The Last Worthless Evening (15 page)

“Speed,” Paula said.

“Yes. And I take the others. You know, to get me down.”

“Don't you worry about your head?” Paula said.

“I can't. Once I get down to one hundred and six pounds, that's when I'll stop the drugs. And see if I can make it on my own. You know: throw away my clothes, buy some new ones.”

“Why one-oh-six?” I said.

“That's what I weighed in high school. Junior year. Before I turned into an elephant.”

“What will you do without Clark?” I said.

“Oh, Gawd, find another doctor. I still have some pills left.”

“Will he be hard to find?”

“Oh, no. It's like sleeping pills. I've never had trouble sleeping, but a friend of mine does. You just have to shop around. Some are strict, some are—helpful.”

“Understanding,” I said. “I don't sleep well either.”

“Oh? What do you take?”

“Moosehead,” Paula said.

“Really? You don't look it.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes I just read.”

“He runs a lot,” Paula said.

“It's all legal,” Ada said. “I mean, wasn't it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Good luck with the one-oh-six.”

In the car, Paula said: “You shouldn't have looked at her like that.”

“Like what?”

“Angry.”

“Was I?”

“Weren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She opened her purse and went through the smoker's elaborate motions, whose rhythm was disrupted by her hurriedly lifting and pushing aside whatever things had found or lost their way into her deep purse, until her hands emerged with the pack and lighter, and with thumb and forefinger she tore open the cellophane, opened the box, removed the top foil, put it and the crumpled cellophane into her purse, and so on. I have never wanted to smoke, but I would enjoy opening those pretty little boxes, as I would enjoy filling a pipe. My brother Kosta carries worry beads, but at work he is too busy to play with them. If he smoked, he would have to pause to give his attention to the cellophane, the cardboard, the foil. I thought of telling him he should stop every half hour to play for five minutes with his beads, and opened my window a few inches. Her cigarette was American.

“Well?” she said.

“Because it's bullshit.”

“What is?”

“All that dieting.”

“You should feel sorry for her.”

“I do.”

We passed the college where she lived and, on some nights, slept.

“Describe her,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Well. Go ahead.”

“I mean okay, I get your point.”

“Do you really?”

“I don't want to, but I do.”

“
You
look at women that way.”

“You couldn't let it go, could you?”

We passed the Common, a small park with a white fence and scattered old trees. On Thursday nights in summer an orchestra of old men plays old popular songs and marching tunes, and old people bring their lawn chairs and listen. At other times, young people gather under the trees. In the summer afternoons they are still-lifes, except for an occasional Frisbee game. I have never understood why they cup their hands and lower their heads when smoking dope, since those are the only signs giving them away to anyone passing by. They should pretend to be smoking cigarettes, but then no one cares anyway, until night when the police cruiser disperses them.

“You just had to say it.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

At the Square that is not a square but a street and one parking lot in front of commercial places, I parked and we crossed the street and looked in the window of the young Greek's fish market. He waved from behind the counter where he was wrapping and weighing white fillets of fish for a woman taking bills from her wallet and wiping her nose with Kleenex. We waved and went to Timmy's.

“Does it bother you?” I said at the bar.

“Why should it? I'm not fat.”

“It bothers me,” I said, and big Steve Buckland came and greeted us and took our orders. Steve has a grand belly, but his chest is even larger, by eight or ten inches, and if he didn't have the belly he would look like those body builders who seem involved with their bodies to the point of foolishness, so I don't like looking at them. It gets confusing. We drank beer, then went to my apartment for the steaks we had not cooked the night before.

