Death Will Help You Leave Him (9 page)

I took a cab from the Islip station. There’s a bus, but no way was I getting into this without cigarettes. Four or five taxis waited along the curb as I emerged from the train. I picked the one whose driver I could see ignoring his own No Smoking sign. I’d phoned to tell Ma I was coming. She hadn’t bothered to dress. Ma hardly ever appeared in anything but a Fifties ensemble of flower print housecoat over fraying white slip, shambling felt slippers, and old-fashioned hair rollers. She couldn’t have crossed the street to mail a letter in that outfit. The rollers suggested that she had somewhere better to go later on. But she never did. If I wanted to remind myself she ever wore anything else, I had to visualize Dad’s funeral. To which I’d gone drunk.

“You want a cup of tea?” she greeted me. She turned away from the open door and shuffled toward the kitchen.

“It’s great to see you too, Ma.” I closed the door, clicked the lock, and caught up with her. “Hold up a minute.”

I leaned over and kissed her cheek. She looked surprised. Then, plodding along like Slow and Steady the tortoise intent on winning the race, she resumed her course toward the stove, where the teakettle shrieked and rattled.

“I got cookies.” Oreos, my childhood favorite. A flash of memory startled me: my mother and I sitting at our kitchen table in the city, both of us scraping the cream off the inside of our Oreos with our front teeth and laughing. She looked big, so I must have been little. It occurred to me that my mother had probably been depressed for the past twenty-five or thirty years.

I dunked the supermarket brand tea bag she supplied a few dozen times, going for maximum caffeine. Ma was too Irish not to boil the water all the way, but too cheap to buy better tea. I fished out the string with the little tag, which fell into the cup the way it always did. I plunked the sodden tea bag into a spoon and wrapped the string around it to squeeze out the last few drops of infused liquid. All part of the ritual. I sipped my tea.

I didn’t know where to start. Ma wouldn’t help me out, either. She never asked questions, not “What did you do in school today?” or “Doctor, am I going to live?” If the silence went on too long, she might start telling me something she’d heard on the news. I’d better spit it out before that happened.

“Ma, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve stopped drinking.”

She sipped her tea. What did I expect? Earth to Ma.

“Ma? Say something.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your father went on the wagon a few times.”

I told myself to stop grinding my teeth.

“No, Ma, I mean I’m really sober.” Clean and sober, but she’d never had a clue about the drugs. No point in enlightening her now. “I’m going to Alcoholics Anonymous.” She wouldn’t ask me how long. “It’s almost ten months.”

She actually put her tea cup down.

“I went to that Al-Anon once.” Now she’d surprised me.

“Really? I didn’t know that. How did you like it?”

“It was okay, but the women were all talking about how their husbands drank. I had enough of that at home, so I didn’t go back.”

I thought of telling her it wasn’t supposed to be that way. She’d heard only what she could hear.

“How long did you go?”

“Just the once.”

It figured.

That covered the topic of recovery. A wave of despair washed over me. Given my family, how could I ever become a normal human being?

The gray silence stretched out. At this point, I always used to go in the fridge and pop a beer. I took another Oreo and racked my brains for something to say.

“I saw Laura the other day.” Laura was the only one of my girlfriends my mother knew, because she was the only one I’d married.

“That tramp.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I had said the same words in the same tone countless times. All my life.

“She wasn’t the kind you marry.” She’d said that a few thousand times too. It was one of the few subjects she had a strong opinion on. Not counting stuff like whether Leno was better than Letterman. I remembered belatedly how profoundly my mother irritated me. No wonder I’d considered the six-pack a necessity. Two, if I stayed more than an hour. The fact that she was right about Laura didn’t help.

“Well, I did marry her.” I knew I sounded sulky. “So if you can’t say anything nice—” How dumb could I get? Telling Ma “don’t say anything” was like telling George W. Bush to be stupid. She had it covered.

I pushed my chair back with a scraping of wooden legs on the squeaky linoleum.

“I gotta go. I just stopped by to tell you about the drinking.” I felt too embarrassed to use the word sobriety. Odd, considering how long Ma had known me. She’d wiped my baby butt like any other mother. I don’t know what I’d expected. That she’d cry and fall on my neck? That she’d tell me I’d made her proud? That she’d ask a question?

