Curled in the Bed of Love (7 page)

I look again at the windows of my house. I can't see Nathan's shadow anymore. I can't see any shadows behind the blank, translucent eyelids of the window shades. For a minute it seems as if I've only imagined the life I know goes on inside that house, belongs to me, welcomes me back.

“Can we go now?” I say.

“You can do whatever you want,” Walter says.

When I get up from bed after we make love, Jay puts earplugs in his ears so I won't wake him when I come in later, a practical
precaution that invokes guilt more effectively than a protest would. At my computer, I'll feel the pull of his wanting me to stay in bed, of his sane dismay at my foolish late hours and the price I'll pay tomorrow when I drag myself through the day. The four golden rules of
AA
are that you never allow yourself to stay hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.
HALT
.

I used to have to stay up later than Jay. When I was drinking, this was my chance to indulge without witnesses, devour stolen pleasure. When the bottle was empty, I'd exchange it for a full one from the case I kept hidden in the garage. I'd open the new bottle and pour off the equivalent of the glass or two I'd had with dinner, so that when Jay opened the fridge in the morning, the bottle would be there, telling a lie for me. I used to imagine that he observed me that carefully, that I had so much work to do to hide my secret.

Now I have nothing to hide except for the handouts on grammar that I type for my students while the house hums with silence. I print out the night's work on the computer, and then I click on the solitaire game. You can't cheat at solitaire on the computer. I've learned little strategic tricks: I never draw from the deck if I can move a faceup card and turn over the card beneath it instead. But chance determines whether each game is a process of slowly dwindling options or unexpected, expanding possibilities. I cannot quit until I've won three games. Even if my eyes grow heavy lidded with drowsiness, I have to keep playing, out of a narrow need so simple that I can vanish into it.

As usual Walter arranges things so that he'll be the last person I drop off. When we arrive in front of his house, he doesn't get out of the car. He asks if I'd mind if he has a cigarette before he goes.

We smoke together, watching the men who stand outside the corner liquor store, clutching brown paper bags twisted tight around the necks of bottles. It is cold enough that their breaths
form clouds, unfurling so thick and white I'm reminded of smoke pluming from a locomotive, from some indefatigable engine of misery. The cloud of smoke in my car is tinged with the smell of gasoline that always clings to Walter, who nowadays is lucky to have a job pumping gas. This secret commingling of odors reminds me of my mother, who came home from work smelling of chocolate, a stale, cloying odor that should have been sweet but wasn't.

“I sure could go for a nice cold beer,” Walter says.

“I only drank wine. Good California white wine.”

“You lie right and left,” Walter says. “Bullshit you only drank wine. Never had a desperate moment when you drained the cough syrup.”

“Would you give me a break? I already have a complex about my piss-poor drunk credentials. I never have any big confessions to make at meetings.”

“No. You're always so full of sweetness and light. Why do you put that on for all the other drunks? Like they don't know the scam.”

“What do you want me to do? Apologize for being happy?”

Walter unlatches the door and heaves it open with a grunt, as if it requires superhuman effort. “You're not happy,” he says.

Hannah has to make up word problems for her math homework. I help her count the books on the shelves in the bedrooms, the living room, my basement office, so that she can write a problem that requires adding all these sums. When she sits at her desk to arrange the numbers in a column to solve her own problem, we are both astonished to discover we own over twelve hundred books. I grew up in an apartment where there were no books, and I'm a materialist about them now, rarely use the library because I want to own what I covet. I stuff my children with these goodies, so essential to the sweet universe in which I want them to grow.
With my books, with Bach and Coltrane and Haydn, with the music and theater that Jay loves, I've accumulated enough wealth to insure me against the shabby rooms of my childhood, become a giddy nouveau riche of culture. So much so that when we have my mother to dinner she is puzzled, merely querulous in her poking:
Your hair's so black, do you dye it? That boy eats too much. Hannah's a fresh one, she is.
I feel as if I've put one over on her, Hansel putting a knuckle through the bars of the cage for the witch to pinch, hiding from her how fat I've grown on plenty.