When I look back on that week, I see a series of female faces and gesturing hands, and I hear their voices, and I remember the constriction I felt, as though I had left the world and its parts I recognized, and was immersed in only one of those parts, and it blinded and deafened me to the others. All I could see was female flesh, all I could hear was female voices: they were intense, as from long anger; they were embittered yet resolute; they were self-effacing, with a forced note of humor; they were lyric in their plaintiveness, abrupt with considered despair; they were hopeful. Their hands held pencils, pens, cigarettes, black coffee, diet drinks, and moved in front of and beneath their faces, hovered and swooped over laps and desks, and darted to the mouth that sucked or chewed, smoked or drank. Their faces, I realized, were the faces of the obsessed. Always, behind their eyes, I could see another life being lived. They spoke to us of Dexedrine balanced by Seconal, Nembutal, or Quāāludes and, before the drugs, water diets, grapefruit diets, carbohydrates, calories, diuretics, laxatives, vomiting—every one of them but Ada had forced herself, until Clark's treatment, to vomit at least three times a week, usually more, so we assumed Ada had too, and I liked her for not disclosing that, for keeping private at least that humiliating detail, and also the other one these women did not spare us: images of frequent and liquid emptying of the bowels, whose imagined sounds and smells destroyed, for me, whatever beauty the women did have (none of them was truly fat), as well as that ideal of weight and proportion they strove for. Yet, while they turned their bodies, before my eyes, into bowels, intestines, adipose, digestive juices, piss, shit, and vomit, there was that other life visible in the light of their eyes. Perhaps they strode across the room of their consciousness, graceful, svelte; or sat naked, their stomachs flat, unwrinkled, the skin as taut as the soles of their feet; or, with slender arms, whose only curves were those of athletic muscles, whose flesh did not shake or hang, they reached for steaming bowls of food and piled it on their plates.

That week, except for the martini and Sambuco night, I kept my usual discipline and drank only a few Mooseheads in the evening. So I was sober all those nights after our talks with the women, and I lay awake long after Paula slept, and the little bastard spoke to me of flesh, of food, of dresses, of Lillian's Porsche and my brothers bent over bows and vamps, and I tried to shut him up with the word
vanity
, but he was persistent.
It always connects
, he said.
Everything connects. You have only to look
. I got up to drink milk in the dark living room; I rolled from side to side on the bed and lay still, listening to Paula breathing, and I thought of my brothers fleeing the shoe factory and the future my uncle had planned for them: to learn English while they learned the work of every room and bench in the factory, from the designer in the basement, whose ideas were stolen from Italian shoes bought or photographed in Italy by my uncle, or clipped from magazines, to the cutting room, the stitching room, and so forth, to the room where women inspected and boxed and shipped the pieces of leather that would be the tops of shoes, and then perhaps my brothers would become foremen, certainly not partners, for my uncle had his own sons (has: they now own the factory), though maybe he would have left them a share. Fled to beautician school, then borrowed money and opened a shop and married Greek women, lovely Greek women who bore children who are respectful, beautiful, and well behaved, not at all like American children, though they speak English without the accents of their parents. Anyone visiting my brothers' houses will be given a drink and food, and always there are feta cheese and olives, and my brothers' wives keep stuffed grapeleaves and spinach pies in the freezer. They proudly sent me through school, and now, with love and less pride, they look at my life, and sometimes they ask me, as the little bastard did those nights of the week of the dieting women, why I am, at thirty-three, still living in a three-room apartment (including the kitchen, with the table where I eat) and going to work at ten in the morning and taking Wednesday afternoons off and spending so much time running and fucking young girls. They are not opposed to running but that I do it during my long lunch break and so return late for the afternoon's work; nor are they opposed to the young girls, but insist that I could have them and marriage and a family. I have no answers. But when they tell me I'm thirty-three, I am for moments, even minutes, frightened. It is strange: no one is Christian anymore, but every man I've known reach the age of thirty-three has been afraid that he will not see thirty-four, as if none of us can forget that the most famous death of our culture occurred at thirty-three. I do tell them I don't need more money, but they say I do, I should be investing in stock, in bonds, and buying a house, and I shiver at this and grow silent until they laugh and clap my shoulder and hug me, and I am the baby brother again, whom they care for and indulge.

