Another Broken Wizard (8 page)

Joe leaned his mouth near Moniqua’s ear and said some words. She paused and did the same. They both came up smiling.

“Can you drive me and Monique back to my place first? We just have to finish these drinks,” Joe said. Moniqua pursed her lips as Joe mispronounced her name one more time.

We left Vincent’s and they climbed into the back of my rental car. I approached Joe’s apartment and drove slowly past it, looking for the exhaust of idling cars, lit dome lights or other signs of people waiting in the parked cars that lined his street. I circled the block and pulled up to his house, checking my mirrors as I put the car in park. It sobered me up.

“We here?” Joe said, barely turning his head from Moniqua.

Looking back, I could see her jeans were at her knees. The orange streetlight shone off a patch of wet and dimpled upper thigh. She pulled up her pants, giving me a gap-toothed, drunk-eyed smile. I looked at Joe.

“Hey man, be careful and give me a call tomorrow. We should talk over your plan again.”

I waited until they were in the house and the lights turned on, then drove back across town, down Highland Street, past the bridges and frozen pond of Elm Park and the monument to peace they’d put up across from the park that looked like a man and woman pushing a vacuum cleaner. Emily lived in a three-decker on Park Avenue, not too far from Clark. I parked on the street, climbed over a snow bank and rang her doorbell. She came down wearing sweatpants, a t-shirt and a pink bathrobe. She smiled big when she saw me.

“Hey Jim,” she said. Even when excited, her voice never lost its flat, sarcastic tone.

Her apartment was a spacious half a floor, with a front and back staircase. Emily and her roommate had decorated it sparsely, but effectively. She motioned me over to a small couch and I sat down, surprised at how tired I was. She pulled up a footstool and sat across from me.

“I don’t have much in the house, but I can re-heat some pizza for you if you want.”

“Actually, yeah, I could go for a slice or two, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Listen to mister New York City,” she said playfully.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re in Worcester. They’re called
pieces
of pizza. I can’t believe it. You’ve gone native down there.”

“No. Not really.”

“Okay, I want to know what you call the little candy bits that go on an ice cream cone?” she asked, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Sprinkles.”

“What about
Jimmies
? I mean come on. It’s practically your name. What about long sandwiches? You better not have forgotten this,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I know. I know. Grinders,
grindahs
. Now can I have a
slice
of pizza or what?”

Emily laughed, her green eyes sparkling and nose wrinkling. She was a small girl, and with her bathrobe and blonde hair, she looked more like she was blowing down the hall than walking. Sometimes we’d go a year without talking, but we always picked up where we left off. Emily put two slices into a toaster oven that looked like it had seen the Carter administration.

“So what’s new? How was your Christmas?” she asked, leaning against the counter.

“Don’t ask. It’s only my second double-Christmas—one at Mom’s and one at Dad’s. But I think I’m getting better at it. At least I drank less this year. The worst part is the transition from one to the other. It’s the holiday, and I’m leaving one of them alone. I mean, I’m up there, mostly for them, and failing even at that. It’s no damn fun. They both tell me to relax, but that’s not very likely.”

“It’s tough when it’s right in your face like that. My dad moved out of state before the papers were even signed. I remember one Christmas, when I was little, I went to see him. I guess he was late driving me to the airport and I just remember running after my dad with my suitcase, knowing that if I didn’t run fast enough I wouldn’t be able to get home,” she said, laughing as she told the last part.

The switch on the toaster oven popped up and a muffled bell went tink and the kettle started whistling. Back in the living room, I ate the pizza and Emily told me about her Christmas in Hubbardston.

“So Peggy, the aunt who tried to blame her DUI on hair extensions, she comes up to me after dinner and starts asking me about my hopes and dreams. Usually, she’s drunk at this point and talking about her sisters’ sex lives back when they were in high school. It’s pretty gross. But she’s almost sober and she’s talking about life goals and looking me in the eyes and saying my name in every sentence. ‘Emily, it’s good to have dreams, like your PhD. But Emily, you need security in order to pursue those dreams, Emily.’”

