Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  Leslie got up from the couch and walked more steadily than she’d thought possible into the small kitchen off the living room. She clawed a fistful of ice out of the freezer and dropped it in a tall glass, then filled the glass nearly to the top with gin. She emerged back into the other room brandishing the drink like a gun. She caught Todd’s eye, then tipped her head back and poured most of the drink down her throat. It went down surprisingly smoothly, until she stopped chugging and caught the juniper-flavored puke at the back of her tongue, and swallowed it back down.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Todd said, panicky now.

  She lifted the glass again and, faster than she could process it, he slapped his hand against hers, hard, sending the glass into the wall and breaking it into heavy pieces on the floor. She walked purposefully into the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of gin out of the freezer, unscrewed it with a flourish while looking straight at Todd, lifted it to her mouth.

  “Leslie, Leslie, fuck, stop,” Katie said, her eyes on the floor. There was a trail of bright blood between the foyer and kitchen. And there was some serious pain emanating from the soft middle of Leslie’s foot, which definitely had something large and sharp embedded in it. She sat down heavily, heard more glass crunch under her denimed ass. She examined her foot, found the source of pain, gaped into the abyss of blood and flesh.

  “Okay, Leslie, just stay calm, okay?” Katie’s voice came from a distance, fuzzy. She didn’t know where Todd was—had he walked out the door? Had she missed the slam? Calmly, carefully, she tugged the jagged slice of glass from her foot. She examined it in her hand. It looked artisanal. A hip earring, a blood diamond, a fat DiCaprio calling out to her with a bad accent …

  She woke in the dark, naked except for her underwear, which, a moment’s examination revealed, was not her underwear. There was a folded towel next to her head, unsoiled. Then she felt an incoming throb from her foot, a pain that built, and built, and crested, and stayed.

  “Ow!” she cried out, like a child on the playground. “Oh, fuck, ow. Fuck.”

  “Shhh,” Katie said. She was in the bed, too, apparently. A lamp flicked on. “Did you throw up again?”

  “No?” Leslie said. The question scared her. “I don’t think so? Oh god, what did I do?”

  “You’re okay,” Katie said. “You’ve been having a pretty bad time. Are you with me now? Do you know where you are?”

  “Your apartment? Is that right?”

  “Good, yeah, that’s right. You got a little bit sick.”

  “Oh god. What about my foot?”

  “I cleaned it up. It stopped bleeding, mostly, but I don’t really know. I think you might need stitches.”

  As Leslie came to awareness, she realized they were lying on and under towels spread over a bare mattress, in a bed that took up most of a small room. Leslie looked down and saw that there was a plastic shopping bag taped around her foot.

  “I’ll buy you new sheets,” Leslie said. “I’ll buy you a new bed. Jesus, I’m so sorry, Katie. I don’t know how this happened.”

  “Things got crazy,” Katie said. Her voice was tired, but not unkind. “And just so you know, Todd left. And hasn’t answered his phone.”

  “Shit, I hope he’s okay,” Leslie said. “Let me try.” She looked around for her phone, or anything that belonged to her, and found nothing.

  “Your phone is … out of commission,” Katie said gently. “It’s like five a.m. You should try to sleep more if you can, okay?”

  Leslie curled into a ball. She wished she had the courage or the resources to die at that moment without causing Katie any more trouble. Katie put her arms around Leslie and pulled her body tight.

  “You had a bad night,” she murmured. “It happens. It’s okay. I know you’re not a bad person. I still want to be your friend.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, maybe inaudibly.

  “You’re a good person,” Katie said. “You had a bad night. It’s going to be okay.”

  Katie’s supportive muttering faded into snores eventually. Once some gray light had filtered into the room, Leslie gently extricated herself from Katie’s sleeping grasp and went into the bathroom. Her shirt and jeans—even her shoes—were piled in the tub, covered in bright red vomit—what had she eaten?—along with some sheets and pillows and a Mondrian-patterned comforter. She extricated her pukey phone from the pocket of her jeans. Had she puked on it and then put it back in her pocket? She held down the power button as she peed, trying to force the phone, without success, back into digital consciousness. She was upset, like an idiot, about losing her pictures.

