We stepped out onto Madison Avenue, into the world in which I was suddenly single again. Not only single, but a divorcé. I was suddenly less substantial than I’d been an hour ago. I had a scar to show for my travels, a mark on my permanent record. There was something oddly appealing about being damaged. I needed to get drunk in the worst way.
“Well,” I said, thinking that there should be something more to say to her after having shared a bed, a bathroom, a bank account, and the occasional toothbrush for almost three years. A family of blond people in T-shirts and sneakers walked past us, holding hands and smiling like the Brady Bunch as they looked around. Tourists.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Sarah said, “if after a marriage didn’t work out there was a place you could go, once in while, to just see the person, see how they’re doing, and just kind of touch base with them?”
“That would be nice,” I agreed.
“I mean, it’s kind of hard to shake the notion that we are, in some way, still family.”
We thought about that for a moment. There was still a sense of togetherness to us, in the way we were standing and talking, and both of us were having trouble breaking away. The aroma of sauerkraut came wafting over from a hot dog vending cart on the corner. I knew that now divorce would always smell like a hot dog. I would have to avoid barbecues for a while, which, given my social calendar, wasn’t looking like it would be a huge problem.
“I’m sorry if I caused you any pain over all of this,” I said.
She waved away the apology. “I guess it’s just a good thing we did this now, while we’re still young and there are no children. We’ll be able to look back on the good times, you know?”
“I guess so.”
She extended her hand and I shook it, and the absurdity of the gesture suddenly brought the whole scene crashing from the realm of the surreal back into reality. “Well,” she said. “I wish you all the happiness in the world.”
“Me too,” I said. “And I hope you do okay, too.”
“Ha ha.”
“Take care, Sarah.”
“You too, Ben. See you around.”
“Yeah, see you,” I said, but what I was thinking was, eight million people in the naked city, fat chance.
Chuck came over that night to get drunk with me. We sat on the floor with our backs against the couch doing shooters, two parts Sprite and five parts vodka, while watching the “News at Eleven.” Sue Simmons had just told us about Louis Varrone, a twenty-three-year-old man in Brooklyn who had committed a sensational suicide. He had set up a lounge chair on the tracks of the elevated train, then listened to Beck on his Walkman and drank beer until the D train came in and pulverized him. His mother, who was not available for an interview, nevertheless sent word to the reporters that Louis had become increasingly despondent ever since the cancellation of Star Trek: The Next Generation a few years earlier.
“What a nut job,” Chuck said. “Can you imagine what kind of loser that kid must have been?”
“I don’t know,” I said, letting out a burp that was two parts Sprite and five parts vodka. “I remember being pretty upset when they canceled Battlestar Galactica.”
“Well, for Chrissakes,” said Chuck, who was not quite as inebriated as me, but getting there fast. “It’s just a damn show. You don’t go and kill yourself.”
“I know. But I guess for some people, it’s all they’ve got.”
“Well then they might as well kill themselves anyway.”
The news went on to show a fire that killed a family of five in Elmhurst.
“Have you ever noticed that the news is really just a glossy, overproduced body count?” I said. “I mean, why is it that death is all they think we really want to hear about?”
“It’s human nature,” Chuck said. “There but for the grace of god go I, and shit like that.”
“They may as well just come on at the beginning and say, ‘thirty-two people died today,’ ” I said. “Then do the weather and sports and be done in ten minutes.”
“Yeah, and then they could show Gilligan’s Island or something,” Chuck said.
“Or Star Trek reruns.”
“Or more Baywatch,” said Chuck.
“We could always use more Bay watch,” I agreed.
Chuck leaned back and closed his eyes. “There should be a Baywatch Network.”