Across from me, in her rocking chair and pink bathrobe, blowing on her tea between sips, Emily looked like she was dressed up like an old woman for Halloween. She leaned forward for her wide-eyed impersonation of Aunt Peggy.

“So I think—A—Peggy’s going to start talking about Jesus, because that was sort of her thing in the eighties, or—B—she’s going to ask to borrow money. I’m bracing myself for either. And she starts saying that people will lie about you, that they’ll do anything just to keep you down, and that you just have to ignore them. So after like twenty minutes, she gets to the point—she wants me to sell sports drinks. It was a pyramid scheme.”

“It would almost be better if it was Jesus,” I said.

“I know. At least Jesus has some kind of track record. And then she got all mad when I called it a pyramid scheme. It’s a ‘vertical entrepreneurial paradigm,’ she kept saying, and going on about the testimonials she had in her car.”

“Did she get you the testimonials?”

“No, she got drunk and started telling me and my cousins about what sluts our mothers used to be, and how she always suspected our dead uncle was secretly gay.”

We laughed some more and fleshed out our recaps. Finally, she asked me what I had planned for the next day.

“I have to drop off my rental car and get ready for Dad’s surgery. But I’m going to be stuck in a hospital, then the rehab facility, and then in the apartment after that, so I’m up for something tomorrow.”

“I can’t believe you’re back for so long.”

“Well, someone has to help out. Mom’s out of the picture and he doesn’t have any other family.”

“It’s a good thing that you’re doing.”

“Yeah. When I made my plans, I was all pumped up on being the good guy and all that jazz. That was the story I’d told myself. The story made it easy.”

“Well, it’s true. It’s not just a story.”

“It feels like a story. In the story, everything was alright. I was alright. My childhood was alright. And Mom leaving Dad was just one more thing that had happened, distant, like the election or something. But I was in New York, with a girlfriend and job prospects, and so it had all worked out for the best. But now … it’s like …”

“It’s like you’re stuck here.”

“Yeah. And it’s harder to tell myself that all’s well that ends well. Now, I don’t know. I’m just trying to keep my head above water.”

“Then I don’t know if you’ll be up for going to see Jeff tomorrow.”

Jeff was one of my best friends in high school, and he’d dated Emily. He was a funny, good-natured guy. But something happened to him in his first year of college, and he had to drop out. Back in high school, I’d taken my fair share of drugs with him, and at first I’d tried to calculate my share of the blame. But blame didn’t matter as much as the diagnosis, which was that Jeff was schizophrenic. In the last few years, we’d fallen out of touch. Maybe that was just moving on. But it had a taint to it.

“Oh shit, I am such a prick. He called me at Thanksgiving and I never called him back,” I said.

“Don’t feel bad. I live here. I’ve been putting him off all semester. I mean, I love the guy … But I’m also out of excuses.”

“Is it that bad?”

“We talk on the phone every few weeks. He has his good days and bad days. They keep changing up his medication, so you never really know what you’re going to get. Some days, he’s mostly there. But more often, he’s out of it. And those calls just suck. It would be a lot more fun for me if you went,” Emily said, pursing her lips.

“Sure. I’ll go. Can I have some tea?”

Back in the kitchen, Emily and I drank tea and talked more about Jeff—how it was hard to tell if the problem was the schizophrenia or the medication, how he wasn’t really there a lot of the time, how he’d put on weight, and so on. It was an old conversation, a ceremony of frustration.

“So, Aileen is out of town. You can sleep in her bed if you want to crash here,” Emily offered at the end of our liturgy.

Aileen’s room was decorated with a few art prints and a big poster board collage of her friends. I pushed the pillows, stuffed animals and heavy comforter off the bed and pulled a cotton sheet over me. I listened for Emily’s footsteps in the hall. But she wasn’t coming. We weren’t like that.

Just talking to her had taken some of the week’s weight off my back. I closed my eyes and thought about old friends. First you’re an infant, then you’re a kid, and you get put in a town, then in a school. You pretty much have no say in it. But you find these friends who will always know you, no matter how far you wander. They become another family, the family of your heart, corny as it sounds.

