Ellickson had been sober for forty-three and a half days, but he still had the shakes. Just filling the coffeepot required maximum concentration. If his concentration lapsed, the coffee grounds sprayed themselves all over the kitchen floor and had to be cleaned up with a whisk broom and a dustpan. Everything, even the drinking of tap water, called for discipline and tenacity.
All day Ellickson endured. The sun rattled violently in the sky. After the passing hours had presented their trials by fire and ice, he would go to bed feeling that his skin was layered with sandpaper. The post-alcohol world contained no welcoming surfaces, and the interiors of things did not bear much looking into, either. Although God might have supplied a solution, He was in a permanent sulk. A determined Christian, Ellickson had put his faith in the Almighty to get him through this episode and through the rest of his life, but God had declined the honor so far and was keeping up a chilly silence.
The world was glass, and Ellickson felt himself skittering over its surface.
Ellickson, drunk, had lashed out at his family one night and done something unforgivable. Nightfall had always brought his devils out. His wife had therefore taken the two kids, Alex and Barbara, and had driven 150 miles to her mother’s. His family hated him now for good reason, and although he could live with his wife’s hatred—he was sort of used to it—he couldn’t bear the idea that he had become a monster to his children. Ellickson’s shame felt so intense that when he contemplated his actions, he groaned aloud.
Patiently and without hope, he went to the twelve-step meetings.
He had maintained the drinking for years in a careful program of adjustments and stealth. His job as a supervisor of hospital cleaning personnel had been so undemanding that he could work steadily under the influence and no one ever noticed. Drunk before breakfast, his mind regulated by alcohol, he’d been as steady as a bronze statue. The vodka had kept his breath clean and his hands strong. Now that he was sober, no one seemed to like him anymore, and his judgment flew away from him in little clouds. The real Ellickson, without the gleaming varnish of the booze, seemed to constitute an offense.
Desperate, unable to move, faced with the frightfulness and tedium of Saturday afternoon, he called his friend Lester, the ex-doctor.
“Lester,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”
“Hey, buddy. What sort of help d’you need? How’s the day so far?” Lester asked, blithely. The man’s usual speech was somewhat formal, but Lester was all right. He would cross a minefield without hesitation if you needed him to.
“I’m barely hanging on,” Ellickson said. “The sky’s falling again.”
“It does that. Yes?” He waited. “Go on.”
Ellickson tried to speak. But even speech seemed difficult. “It’s all creeping up, every bit of it. Do you know the word ‘heartsick’?” Ellickson waited for his next thought, and, on the other end of the line, Lester waited, too. “Boy, is that a good word. I’m glad we have that word. So, here’s the thing. I can’t do it anymore.” Ellickson knew that he did not have to define “it” to Lester. “I’m sitting in a chair and I can’t do it.”
“I can come over.” Lester had once been a surgeon—until drinking had led him ungently out of medicine. He couldn’t go back. Now he volunteered at a science museum, explaining the fossils to children. “Tell me what to do now. I can be over there in ten minutes. Say the word.”
“Maybe. No. It actually isn’t that. I just can’t live this way anymore.”
“No. That’s wrong, my friend. You can live any old way,” Lester said, “except drunk. We all can. Remember this will pass. Everything passes.” Then he said some of the usual admonitory phrases, complete with elaboration into belief and faith. They sounded correct but feeble at two thirty-six in the afternoon. “You can be proud of yourself. This is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. We’re in this together, pal. People love you. Never doubt it.”
“Right, right. People. Ha. What people? The stars hate me. The moon hates me. The entire creation is opposed to my existence. What I need is a drink.”
“No, that’s what you don’t need. Ease up. What about the bus cure?”
The bus cure involved getting on a city bus and riding around until the urge to have a drink had passed. It only worked, however, if Ellickson took the number 13 route, which did not go down the streets where the bars were located. Also, he had to take a book or a newspaper along with him for the bus cure to work.
“I feel all the time as if …” Ellickson feared boring his friend and did not complete his sentence. “By the way. I haven’t told you: a murderer moved in next door.”
“What are you talking about?” Lester asked. “He’s murdering people now?” Lester laughed. Murder was easy compared to sobriety.
