement of magazines on the coffee table with his toe. "Not an original metaphor for a negative emotional state, but I think it fits the case."
Dr. Taylor nodded, his jowls shaking. "That's understandable. Your body is still recovering from addiction. But we've got to try to identify your issues—"
"I'm worried about the rain forests."
"Tell me more about Caitlin, Jeff. She left you two years ago. Why do you think she left?"
"Why not ask her?"
"All that need concern us here is why you think she left."
"Because I couldn't commit?" This answer had an experimental, interrogative rise.
"That sounds like something she would say. "
"It's true. I wanted everybody in the world to love me, and her ambitions for me were narrower. She just wanted me to love her."
"And did you?"
"Yes. But it didn't seem like enough. Ideally she would've been a blonde, brunette redhead who was whippet-thin and also voluptuous, tall and petite, nurturing and independent, fiery and complacent, whorish and motherly."
"You expected a lot from her."
"I suffer from gross expectations. This may be the only sense in which I'm a somewhat representative figure."
"Did writing a book give you a sense of fulfillment?"
"The day I finished it I suppose it did."
"Then?"
"Then an absolute conviction that the book wasn't very good—segue to more yearning, restlessness, insatiable, undiagnosable desire."
"Let's try and break that down, shall we?"
"You and what wrecking crew?"
Mail call. More books from good old Russell, the fucking dope; Jeff had been unable to read since he arrived, his concentration shot to hell. And a separate package from Corrine, which included a new copy of Charlottes Web, a secret shared favorite, which Jeff had once read aloud to her in a frigid farmhouse near Middlebury, Vermont, while she nursed an ankle twisted on the slopes of Killington. Russell was off in Oxford being scholarly and all that. The nurse flipped to the end of the book and read aloud the last lines, underlined by the subtle Corrine: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." She looked up at Jeff to see if these lines had some special, encoded significance.
"Sounds like drug lingo to me," Jeff said.
He had to open the other books in front of the head nurse, who checked for narcotics and sharp instruments. She held the books upside down and fanned the pages, ran a letter opener up the spine of the hardcover The Stories of John Cheever. The late St. John, the country husband half drowning in alcohol, trying to be someone for whom the garden and the family and the holy smell of new wood in the basement workshop were enough, unable to resist the baby-sitter or the paper boy or the mid- morning drink. And here am I, thought Jeff—a blue-blooded junkie in suburban Connecticut.
A buddy had been assigned to Jeff when, upon graduating from detox, he'd enrolled in group. Tony had missed this morning's session because he had a pass to go into town on a job interview. Tony Del Vecchio once managed a chain of bar/restaurants based in New Haven. A tough guy, he'd started dealing coke; a natural fit, pure synergy, he explained, alcohol and drugs. Eventually he couldn't keep his nose out of the bag. Then he'd started going downtown, first chasing the dragon just to come down from the coke. Before he knew it, he was skin-popping, which led effortlessly to mainlining speed balls. After losing his job, house, wife and kids, he'd finally chosen to come here as an alternative to jail. He related this story at the first AA meeting Jeff attended, his confession tinged like all of them with the perverse pride of the survivor.
"Hey, buddy, what's this I hear about you in group," he asked, taking the chair beside Jeff's bed and turning it around, sitting down with his arms folded on the back.
"What can I say? I've never been good in groups."
"I'm just trying to help here." Tony was an unlikely-looking Samaritan, tattoos staining his forearms. "What have you got against Fran?"
"Right now I hate everybody."
"Tell me about it, buddy." He clapped a hairy hand on Jeff's knee. "I been there. Huh? It's like there's this big fucking hole in you screaming to get filled up, and everything else is just boring and stupid. Am I right?"
Jeff read the homemade tattoo on the back of Tony's hand: "Born to Party."
"I especially hate Fran."
"How's that?" Tony offered him a Camel filter, which he accepted.
"She's a fucking phony. People like Fran are the reason you start doing drugs. So you won't be like them. I don't care if she claims she's an alcoholic, she's one of the straights, one of the anal rule followers. She's a group person, the original happy camper."
"Bullshit. You take drugs to get high."
"She did something nasty to me," Jeff said, realizing how petty it would sound if he tried to explain it.
"Are you sure?" Tony removed his hand from Jeff's knee and slicked back his hair repeatedly as though massaging his thinking apparatus. "You probably did a lot of shitty things under the influence. Am I right? Huh?" He slapped Jeff's shoulder. "Why don't you think about that. Why don't you start by forgiving her. Then think about Step Eight in the program, that's the one where you think about the persons you failed. Make up a list of all the people you hurt because of your substance dependence. Then in Step Nine you try to make amends."
"I'm still stuck on Step Two," said Jeff. "The one where we come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity."
"That's the big one," said Tony. "Give it time."
"The entire history of civilization has been directed at freeing us from God and other arbitrary and bogus authority figures. And now, just because you crash the station wagon into a telephone pole you're supposed to say, 'Sorry, Dad, I'll eat my spinach and go to church this Sunday'?"
After dinner Corrine called. Jeff was in the TV room watching Jeopardy with the other burnouts when he was summoned to the phone.
"Just wanted to say I've been thinking about you."
"Been thinking about you, too."
Neither one of them seemed able to add anything. Jeff could imagine her embarrassment, her fear of saying the wrong thing.
"How's Crash?"
"Boring. All he ever does is work, and when he pops in for a second to change his clothes that's all he can talk about. He hardly even knocks anything over anymore."
"Divorce him and marry me."
"You're a real safe bet."
"That's just the point." He tried to sound chipper. "Would you rather be safe, or happy?"
"We were thinking of coming up this weekend."
"Neato."
"Try to feign some enthusiasm."
He couldn't imagine being enthusiastic about anything, much less a Sunday brunch with America's sweethearts. Somewhere in some sealed-off compartment of his heart was the knowledge that he loved these people, but he couldn't actually feel it. Mostly what he felt was angry. They were out there in the world, and here he was, stuck in the fucking nuthouse.<
br />
"I don't think I'm ready for that," he said.
"You must need something. We could bring—"
"How about you bring me about twenty balloons of junk."
"Not funny."
"Gosh, I guess I must've lost my sense of humor in detox."
"We love you, Jeff."
"We? What's this 'we' stuff? Love's not a group activity, goddamnit. Even though the mental hygienists here act like it is. Group fucking therapy. Do you know—we're encouraged to share and hug a lot. The word 'share,' that's a goddamn intransitive verb up here. We're supposed to write little journals where we say, 'I shared with Tony today... Fran shared with us about not being able to share with her family.' I know you and Russell like to do everything together, but in this case why don't you just speak for yourself." He paused, picturing Corrine's pained, beautiful face on the other end. "I love you, too," he said angrily. "Just give me some time to stop hating you."
36
"Do you want to talk about why we don't have a sex life anymore?"
"No."
"Well, I do." She knew, of course, but she wanted to hear him say it.
Lying beside her in the darkness, he sighed emphatically. "Corrine, I have to wake up and go to work in five hours."
"Is it that you find me repulsive after... after what happened?"
"Of course not, that's ridiculous."
"What am I supposed to think? It's been weeks since you touched me. You think I'm disgusting."
"You're supposed to understand I've got a truckload of shit on my mind right now, that I'm under a lot of pressure at work."
"What about what I've been through?"
Russell could hear those little tearful catches seeping into her voice.
Brightness Falls Page 35
