The Lights
Page 14
Settling.
Even now with my fortunes at their lowest and his at their peak, I viewed Mark as settling. Was it possible my entire twenties were just a dress rehearsal for the same mistakes to happen again and again? Was it possible in light of my entire twenties to dismiss a man I knew would be a good father?
There was another consideration.
The reason so many writers are drinkers is simply because drinking and writing are both ways to manage the darkness. Now I had stopped drinking, leaving no choice between the terror and the work. I had gotten back to it, my real work, for the first time in years. I was like Victor Hugo locked nude in a room with only paper and pencil. Was that Hugo or Dumas? Or entirely apocryphal? Irrelevant. There was no man in my life, no piece to file, no romance with my own destruction.
I had no more distractions.
Things are getting out of hand. What does any of this have to do with YOU?
The objective of this letter is to accept responsibility, repay debts, and ask forgiveness.
I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore. Recently a cousin posted the Christian the Lion video on her Facebook and it was the version where at the moment the lion runs up and hugs those guys it plays “I Will Always Love You” and it would have taken a forklift to lift me up.
Your first movie is about to come out. I hear it’s pretty bad. You and the director fought like cats and dogs. I am not worried about you. This life is not for the faint of heart, and I know your heart is an endurable piece of meat. I hear you break hearts. (Of course, I have gathered far more intelligence on your activities than these pages reflect.) The party line of my gender is to vilify a man who is cavalier with the female heart without necessarily excavating why he became this way. But I know you are the wound you are because of me and, like the sick bitch Pygmalion I am trying not to be, it gives me a sense of accomplishment.
I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore.
I remember the morning you left. The bright spring sun and the sound of the grackles. You sitting hunched on my stoop, your back as lean as a two-by-four, and seemingly as brittle. Your truck in the gravel lot with an oversize army navy duffel bag in the back, pretty much everything you owned. I was on a lot of pills, but had the presence of mind to grab Zion by the collar and prevent his escape. You made a comment about the price of dog-skin boots. I sat next to you and would have liked to have rubbed your back, but even I was not cruel enough to comfort you.
The look in your eyes. As a gifted youth of course you had chafed at the notion that you would have a superior appreciation of art with maturity, but only now did you finally understand the majority of the country and western corpus, or the book of Genesis. Could it be true? Could it be true I had fallen out of love with you just like that? You did not ask because you were too tender to hear me repeat the lie.
Of course it was a fucking lie!
Why did you have to believe me? Why did you have to leave?
I touched your shoulder and you flinched. I said you should get a back rub before the drive. You asked if I was offering you a fuck. I told you I didn’t want to do that. You observed that mine was the species of self-sabotage that caused the maximum level of inconvenience for others.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said.
“I guess you can take it and shove it up your ass,” you said.
I listened to the grackles. This sound didn’t occur around Harry’s house. He shot all the grackles with an air rifle and now they stayed away.
You stood.
“There is a light in you that can change lives,” he said. “And no one is trying to destroy it more than you. Enjoy becoming your mother.”
My face was hot with weeping I had not noticed. I stumbled to my knees and clung to you, shaking and burying my face into your abdomen.
I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore.
“Go,” I said.
The thing is, if this letter serves its purpose, if I really and truly seek forgiveness for the way that I wronged you, the thing that follows that is—
I don’t need you. I quit drinking because it was time to quit drinking. I started working again because enough already. I am a cockroach. I am Diana Ross. I am in the slow, arduous, intensely uncinematic process of not becoming my mother, and I need a man to save me like I need a hole in the head.
But I miss your brain. Talking with you was like a sandbox of infinite dimension, infinite joy in what it could become. You are the broken angel who brought my worst self to light, an exorcism in recursive loop. You are my favorite person in the world, and more audacious than forgiveness, I want to feel your hand on the back of my neck again. I want to feel the tip of your finger on my broken thumbnail. I want to feel like you have the longest, greediest arms, holding me all to yourself. I want to feel that you are proud of me. You are the mythologist that became the defining myth of my heart, and actually setting my pen aside, abandoning all flights and digressions and epistolary tap dancing and actually sending this means—
It means—
There is nothing more to say.
goodbye
She sits for a long time looking at her computer screen. She hits Return twice and types:
Goodbye,
Me
She hits Command+P. There is no reason to go over the document one more time—at this point doing so would be grounds for calling her sponsor.
She rises from the desk and sits Indian-style on the bed. The bed is really a mattress on the basement floor. The floor is carpeted. The only natural light comes from a narrow window close to the ceiling. Her father painted the walls turquoise to liven things up for her, but he couldn’t be bothered to get painter’s tape so at the floor and ceiling there is a border of hodgepodge rectangle edges from the roller and then the base color.
She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, which is a milk crate with a lamp on it. The lamp is made out of popsicle sticks; her father got it at a thrift store for three dollars. She opens a text message she has been avoiding for too long. It is from Mark.
Verdict?
Her hope has been that the right answer would simply emerge, but every time she has decided on one she has been overwhelmed with panic that it is the wrong one. Maybe there isn’t a right answer. It could be that this sense that the next decision she makes will irrevocably alter the course of her life can be attributed to generalized anxiety morbidly fixating on this specific issue. It could be that what she does next is not meaningful at all in the scheme of things, that this indecision is worse than whatever she could decide, that if she is taking things ONE DAY AT A TIME what could be the harm in being a little less lonely for a weekend. Could feeling a man’s hands touching her with love really be worse than another night of reading Flannery O’Connor to a lamp made of popsicle sticks? She tells herself to relax, her stomach to unknot, this is not the thing that knocks the world from its axis. More importantly, this is not GOING BACK AGAIN. Life is a labyrinth, not a maze—every step you take is just one more that brings you closer to the center.
She looks over at the stack of pages incrementally rising on the printer. She pulls the sleeves of her cardigan over her fingers the way that used to give her comfort as a child wearing adult clothes, and rests her elbows on her knees and her chin on her knuckles. Abruptly she gets up and stands in front of the mirror, where she slips off her cardigan and lifts her shirt. She bends and removes her yoga pants and then her underwear. She picks up the phone and hits the button to respond to his message with a photo, standing white, a frantic, amphibious white like some cave life form, blind and primordial and stupidly innocent.
Every step you take is just one more that bring you closer to the center. Or whatever story you tell yourself. Thank you and goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
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br /> She is just about to send this picture as her response when there is the sound of the front door buzzer. She pulls her clothes back on and goes upstairs and opens the door. She wheels back several steps and leans against the newel. Her hand covers her mouth, but she makes no sound.
I… I… I… I’m sorry, Terry, I need a moment.
“I love you, you bitch,” said Jason