The little bastard is not so gentle, and those nights he demanded answers and got none, and he kept saying,
It all connects; it all connects
, as I tried to sleep and tried to read, but
Anna Karenina
took me back to, rather than away from, the women; for if she had lived now and had believed she was fat because her stomach creased, because she could pinch flesh over her ribs, because she could not wear her size eight or ten, she would have been among them, taking pills and getting through the day on black coffee and cigarettes, nibbling food while her face tautened and her heart beat faster, creeping down to the kitchen at night to eat a half-gallon of ice cream, then rushing in remorse to the bathroom to jam fingers down her throat and vomit the colors of that food children and dieting women so love, if I can take as a microcosm the women we interviewed, for each of them confessed ice cream as her secret wickedness. These images of shitting and vomiting induced by laxatives and fingers interrupted me whenever, that week, I touched Paula: to teach her a Greek dance in my living room, standing side by side, hands on each other's shoulders, as I counted one-two one-two; to make love with her before she slept and I lay staring opposite the bed, at the dark window, its glass fogged and moist.

We simply happened, on Friday, to be free at two-thirty, so we drove to the public high school, whose crowded halls and rooms I had endured for four years. I parked at the front of the building. They would all come out there, to the waiting buses in line ahead of us, to the cars in the lot. A large statue of
The Thinker
was on the schoolground, between us and the building. A bell rang loudly, and as they came out, some singly, most in hurried groups, lighting cigarettes, Paula got out of the car, stopped several of them until one boy turned back to the grounds and pointed at a girl alone, lighting a cigarette in the lee of
The Thinker
. Paula went to her, and I watched them talking. Then they came to the car. I watched Paula talking, smiling; when they got closer I could see that the girl was doing neither, and as she slid into the back seat and looked at me, I thought she wouldn't, not in this car, not with us.

“Who's your father?” I said.

“Jake.”

“Jake? I know Jake.”

KAREN ARAKELIAN

They said they would take me home, but could we go by his office first and talk where it was comfortable so him and the girl didn't have to stay twisted around to look at me. I knew who he was, I had seen him a lot in town, but he didn't recognize me, because I kept growing up while he stayed the same. Except he had lost more hair. He drove, and I just watched his bald head and the hair at the back and sides and smoked two cigarettes. I didn't say anything, and I didn't know if I would or not in his office; I wouldn't know till it was over. But I felt like it was all over and nobody would understand what it's like when they're all so thin. Everybody, even Heidi, even though she's always talking about how fat she is, but I know it's so we'll look at how thin she is and be jealous. And we are. Anyways I am.

I think it was money. I even thought of shoplifting and trying to sell things, but after I figured out how I could do it and where, and that took hours and hours, for days and nights, a lot of time thinking about the different stores and what they had in them and where the clerks were. I even went to some of them and looked around. Then after I planned how to do it and what to take, I realized there was no one to sell it to. Because if they could afford to buy the stuff, then they didn't have to buy it cheaper from me, and if they were my friends, or people like them, they couldn't buy anything anyways.

I was relieved, but I was at the bottom again, like the times when I wanted to be dead, because the pills were working but I couldn't afford a second prescription. I had saved for the first one, and for the first visit to Francis too, and there were no jobs, not unless I quit school and worked full time, which I would do, but my parents would never let me. All of us were supposed to go to college, my Dad was very proud about that, and I could see why: he had worked so hard at that shitty place, and his father had come over from Armenia to get away from the Turks. I have heard those stories, about them killing my great-grandparents, and other stories, and I hate fucking Turks. Everyone else went to college, and I'm the youngest. So I couldn't get a job.

I went to Francis for my second appointment in January, when school had just started and my Christmas job at the department store was over and I was down to my last two days of pills. He weighed me; then I started crying, and he told me to get dressed and he sent the nurse out. When I was dressed he sat me down in his office and said, “You lost seven pounds. Why did you cry?”