by David Payne
I throw the handset across the room into the sofa cushions.
Suddenly, I’m regretting my Burnett’s, the blue-capped soldier I poured out on the roses. Maybe George A.’s birthday wasn’t the best time to stop drinking . . . like those ten or fifteen other times weren’t either.
But how can I not write it? Two months ago—not even two: on July 22, my son’s sixth birthday—I came back from a book event on Pawleys Island and called Will from the Hampton Inn, where I was staying, and wished him happy birthday. And I then unzipped my little suitcase, where—together with a toothbrush and T-shirt and change of boxers for the drive home—I had my big Burnett’s and the green Martini & Rossi for the needful quarter-capful and my jar of fancy olives, and I poured myself a triple and as I raised it to my lips, something in me said, It’s time to write about George A., spoke it right aloud there, bell-clear. And the hair rose on my forearms, and I leaped up as well as my bad knees will leap now and wrote it down on a half sheet of foolscap and knew I’d been assigned my next book, and I dated it because I was afraid I might forget it if I didn’t. And then Atlanta, the memory, came back and I wrote a note about that also, about Margaret’s phone call to me in New York in 1980 when I was twenty-five and first lived there. George A., twenty-two, had been hired by Merrill Lynch straight out of Carolina, the youngest broker in their Buckhead office. And one morning after three or four months on the job, he went into the bathroom, took off his tie and jacket, unbuttoned and removed his shirt, took out his wallet, and shredded his credit cards and license and flushed them down the toilet. Having stripped and removed all trace of personal identity, he announced that he’d been tapped to undertake a mission to go to Tehran to rescue the American hostages at the embassy. My recollection is that police and paramedics were called in and wrestled George A. into submission, though whether this is memory or assumption I can’t be certain at this distance. I do know he ended in the psych ward through the agency of strangers.
I flew home to Winston and drove down to Atlanta with a U-Haul and collected his belongings. George A.’s apartment read like a bleak and terrifying novel—weeks of dirty laundry, pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, overflowing ashtrays, unsleeved albums, notes scrawled in his shaky, disordered hand like hieroglyphics. In the kitchen, the Formica countertops were pocked with cigarette burns; so, too, the carpets, and the fridge, a petri dish with old take-out boxes sprouting multicolored strains of mold.
I stayed two weeks in Winston, and after George A. stabilized we took long walks in Buena Vista, where Jack and Margaret lived then, on Georgia Avenue and Runnymede and in Hanes Park around the tennis courts and ball fields, and as we went we talked about the hostages. I asked George A. who he thought they were, where they came from and what mission his unconscious might be proposing for him.
A psychiatrist will later tell me that psychotic fantasy often deals with national security issues and that George A.’s images might have been generic, generated by the headlines, and whether that was so or not, I never forgot it, and fifteen years later at Margaret’s town house in the ’90s, when I walked in and caught the smell of George A.’s Winstons from the back room and Margaret looked up from her pool of lamplight with that look of grievance, she seemed like a hostage in her own home. It was as if they were under a spell and the reason I stayed away was because I feared it.
That’s what I remembered and wrote down at the Hampton Inn in Pawleys when I knew a book had been assigned me, and my first thought was that it might be something wistful, elegiac, something like A River Runs Through It, and I could pose George A. the way Norman Maclean posed Paul on a big rock in the Little Blackfoot River, shadow-casting with the sun dazzle all around him, and leave him there young and beautiful forever.
