“Is that better?” Her hand was a little cold, and agonizingly soothing.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re not.”
Of course I realized my feigned indifference was all just an increasingly transparent pretense. Everything she said, had ever said, fractured my resolve. She’d gradually been pushing my guard farther and farther out to sea since the day I met her. The thunder’s next declamation caused the lights to flicker. It was the first time I considered seriously the possibility that I might end up trapped here, with her. I’d never witnessed an interruption of power on campus from this high. And here I was yoked to Talia, as though we’d planned it.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“Don’t be crazy.”
“It’s crazy for me to be here. I shouldn’t have come.” She stood up.
I followed. “Is this the first time that’s occurred to you?”
“No. Not the first time.”
“So if you had second thoughts, why are you here?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
“How about I’ll tell you I made a mistake and I’m going before I can do anything else wrong?”
I stepped closer. I could now see the topography of her lips. They were glossed, likely with the pomegranate and fig botanical butter from Portland she ordered online. I could smell Exclamation on her skin. “You don’t want to fuck around with those elevators.”
“Goddamn it. When will it motherfucking stop raining?”
“Probably never.”
We faced each other, frozen, as though reflections waiting for a gesture to mirror. But neither of us moved. My limbs were paralyzed. My heart thumped. Rain sheeted the window. The glass still afforded dark opacity, only the suggestion of a vantage. Whether or not we were trapped here had little to do with the storm. Something else refused to relinquish us. Something impossible to relinquish rendered each of us inextricable to the other. That something was the motherfucking past.
At the department party, in a checked shirt and navy blazer, I hung around the middle room of the Koenig Alumni Center, where the bar was situated. I didn’t want to be too far from the booze. I bantered with tenured professors who sipped cocktails that contained amounts of alcohol that recalled World War II Stateside butter and sugar rationing. Some of the acclaimed grad student creative writing instructors sauntered in for a beer or glass of jug wine. They worked themselves into the chat. The pleasantly inconsequential conversation topic segued to Kafka and the election and contemporary novelists I was ashamed to admit I’d heard of. These ingratiating talking points peeved me and turned my discourse rancorous. “Well, I mean, would anybody really give a shit about Nick Laird if it weren’t for Zadie Smith?” I figured I could get away with it in the spirit of good-natured intellectual inquiry. Garrulity was a departure for me from my typical mild-mannered demeanor at these unpleasant annual events. I’d never before imbibed this liberally at an on-campus function. I’d been downing well vodkas since five o’clock.
The professors became more interested in the grad students, so I turned away and shortly found The Pregnant Lady at the bar. She’d given birth semesters ago, but the nickname endured. Together we declined the warm Cabernet Sauvignon when the bartender attempted to spill it into our stems. We opted instead for his heavily oaked Chardonnay. The bartender withdrew a new bottle from a bin of ice beneath his station. The white and the red were equally execrable, but at least with the Chard, The Pregnant Lady reminded me, we were guaranteed a more felicitous serving temperature. (She watched Vintage Attraction regularly, and this rationale was a famous party tip of Izzy’s from the show.) T. Stoddard shortly joined our adjunct coterie. He was an unshaven, pugilistic, foul-mouthed, couplet-wielding, tortured-spirited Bukowskiesque drunk. T. Stoddard drove a rusty El Camino with expired tags to and from school. His comp class “insurance policy” was never to teach without having a scotch and soda in his Starbucks tumbler. He ordered us tequila. I was already spinning from vodka and wine when the first shots (and the second shots) arrived, but what the hell.
Berkal was in rare form. He looked like a politician in a black suit and a red tie. He spent a large portion of the evening chatting up the department head. I had no doubt he was procuring for himself every last undergraduate fiction workshop UIC would offer from now until fall 2018. I tried diligently to ignore him in order to preserve my buzz.
