The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  Oh, little Russian fairy, don’t you turn against me now. The Russian fairy was one of the more perfidious. She could snap from fire-honey comfort to sweet restful sorrow to Rasputin rage to Gulag horror in a matter of minutes. She should have remembered that when she bought the bottle. Why did she never remember these things when she was sober? It was as though the mystical knowledge acquired when drinking was only accessible again when drinking.

  She half-stumbled down the treacherous hall and into the bedroom. She stripped off her clothes and left them pooled on the floor. It was important to move with deliberation. She pulled sweatpants and her favourite manky black sweater from the bottom of the closet. She wrestled her way into them. She was chilly. She put heavy socks on her feet. She would write, she would.

  At her desk the lines on the paper slithered and slipped. But, to begin was everything. She wrote that down. To begin, to begin, and I am here beginning and you and me and we are all here together. I see you, Moon. Don’t think I’m blind. It’s not true. True is that I’ve come home by way of you. By your full-blown light here in the muslin night, filled with concertos and kindness least expected. There will be a battle …

  What utter bullshit, she thought.

  Colleen threw herself on the bed and sobbed. The bed spun and her stomach lurched and she slid halfway to the floor to stop it. She knelt by the bed and found herself praying. She prayed for something to happen, anything to make the pain stop, and death would be fine, right now, if she could just slip away in her sleep and have it all be over.

  She stood up and headed for the bathroom. Perhaps there was something in there with which she could kill herself.

  Pardon me?

  Colleen stopped at the threshold. Had she really just thought that? She had. A hole gaped where thought should be, black as the dark side of the moon. She sat on the side of the bath. On the shelf above the toilet stood the pretty perfume bottles: Dior, Trésor, Chloé, Oscar de la Renta, Angel, Perry Ellis 360, Intuition, Ysatis, Opium, L’Air du Temps, this last with the pair of tiny doves on top. Sweet little bottles, magical potions of promise.

  What a fucking joke. How many times had she sat right where she was now, staring at those toy bottles, believing their cheap plastic promises? Lies. Why had she never seen that before? Like her job, like her friends, like her family, like her dreams of one day being a writer, it was all tawdry, cheesy, imitation life.

  The sound that came out of her mouth was of something ripping inside, something that could never be stitched up again. Colleen launched herself toward the shelf and smashed her fist down on it. The bottles flew every which way, crashing to the floor, in the bath, the sink. The star on the Angel bottle cracked and a point fell off. The Trésor bottle broke, as did the Intuition. The others lay scattered on the floor. The air reeked of stale perfume, the mix of odours so astringent and sweet at the same time that it smelled like decay.

  Some of the glass bits were nice and sharp. A hot bath, a lovely glass of Chablis and a glass shard, followed by an eternal restful sleep. What more could a girl ask for? She pictured herself in the bath, her hair streaming out in the water, the water itself the colour of a garnet, her skin the palest ivory.

  A part of her retreated to the far corner of the small tiled room and considered. It appeared madam was earnestly contemplating taking the great leap, the final fall, the last bus, the long walk off a short plank. That was a sobering thought, although not nearly sobering enough.

  Here was the truth of her situation at last. Here was the moment in which she arrived at the closing act of her life. Her mother appeared before her—she who had threatened so many times to kill herself and never did. Colleen bet she regretted that now. Helen’s face, twisted in grief, popped into her mind. What was it that stopped her from killing herself? Colleen would probably end up exactly where Helen was in a few years, although her delivery bills from the Dial-a-Bottle would be considerably higher. The question was not why did people kill themselves; it was why didn’t more people kill themselves? Life was, after all, so incredibly futile. The trick was to choose the right moment. Wait too long and the decision might be taken out of your hands, as it had been for her mother—whom all the world seemed intent on keeping alive as long as possible, regardless of how miserable everyone was.

  She sat down again on the side of the bath. The question was: was this the right time? Colleen was alone, and would likely remain so. (How interesting it was to have such a rational conversation with one’s self about this. There was no emotion involved at all. Such a relief.) She was jobless. She was, let’s face it, friendless—she was not a success as a friend, or anything else. Well, that wasn’t quite true. She was a great success as a drunk.

  In this detached, analytical state of mind, she wondered just when it was she had first known she was a drunk. She might not have admitted it to others, but her own alcoholism was no surprise to her. She was an alcoholic, and one who, just at this moment, wanted a drink very badly, since the black hole in the centre of her mind was growing larger with every passing minute. It was enveloping her whole head and creeping slowly down toward her heart and gut. Soon she would be nothing but that great hole.