Nathan pokes his head in the door to annoy his sister. I get up, slip the scarf from my neck, and lash it through the air like a lion tamer's whip, backing him into his room again. At the sound of his laughter, Hannah jumps up from her desk to join us, and the three of us are tangled on the floor when Jay comes home from work.

Jay gets down on his hands and knees with us, butting Hannah with his head and lowing like a cow, sneaking a feel on me in the tangle of bodies, kissing me in a showy way that the children pretend to be embarrassed by but that they really enjoy. Walter's wrong. Happiness is the simplest, most literal thing, as carelessly sprawled around me as the warm bodies of my three loves.

Walter is jumpier than usual, maybe because at the meeting tonight he confessed to backsliding, having a beer at a bar on his way home from work yesterday. We've gotten into the habit now of having two or three cigarettes together when I'm parked in front of his apartment building, and Walter can't sit still even when he's sitting still. He snaps the cover of his matchbook open and shut over and over, knocks his hand against the window while he talks, smears a spilled cake of ash into his clothing, tugs an oily strand of hair loose from his ponytail, raps a knuckle against the dashboard and scatters more flakes of ash there.

He asks me to come up to his apartment, just for a minute. “Just till I make sure the bogeyman isn't lying in wait.”

I know better. I know he's come up with that bogeyman in order to trigger a maternal yes. Still I agree to come up.

His apartment is no surprise: an L-shaped studio with a garage-sale Formica table and two chairs next to the compact, filthy kitchen counter, a worn sofa covered with an ugly afghan. I could even say I feel at home with the bare floor, the bare walls, the big
TV
—a big blank eye, the only new thing. Clothes are scattered everywhere, and cups and plates. Beside the
TV
is a pyramid of crumpled, empty potato-chip bags. To make room for us to sit, he shovels things from the sofa—a blanket and pillow, a Game Boy, and a plate of stale crackers.

If I sit down, I'll have to stay. “Is that your kid's Game Boy?”

He nods. “I'm supposed to get my kid every other weekend. But he doesn't want to come anymore. Guess he doesn't like sleeping on the pullout sofa. My ex-wife won't help me out with him, either.”

“Is that why—”

“There's always a reason,” Walter says.

“You'd think she'd want him to have a relationship with his father.”

Walter laughs. “Well,
you
might.”

He lights another cigarette, and when he cups his hands around the match, the glow reflected on his face shivers like his shaking hands.

“I didn't always stick to wine,” I say. “Sometimes I'd drink vodka.”

Walter nods.

“When we went on trips. I used to dread vacations. I'd have to wash out bottles of shampoo and conditioner so I could refill them with vodka. And it still tasted like perfume. Jay would complain
that he didn't see why I needed all those cosmetics when we were only going up to Lake Tahoe to sit on the beach. He still thinks that I never drank
that
much.”

“It's hard not to develop a little contempt for people when you're an experienced drinker. The way they always want to be fooled.”

“I always felt I was just about to be caught. That I had to be so careful.”

“I remember that,” Walter says. “Planning everything. So you could pretend you were in control.” He holds out his shaking hands. His cigarette butt shivers between his trembling fingers. “Would you look at me now? Sometimes I wonder what the point is of staying sober. I'm never going to want anything—not a woman, not my son back—like I want a drink.”

If Jay hasn't gone to sleep, he'll be starting to worry about why I'm late. “You should talk to your sponsor.”

He smirks at me. “Take it through the appropriate channels.”

“Maybe he can help you negotiate with your wife.”

“My wife. She used to hide the car keys when I got drunk at home, 'cause once I reached a certain point, I'd want to go out and catch my buddies at the bar. She'd hide them in my kid's room when she put him to bed. I'd go in and turn on the light and start tossing his room. And she'd be on the bed with him, crying, and I'd grab her by the neck and start pushing her around the room. If I was looking in the wrong place, she'd have to say I was cold. If I was getting close, she'd have to say I was getting warm. Hot, hotter, hottest till I found the keys.”

Walter places a shaking hand on my wrist.

“Will you be
OK
now?” I say. “I should really go.”

Walter shrugs. “Aren't you at least going to look under the bed and behind the curtains before you go?”

The alcove that serves as his bedroom is so dim I can barely
make out the outline of the bed, the concave surface of the lousy mattress.