“No, no, he’s paroled or something. A lady up the street told me. I haven’t introduced myself to this guy yet.”
“Well, you should go do that.” Lester waited. “It’s Saturday afternoon. Go right over there. Tell the guy that you’re an alcoholic. Be up front about it. Provide a basis for friendship. He’s a murderer, and you’re a drunk. This friendship needs a basis to keep it solid, and you have one.”
“So okay. Maybe.”
“Not maybe,” Lester said firmly. “Definitely. Introduce yourself to the murderer.” He laughed at how upbeat the conversation had become. A murderer next door was good luck and great news. “Think of him,” Lester said, “as the next stop for your welcome wagon.”
Other murderers were probably somewhere in the city, but they weren’t in close proximity, at least that he knew about. Ellickson didn’t much care whether the murderer had paid his debt to society, because once you had committed a murder, you would always be a murderer. You would never be anything else. Nevertheless, Ellickson managed to get off the sofa. He went to the bathroom and combed his hair, hoping to look convivial. Then he strolled over to the murderer’s back patio, where his neighbor was pruning a rosebush with a pair of clippers.
“I was wondering when you’d get over here,” the old man said, straightening up and adjusting his glasses to take a look at Ellickson. “You’re not alarmed by my yardwork?” He laughed heartily, and his mouth showed uneven gray teeth with a prominent gap near the back. He wore a floppy blue hat, and a stained red handkerchief stuck out of his back pocket. “These roses are blighted.”
“No, I can’t say that I’m alarmed,” Ellickson said. “No, I can’t say that. Sorry I haven’t come over to introduce myself. I’ve just been through a spell of difficulties, that’s all.”
“Well, then,” the murderer said, “we’ve got something in common.” He slid off his gardening glove and extended his right hand, wincing as if his shoulder hurt him. “Name’s Macfadden Eward,” he said, shaking Ellickson’s hand. It sounded like a made-up name. “Call me Mac.”
“Eric Ellickson.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ellickson.”
“Oh, no. Make it Eric.”
“First names? Fine. You know, in Germany,” the old man said, hawking and then spitting to the side of his rosebush, “they spend a lot of time negotiating with each other about whether they’ll use their first names. Before that, it’s always ‘Herr Ellickson’ and ‘Herr Eward.’ They believe in the formalities. Did you know that?”
“No,” Ellickson said. “I can’t say that I did.”
“Interesting country, Germany,” he said, bending over to rub his knee. “They have themselves quite a history. Well, now, I’d invite you into my house except I gotta tell you that my place isn’t shipshape just yet. The boxes won’t unpack themselves, you know what I mean?” The old man leaned back and roared with humorless laughter. All this laughing made Ellickson uneasy. Then Macfadden Eward’s laughter suddenly stopped, and he gazed solemnly at Ellickson as he pointed his pruning shears at him. “So you can’t come in.”
“Well,” said Ellickson, feeling somewhat off balance himself, “I wasn’t looking for an invite from you. In fact,” he s
aid, realizing before the words came out of his mouth that he would now have to invite the murderer over to his house, “I wanted to see if you’d like some iced tea or a cool drink.”
“That I would, that I would,” Macfadden Eward said, “but not just this minute. It’s very kind of you to invite me, Mr. Ellickson. Maybe later. Tomorrow or the day after that.” He cut off another dead part of the bush with the clippers. “So I’ll just take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”
“I can’t offer you a drink,” Ellickson said quickly, remembering what Lester had told him to say. “I’m on the wagon, you know.” He tried to smile. “Can’t touch the stuff.”
“I didn’t know, but that’s fine,” the old man said, with a horsey smile, displaying his teeth again. “There’s some things I don’t do myself. I can drink, but I can see now that you can’t. But that particular discussion’ll have to wait until next time.” He smiled again and waved in the direction of his house. “One of these days, you can come down to my basement, and I’ll show you the spaceship I’m building down there.”
“A spaceship?”
“Shh.” The old man put his finger to his lips. “Mum’s the word.” Then he jabbed Ellickson in the ribs. “Maybe I’m kidding! Maybe there’s no spaceship!”