  She wrapped a towel around herself and crept into the front room to examine the damage. There was a small dent in the wall where the glass had hit, and faint bloodstains on the kitchen tile, but other than that, it looked okay. She’d write Katie a check, or send her a bunch of money online when she got home. She wished she could just sneak away, but she needed something to wear, and stealing clothes probably wasn’t a great finale to this whole debacle. Though, to be honest, it would be one of the less bad things she’d done in the last twenty-four hours. She curled up on the couch and fell back asleep.

  * * *

  Katie insisted on accompanying her to the ER, even waited with her for the two hours it took before a doctor would see her, reading last weekend’s Times Magazine while Leslie stared at the blown-up Hieronymus Bosch reproduction on the cover of her book, an upside-down naked couple looking sad and stunned to be trapped in a presumably unpleasant landscape. Good thinking, book jacket designer. It’s like the fact that they’re upside down echoes the psychological circumstances of the characters.

  When a nurse finally called her name, Leslie asked Katie to come in with her, because she was still the tiniest bit needle-phobic, and more than a tiny bit hungover. Maybe, if Katie saw her through all of this, she could be in love with her.

  The doctor shook his head unhappily at the sloppy triage done on Leslie’s foot.

  “You should have come in right away,” he said.

  “Is it bad?” Leslie said, involuntarily creeping toward panic. “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s not that bad,” he said grudgingly, now that he’d succeeded in scaring her. “The scar’s just going to be a little more … interesting than it might have been. Sit tight and we’ll have somebody come in and stitch you up.”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” Leslie said as they waited for the medical student.

  Katie crossed her legs, smiled vaguely.

  “I don’t know you that well,” she said. “But it seems like you might need someone looking out for you.”

  Leslie exhaled, attempted to check her defensiveness.

  “I know,” she said. “I know I fucked up last night. I’m going to join the Peace Corps and move to Botswana.”

  “Well I don’t want you to do that,” Katie said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you were pretty amorous last night before everything went to hell,” Katie said. “Before it was entirely clear to me that your brain had exited the scene. Or maybe I was taking advantage of you.”

  “I’m sure I liked it. Did it seem like I liked it?”

  “Yeah, until you started vomiting uncontrollably.”

  “I promise I’m going to buy you some new sheets,” Leslie said.

  “That’s right,” Katie said. “And dinner.”

  “Anything you want,” Leslie said. “From the dollar menu.”

  Then the medical student entered the room, a boy who didn’t look a day over seventeen.

  “So,” he said, stretching on his latex gloves. “What happened here?”

  * * *

  They went their separate ways for the afternoon, Leslie promising, after a quick, fluttery kiss, that she’d text her about dinner that night. Maybe that farmy-looking place on Seventh Avenue if it wasn’t too jammed? She’d better text, Katie said. Leslie limped toward the subway, not at all sure that she would. Sh
e forced her eyes to stay open on the subway so she wouldn’t miss her stop, then felt herself nearly falling asleep as she unlocked the front door to her apartment. She did not remember getting into bed, but that was where she was when she woke up, in the dark, an indefinite number of hours later, hungover, again.

  She opened her laptop—8:22. She had an email from Katie a couple of hours old. Katie realized that Leslie’s phone wasn’t working and that she probably needed to rest and that she’d maybe come on a little bit strong at the hospital and that it made sense to give her a little bit of space, especially because Leslie was still dating Todd. But she still really hoped Leslie would get in touch if she wanted to have food or coffee or see a movie or something, because she, Katie, would really love that, even if it didn’t lead to anything else or whatever.

