Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  Charlie isn’t good-looking, but neither am I. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and tan slacks that bunch at the ankles. There’s a ravaged quality about his face. His lower eyelids are purple and puffy, and it looks like he’s just gotten into a brawl with someone, but I don’t mind because Charlie has the most mournful, coppery eyes I’ve ever seen, more mournful than the patients at the old folks’ home where I work as an aide, the ones who, when I help them out of their beds and into their chairs, grip my arms and lift their near-blind eyes up at me, and I know they’re lonely and want to be touched. The expression on their faces and Charlie’s face is pretty much the same. Just a few nights ago, Charlie confessed to me that he wasn’t sure he ever really loved a woman, and when I joked, he said, “I didn’t mean I’m queer, Daisy.” I teased him more, but I knew what he meant, really. There was a time I thought I loved Ray, my last boyfriend, because whenever he was gone my heart ached. But then Ray’s knife cut into my face, and I realized that sometimes your feelings about people are wrong. Sometimes your heart just tricks you.

  I don’t want to get romantic about this. The truth is Charlie is drunk and needs to stop drinking if any of this is going to work. You don’t always choose unhappiness. Sometimes it chooses you, but you can always change for the better if you set your mind to it.

  Back at our table, Charlie sets the gin and tonic down. He says, “Daisy, you’re so beautiful I’d marry you if I were a better man.”

  I push away peanut shells, let them drop to the sticky floor. “Is that you or the booze talking?”

  “Both of us,” Charlie says, and he grins. He sits down and gets quiet then, as if he’s embarrassed, and because my cheeks are flushed, I do the same. You’d think with all the people who drink in town—and there are quite a lot that I know of, personally—Leroy’s would pack them in. But it’s also a hole-in-the-wall: dank and poorly lit, and the air smells stale from beer. The karaoke machine only plays outdated songs from the seventies and eighties, and lots of the up-and-coming drinkers have never even heard of the bands. The bar itself is long and dark, and the wall behind it is lined with mirrors. As usual it’s a slow night. There are only a few locals—Ed, Joe, Jim, and Johnny sitting with their rears glued to the stools, and Charlie and me on the other side of the room, sitting at a table. I know the guys from back in high school; that’s how small the town is. But I don’t know the young couple leaning against the pool table, kissing each other in all manner of pre-fornication. The girl turns, and I catch her profile—her small nose and chin, her long earrings. She has strawberry-colored hair and is more than a little tipsy. She taps her foot and sways in time with “I Will Survive,” but I bet she’s never had to survive a bad day of anything in her life. After they kiss and sing, she and her boyfriend play pool. She squeals whenever she manages to hit one ball against another. When she does, even Charlie turns around to see what all the fuss is about. So do the guys at the bar. The girl waves at them and winks. I think there’s something probably shallow about her. I try to ignore her, especially, because unlike me she really is beautiful and has her entire life ahead of her, and everything for the taking. As for me, it’s true I’ve got firm thighs and strong arms for lifting, a good, full head of curls, and I already mentioned my chest, but I’ve always been homely and Ray’s knife didn’t make any improvements to my face. I’ve got bad, pockmarked skin, and a hook-shaped scar like a question mark that runs from the corner of my eye to my chin. Sometimes you don’t choose all your ugliness, either.

  Before these past two weeks with Charlie, I haven’t been with a man in over ten years, not since Ray. Sometimes I put my hands on the old folks’ faces just so I can remember what someone else’s skin feels like—that warmth and heat, the wrinkles and lines that mark all a person’s living and time served on this earth. I cup their faces and tell them they’re beautiful. I sit with them sometimes, when I can, when there’s a little lull in between cleaning bedpans and lifting them on and off gurneys. Sometimes when they’re near their end, I tell them it’s okay to let go and just be open to whatever is next. A lot of them hardly have family who come and visit, and if no one on staff takes the time to sit with them it’s just the fluorescent lights overhead to consider, the sharp sting of them, and waiting.

  I’m thirty-nine and have never been married.

  Charlie hasn’t ever been married, either. During the day, when he’s sober, he operates a forklift at Walgreens and spends more than twelve hours holed up in the warehouse, and while it’s true he hasn’t ever been promoted, he hasn’t been fired, either, so I’m hopeful that when he’s not drinking he’s pretty clearheaded. Ray couldn’t hold down a job to save his life.