  The hall was empty. The living room was empty; the kitchen, empty; and the world beyond her window full of ghosts. How empty she was too. Where had all the vodka gone? Less than a third of a bottle left. It was nearly ten-thirty now and she should be sleeping; all the world, it seemed, was sleeping. So she would have just this, a nightcap, while Tom Waits sang.

  Oh, the long walk down the hall. How vast it seemed, how treacherous with angles. It was an epic quest, from bathroom to kitchen. But at last, the holy grail lay on the counter within reach, shimmering and clear-eyed. As she drank, however, the vodka was like a snakebite on her tongue. No fairy appeared. On the counter the knives in the rack gleamed temptingly. She took the glass, smudgy with her greasy fingerprints, and sat on the middle of the couch.

  She thought of the myth of Sisyphus, the deceitful and avaricious king condemned for all eternity to push a great boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. Meaningless. Futile. She thought, through the misty vapour of alcohol swirling through her mind, that she might be a sort of Sisyphus, with each day being the boulder she must conquer, only to inevitably fail and be forced to begin again. Why not let the rock simply roll back over her and crush her like a beetle? Then it would be over, this terrible ordeal of life.

  It wasn’t as though anyone would care, or even grieve her. Lori would probably cry, but those tears would quickly dry. Besides, the thought of other people’s grief might be enough to stop one killing oneself, but it wasn’t enough to make one go on living.

  She could jump from the balcony. But that seemed so messy and even that was uncertain. What if she simply crushed her spine or mangled herself? Then where would she be? Strapped to machines. Forced to watch reality television in some hospital day-room, unable to wipe the drool from her own chin, let alone change the channel. No. That wouldn’t do.

  The vodka tasted worse with each mouthful. It felt as though her tongue were being gnawed. Wormwood and acid. It occurred to her that she could stop drinking. That was an option. Or was it? How many mornings had been like this morning, which she only vaguely remembered? She woke up. She felt like death. She loathed herself. She vowed never again. And then a few hours later that little voice popped up. Oh, come on, have one, just one, anyone can have one, and you of all people are justified in having a drink because, good Lord, look at how awful your life is.

  But her life was so awful because she drank so much.

  She swallowed another mouthful.

  And she couldn’t seem to stop. And perhaps she needn’t. She could just sit in this empty room. She could call up good old Dial-a-Bottle and have them deliver a crate of vodka and scotch and maybe some Grand Marnier. She wondered how long it would take to drink herself to death.

  Her grandmother had, after all. Or close enough.

  YOU AND
I ARE A LOT ALIKE

  Colleen was eight and she and her parents were in Florida visiting Deirdre’s parents. Nanny and Gramps had moved there when they retired, choosing the Florida heat over the frigid Manitoba winters. They lived in a tiny two-room cottage in a strip of attached cottages in a section of St. Petersburg not far from the beach. When Colleen and her family came to visit, Colleen and her mother shared the bedroom with Nanny, while Gramps and Colleen’s father slept on a cot and the pullout couch in the living room–kitchen.

  Colleen was fascinated by all things Floridian—the little lizards who sunned themselves on the windowsills, the names of the nearby motels (Sandy Toes, Dis’ll Do, The Rusty Anchor), the fleshy flowers and hanging moss. Her grandparents had mysterious items in their home—Gramps brushed his teeth with a powder that came in a pale blue can, and the screen of the television, which stood on a metal stand in the living room, was covered with a coloured piece of plastic—blue at the top, green in the middle and brown at the bottom. It was supposed to add colour to the black-and-white images, but Colleen thought it made the faces look very strange indeed.

  Every day the family went down to the swimming club her grandparents belonged to. It had a big pool and a snack bar and her parents and grandparents sat under cabanas, their skin all shiny with oil, except for her father, who burned easily. He wore a shirt and covered his skinny legs with a towel. They took long walks on the beach, even past the fence that marked the end of the private beach and the start of the public one, where the black children played. Colleen wanted to talk to them, and maybe make a friend, but was told she wasn’t allowed to, although no reason was given. She fed the seagulls instead.

  Nanny’s real name was Edith, but everyone called her Gypsy because of her dark hair and eyes. She smoked menthol cigarettes in a long ivory holder studded with rhinestones. Her hair was tinted with a blue rinse and her skin was brown as a nut. She laughed a good deal and liked to have what she called “elevenses”—a beer or a gin and tonic at eleven in the morning. She said everyone in Ireland, where she and Gramps came from, had a little something at eleven in the pub. Colleen’s father always joined her, but Gramps and Colleen’s mother never did.

