Second Best Fantasy (15 page)

I took an immediate dislike to Jess. Not because she was an ex of Janine’s, but because she was loud and obnoxious. She trotted back towards the bar yelling to her other friends, “Do you
know
who the fuck this is?”

“Sorry.” Janine looked at me sheepishly.

“It’s fine. Just hard to imagine you with her.”

“It is for me too, believe me. It wasn’t serious. I used to play at this dive bar and she was always there, then suddenly I had a big dyke following. They bought my singles and gave me confidence.”

“So you slept with a groupie?”

“We don’t have to stay here.”

“Don’t be silly! Its fine, I’m kind of amused actually.”

She patted me on the ass and pushed me in the direction of the bar. “Jerk,” she teased.

Sappho’s was busy for a Thursday night. We hung out at the bar and chit chatted with the other women, occasionally interrupted by the sheer decibel level of Jess. The bar had a stage but there was no one on it, just a single mike and an acoustic guitar propped up against it, and I kept seeing Janine eying it sideways. Such a performer. While she was in the bathroom, I approached Jess.

“Hey, no hard feelings, huh? Me and her were a long time ago.”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Listen, are you a regular here?”

“Honey, I’m a regular everywhere.”

“Right. Do you think you could get the bartender to turn on the sound system and let her play?”

“Why fuck yeah! That’s a great idea! Charlene! Char, get off that damn cellphone and get over here!”

When Janine came back from the bathroom Charlene said, 102

“I hear you’re a singer?” and handed Janine the cordless mike.

She looked at me. “Let me guess. This was your idea?”

“You know it.”

No further convincing was needed. Someone else in the bar also played guitar and went to their car to get their instrument. Within an hour I felt like I had that night with Cin at CBGBs, so proud, so grateful, so glad she was mine.

Different girls in the bar went up and sang with her, kind of like live karaoke and Janine was the machine with all the lyrics.

The other guitar girl was good and knew quite a few tunes, they covered Fleetwood Mac, Bonnie Raitt, Fiona Apple. The crowd grew and by 1 AM the whole bar joined in for a rendition of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Janine exit through the side door with Jess. It didn’t concern me too much until after about twenty minutes they didn’t return.

“Excuse me for a minute,” I said to the brunette who was asking me about my book. The one woman in the bar who didn’t know who Janine was, but knew who I was instead.

I stepped outside the door they’d gone through and no one was there. Just the looming dumpsters of the bar and a darkened alley. I walked the length of the alley looking for other doors or spaces they could have been and found none. Panic slowly started to creep in. I went back around to the front where the parking lot was and, sure enough, our rental car was gone, and Janine and Jess along with it.

“Want me to give you a ride?” the brunette asked when I grabbed the phone book off the end of the bar.

I thought for a minute. She was hot. Really hot. And I was entitled since Janine had just run off to God knows where, abandoning me here in this shitty dyke bar crammed to the hilt with white trash, peroxide bleached, hide tanned locals. The woman I was talking to whose name I hadn’t caught was on vacation too, some social worker from Pennsylvania. And she wasn’t high,
and
she’d read my book. How much sex is driven by our ego? But in my heart I knew I couldn’t do it. Hadn’t I just decided earlier I wanted to marry the woman, after all?

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“Thanks. I’ll take a cab.”

* * * *

The phone in the condo rang at around 5:30 AM. I did not intend to rescue her, so I let the machine pick up the call and rolled over to go back to sleep. And then I heard a man’s voice say, “This is officer Roberts at the Brevard County Sheriff’s department…”

“Hello?”

“Is this Margaret O’Leary?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a Ford Taurus rental car registered to you, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“And you’re traveling on vacation here with a Jeanie…I’m sorry…Janine…”

“Janine Jordan, yes? What’s happened?”

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to come down here.

There’s been an accident.”

Frantic, I dressed and went downstairs. Fuck! How was I going to get there? She had taken the car. I ran back upstairs, past my own door and down the hall to my aunt and uncle’s place. Thank God old people rise early. The door was open and they were out on their balcony drinking coffee.