He plucks at my wrist, so delicately. “That's another thing,” he says. “I can't go to bed now, not if I'm alone. It's just so much work when you're stone-cold sober. I usually wake up on the sofa with the
TV
still going.”

I know that everything everyone in
AA
confesses is genuine. I know that Roberta joined because one night she left a cigarette burning and destroyed her apartment, everything in it, and was lucky to escape with her own life and her son's. I can picture Walter's frightened wife, speaking her lines—“you're getting warmer”—wincing, dangling from his big, clamped hand. But Roberta has held me in her arms. Walter's touch now is so light that I want to press my mouth to the palm of his hand and kiss it. Walter, Roberta, all my fellow drunks, are like nesting boxes to me, one confession snugly fitted within another—the sad enclosing the brutal enclosing the next smaller universe of regret.

It's hard not to feel blue when I come home from another session with Walter. He wants me to come upstairs every time now, and I don't want to go, but I do. Jay is waiting up for me, sitting at the dining room table with a book. He always reads as if he's studying, with a certain grim sense of duty and discomfort, slogging away at the painful process of decoding words to get pleasure.

He slaps his book shut. “What's going on?” he says. “You come home later and later from your meetings.”

“I just have so many people to give rides to.” The habit of lying resurfaces so easily, and I want to blame Jay for this, for all the years when he so readily accepted excuses and pretexts.

“I was expecting you,” Jay says. “I let Hannah wait up for you till nine-thirty.”

I feel guilty as charged. Why do I not come home right away?
Why do I stay up at night, my eyes shutting against my will, staring at the cards on the green background of the solitaire screen? Why can't I say no to Walter when he leads me up the stairs to his apartment, badgers me inside with his darting hands?

When I offer no excuse, Jay says quietly, “I wish you'd be home with us more, that's all.”

“Honey, I'm tired,” I say. “Can we hash this over some other time?”

He gets up from the table and kisses me. “Come to bed then.”

I'm amazed at how easily he yields. Grateful. We're both spared the alternative, the truncated binary series that stops at
no,
at confrontation. I can hardly be homesick for that, can I? I got my fill of it growing up, my whole childhood choked in the vise of my mother's misery and anger. But still, Jay's too easy, makes me feel I'll tumble forever through his transparent
yes.

I tell Jay that I'm going to read for a while. “I need to wind down a little before I can sleep.”

He sighs but doesn't protest. “Well, look in on Hannah. I promised you'd go in and kiss her even if she fell asleep.”

I sneak into Hannah's room. I envy her for being able to sleep so open to the world, her arms spread wide. When I lean down to kiss her, her eyes fly open for a moment, and she murmurs “Mommy” and puts her arms up automatically.

“Good night, Peanut,” I say, holding her limp body for a moment, knowing that she isn't really awake, that I've crossed the permeable barrier into her dreams, that my touch will be woven into them. I will never be so close to anyone, not even her own older self, as I am to her now, at this moment, when she has yet to outgrow the passionate possessiveness of her love for me. Nathan has already ordered me not to call him Little Guy anymore. One by one their nicknames will be crossed off each of their lists. I hold her for a moment longer to stave off the letting go that awaits us. Maybe that future already infuses the present, just as the past,
when I could have lost my children or hurt them because of my addiction, compacts joy from the other direction.

I sit on the sofa reading long after Jay goes to bed. But I can't concentrate. Tonight Walter begged me to stay until he fell asleep. He took my hand, led me to the lumpily made bed. He said, “Please, just sit,” but he was forcing me, in the same way he makes it impossible for me to say no to coming up to his apartment. He crawled under the covers in his clothes, held me there with a hard hand I could believe he raised against his wife, making a fist the way his tense body made a fist in the rumpled sheets. I could smell his unwashed hair, the stinging echo of gasoline fumes, and some mysterious sweetness I couldn't name. That vapor held me where I was, even though every muscle in my body tensed against the intimate closeness of his, the slithering commotion of his limbs beneath the blankets. I couldn't yank my hand from his or refuse when he asked me to lie down for just a minute, unfold my body from its determined resistance.