  Nanny’s best friend lived in the cottage to the right of theirs. Her name was Winnie and she used to be a card dealer in Las Vegas. Colleen thought this very sophisticated and glamorous. Winnie had never been married, which Colleen found astonishing. She had one blue eye and one green eye and they never seemed to be looking in the same direction. She taught Colleen how to shuffle cards like a real Vegas dealer, in what she called a riffle. Colleen was clumsy at first, but Winnie just sat there patiently, sipping her Southern Comfort. She let Colleen try a little and it tasted like spoiled peaches, but felt very nice and warm in her tummy.

  “Don’t let your mum know I gave you that, okay?” Winnie said, touching her nose. “It’ll be just between us.”

  Colleen understood. Nanny had said the same thing to her on a number of occasions.

  Winnie and Nanny often went out together in the afternoon, and often where they went was a “nice place,” as Nanny called it, named the River Queen. One day, when Colleen had to stay out of the sun because she’d been so badly burned the day before that there were blisters on her nose and shoulders, she asked if she could go with them.

  “No, precious, it’s not a place for children.”

  Gramps, who was reading the St. Petersburg Times at the small kitchen table, grunted. “It’s not a place for any decent person.”

  Gramps was what Colleen’s mother called “a Victorian throwback.” He was born in the impossibly long ago, in 1896, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne in England and when people did things like dress for dinner and keep their upper lips stiff. (Colleen had attempted this once, but only managed a horrible grimace she couldn’t possibly maintain.) Gramps wore a shirt and tie at the dinner table, even in Florida at the Formica and chrome table where he now sat, even when it was so hot and steamy the newspaper curled and Colleen’s hair stuck to her head like seaweed. His moustache was always tidily combed and his spectacles gleamed. He knew how to do wonderful things, like make chewing gum from the sap of trees and fashion tiny canoes from birchbark. He exercised religiously every morning—deep knee bends and running in place and push-ups, fifty of them. Nanny never participated, but she watched, sipping her black coffee and nibbling her toast with “just a scraping of butter” on it to settle her stomach, which she frequently said was bilious early in the day. Nanny had lots of stomach trouble, and Colleen knew that when her mother was a little girl Nanny had been in and out of hospital for mysterious reasons having to do with her biliousness.

  “Don’t be absurd, Henry,” said Nanny now. “Those young men are artists.”

  Gramps snapped his paper shut and went out onto the porch, where Colleen’s mother and father sat on lawn chairs, watching the pelican that had built a nest on the top of a nearby telephone pole. “You know my feelings on this, Gyp,” he said as he left.

  Nanny watched him go and then went to the cupboard and pulled a bottle of Worcestershire sauce from the back. She poured some into her coffee. “Don’t tell on Nanny now, will you, precious?”

  Colleen was less interested in her grandmother’s strange beverage preferences than she was in the artists at the River Queen.

  “What kind of a place is it?” she asked. “What kind of artists? Do they paint?”

  Nanny laughed. “They are beautiful young men who dress up as women. You wouldn’t believe how lovely they are.” She looked wistful. “So perfect in their gowns, their hair just so. Their makeup flawless. One of them, his name is David, although he likes to be called Glenda, did my makeup one afternoon, but your grandfather didn’t like it. He’s such a stuffy old thing.”

  This sounded wonderful—grown-ups who played dress-up and did each other’s makeup. It seemed a magical world. “Can I come with you, please? I want to see them.” What she really wanted, of course, was to dress in the beautiful gowns and have her own hair just so.

  Nanny came over and put her long, red-nailed fingers under Colleen’s chin, tilting the child’s head toward her. She smelled of coffee, cigarettes, lavender talcum powder and something else, something a bit like the floor polish her mother used. “One day maybe, when you’re older,” said Nanny. “I think you’d like it there. You and I are a lot alike. You’re my special girl, aren’t you.”

  Not special enough to take along, however.