  The pool balls crack together and the girl squeals again.

  “What can you do with kids?” Charlie says, looking as the girl shimmies around, dancing, arms up in the air, body winding around her boyfriend’s. The boy pats her rump. She’s wearing a short jacket and jeans that are so tight they seem painted on her. “Ah,” Charlie says whimsically. “Misspent youth.”

  “Wait until they actually have to work for a living,” I tell him. “How old do you think they are, anyway, eighteen, nineteen? Underage for sure.”

  “It gets harder and harder to tell,” Charlie says, and he takes a swig of his drink. “Anyway, Leroy doesn’t care. Good for business, a little happiness like that.”

  “If he doesn’t get caught serving them,” I say.

  “Who’s going to catch him?” Charlie asks. “He knows everyone in town, even Billy, and Billy’s the only one with a badge. Anyway, Daisy, that girl’s got nothing on you.”

  He lifts my hand and kisses my fingers. My cheeks turn rosy, petals closing up around my scar. I say, “Are you trying to make me feel sweet about you?”

  He rakes his hands through his hair. “You’re already sweet as sweet can be,” he says.

  “Would you say that, Charlie, if you weren’t drinking?”

  Charlie says nothing. The girl slips one arm under her boyfriend’s leather jacket and tousles his hair. She lifts her face to his and waits for a kiss. When I see them, I think about us—Charlie and me. I wish we could be like that, young and free and all our love ahead of us.

  Charlie takes his last swig, then contemplates his empty glass. He says, “God, I can hardly believe it’s time for another. You game?”

  “I’m good,” I say, holding up my glass. With that, Charlie staggers over to Leroy, who has the sense to tell Charlie that he’s had enough. Leroy is a good man. He’s hulking and quiet but he’s firm in his pronouncements. Once when I was too young to know better and banging back shots of tequila at the bar with Ray, a rosy-faced girl like the one at the pool table came into the pub. She pulled her long blond hair back and then let it fall again against her shoulders. She angled up to the bar and asked for a piña colada. Leroy just eyed her up and down and toweled a glass. He drew a glass of beer from the tap, set it in front of her. He told her, “We don’t serve none of those fancy drinks.” When I laughed, the girl blinked hard at me and smiled in a calculated way. She said, “What are you laughing at, you ugly bitch?” Ray, trashed to high heaven, snorted and told her that I sure was ugly, but then again he didn’t have to see my face when the lights were out. He told her she wasn’t ugly. She ran her long fingers over her silver bracelets, then clanked them together and said, “In your dreams, cowboy.”

  The pool balls crack. Another yelp, another kiss. The girl is probably the type to drink piña coladas, too.

  “What you looking at, Daisy?” Charlie asks now. “That handsome pool boy giving me a run for the money?” He smiles and I smile in that terse way I sometimes do, when I’m not entirely happy.

  “Leroy denied you?”

  “He’s got a stone-cold heart,” Charlie says, shaking his head. He sits and places his thin hand on my fishnet stockings and lets it crawl up my thigh, under my skirt. These two weeks with Charlie touching me have been heaven. And even though he’s drunk, he still knows how to wor
k his fingers in a way that makes my skin tingle. I pull his hand up, a little higher.

  I say, “I wonder what it would be like if you were sober. Think of all the sweet things we could do.”

  “Sober is for the dead,” he tells me.

  I say nothing. I want to tell him that he should stop drinking altogether, that you can’t really love a person until you see them clearly. Charlie and me, we don’t see like that yet. We get together at night to drink and then walk to his apartment and fool around, and at first that was fine. But now it turns out that I’ve got other things in mind for Charlie, things that stretch beyond the night and clear into the morning. But I don’t want to tell Charlie all this, or that he has to quit drinking in order for us to really love each other, not right at this moment, right when his hands are working their way up, between my legs.

  Charlie whispers in my ear. His breath feels warm and thick. The girl at the pool table scratches. When her boyfriend teases her, she jumps on his back and rides him like a pony, and the entire room seems to explode and fill with a light so tangible I can feel it, feel how it threatens to pop Leroy’s walls at the seams, split the place open.

  Charlie’s fingers stop climbing up my leg. He says, “Well, look at that pretty thing riding around like that.”