But this morning, September 10, on what would be George A.’s forty-eighth birthday, I know that whatever this is, it isn’t A River Runs Through It. And Margaret, whom I called when I came back from Pawleys in July, must have known before I knew, and that’s why she doesn’t want me to write it. And I not only love my mother, I respect and like her also, but I already know I’m going to write it. I have to. And why? Because the same spell that fell over George A. and Margaret once upon a time in Winston has fallen over us and over me now. I tried to keep it at a distance but it’s here, right here in the kitchen of our North Carolina house, where I come to after my brief fugue state to find the kids’ cereal bowls on the table side by side with last night’s dishes, and on the range the pots and pans I used for supper. On the counter, eight or ten days’ worth of mail, and now the dryer buzzes, another load to add to the three or four already on the sofa, waiting to be folded and carried upstairs to the various dressers in the various bedrooms. I’ll attack this as I write and prep tomorrow’s class—a three-hour seminar sandwiched between two three-and-a-half-hour drives, to and back from South Carolina. And there’s tonight’s dinner to contrive and put together, and then I’ll need to fetch the kids at after-school. By the time we finish homework, supper, bath, Stacy should be home.
This is how our days go since she started work a year ago. During the week, she leaves with the kids at 8 A.M. and shows up most nights between 6:30 and 7. After ten years at home, she’s putting in long hours at her job and learning what she’s doing as she does it. In the meantime, all the cooking and cleaning and laundry and the lion’s share of child care—all the things Stacy used to do, which I took for granted—has fallen in my lap, while I write five days a week and sometimes six and on the seventh do my round-trip drive to teach in South Carolina. Even on the rare occasion when I catch up with basics, the porches go unswept and the garden Stacy planted with the kids in May has gone to seed, the little fruit it did produce unpicked and blackened.
And most days this seems normal, our particular version of quotidian reality. That’s how it appears with one eye open. Today, though, as I scrape a greasy clot of black beans from a place mat, I notice Stacy’s supper dishes on the table with the children’s where she left them, I see the stack of mail she put atop the previous eight or ten days’ worth she left for me to sort whenever I should find or make the time to sort it. I think about the nights I pad upstairs to find her sleeping with her back turned, and it strikes me that Stacy’s mad like I am, and what we’re mad at is each other, only we aren’t fighting, the conflict isn’t in the open, we don’t even know the subject. Something’s wrong only it’s so old and deep we’ve both been afraid to look at it or speak of it, afraid even to allow ourselves to know it exists for fear that if we did, we would not survive it, our marriage wouldn’t.
Our conflict has to do with who does what, who owes, who pays, with getting our needs met and each meeting the other’s. It has to do with money, labor, time, attention, affection, sex, and energy—what the Taoists call qi, or lifeforce. It’s a qi-exchange equation. How much of mine do I owe her, how much of hers does she owe me, how much into our common operation?
Stacy and I have never had a clear understanding on these issues. We fell in love as children in our twenties and thought love should be enough and amor vincit omnia. We entered the relationship carrying assumptions from each of our first families that to us seemed reasonable, universal and self-evident, only to discover quickly that the other found them suspect if not appalling. Rather than bring our differences into sunlight and negotiate toward the middle, we’ve each spent twenty years trying to convert, educate, persuade and finally coerce the other to the proper viewpoint. We’ve failed and ended in a state of warfare with the person we know best and love or once loved deeply, and I don’t know how this happened or how we got here.
We each secretly suspect the other of malingering, forcing us to shoulder more than our share of the burden, taking too much qi and giving back too little, though when we look hard and close and fairly—the way I’m trying to—I can see that Stacy works just as hard as I do, and has no more rest or luxury or ease than I have. The most ready explanation for the hell we’re in
is that the other must have caused it. Why assume this? Because we both remember a time before hell opened, a time when we were single and lived in clean, bright spaces we maintained with modest effort, a time when we woke up with a cheerful outlook and went about our business with a sunny spirit and succeeded at it mostly. We weren’t in hell then, hell came after we joined forces and post hoc, ergo propter hoc would be the obvious assumption—after this, therefore because of this: a classic fallacy in logic. Hell came after the other did—post hoc—ergo the other must have brought it with her—him, if you are Stacy—from the forest of his or her first family along with the stone arrowheads, the nosebone and organic poisons. And the specific hell we’re in is one we colluded to create and have perpetuated, and neither one of us is innocent, and of the two of us I may be the guiltier. I know Stacy thinks so, and I fear it.