Ellickson returned to his house, uncertain about the nature of the conversation he had just had.
For his daughter, Barbara, Ellickson had been putting together a dollhouse, and now, for his son, Alex, he was writing a letter. He hadn’t been able to get past “My dear son” despite many attempts. It was as if his heart had suffered a blockage, and the language of feeling that other parents drew upon effortlessly had been denied him. He loved his son, but to say so in so many words seemed unthinkable. If you just put it like that, with the love right out on the table, the words would lack force. They would sound fatuous. Nothing would stand behind such a statement, especially after a father’s drunken misbehavior, and besides, the kid might be spoiled if you said it flat-out like that.
Ellickson felt that he had had to earn every single bit of love that he himself had ever received, and that if he hadn’t tried to satisfy everyone’s expectations for him, he would have been promptly thrown out into the street to die in the gutter like a dog. He still might suffer that fate. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, staring out the window at his neighbor, who was now putting in a bed of petunias.
“Fourteen years ago,” Ellickson finally wrote to his son, “I met your mother at a rock concert. Maybe we told you this story. We were standing together in the aisle of this big converted bus terminal downtown that had been turned into a club, and then we both started to dance at almost the same time, and before long, we introduced ourselves.” The place had been thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of weed, and the band, Town Dump, had only an approximate sense of how they should be playing, but somehow, despite their ineptitude, or because of it, the musicians lit up the audience, and Ellickson had found himself dancing with this beautiful young woman who had appeared magically in front of him. “Your mother,” Ellickson wrote, “was wearing a speckled-green T-shirt with a little pin on it, and plain blue jeans, and she was the prettiest woman who had ever looked me in the eye and taken me by the hand.” This confession was not quite the appropriate history for him to be laying out for his son, he realized, but he couldn’t think of what else to write, or what other route to take toward an apology. “I started to fall in love with your mother right there,” Ellickson wrote. “We talked for hours that following week.”
Ellickson had had many girlfriends and one ex-wife by that time. He was ready for love to strike. On their first real date, when he had taken the girl he had met at the rock concert out for a spaghetti dinner and a movie, he knew this one, this Laura, would be serious. “And then what happened, what really did it for me, was that your mom took me over to where she lived and played the guitar for me and sang a song she had written herself.” She had had a sweet voice. The song was about how things pass and how you have to reach for the moment. Ellickson had always carried a torch for women who raised their voices in song.
“What I’m saying is that I’m not a bad person. My dad used to take me deer hunting in the woods up north,” Ellickson continued, in a new paragraph, not wanting to write about how everything had gone wrong with Laura. The letter to his son was growing a bit disconnected, he knew, but this wasn’t an English composition, this was a soul statement. “When you’re older, I’ll take you deer hunting if you want to go up to the woods with me. I haven’t really done any hunting since you were born. I don’t know why that is. Maybe there hasn’t been time. I’m a pretty good shot, and I can teach you how to kill and dress a deer. We should go fishing, too, up north. Have you ever pulled in a fighting trout? It’s a great experience. I would love to do that with you.”
Ellickson watched his neighbor water his petunias. When he glanced at his watch, he saw that several hours had passed. A miracle. He had almost made it through another day. The phone rang.
“How’d it go?” Lester asked. “With the murderer? Did you talk to him?”
“It went pretty well,” Ellickson said. “He’s a little strange, though.”
“Well, he’s a murderer.”
“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not that. It’s like he’s a master of ceremonies of some TV show that no one’s watching. He told me he’s building a spaceship in his basement. Then he said maybe he was just kidding about the spaceship.”
“A spaceship, huh? I know the feeling,” Lester said. “Did you tell him you’re an alcoholic?”
“Yeah,” Ellickson said. “I did that.”
“Good,” Lester said. “Next time you’re over there, check out the spaceship and then report back to me.”
That night, Ellickson went to his sister’s house for dinner. She lived with her partner, a sizable Russian immigrant woman named Irena, in a ramshackle colonial on the better side of town. He continued to get invitations from them, he believed, because he performed small electrical and plumbing repairs whenever he visited and because he had offered to be the godfather if they ever had children. Also, his sister never asked him about how he was, so he never had to explain.