  Leslie got just a little bit stoned and thought this over. What did she want to do? Like, now? She didn’t want to stay in her disgustingly messy room. She didn’t want to deal with Todd. She didn’t want to go to her friend Francesca’s birthday drinks in Bushwick. She wanted: to see Katie again, and be high, and treat Katie to some expensive, delicious food that she couldn’t really afford to buy her but would, as a result, ease her guilt a few degrees, and would feel romantic in its ignorance of her material circumstances. So she wrote her a quick, flirtatious email, ignoring the Sturm und Drang of Katie’s original, asking if she still wanted to go to that place, Woods, it was called, for dinner, because she hadn’t eaten all day and was, frankly, starving. Katie wrote back almost immediately to say yes.

  So an hour later, after finally taking a scalding shower and putting on her go-to black cocktail dress, and writing an old-fashioned hundred-dollar check that she would try to force Katie to take later in the night, and getting substantially more stoned than she already was, she took the subway a few stops to Seventh Avenue and arrived at the restaurant, only fifteen minutes late. Which proved to be five minutes before Katie—well played, Katie.

  But when Katie finally made her entrance, Leslie realized that she’d made a mistake. Leslie’d taken care to look respectable, but Katie was transformed, made-up and cinched and showing off her legs in a way that indicated she was unmistakably on a date of import. And the fact that this sharpened Leslie’s nascent nausea told her that she had made the wrong choice in inviting Katie to dinner. Even if things went perfectly, she would remember having felt a pang of embarrassment for Katie when she walked into the restaurant, even though she looked amazing, like something out of a luxury handbag advertisement. These little fucking blondes, man. Leslie’s charm, such as it was, tended toward the feral.

  “You’re looking alive,” Katie said as she sat down across the candlelit table. The restaurant was very loud, as were all restaurants in New York now.

  “A roguish façade,” Leslie said. “I’m pretending for you.”

  “That’s nice,” Katie said. “You do have some manners lurking in there.”

  “They only come out at night. And only, um, between eight and eleven. Prices and participation may vary.”

  There was a pause as Katie held a smile, waiting for a further punch line, or an apology.

  “You look really, really great, by the way,” Leslie said finally.

  “Thanks!” Katie said, in the faux-surprised voice that Leslie hated in most people, but now found almost charming, or at least forgivable. “I thought it’d be fun to get dolled up.”

  “I like it,” Leslie said. She was trying to lean into it, into the weed, into possible attraction. “You look a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

  “Is that a Sarah Palin joke? If so, great job.”

  “I was thinking of Dick Cheney. As I often am.”

  Katie looked into Leslie’s eyes queryingly, like she was trying to determine whether or not John Malkovich was in there.

  “Are you fucked-up?” she said brightly. Maybe Katie was being deeply facetious and was furious at her. Or maybe she was glad to find her pliable again so soon. Leslie tried to smile in a way that didn’t make her neck tendons stand out too much.

  “I’m staying off the booze for a while,” she said. “But you should know, I guess, that I’m usually, like, pretty stoned. More so now from lack of sleep and general whatever. Malaise.”

  “Understandable,” Katie said. “No judgment. Would you be annoyed if I had a cocktail? Obviously you should have one, too, if you’re up for it.”

  “I’d enjoy watching you have one,” Leslie said. It seemed like the kind of thing an alcoholic lesbian might say.

  Katie ordered something with strawberry and basil in it, and Leslie ordered a Diet Coke, which made her think of eating lunch with her mother, accumulating free refills for two hours and thus needing to pee about four times over the course of the meal, which otherwise consisted mostly of her mother criticizing her life choices, or lack of them. Katie so far seemed like the opposite of her mother, which maybe was what women looked for in other women? The only girl she’d dated dated had been a boyish poet in college who dressed like a nerd from an eighties movie, all coffee-stained bow ties and heavy glasses held together with tape. Less a disguise, it turned out, than an attempt at manifestation—Becky thought she was John Berryman, basically, suicidal ideation and all, and Leslie hadn’t minded chasing her around and visiting her in the hospital until, eventually, she gave up in exhaustion. She’d liked Becky enough that she’d tried to explain it to her mother, who had pretended she didn’t understand until Leslie got the hint that she didn’t want to talk about it. She wondered now if she even had tried to tell her mother—could it have been a false memory? She preferred that possibility to the more likely fact of her mother’s unkindness.