And standing here staring at her dishes, the message I receive is: You wanted me to work outside the home and earn? Well, now I am, see how you like it. And in my Sent email queue right now is one I shot to her at work last week—Drinking, pls get kids. I sent that at 5 in the afternoon, thirty minutes before I was due to be in the car line for pickup. On that particular day, I’d miscalculated my afternoon consumption and by the time it came to leave I was in no condition to drive to get them. Stacy received this, she told me later, in the middle of a meeting, and the people around her said, What’s the matter? Is everything okay? Has David had an accident? And this morning, with one eye open—the one that enables me to read the message Stacy left me—I can see that mine to her was: This is too much, come home and pitch in, I need help, I’m drowning.
And where I’m drowning is in a bottle, and the reason why I poured my vodka on the rosebush and have done so ten or fifteen times before this is because I don’t want to do this, it’s not okay, I know it isn’t, and I’m not okay either and haven’t been in quite some time, and because I’m not, I’m making it not okay for those around me.
A one-drink night now constitutes a victory. And “one” now means three jiggers—four and a half ounces—of 80-proof Burnett’s on cubes in a double old-fashioned glass, a quarter-capful of dry vermouth, two olives, maybe three. There was a time when one single-jigger drink gave me just the kick I wanted, the little “click” that Brick awaits in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
More often than not in the last year, one triple doesn’t do it. And when I have the second—yesterday, for instance—I succumb to a suspect form of Big Picture Thinking, according to which the idea of restraint seems rather paltry. And once I’ve crossed that line, you see, there’s no compelling reason not to continue and have three. Two drinks constitute a kind of nec plus ultra, and once I sail past that rocky outcrop into the wide and windswept wine-dark sea, once I hear the taut snap of my sails and feel the sting of salt spray in my face, turning back holds no further interest and is virtually impossible for me. Beyond lie my three-drink nights, which are bad, and my four-drink nights, which are catastrophes. On four-drink nights, after downing eighteen ounces, I shut myself away behind closed doors and let my family’s night unfold upstairs without me.
Last night was a three-drink night, or rather afternoon, for my MO is to write up to exhaustion, and then, as my concentration frays, to start to sauce it. Passing the Pillars yesterday, between Drinks 2 and 3, I had my little private party, the one that makes life seem—for thirty minutes, maybe forty-five—what it might or should have been. But even as the crowd roared and the ticker tape rained down, I heard the whistling in my ears, the sound of the not-too-smart bomb homing in, and when it hit me yesterday at 3, after I’d knocked back those thirteen and a half ounces in sixty minutes, I was no longer capable of typing. In that condition, I make two or three mistakes for every key I strike correctly, so writing’s out. Instead, I staggered to the couch, smutch-faced and hair on end, like a cartoon character with tweety birds circling my head and revolving pinwheels where my eyes had been. There, I fell into the delicious sleep, long dreamt of and long denied, that I rarely—that is, never—get at night. After ten minutes, though—fifteen, tops—my eyelids popped up like window shades, and that was it, all I got, and all I ever get.
And that, for the last nine months or a year, counts as an average afternoon.
When I woke from my nap, I was no longer quite so drunk, no longer stumbling. Though still impaired and groggy, when an hour had passed—by four—I could type normally again. By 5:30, when it was time to get the kids, I’d passed from drunkenness itself, the Big City, across the bridge into the depressing suburbs. Putting on dark glasses, I set out to pick them up at after-school.
Around the time I poured Drink 1, I’d put on Cuban black bean soup to simmer, a recipe my old flame Nell taught me in New Haven that’s easy and since the kids were small, a favorite.
On the way home, we stopped for sour cream, and I was halfway down the dairy aisle when I realized Will wasn’t with us. I found him in the foyer, eyeing the glass bubble of the jawbreaker machine.
–Daddy . . . ?
–Don’t even think about it. Dinner’s in twenty minutes. We’re having black bean soup and rice.
–Beans and rice! he said with dramatic, six-year-old unhappiness. I hate beans and rice!
–Since when?
–I hate them.
Bemused, I looked at his big sister.