  “Let’s skip out,” I say. “I want to go someplace quieter, without so many distractions.” I smile and squeeze his thigh, squeeze it tight and high on his leg, and he nods and tells me that we can get a bottle to go.

  The fall night is warmer than usual, and the streets are nearly empty. I can smell the newly laid asphalt on the road, the stench of beer bottles in the Dumpster. My ears ring from the music. Above the pub, a few floors up, a couple fights, unconcerned with the open windows. Charlie tsks this, and takes my hand. I look up at the stars as we walk. “Do you believe there’s a God, Charlie?” I ask. “A God who looks down and actually cares?”

  “Why, hell yes,” Charlie tells me. “My mother didn’t raise a fool.”

  “I’m glad,” I say.

  We take turns singing “I Will Survive.” When Charlie sings he sounds a bit like a dog howling at the moon, and he laughs and laughs. I help him along when he forgets a line, or vice versa. “Ha!” he says, and he smacks his thigh. “Daisy we got it! We’ve started our own party now. Together you and me make a whole song.” He does a little two-step and catches himself before he staggers. “Close call,” he says.

  “Oh Lord,” I tell him, “every day is a close call, isn’t it?”

  AT HIS PLACE, Charlie slips off my jacket, sits down in his recliner, and pulls me on his lap. He rests a glass of scotch on my thigh. We kiss in the dark.

  I’ve never stayed the whole night at Charlie’s apartment, even after we’ve fooled around and I’m sleepy and his body feels warm under the blankets and my leg hangs over his leg. I don’t want to get up and walk back to Leroy’s for my car, but I slip out before the first crack of light hits the windows. Sometimes when I’m feeling really sweet about him, I like to imagine that he gets up in the morning and wonders if I was a dream. I’ve never been any man’s dream, but I’d like to be Charlie’s.

  Now, in between kisses, he asks if I want a drink. I tell him that I don’t want anything to drink, that I want something else instead. When I say that, he kisses my chest. “Sorry, Charlie,” I say. “Not that.”

  “Aren’t you sweet on me, Daisy Mae?”

  “That’s not the point,” I tell him.

  He stares at me hard now, as if he’s thinking, only I know he’s too drunk to go any place deep. I say, “You don’t need to drink, Charlie.” I feel foolish saying it because he’s a grown man, and I don’t want him to get angry. I’ve never seen Charlie angry, but when Ray drank the smallest thing would set him off. Then I think of Ray the night he was drunk and what he did with his knife after we left the bar and the pretty blond-haired woman told him he didn’t have a chance in all his dreams and called him a cowboy.

  Charlie takes a swig of scotch. He looks out the window. We both sit and don’t say anything. It’s the first time I notice how dark his apartment always is, with only the streetlamp outside in the alley illuminating the living room. I imagine Charlie’s apartment in the morning, the tidiness of it, the simplicity of his furniture, the white walls, the clock on the mantel, the electric fireplace that he’s said he uses all winter. Charlie never turns on any lights while I’m here, and even though it’s never bothered me before, it bothers me plenty now.

  When I ask him if he’s ashamed, Charlie tells me the lights give him a headache and hurt his eyes.

  “It’s good to see the person you’re kissing,” I say.

  He scratches his head and looks sleepy but says, “I guess I agree.”

  But then neither of us reaches over to turn on the light.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I tell him. I take the scotch from his hand and set it on the coffee table.

  “Thinking never did a smart man any good.”

  “I’m serious,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. His lower lip, wet with scotch, comes down in a pout. When I smile he says, “See, Daisy, I knew I could make you laugh.”

  “Listen here,” I say. “If we’re going to try to make things work, you need to stop drinking. I’ll help you.” I speak to him in a quiet but firm way, like I speak to the old folks who just lie in bed and don’t want to get up and into their chairs, the ones who have given up hope. At first Charlie snickers more, but when I tell him it’s not funny, he stops laughing and grows quiet instead. He nods, he’s taking all this in, only I can’t tell how much he’s hearing on account of the booze. I tell him that this is the plain truth of the way I see it all working out. I tell him we’ve both had a rough time of things, but that’s no excuse. “Well, what do you think?” I say. I twist the bottom of my skirt.

  He kisses my cheek quickly, so that it feels like a little brush of air. He pats my leg. “You’re an angel,” he says.