  “What’s good to eat here?” Leslie said. “Duck? Ducks are usually tasty.”

  “I want to get something expensive,” Katie said. She grinned wolfishly, and Leslie wanted her again, for however long it worked out.

  By the end of dinner, Leslie had talked herself into having a cognac for dessert. It was basically a necessity, as the weed had worn off, and she’d felt too hollowed out and nauseous to eat much. It seemed like the only route to getting regular. It did just what she’d hoped it would, warmed her up and sparked her into clarity without making her feel sick or drunk. Thank you, kind elixir! Leslie loved not having a phone—she felt practically snowbound with Katie, stuck in a blizzard of two. When the bill arrived, she did her best to stifle her unhappiness. She absolutely couldn’t afford it, but she put her credit card down anyway. It was what she deserved. The closest she’d get to medieval penance.

  “It was really sweet of you to do this,” Katie said once the boy had whisked away the offending numbers. “It shows, god forbid, character.”

  “I mostly just don’t want you to hate me,” Leslie said. “Which is pretty selfish.”

  “Hey, if it results in a good dinner, I’m willing to fudge it. I imagine you’re about ready to go back to bed.”

  “I’m kind of awake now. Having slept through the day. Do you want to, like, go to the movies? Would that be fun?”

  “Oh man, it would, wouldn’t it? I wonder if anything’s playing.”

  “I think they’re still doing Altman at BAM,” Leslie said. She knew they were; she’d looked it up, by habit, before she left. “What is it, Saturday? They usually save the good ones for Saturday.” She knew it was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one of her favorite movies, and that it started in twenty minutes. Katie looked it up on her phone—she’d never seen McCabe & Mrs. Miller, actually. And it started in twenty minutes.

  So they walked to BAM and soaked in the same three Leonard Cohen songs over and over again and Warren Beatty’s incomprehensible muttering and Julie Christie’s feline perfection, and Leslie felt happier than she had in a long time, with Katie sighing next to her in the dark. When they said good night—Leslie couldn’t deal with returning to Katie’s, the scene of the crime, so soon, and her own place was too disgusting to host another human—Leslie gave her a serious kiss. This—
this could work, she thought.

  Three nights later, they hooked up for real back at Katie’s house, on the new plaid sheets she’d bought with the money that Leslie had given her. It was wonderful to remember that things did not have to be as difficult as they’d been with Todd, that of course two people with sexual chemistry could please each other quite adequately. Katie was even smaller than Todd in every way, so Leslie still felt like something of a giantess. But with Katie she felt more powerful than awkward, even if she still, inevitably, felt a little bit awkward.

  They were very different kinds of women, it seemed to Leslie, besides the basics of them both being artistic and drunk and broke. Katie, unlike Leslie, was not simply tumbling through her life. She’d gotten a master’s degree in theater arts at NYU, somehow paid her own rent, cooked frequently, showered as often, apparently, as once a day. She had an actual television. Leslie mostly found this stuff a turn-on, though it also gave her pause. She suspected that Katie didn’t really understand what a disaster she was, and didn’t understand that Leslie was actively taking notes on her, greedily excited to have someone she didn’t understand to investigate.

  One night, as a date, maybe, Leslie took Katie to a punk show headlined by a band she loved, one whose name was unprintable in The New York Times. They’d both gotten very stoned on intense stuff that had been inadvisably mailed from Denver (Leslie was still pretending she wasn’t going to drink much anymore), and the opening band that was playing when they walked in—a very thin woman shaking a metal trash can full of what sounded like tin and marbles—was too much to handle in their condition. They stood at the quiet bar downstairs drinking water and staring at the bloodred wall behind the tiered liquor bottles.

  “Shit, I don’t think I even asked if you liked punk rock,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, I guess I don’t, really,” Katie said. “But I figured it would be fun.”

  Leslie put her hand on Katie’s back, pressed against it gently.

  “You’re a true comrade,” she said. “When the revolution comes, I will spare you. If I can.”