–Maybe we could have something else tonight? Grace suggested with cautious diplomacy.
–Look, guys, I said, I’m sorry, but beans and rice is what I made, and it’s what we’re having—and sourdough, the good kind you like from Whole Foods.
–I hate sourdough, Will said. Can I have a gumball for after supper?
–No, I answered, at the simmer now. They’re a waste of money, plus they rot your teeth.
–Can we have ice cream then? Will’s grimace, by this point, was reminiscent of the mask of tragedy.
–No ice cream. Come on. Now.
–Fine! Will said, and stamped his foot. With the cashier and the people in the checkout line fixing disapproving stares, I choked my anger down and shopped.
At home, I put the rice on and sent them up to take their baths. While I was checking email, Will peeked in.
–I thought I told you to take a bath.
–Grace is going first. Can I play Danny Phantom on nick.com?
–I’m using the computer.
–Can I watch the Cartoon Network then?
–You know we don’t watch TV on school nights.
–Please, Daddy, please . . . just for a few minutes, just till Grace gets out?
–I let you watch last week, Will—remember what happened? When it was time to turn it off, you stomped and fumed and slammed your door and made everybody tense, and that was why we made the rule.
–But I won’t, Daddy, please, just this once.
–Damnit, Will, no. N-O. Why do we have to do this every night? We don’t watch on school nights. Period. Now go upstairs and find something to do for twenty minutes.
–Will you play with me?
For a moment, the anger in his face lifts like a dark curtain, and I see him as he was before it dropped its heavy folds around him—a little boy with a sunny temperament and a big, energetic personality, seeking a connection and asking me directly. Only I’m too wiped out to make it—the flash is too brief, the momentum of battle too established—and I fail him.
–Maybe after supper, I hedge guiltily. Right now, I have to answer this email.
–I don’t have anything to do.
–You have a whole closetful of toys to play with.
–No good ones.
Now the anger’s back, and his sparks mine. I flash to the shelves of books, the action figures—superheroes, monsters, villains, bots, droids, transformers, pirates—the ceaseless torrent of cheap Chinese plastic pouring out of bins that we bundle up in trash bags quarterly and cart off to Goodwill. �
�No good ones,” Will says, and this is when I start to feel the malignant spirit in the mine shaft, rattling its chains.
–Will, go upstairs, I say. Now. I’m getting mad. I need you to get out of my face.
–Fine! he says, and as he turns away, he mumbles, not quite sotto voce, I need you to get out of my face.
–What did you say?
–Nothing! And he stomps off through the living room so heavily he makes the crystal in the corner cupboard ring the same way Bill, my father, once did.
Ten minutes later, when I serve the meal, he pushes the bowl to arm’s length.
–Yuck! I’m not eating this.
–Take one bite, I say.
Will glares and locks his arms across his chest.
I walk toward him.
–Try those beans, I say, in a low, warning tone. One bite. If you don’t like them . . .
He doesn’t budge.
Grace, at her place, watches with brooding, dour eyes.
–Goddamnit it, Will, I’ve had it with your—
Suddenly, the key jangles in the lock.
–Mommy! Mommy! they both cry, making for the door like whale ship conscripts for a white beach.
–Mommy, I’m starving, Will cries.
–Me too! Me too! says Grace.
–Are you? Stacy says. I think there are some mini-pizzas in the freezer.
Exuding a perfume of fresh air, she comes in with a smile, glancing at the mail, which she then puts down on the stack for me.
–Hold on a minute, I say. I made black bean soup and rice.
–We don’t like beans and rice! they cry accusingly.
–Why don’t we microwave those little pizzas? Stacy suggests.
–Look, I’m responsible for dinner, right? I say, already feeling like the bad guy. The last time I made this they scarfed it down and asked for seconds—remember? And don’t we have a rule they have to try one bite? This isn’t a restaurant. I’m tired of making two and three dinners every night till we hit on the mystery combo they’re going to like. This is what there is for dinner. As far as I’m concerned, they can either eat it or go without.