  I push his hand away, but gently because the truth is that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. What Charlie says hurts to hear. “I’m not an angel,” I tell him.

  He cups my face. “You’re Daisy, beautiful.” He gets the words a little jumbled, but I don’t mind. “A Daisy angel,” he says. His hands on my face are warm and sweet. I can’t remember the last time anyone touched me like that, not even Ray. I can’t think of what to say, so I just tell him, “Charlie, don’t say that. Don’t make me feel sweeter about you.”

  Charlie says, “I’m sorry.”

  We sit there in the quiet because now I’m stumped about what to do next. The truth is, I’m close to crying but don’t. Instead, I get up from the recliner and then turn toward him. I say, “No time like the present.” I lean into Charlie and can smell the sourness on his breath, but I don’t mind because I know there’s tomorrow and the next day and the next, and the smell and all the bottles will be gone. He cups my breast with his hand. “Easy,” I say.

  “Just a silvery angel,” he tells me.

  I lift him with my legs and not my back. I brace my arms around his waist. As Charlie rights himself, I grab the glass. I walk him into the kitchen and turn on the light. There are a few dirty dishes in the sink, and sudsy water. I reach in and pull the plug.

  “What are we doing?” Charlie asks, squinting. He pulls away, staggers back, and leans against the refrigerator. I pour the drink down the drain. Then I take the bottle from the kitchen counter and hand it to Charlie. When he sees me untwisting the cap, he says, “Oh no.”

  “If you think I’m your angel,” I say, “then you need to get clear-sighted if we’re going to be together.” I hand him the bottle. He licks his lips a little and rakes his hands through his hair then over his face. He says, “I can’t do it.” He’s almost crying, wallowing over his bottle and acting like a grown baby with his lip quivering, and even though it bothers me to see a man acting like this, I think, What else can I expect, telling him to give up what he’s used to? I tel
l him that it has to come from him, that he has to stand up straight, pour the scotch down the drain, and promise to be clear-sighted.

  I sit down at the table. I wait. Finally he says, “Christ Almighty.”

  “Sorry, Charlie,” I say. I tell him he can’t be a hound dog all his life.

  He doesn’t move. “Daisy,” he says, “I never knew you could be a bitch.”

  “I thought I was an angel.”

  “Oh, piss off,” he says.

  I say nothing. My eyes well up, and Charlie, raking his hands through his hair, looks over to me and sighs and says, “Christ, all right. Don’t start blubbering.”

  “I’m not blubbering,” I tell him.

  He stumbles over to the sink, promises, and pours out the half-empty bottle of scotch. “I’m the one who should be crying,” he says.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t start.”

  “Fine,” he says. When I go up to him and touch his arm, he turns his face toward me and says, “You’re right, and you’re a good woman.” He pats my shoulder.

  I tell Charlie I don’t want to fight. I tell him that he’s sweet and brave, sweeter than anyone I’ve ever known. I kiss his neck.

  EVEN THOUGH CHARLIE is drunk, I straddle him in bed to ride him like a pony. I’m already down to my fishnets and bra, and Charlie—well, I’ve managed to get him down to his boxers. He says, “You got a good body,” and I say, “Thank you.” His bed feels warm and lived-in.

  “I want to feel the love of a good woman,” he tells me.

  “Thank you,” I tell him again. “Thank you very much.”

  Amused, Charlie sings a line from “Heartbreak Hotel.” When I touch him, he trembles in a quiet way, not like Ray, who was loud and rough and thrashed around. That night, after the blond girl shot Ray down, he wrestled with me on his bed as if he had something desperate to prove. He put a knife to my cheek and said, “What’s one more thing wrong with your stupid face?” The knife was sharp. I didn’t flinch. I barely felt anything. I thought he was playing, because he always did like rough sex. But then I saw the blade again—not silver but silver and red—and I put my hand up to my face and it was warm and moist and then there was a deep, sharp pain. Ray held the knife to my throat, pressed. Then he laughed in a bitter way and said, “Even ugly can get uglier,” and I thought for a moment that my time on this earth was over. I thought, then, too, that it didn’t matter if I was beautiful or ugly, any more than it mattered if I drove a Beemer to work or had a million dollars or was poor. It didn’t change the fact that we all died, and no matter who was there with you in those final moments, dying was still something you did alone.