The secret vice of the nineties man. A mindless one-hour pictorial with no depth to speak of, yet every man I knew occasionally watched it. You didn’t plan to watch it. You didn’t look at your watch and say, “Hey, it’s six o’clock, time for Baywatch,” You just invariably found it while you were channel-surfing, and there you stayed, your finger poised over the clicker, as if you might change the channel at any moment. There was something undeniably comforting about the show, especially at one in the morning when the emptiness of your life was keeping you awake. Endless sunny days, beautiful women, so accessible in their tight red bathing suits, clearly defined moral situations, weekly heroics and long romantic walks on the beach set to eighties-style love songs. Everything life wasn’t. Baywatch was how your eyes massaged your brain.
At some point I dozed off, and dreamed that I was sitting somewhere outdoors with Lindsey. The air was the color of faded vermilion, and a soft breeze was blowing against our faces. I was holding her hand, but she didn’t realize it. It seemed very important to me that she say something to me to show me that she knew we were holding hands, but all she did was talk about a temple in Luxor she’d once visited. As I grew more frustrated I tried squeezing her hand, but she remained oblivious. It was like I wasn’t there at all, which didn’t strike me as fair since it was, after all, my dream. Right before I awoke I thought to myself wistfully, maybe it’s not my dream. Maybe it was her dream that I’d somehow ended up in, and that’s why I wasn’t having any effect.
I rolled over, seeing every fiber of the carpet with a drunken clarity, and looked up to find Xena, the Warrior Princess, scowling at me from the television and Chuck looking at me, cup in hand, a triumphant smile on his face. I could see a patch of stubble in the fold of his neck, where his razor had missed. “I know what we should do about Jack,” he said.
Chuck’s idea was simple in its premise, and damn near impossible to execute. What it amounted to was this: We would kidnap Jack, one of the most recognized movie stars in the world, take him to a secluded place where we could keep an eye on him, and stay with him until he kicked the habit.
“It would take forty-eight to seventy-two hours for his blood to be completely free of coke,” Chuck said. “After that, we would just need to keep him there for a while to stop him from getting more. I don’t think he’s been on it long enough to have a full-blown addiction.”
“What are we going to do, tie him up?” I said.
“If we have to.”
We thought about it for a minute. “How do you kidnap Jack?” I asked. “He’s always got an entourage with him.”
“Don’t fuck me up with details, dude,” Chuck said. “I’m still talking big picture here.”
“You’re talking felony, my friend.”
“I open people up every day,” Chuck mumbled irrelevantly, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. “I open them up and fix them.” He suddenly looked up at me, as if he’d forgotten for a minute that he wasn’t alone. “We can do this,” he said. “It’s not so crazy.”
“You’re talking about taking someone against his will—”
“Not someone. Jack. Our friend.”
“Our friend who isn’t speaking to us,” I reminded him.
“Details,” Chuck warned.
“The devil’s in them,” I mumbled. “Or is that god? I’m always getting those two mixed up.”
“The devil’s in the shit going into Jack’s blood,” Chuck said.
“I think we’re both too drunk for melodrama.”
“Fuck you. It’s a good idea.” Chuck heaved himself to his feet, groaning from the effort. “Jesus, I’m hammered
.”
“You leaving?”
“Yeah. If I begin my hangover now, maybe I’ll be okay by tomorrow night when I’m on call.”
I got up to walk him to the door. I was dismayed to discover that my brief nap had destroyed my buzz. “You going to be okay?” Chuck asked.
“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “It was just paperwork.”
“Well, you two had some good times,” he said weakly. “You shouldn’t have any regrets. Do you?”
“None,” I said. “Except I wish to hell I’d never gotten married.”
He looked at me, not sure whether I was joking or not. I couldn’t have said for sure myself. “Let me know when you’re ready to get out there again,” he finally said. “I’ll hook you up.”
“Thanks.”
Chuck paused at the door. “My idea would work,” he said. “Just think about it.”
“Okay,” I promised. “But I think it will sound a lot less reasonable without the benefit of alcohol.”
“Bounce it off of Lindsey or Alison.”
“I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if they salute.”