  That afternoon Nanny and Winnie went to the River Queen without Colleen, and they didn’t come back until after supper. Nanny had fallen down in the street. Her nose was bloody, her eye was black. Her mother banished Colleen to the bedroom where she couldn’t help but hear the snarling words through the wall. Gramps called Nanny a disgrace and said she’d ruined his retirement, ruined his life, and he was so ashamed of her he was going to cancel their membership to the beach club, since surely everyone had seen her stumbling through the streets. Nanny cried and said she was sorry over and over again. Her mother spoke to Nanny disrespectfully, calling her a liar and someone who broke promises. If Colleen had ever spoken to her mother like that, she would have been beaten within an inch of her life. Hearing her mother’s vicious tone was both electrifying, since apparently it was possible to argue with one’s mother after all, and terrifying; it appeared there was no one her mum couldn’t attack. Only Colleen’s father had nothing to say.

  Colleen pulled the covers up over her head. She didn’t understand why Gramps and her mother were so mad at Nanny. She’d had a fall. Why were they all so ashamed of her for that? Anyone could fall. Colleen herself had done it hundreds of times, from her bike, from her roller skates, from swings and trees. She always had scabs and Band-Aids on her knees. Were they ashamed of her the way they were of Nanny? Maybe they just weren’t saying so because she was so young and they hoped she’d grow out of it, like being afraid of the dark (which she still was but didn’t tell anyone, since it made her mother ang
ry to be pulled away from her television programs to see to her). Colleen resolved to do better, and if she fell again, she wouldn’t tell anyone.

  And then her mother spit out the words “Stinking drunk!”—the very words she’d used on more than one occasion to describe Colleen’s father. Colleen had some understanding of the term. She knew her father drank too much alcohol and when he did he spent time with women he worked with and squandered the money that was supposed to go to something called the mortgage. And now Nanny was spending time with Winnie instead of Gramps, and going to the place where men dressed up as ladies. It didn’t seem such a bad thing, to be able to get away from this crazy family, to go where people liked you and had fun.

  But the fun always ended badly, as it did for Nanny a few years later. The doctors said it was a stroke, but Colleen’s mother said she might as well have put a gun in her mouth. Colleen had loved Nanny. Love was such a failure. It saved no one.

  SAILING AWAY

  No, drinking oneself to death took too long, Colleen thought as she stared dully into the night sky beyond the window glass. It might well take years, sitting on this very couch, grimly downing bottle after bottle. Colleen looked at her hands, no longer the long-fingered delicate things they once were, now more like hag’s hands. Years more of this? Years of watching her liver swell, her eyes go yellow, feeling her esophagus ulcerate, her stomach bleed? Years more of the wine trots and the shaking, anxiety-ridden nights, the shame-filled white-light mornings? She didn’t think she could bear it. She wanted the pain to stop now, not six months from now, not six years from now.

  She tried to remember the last time she had been happy. Blank. She tried to remember any time when she’d been happy. Scenes presented themselves for consideration: the first date with Jake when she’d invited him to her house and cooked sole almandine, which they ate by the light of a solitary candle on that very table there. It had been a nervous-in-a-good-way night and he’d kissed her before he left, but that memory was now encrusted with all that came after. It was tainted by heartbreak. Impossible to think of part of Jake-time without thinking of all of it. Taquanda. So, not that. None of that. What about the Christmas when she was thirteen and her parents gave her a guitar? Her mother, in that spooky-smart way of hers, had hidden clues to where the gift might be all over the house, starting with a note in the over-decorated tree. Each note was written backwards, so Colleen had to hold it up to a mirror to read it, and each was in rhyme. There were at least a dozen notes, leading her on a merry chase, until she finally found the guitar in her father’s clothes closet. Colleen smiled. How surprised she’d been, and how elated. Her mother had gone to a lot of trouble for her. Mother. Best not to think of Mother … She strained to think of other happy moments. That time in Nova Scotia, the falling snow. Yes. There. Brief, but undeniable. And walking in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery one autumn afternoon when the leaves were a garland of garnet and ruby overhead and the sky was rough and ragged with pewter clouds. A feeling of peace there, and rightness. Pixie. Best of all friends. In the fields with the dog. As a little girl, to see the big old horse who ate apples from her hand. Stolen hours in Hart House Library, on rainy days when no one else was there and she spent her lunch hour nestled in the deep stone sill of the leaded glass casement windows, reading C.S. Lewis or Chesterton or Loren Eiseley. A time or two in bed, just before falling asleep, when she thought that if she slipped away, if she died right then, it wouldn’t hurt at all and she wouldn’t mind a bit. Colleen snorted. What a curious image to include among a list of possible joys. It occurred to her that the only times she’d been truly happy, or at least the only times that weren’t tarnished by the stain of future unhappiness, were when she’d been alone, or in the company of non-humans.