I snatched up my jacket, which I’d thrown on a chair when I came in, and left. It took all my self-control not to slam the door. So much for good intentions. No amends today. But I was mad at myself, not her, all the way back to Penn Station. As they say, the program works.

“Let’s go out,” said Laura.

Another Saturday afternoon at her place. I lay stretched out on her water bed. I was full of black truffle frittata, emptied of desire, and perfectly content to spend the next two hours in a state of suspended animation.

She stopped pacing up and down and peered out the window.

“You expecting someone?” I asked.

“No, of course not.” She paused to light a cigarette, then forgot to put it to her lips. I had seen her take her medication, so it wasn’t that. She had what Barbara’s Yiddish-speaking grandmother called
shpilkes
. Ants in the pants. “I just need to get out of here for a while.”

“Am I allowed to come?” I inquired.

“Of course, dummy.”

“Any particular destination?”

She shook her head, then stalked over to the heap of clothes we’d discarded in the dash for the Pole. She scooped them up in clumps, shook them briskly, and disentangled hers from mine. She tossed mine in my general direction.

“Hey!” The belt buckle almost took out my eye. “Not the head, not the head.” A direct hit could do damage.

“Then get up.” She hopped on one foot, pulling on a pair of panties that were little more than a thong. Overdressed for her. “Come on, Bruce, don’t make me wait.”

She’d said the same thing a lot more sweetly half an hour before. With a resigned sigh, I reached for my pants.

On the street, Laura sniffed the air like a dog scenting game and set off at a brisk pace, heading south. I trotted after her, threading my way around the knots of tourists and gallery goers. What she was up to?

“Yo! Laura! Wait up!”

She stopped, tapping her foot in a show of impatience. The tourists rightly considered her one of the sights. More than one raised a digital camera, then hastily lowered it when she glared. In full manic regalia, she qualified as a work of art. Blue hair this week. Eye liner, lipstick, finger and toe nails to match. Decked like postmodern halls with a parure of her own design. The necklace covered most of her chest like King Tut’s pectoral. The matching earrings hung almost to her shoulders. The tiara perched impossibly on the top of her fluffy mane. The elements included exotic feathers and the wings of butterflies that had died naturally.
No animals were harmed in the making of this jewelry.
She didn’t mind killing a flock of spring-loaded ball point pens and a clock or two, though. She’d electroplated the innards of both and soldered them on for a sculptural effect.

“Come on!” She jerked her head toward Canal Street. The earrings swayed like chandeliers in an earthquake.

“What’s the hurry?” I complained. “You said we’re not going anywhere special.”

“We’re not,” she snapped. She set off again before I managed to catch up.

“So why does it matter when we get there?” I asked her receding back.

At Canal Street, we turned west. I was surprised. Chinatown, which on a Saturday afternoon is alive with vendors selling fresh fish and produce and always fun if you like silk brocade and lacquered ducks, lay to the east. In spite of her disclaimers, I suspected we had a goal.

We ended up on a narrow street in TriBeCa, not far from West Street and the river. She had stayed ahead of me all the way. Some stroll. She halted in front of an old-law tenement, six stories with grimy windows and a fire escape obscuring the brick façade, squeezed between two warehouse buildings newly converted to residential lofts. TriBeCa— Triangle Below Canal— hadn’t even been named when prices started going through the roof in SoHo, but it was catching up. For the first time, she looked hesitant.

I squinted up at the building. Nothing to explain her interest jumped out at me.

She nuzzled up to me and took my arm. Suddenly we were a couple again.

“Could you get up on that?” She nodded toward the fire escape. It started on the second floor. The bottom ladder hung down just far enough from the ground so you had to drop if you were actually escaping a fire. Unless you were a cat, you could break an ankle.

I looked at her.

“Oh, Brucie, don’t be slow. I know, I’ll go first. I’ll climb on your shoulders, and you’ll give me a boost.”

First? Thank you for sharing.

“And we’d do this because—?”

She pouted and started biting her nails. I put my hand on her wrist. It was still so thin my thumb and fingers met. I pulled her fingers away from her mouth. Who knew what they put in that blue gunk she’d painted her nails with? Ground lapis lazuli, maybe. I wondered if lapis was poisonous.