A trio of beleaguered adjuncts stopped me at the unfortunate moment my plastic glass was empty. I’d noticed they’d been rambling in pairs and triplets all night. Why did the underemployed always travel in groups? Was there job security in numbers? Without anything to drink, I quickly tired of more of the same talk of Kafka and the election. I detached, I hoped gracefully, and approached the bar for a refill. As I swaggered over, my phone began seizing. It was a call from a local number I didn’t recognize. I answered, instead of letting it ring out to voice mail. I had a suspicion about who was trying to reach me. The numbness in my mouth and on my skin where prior to the party I had sensation was sufficient enough to embolden me to confront my pursuer, face to face, so to speak. I stepped onto the patio before pressing the green button.
“I need to see you,” a soft, high-pitched female voice intoned. “What are you doing?”
“Getting wasted,” I said.
“Are you at home?”
“Campus thing.” It was colder out here than my drunkenness and the surge of adrenaline the shuddering phone had brought out of me led me to suspect initially. I leaned my head in the direction of my shoulder to keep the phone in place and pressed my arms as close as I could to my sides. “Open bar, unlimited bacon-wrapped scallops, conversation, career advancement, no papers to grade. In short, everything academics dream about.” I gazed through the casement doors into the buffet room. Grad students still marched the procession along the route of silver domes, which covered the chafing dishes. They lifted the lids to peer down at the picked-over contents, which probably remained still somewhat heated by the last of the hydrocarbon jelly that burned away in Sterno cans between the dishes’ legs.
“Come to the Days Inn,” Talia said. “I got a room for the night.”
“How about if I just go inside?” I slid away the porch door and returned to the warmth. Shortly thereafter, T. Stoddard, mouth purple-red and flecked with black, entered via the hall connecting the bar to the cloth-covered folding-table buffet of pillaged hors d’oeuvres. He was speaking unintelligibly, to no one in particular.
“Are you going to come or not?” she asked. The impatience in her voice made me feel appreciably weakened, despite my surplus of alcoholic bolster. T. Stoddard here, facing me, lifted a partially depleted bottle of warm Cabernet from the particleboard sideboard. He brought the bottle to his lips, tilted his head back, and drank without stopping to breathe until the wine—at least a quarter of the bottle, by my estimation—had decanted into him. He burped. He raised the empty into the air like a sword. With a French accent, T. Stoddard declared, “I will honor my member!”
“What room?” I asked Talia, which I immediately regretted.
“I’ll meet you outside.”
“I’m not waiting in front of a hotel that’s within walking distance of campus,” I said.
“Why the fuck not? It’s not like I’m still an undergrad,” she said. She had a point.
“My entire department is out tonight,” I said.
“Paranoid Hapworth,” she said.
The booze had made me superhuman in the depth and range of my aggression with my colleagues. It had allowed me to blithely transgress in front of my superiors. But on the phone with Talia, it rendered me sensitive and susceptible to offense. Instead of steeling me, my drunkenness magnified her offhanded casual insult to a level meriting righteous indignat
ion. It also reminded me I shouldn’t have been talking to her in the first place. “I’m hanging up,” I said.
“No, wait, don’t,” she said. Her tone once again was gentle and frightened. “Wait for me in the parking lot,” she implored. “The farthest, darkest corner you can find.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. And I’m only waiting around for you for ten after that. It’s freezing outside.”
“It’s not that cold,” she said.
I ended up in the parking lot, in a far, dark corner, passing out in the old Mustang. On an algid Chicago winter night, that I went without suffering serious hypothermia injury or dying was remarkable, especially so considering how drunk I was. It was after one in the morning when I awoke. The nap and the profound embarrassment that coursed through my ravaged veins had sobered me up. I got out of the car and faced the hotel. My attention was focused on the small, curtainless windows of a room. It was one of few with its lights still illuminated.
“Talia!” I yelled, as loudly as I could. My voice was raw and dissonant. “Talia! Talia!!”