“Hi there! We wondered if we’d see you today! We were pretty sure you got in last night.”

“Hi. Um, I can’t explain right now, but I need to borrow your car. Janine’s been in an accident.”

“Oh, my, is she okay?” asked my aunt Mary.

“I don’t know, I need to go. Now.”

My uncle Bob handed me his keys and I was out the door.

They were very sweet, my aunt and uncle. I liked spending time with them when I got down to the condo, but had no time right at that moment.

My mind raced all the way to the police station. What if she was dead? They wouldn’t tell me on the phone. What if 104

she’d killed someone else? They wouldn’t have told me that on the phone either.
Calm down Mags, just calm down
, I told myself.

I parked crookedly in the first spot I found and ran inside.

After giving my name I was told to wait for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, a uniformed officer came in, retrieved me, and walked me down a long hallway to an office. “Here she is,” he said, and ushered me in.

“Have a seat Miss O’Leary. I’m Lieutenant Whitesell.”

I braced myself.

“Miss Jordan is in a holding cell downstairs.”

I was confused.

“They said there was an accident. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. The accident didn’t involve another vehicle.

Just your rental car. Miss Jordan was driving. There was another woman in the car, a Jess Morrow, do you know her?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Miss O’Leary, do you use illegal narcotics?”

“What? No. What’s this about?”

“Miss O’Leary, Miss Jordan was driving your rental car around, and then decided to drive the car into the Atlantic Ocean, endangering both her own life and the life of Miss Morrow. They both tested positive for opiates. And you’re telling me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

Jesus Christ.

“I guess you don’t, since you look genuinely surprised.

Look, Miss O’Leary, we get all kinds of tourists down here. If we prosecuted every DUI, we’d never get anything else done. You will have to deal with the rental car agency and the damages to the car on your own, and by law we do have to file a report with them. I’m willing to release Miss Jordan on her own recognizance if you can pay the fines, fill out the necessary paperwork, and stay out of trouble for the duration of your stay.”

“You’re very kind, Mr. Whitesell.”

“I know who she is, Miss O’Leary. My daughter’s a big fan. Tell her she was lucky. This time.”

“I will. Thank you sir.”

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“The car is here in the impound lot. There’s a set of paperwork for that too. I believe it’s drivable, it’s just…wet.” He struggled to contain a chuckle. I was thoroughly humiliated.

* * * *

“I need a cocktail,” she said, as we slid into the soaked interior of the car.

“I thought you were dead,” I said. “When they called they told me there was an accident.”

“Fucking dramatic. We just got a little too close to the water.”

“You’re un-fucking-believable. So did you fuck her?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“What then? Why the fuck did you leave with her?”

“Guess.”

“Heroin.”

“Yup.”

“You need help.”

“I know. I guess it’s my turn.”

I couldn’t argue with that. She trashed a rental car, I nearly killed the family pet. Was that an equal playing field?

I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up Janine’s mess. Dealing with the car at a detail shop, making up lies to my aunt and uncle, dealing with the rental car agency, all while Janine slept off her chemical hangover in the condo. When all was said and done, my new credit card balance was through the roof and the Brevard County sheriff had taken a nice chunk out of my savings. I was exhausted and at 4:30 PM it started to rain.

Perfect. I crawled into bed next to her.

She rolled over and kissed me. I resented her power over me, no matter what she did, my love for her would not go away, would not diminish in the slightest. But I really needed her to stop fucking up like this.

“Do you want to stop?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to go to treatment?”

“No.”

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“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should call your friend Dan.”

“Um, I think the fact I’m drinking would make him not want to talk to me.”

“Maybe I should go to meetings. They have different ones for drug addicts, don’t they?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“I’m sorry Maggie.”

“I know baby. I know.”