Laura stuck out her bottom lip. Still pouting. I’d nibbled on those lips, sans makeup, less than two hours ago. I didn’t feel much like it now. To tell the truth, I wanted to shake her. But I’m not that kind of guy.

“Talk to me, Laura. Tell me why we’re here, or I’m leaving.” Set limits. Don’t enable. How did this crazy woman manage to turn me into such a wimp? “Who lives here?”

Long silence.

“Mac,” she said finally in a sulky baby voice.

“Oh, Laura, f’Godsake! What do you think you’re doing?”

The lip twitched.

“That’s it. I’m going.” I wheeled and took the first step. It could have led to a journey of a thousand miles. But she grabbed the tail of my shirt and pulled me back. She was that kind of girl. Woman.

“He’s not there,” she said. As if that made a difference.

“Oh, yeah? How do you know?” Now we were two big babies.

Her eyes shifted. A dusting of glitter overlaid the blue on her eyelids. I resisted being distracted.

“How do you know?” I repeated.

“I called before we left,” she muttered.

“Ha! So we were coming here all along. You just didn’t bother to tell me.” After you’re sober ninety days, you get to be self-righteous about lying. No, the program doesn’t say that. “That’s it. I’m leaving.”

Five minutes later she teetered on my shoulders, straining to reach the bottom rung of the dangling ladder. At least she had on blue ballet slippers. She could have worn Doc Martens. Or hiking boots with spikes. I kept looking up and down the street. Not a soul appeared. I could have used a good excuse to cut this crazy expedition short. Laura didn’t care. She scrambled onto the first platform, if you can call about six feet square of rusty iron bars with lots of space between them a platform. I grabbed her hand, and she pulled me up after her, as nonchalant as a catcher in a trapeze act. We barely fit, and I almost dropped my cigarettes. Yes, I needed a smoke. A guy’s gotta do something with the anxiety. Prayers to my Higher Power for guidance in breaking and entering didn’t seem quite appropriate.

“He never locks it,” Laura said. She whipped out a small screwdriver I didn’t know she had. She had stuck it in a garter I didn’t know she was wearing. Our wedding garter, as it happens. Blue. She pried up the window expertly. Clearly, she’d done this before. I hoped to hell this guy Mac really had gone out. I didn’t think I’d have much to say to him if we met this way.

“Come on!” Laura said. She pushed the sash window up. Her fingers, grimy with New York City soot, grabbed at my shirt again. The front this time. She swung first one leg, then the other, over the sill and pulled me into the room.

I don’t recommend breaking and entering sober. Every time a floorboard creaked, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I had to pee. While I slunk from point to point, Laura acted as if she had every right to be there. She opened drawers, slammed doors, and strode from room to room.

The apartment wasn’t that big. We’d landed in the bedroom: big messy unmade bed, guy laundry on the floor. Mac must have money. His furniture hadn’t come from Dumpsters or even thrift shops. More than one hardwood tree, probably endangered, had died for the sleigh bed and matching dressers and night tables. A closet that would have been walk-in if it weren’t so crammed with stuff held jackets, suits, and shirts with designer labels, enough LL Bean type outdoor things for a polar expedition, and so much sports equipment that I had to dodge back to avoid a leather bag of golf clubs that wanted to crush my toes. As I righted it and pushed it back in, a tennis racket in a heavy wooden press made a pass at my head. I shoved that back onto the shelf it came from. That dislodged a bag of neon chartreuse tennis balls. As I grabbed at the bag, it fell open. The balls went bounding around the room.

“Bruce! What the hell are you doing?” Laura spoke at normal volume, albeit in pissed-off tones.

“Collecting dust bunnies,” I said.

I lay prone and at full stretch with my right arm under the bed. My fingers scrabbled at a couple of runaway balls. Lint clung to my sleeve. I retrieved the balls at some cost to my rotator cuff, wiped them on my shirt, and popped them back in the bag.

“Get up!” Laura said. “Don’t be an idiot.”

I would have been glad to comply, but it was too late. If I could reverse time, I’d go back to before we broke in. Preferably before we climbed the fire escape. Hmm, how could I see the glass half full in this situation? Oh, yeah. Mac wasn’t home.

“Look at this.” Her voice held only pleased surprise. “This must be new.”