Kate, his sister, met him at the door, her hand at her forehead and her face flushed. The smoke alarm at the back of the house was shrieking. “We’ve had a little disaster in the kitchen,” Kate told him. “A sort of disaster-ette. I was on the phone to the goddamn airline and they put me on hold and I burned the chicken. Well, come in.” In the back, the smoke detector wailed on and on, and the dog, Ludmilla, was barking straight up at it.
“Where’s Irena?”
“H-h-h-here I am.” Irena’s h-sounds came out of her throat in the Russian manner. They sounded like gargling. She appeared very suddenly from the living room and, in the entryway, took Ellickson’s face in both hands and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, as if he were about to go off to a firing squad. Irena’s passion for everything, including Ellickson’s sister and himself as Kate’s brother, was disconcerting. Family feeling was fine, but hers seemed a bit excessive for the American context. She stood an inch taller than Ellickson, and he was terribly fond of her—everything about her was outsized, close to bursting, including her emotions. She had russet hair, large dimpled hands, and her breath always smelled heavily of peppermints, as if she herself were a piece of candy. He could see why Kate and Irena were a couple; anyone could see their complementary mixture of similarities and differences. “We have burned you the chicken,” Irena said happily. “This will be dinner, which you can eat after repairing upstairs, where a faucet leaks.” She pointed toward the second floor. “I have bought faucet washer at hardware store. Tools are already up there. Please do this?”
“Irena,” Ellickson said, “it’s a simple job. I could teach you how.” The smoke alarm was still screaming, and Kate was cursing it.
“I do not agree,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “As human being, I am u
ninterested in plumbing.” She gave him another kiss, then retreated in her house slippers to the back hallway and lugged in a stepladder. Ellickson watched her climb it and then yank the battery brutally out of the smoke detector, which fell silent. Well, Ellickson thought, why should she be interested in plumbing? She taught mathematics at a local college; her theoretical interests were so complex, having to do with the bending of topological surfaces in different dimensions, that they could not be explained to ordinary people like himself.
After Ellickson had fixed the dripping faucet, Kate and Irena sat him down at the dinner table, where they ate the edible parts of the burned chicken, along with veggie-everything pizza, which had just been delivered as the second course. Bent over the pizza, Irena picked up each slice with both hands, rammed it into her mouth, and chewed with her mouth full while Kate daintily cut her pieces with a fork and knife. Following the dinner, they played cards for a penny a point, and Ellickson won two dollars. The conversation mostly dealt with the weather and current political conditions. Personal matters were discreetly avoided. As he was about to leave, Ellickson said, “You know, I love you girls.”
Irena nodded. Kate lowered her eyes. “ ‘Women,’ ” she reminded her brother. “We are women.” This was their old familiar routine. “So.” She drew breath. “Has Laura called you?”
“No.”
“Have you called her?”
“I will. Just not yet.”
“Soon?”
“Not yet.” She looked at him. “Yes, I promise,” he said. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. A paroled murderer has moved in next door to me.”
“Is he nice?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” Ellickson told her. “I can’t tell yet. He works all day in his garden and then he disappears.”
“A murderer next door?” Irena said, putting away the deck of cards. “In Russia, this is not unusual.”
Eventually Macfadden Eward invited Ellickson into his house, where Ellickson found himself amid a welter of decaying furniture, chipped and dented Victorian relics, stained and soiled Salvation Army tables and chairs, lamps with three-masted schooners or seabirds painted on the lampshades. On the floor were odds and ends of kitchen gadgets, including a potato peeler and a coffee grinder still in their shipping boxes. Near the unwashed windows sat bookcases with sports memorabilia scattered on their shelves. Everything had been located and partitioned according to no visible plan in the living room and dining room. None of the dining-room chairs matched, and the big living-room easy chair sported dingy antimacassars and a red velvet cushion. The white lace curtains were clean but threadbare. A cheerful chaos dominated these interior spaces, a bachelor-apartment playroom clutter. His relatives had donated most of this stuff to him, the old man claimed. The rest of it he had bought secondhand.
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