We made love that afternoon like we were never going to see each other again. And maybe we weren’t, at least that version of ourselves. I didn’t know how Janine and I would move forward after that day, so all I could do was be hyper focused in each moment, each breath of our sexual energy. The electricity of her touch, the magic of her skin, the feel of her hands in my hair. Never had I so completely given myself to someone as I had to her. There was an actual, tangible, physical feeling that the hand of God pushed us towards each other that night at Avenue A Records, I still remembered it. A singer, a writer, there was so much passion in our togetherness I was surprised things didn’t burn up in our presence. Neither one of us knew how to stop anymore, neither one of us knew how to
not
love the other.

That afternoon in bed, I remembered it all: that first Dewar’s she ordered at the bar, watching Nosferatu, the musicians in the park, making love on the beach, the letters, the phone calls, hearing her sing in the shower. Those snapshot moments I called upon were all there too: that day with our parents in the backyard, the first time I walked through the front door of our Astoria home, the look on her face when I brought Joplin home as a little puppy. All my memories came flooding back as I reviewed our history, Janine’s own lyrics the soundtrack to my reverie. Love was too small of a word.

107

I was sitting at the kitchen island on a stool, reading the lyrics of the song she sang the night before for the first time, for me, a gift. In our entire history she’d never managed to keep a new song a secret, she’d get too excited about it, or too nervous about performing it for the first time, but this one she had. Its relevance haunted me for the remainder of the night and into the morning.

“So keep your eye on the stage show…maybe you’ll find me there… like I do…”
She had been talking about losing herself lately, immersed in a depression about where she was going with her life, I would have said it was a mid-life crisis but she was only shy of thirty-three.

And then there was the part that was especially for me,

“And she’s got me…and I’m drunk again…oh, she’ll regret me in the morning…I know baby…I had it coming…”

Because of course her melancholy had to be complete with her delusions that I would leave her now she wasn’t famous or making a lot of money. The very notion was ridiculous, and I didn’t know how in her own mind she could get so far away from how much I loved her.

But we weren’t happy, and I was out of ideas for how to get happy. Just a few days ago we decided to seek couples counseling. The clean and sober gig wasn’t really working, sometimes we were, sometimes we weren’t. After “the Florida incident” as we came to refer to it, we became diligent “twelve-steppers” for about six months, then we just sort of tapered off.

Now, we both went to meetings sometimes and sometimes not, would put together a few weeks drug and alcohol free, then fall off, then go back. I’d been told what we were doing was

“bouncing in and out of the rooms.” That didn’t bother me. The truth was I got something out of going, Janine did too, we both had beliefs in spiritual practices and strove to be decent and kind people. But neither one of us really wanted to be clean and sober. Sobriety became like drinking and using itself, sometimes we did it and sometimes we didn’t. There were some rules we 108

agreed to and had managed to adhere to for almost a year already. No drinking and driving, ever. If we were together and one of us thought the other one was going too far, with alcohol or anything else, we were allowed to say that and not fight about it.

Neither of us could be fucked up when Janine was performing, whether I was there or not since she needed to come home to a partner who was present. Cocaine was reserved for when it was free at a club or someone else’s house. Weed was okay on occasion when we were both in the mood, which was rare. Hard street drugs like crank and other methamphetamines were out.

And heroin was an absolute no-no.

Our lifestyle had been a little short-circuited financially as well, but we still made out okay each month with our combined income. I hadn’t written anything in several months, aside from a weekly column I managed to grab through a friend of a friend of Cindy’s at the Village Voice. Phantom was downsizing but still holding its own in the industry. My publisher was bugging me for a book of short stories I had promised nearly nine months ago, but it just wasn’t coming. Janine was writing and playing, trying to find a new direction and not be just another chick with a guitar.

To bring in money, though, she had gone to work for Sam, and so had Dean. They team managed Sam’s recording studio, which had graduated from the room in Brooklyn Heights to a full blown facility in the lower east side of Manhattan. The Poe Punks had just completed a global tour, and it seemed nearly everything Sam touched turned to gold. I knew Janine was envious of his success, but I kept reminding her that at least he was one of the good guys.