Snow now hurtled down upon me. I stood there shouting until a yawning security guard came waddling out of the hotel and across the parking lot. He entreated me to get into my car and off of the property before he’d have to detain me and call the police. I, grumbling, shivering, obliged.
I drove to a bar I knew in Humboldt Park, my old neighborhood. I was crying now, and continued to blubber until I got there. Talia didn’t want me back then. She didn’t want me now. She obviously wished nothing more than to destroy my life, now that I finally had one. Was I really going to besmirch my marriage forever with this, this fucking crazy girl? It made no sense. What the hell was I doing?
At The California Clipper I ordered a vodka and soda, but drank first the glass of water the bartender brought over after he mixed my cocktail. I’d become acquainted with the old, greasy, orange-lit bar in college. It was a destination worth the schlep from Hyde Park: the management was willing to eschew the carding of minors. It was surprisingly populated for this time of the morning. Second-shifters unwound. Widowers drank away heartache-induced insomnia. Prostitutes took their breaks. Crack whores who’d exhausted their stashes and couldn’t score more drugs tonight were now trying to come down with the balm of cheap alcohol. The jukebox spun rhythm and blues dusties, Etta James, Miles Davis, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald. I listened to the analog-scratchy, plaintive songs and thought about how little time had elapsed from my first meeting Izzy to the present, and yet how much had transpired within that short time. We’d gotten together, engaged after a handful of weeks, and married—married—not long thereafter. How had a guy who’d gone a decade without a relationship that had lasted more than eight weeks found himself hitched for life?
What an idiot I’d almost been. What I felt for Izzy existed for no other person. Not now, not in the past, never in the future. And she’d taken certain vows before a judge that affirmed she felt the same for me. But as much as we might have hoped for the opposite, our relationship could only protect us intellectually. Falling in love and getting married were lofty and necessary conditions to getting the past out of our systems, at least in theory, but not enough. They weren’t an entirely sufficient defense when actually faced with a face from an epoch preceding. So she’d gone to Pacer Rosengrant’s place a couple of times. If Talia had had an apartment in town, I might have done the very same thing. A restaurant wasn’t the venue for the sort of conversation that had the power to untangle with any kind of finality. I couldn’t believe I’d almost ended up in a hotel room with Talia. This spectacular aberration had resulted in one small, good thing, though. Here with (or, more precisely, without) Talia was our denouement. At that moment, I truly wanted to believe that with Pacer, via a circuitous and only mildly untoward route, Izzy had also found that story’s unknotting. I felt then that the worst was behind us. Quite frankly, what could be worse than what we’d already (not) done?
“Trouble with yo’ lady?” the bartender asked.
“Several.”
“It’s last call,” he said. He poured another vodka soda and placed it beside my empty glass. I didn’t want another drink. I had no idea how I’d even had the stomach to finish the first here, but what the fuck.
My phone vibrated. I expected it to be a text message from Izzy. I was surprised it had taken her this long to wonder after me. She must have been freaked out I hadn’t come home yet. I hadn’t been out this late without her since we met. But the message wasn’t Izzy’s. It wasn’t even Talia writing to taunt me. The many screens had come from Berkal. R U still up? We just closd Parthenon. Crashed a wedding there aftr din. Ask yr somm what the hell Retsina is. Must never drink again. What happened 2U? U took off like u were gng 2 see @ girl.
Talia, I typed.
Oh shit, he returned.
“I’ll pay the check now,” I said to the bartender.
“Ten bucks,” he said. “And your car keys.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Man, you were wasted when you got here,” he said. “I ain’t risking losing my license or getting sued because this was the last place you drank before you go plow into a delivery truck.”
“Fine,” I said. I reached into my pocket for the Mustang key. “I’ll take a goddamn taxi.”
“Goddamn right you will,” the bartender said. He guffawed meanly. I turned and sipped my weak drink.