With Chuck gone, I set up shop on the couch and began the tedious work of reclaiming my buzz. Vodka in hand, I put the television on channel two and began a fresh wave of channel-surfing. Infomercials, Gary Coleman on the Psychic Friends Network, a movie from the early seventies about a prison break, the life cycle of the manatee on Discovery, fuzzy shots of body piercings on public access, a B-movie about radioactive high school kids with neon sweatshirts and bad haircuts on USA, stand-up comedy on the Comedy Network, an old Happy Days episode on Nickelodeon.
Finally, I found a Baywatch rerun on one of the local stations. Lieutenant Stephanie Holden was being held hostage in one of the lifeguard towers by an evil lunatic with a bomb. You could tell he was a bad guy because he didn’t have a tan. Hasselhoff had to get under the tower undetected, so he was tunneling through the sand in his wet suit, digging out the sand in front of him and depositing it behind him with some gizmo he’d kept from his days as a Navy SEAL. He looked like a giant earthworm.
I was suddenly very lonely. For Sarah, for Lindsey, for a party to be named later—I didn’t know. I had told Chuck that nothing had changed, but that wasn’t true. Being an official divorcé brought late-night channel-surfing up to a staggering new level of depressing. I just wanted to belong to someone already. Thirty . . . shit.
The night before I got married, I ate dinner at my parents’ house and afterwards spent some time in my old bedroom going through my drawers and bookcases, looking at all the stuff I’d accumulated growing up. Photos, birthday cards, ticket stubs, pocket knives, mix tapes, notes from old girlfriends. The bedroom was like a time capsule of the first eighteen years of my life, everything perfectly preserved as if I’d just left it the day before. As I went through my drawers, I was struck by how many items were still in the random positions they’d landed in when a younger me had discarded them to be dealt with at a later date. So many things I’d assumed I would revisit, oblivious to the hot breath of time on the back of my neck.
I sifted through all of my artifacts, feeling the need to touch every single one of them, to establish a tactile connection to my past. I found a green, elastic headband that belonged to Cindy Friedman, my ninth grade girlfriend and the first girl I’d ever seriously made out with. I held it to my nose and thought I could still detect the faint scent of her perfume. We’d climbed under my covers that night, quivering with anticipation, and she’d pulled it out of her hair and put it under my pillow. A little while later she had let me take off her shirt. I could still remember the sweet copper taste of her skin, the flawless texture of it against my lips. The next day I’d tossed the headband into my top dresser drawer, where it had remained undisturbed until that night before my wedding. Holding it again, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of desperate yearning, not for Cindy Friedman, but for the quivering.
At some point that night, while wishing that I could go to sleep in my childhood bedroom and wake up in high school again, I realized that I didn’t want to marry Sarah. I’d actually realized it weeks before, but there, surrounded by the innocent souvenirs of my youth, I finally admitted it to myself. I loved Sarah, but I couldn’t remember a single time I’d quivered for her. I must have sat on my old bed for over an hour that night, running through the different ways I could call the wedding off, all the while knowing I never would. High drama had never been part of my repertoire. I was terrified of facing Sarah, who would go ballistic, and my mother, who would have a coronary, but all of that was secondary to my primary fear, which was the knowledge that when the dust settled, I’d be waking up alone again. How long could you hold out for someone who made you quiver before the loneliness devoured you? My marriage might be tainted by pragmatism, but there was something almost reaffirming in precisely that. Almost.
And now I was divorced. I was waiting for the final feeling. The one that would come after the drinks wore off, after the depression and fear faded to faint background noise. The feeling that would stay. I wondered if I’d be elated or sad, liberated or just filled with regret. I had no idea, but I knew it was in the mail. I looked at a picture of Sarah and me dancing at the wedding of one of her friends. She was looking up at me with this wise and loving grin, as if I had just said something to her that only the two of us could ever understand. I wondered what I could have said to make her look at me like that. I was looking right back at her, but my expression was inscrutable, as if the camera had caught it in the middle of forming.