15.

Monday, December 29

Out on Park Avenue that morning, Emily laughed at me while I dug a fresh shirt from the open trunk of my rental car and changed between the traffic and the dirty snow bank.

Emily directed me to Jeff’s group home, at the foot of Vernon Hill. Jeff met us out on the porch, where he was smoking a cigarette. He’d put on more weight since the last time I’d seen him and had to be nearing two hundred fifty pounds. He was always tan, but the brown patches around his eyes had darkened and spread. He was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt and a red, beret-type hat I couldn’t quite figure out. He wanted to show us around the group home and introduce us to his housemates. I said that instead, we should go for a drive. A lot of things in life are sad, and maybe you shouldn’t turn away. But you don’t have to dive in face first, either.

In the car, none of us could come up with a place to go. We drove around a while and wound up at a shopping center near the Millbury line. Its acres of parking lot sat above where they were widening Route 122 to better connect Worcester to the Mass Pike. Not knowing exactly what to do, we went into a big bookstore and got coffee. Jeff, as was his custom, had forgotten to bring his wallet, so I bought his elaborate, chocolate-raspberry-caramel coffee.

“So what’s new, Jeff?” Emily asked.

“You know, just bopping around,” Jeff said, then pursed his lips in an uneasy smile.

“Are you still working at that fake-flower place in White City?” I asked.

“Uh, what,
Michael’s
? No I left there a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. What happened?”

“They wanted me to take these big shards of glass and, like, climb a mound of broken glass and put them on the top of it. It really wasn’t safe, so I stopped showing up.”

Like most of Jeff’s stories, it didn’t make complete sense, but you could make out a germ of what must have happened.

“How’s Janine doing?” I asked. Janine was Jeff’s girlfriend, who he’d met in his last group home.

“She was doing good. But then she got into a fight with this Chinese girl at the club, and it got kind of out of hand and she started cutting herself. So she was in the hospital. Now she’s with her mother until after New Years.”

I gave Jeff my recap, omitting nothing from him. Jeff chimed in here and there with something strange, or just spacing out.

“It’s funny how they call it ‘open-heart surgery.’ I wonder if it ever actually does open people’s hearts, like in the other way, like open them to love,” Jeff said.

That was probably as close as profound as he got that day. Unlike in the movies, where mentally ill characters exist mostly to indulge the screenwriter’s poetic tendencies, schizophrenia had not made Jeff an oracle. A lot of what he said consisted of confused and confusing descriptions of interactions or situations that didn’t completely exist. Nonetheless, we could piece together most of Jeff’s recap. Most of his days revolved around going to the club, a day program for people with similar problems, and hanging out with Janine.

“There are some new girls at club. There are always new people in the winter. But by summer, we usually go back down to the normal number. Some of the new girls look good,” Jeff said.

“Maybe you should trade up,” Emily said, smirking.

“They just look good on the outside,” Jeff said.

“That’s why they keep the insides on the inside. I never heard of a sexy pair of lungs,” I said.

“Or a sexy liver. Can you imagine? ‘Barb has a real knockout pair of kidneys on her.’ And ‘I could watch her spleen all day,’” Jeff laughed, free for a moment from the discomfort and suspicion that always showed too clearly in his face. And for a moment, I had my friend back.

16.

I dropped off Jeff and Emily and called Dad. He said he’d meet me at the rental car place at the airport in an hour. At Logan, I dropped off the gold rental car and complained to the rental car clerk about the broken radio. She gave me a break on the price. I found Dad’s SUV and we drove back to the Fountainhead.

Whizzing down the Mass Pike, I closed my eyes and resumed an old prayer that I’d develop some consuming obsession, learn a foreign language, become an expert on Buddhism or the War of 1812, just about anything that would fill the empty days of Dad’s convalescence. Once we got to the apartment, Dad called and put me on his auto insurance.

“That was more painful than the surgery will probably be. If you crash this one, I’ll revise my will and give it all to charity,” he said after he put down the receiver.