10
In retrospect, I’d say that something besides the shame about spending part of the night passed out in my car worked to keep me from returning to the Biscuit Factory that morning. Something besides the anguish I felt for almost breaking my half of my not-even-month-old marriage covenant outside, or inside, a cheap hotel.
The taxi that the imperious Clipper bartender had shoved me into took me to Berkal’s place in Little Italy. There I passed a fraught few hours hardly asleep and not entirely awake on a standard-grad-student-issue green IKEA couch steeped in old whiskey. Once I made it back to Pilsen, I expected a hassle getting into the apartment. I recalled with a cringe as I walked that the bartender had relieved me of my keys. When I finally reached the building, the main entrance was unlocked. I climbed the stairs with heavy legs. Ironic that at a moment in my life when I had the most: a wife, a job, property, a dog, I couldn’t recall a time when I felt more like I had less.
Strangely, our loft door was also unlocked. I was about to go inside when I heard Ishiguro gamboling down the stairs. He breathed quickly and sneezed and bounced on his hind paws. His fore patted my dark hipster jeans. I couldn’t wait to get out of them. More than twenty-four hours of leg cinching was long enough to know they were better suited for a scrawny Italian kid than an aging Jew who really should have gone to the gym more than once a year just to visit the smoothie bar.
“What’s going on?” I asked the pug.
To catch his runaway breath, he pushed air through his nose. He sprang again and tapped my shin. Wide-eyed franticness beseeched me.
“Were you at the Laheys’?”
He moved around me, as though dodging the question, and we stepped inside. The disarray in the living room was something to which I’d become recently inured. Still, this morning’s aftermath caught my attention. There were more empty wine and cheap domestic beer bottles than Izzy could have drained on her own. She didn’t even like beer that much. An overflowing ashtray also sat on the coffee table. I didn’t even know we owned an ashtray. All the butts, as far as I could tell without digging into the cremains, were of the same brand: American Spirit. I surmised Izzy had hosted a raucous late-night gathering for a bistro bunch. It made little sense for them to come here. The front-of-house reprobates could have just as easily and happily drunk and smoked and commiserated the latest Yelp review-reported guest indignation post-shift at a dive bar. The sight of Izzy’s stockings and skirts and inside-out blouses strewn over t
he couch and the coffee table was both annoying and perplexing. What kind of evening would have called for costume changes?
Ishiguro followed me down the long hallway, to the back bedroom. The door was partially closed. The pug pressed ahead, through the crack, which widened the opening enough for me to enter. There was a crude shape buried beneath the blankets. It brought to mind the pile of laundry a child tries to hide from his parents, who pretend they can’t see it for the first few moments after finding. Ishiguro stood on two feet and pressed his stomach against the edge of the bed frame. This was how he gestured his desire to be hefted. I picked the dog up and placed him on the mattress. Ishiguro went right for the protuberance in the center. He poked it with a front paw. Izzy didn’t stir.
“Do you want me to make you some coffee or something?” I said. I could hear the contralto chagrin in my voice. My own late night notwithstanding, I hated seeing my wife this way, sleeping into the morning. She was supposed to be the respectable one. And here she’d failed to feed the dog, shirked work, me. It was like she was a frivolous and unattached twenty-three-year-old who’d stayed up too late partying.
The “Mmmm” that the sarcophagus sounded was a considerable number of octaves below that which Ishiguro was expecting to hear. I was just as shocked as the pug was. He issued a panicked bark and skittered over to me with a serious get-me-down-right-now expression on his face. His brown eyes, as round and large as a teddy bear’s, had me couching my own reaction and quickly opening my arms in triage. I lowered Ishiguro to the floor. He bolted out of the room and down the hall. I was left to investigate on my own. The contents of my stomach rapidly liquified. Acid refluxed in my chest. My palms were sweaty. The shape was now loosening itself from the rigid semicircle of its repose. Straightened out, it was a much longer and wider form than Izzy’s.
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