The booze wasn’t doing anything for me, so I got up from the couch, scrambled some eggs, and thought about getting a dog.
A few hours later, as the first rays of sunlight came slinking into my bedroom, my mother called. I can always tell it’s her before I pick up, as if there’s a slight difference in the timbre of the telephone ringer when my mother’s on the other end. This small psychic gift is matched only by her uncanny ability to call at the exact times when I really don’t want to speak to her.
“Hi Ben, it’s your mother.” As if she’s talking to an answering machine. Not “it’s Mom” or even just a “hi” with the omission of identification that comes with familiarity. Always “it’s your mother,” as if we were strangers in need of introduction.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Your father and I just wanted to see how you’re doing.” This was also part of her script, an apology of sorts for my father’s poor communication skills. Not that he wasn’t interested in my well being because he was, but in a passive, general way that didn’t require details. As long as I was fine, that was all he needed to know, and he barely required confirmation. He was happy to assume it, unless he heard differently. A hard-working engineer his entire adult life, my father was a quiet, disciplined man, utterly unskilled when it came to showing affection or concern. I didn’t take it personally, which isn’t the same as saying I was thrilled to grow up with it.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How’s your leg?” My mother had recently begun suffering from arthritis in her left knee, an ailment that had taken on a much greater significance than it should have because to her it signaled the beginning of her old age.
“Yesterday was a killer. Today I took some Motrin and I’m getting by.”
“Good.”
“How’s Sarah?” she asked. Although she knew we’d been separated for over eight months, she refused to recognize it for what it was, choosing instead to view it as an indulgence common to couples of our generation that we needed to get out of our system. Every time she called she determinedly asked after Sarah as if everything was completely fine, which somehow helped her maintain the illusion.
“She’s good,” I said, mentally gritting my teeth. “I actually saw her yesterday.”
“Oh!” my mother exclaimed, surprised in spite of herself. “Is she back?”
“Uh, no. Mom, we got divorced.”
“What do you mean you got divorced?” she demanded, as if I
might be mistaken.
“That’s it, it’s over.”
“You signed divorce papers?”
“Yes.”
“With lawyers?”
“Hers and mine.” The lawyers seemed to quiet her for a minute. I heard an electric whoosh as she put her palm over the phone and called out for my father. “Herb, get in here!”
“Mom?”
“When were you going to tell us?” she asked, which wasn’t really the point, but she was reaching out for something to pin her disappointment on.
“We just signed the papers yesterday,” I said.
“Yesterday,” I heard her mouth to my father. I could picture her saying it, comically exaggerating every syllable so that he could read her lips, although he didn’t need to since she was patently incapable of whispering, a failing that had embarrassed me in my youth on more than one occasion.
“Did you tell Ethan?”
“I haven’t really felt like sharing yet, Mom.”
“So what? He’s your brother.”
I willed myself to ignore the silent accusation in her mention of my older brother. She almost certainly didn’t mean anything by it, but still I felt the familiar resentment rise unbidden, a bitter-tasting dryness in the back of my throat. Only four years older than me, Ethan was a partner in a small, highly successful venture capital firm. He was also married with two children and a third on the way, all of which added to his luster as the successful son. Basically, he was fulfilling all of her dreams and I was the screw-up. She never said anything like that to me, never even hinted at it. She loved us both and would never consciously try to hurt either one of us. But still, it was apparent to me in the way her voice changed, ever so slightly, when she mentioned Ethan, in the subtle deference she paid him at family gatherings, usually in his immense house in Hewlett, Long Island. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the pride she felt in my brother’s accomplishments, but I always found myself struggling against petty jealousy whenever I intuited that pride. Whatever I wanted for myself, I couldn’t help feeling a filial obligation to be successful for my parents’ sake, which may have been a silent factor in my decision to marry Sarah in the first place.
Plan B: A Novel Page 7
