The Saving Graces (29 page)

"So I went to see Dr. Slater-he's our family doctor. I had a feeling Curtis wasn't telling me everything, and I wanted to know the worst. I thought it must be even worse than he was saying, and that's why he was being so secretive about it-to protect me. My God." She pressed her shaking hands to her cheeks. "Can you believe this?" "No. Here," said Emma, pouring more wine and pushing the glass toward her.
But she ignored it and kept talking. "So I went to see Dr. Slater. Today, this afternoon-God, it feels like weeks ago. It might be funny when I think back someday and remember the look on his face when I asked him how much longer Curtis had to live." Emma gasped, then laughed. Even Rudy laughed, horrified.
"He said he didn't know what I was talking about. I argued with him." She covered her face. "I was so slow." "No-" Isabel started to say, but Rudy grabbed her hand. - "Wait," she said, "it's worse." Her eyes glittered. She pulled her lips back in a terrible smile. "Are you ready? I told Dr. Slater I'd stopped trying to get pregnant after Curtis told me about the leukemia, and he said-he said-" "What?" "He said Curtis had a vasectomy." "No!" "Last year. Remember I told you we didn't have sex for the whole month of December?" Emma nodded. "That's why! He was healing! And right after that, he told me he wanted us to have a child!" She sat back, dazed. She wasn't crying anymore. She looked like she'd been knocked unconscious and she was just starting to come around.
Isabel and I were too shocked to speak, but Emma did enough cursing for everybody. "What the hell was the mother-fucker thinking he'd do when his five years were up? That's what I want to know. And how the hell did he think he could keep a vasectomy secret from his own wife? Who went to the same family doctor? Didn't it ever occur to him that someday you might ask Slater why you weren't getting pregnant? I mean, what kind of arrogance is that?" "What did he say when you told him you knew?" Isabel interrupted. "How did he defend himself?" Rudy focused on her gradually. "Oh, well, I didn't talk to him yet. I just wrote a note and left. I should've packed a bag, but I wasn't thinking. I took his BMW," she added with a broken-off laugh.
"That'll get him," Emma gloated.
But we were disappointed. But nobody said so. We went over it again, all the gory, unbelievable details of Curtis's lie and Rudy's credulity, the misery she'd been in for the last three months. After a while she stopped shaking. I made her eat some bread, not just drink wine, and soon her color looked more natural, too, not as ghostly. But her eyes were still too-dark and glittery.
Isabel, who hadn't said anything for a long time, announced, "Rudy, I think you should go home." Stunned silence, then we all talked at once. "Never! Leaving Curtis is the healthiest thing she's done in years-Are you crazy?-She can't, how could she-" "What are you going to do?" Isabel cut in to ask. "Stay with Emma for a while, I know, but then what?" "I'll find a place." "With what?" She said, "Curtis ..." and trailed off.
"I've got money," Emma said belligerently.
"I do, too," I said. But I started to think.
We were quiet.
"It's not just the money," Isabel began again in a patient tone.
"Which he'll keep," Emma figured out. "He could get the house, the credit cards, all your assets. Your health insurance." Everything, we realized.
"At the very least he'll get first crack at it," I said, furious. "He's a fucking lawyer." Their mouths dropped; I thought their jaws would hit the table. It's not that I'm incapable of profanity, for heaven's sake. Unlike most, I save it up for when it's warranted.
"Well, shit," Rudy said, waking up.
"And you abandoned him," Emma reminded her.
"It's not just the money," Isabel repeated into the dismal silence.
"What do you mean, Is?" She ran two fingers around the lip of her empty teacup in a slow circle. "I've always regretted walking out on Gary. Not divorcing him," she said over our protests, "leaving him. I was the wounded party, and it gave me some small satisfaction to march out and leave him on his own. But he betrayed me, and he's never faced that, never even admitted it. Not to this day. It's beside the point that I've forgiven him." "He cut a class in the karmic lesson plan." "It's true," I said when Isabel only sent Emma a bland look. "He wronged you, Isabel, and he never paid for it." "Yeah," Emma said. "Motherfucking bastard lied and cheated and screwed other women, and he never suffered." "Like Curtis," I said.
"Oh," Rudy said, "but there's no comparison." "Yes, there is." - "What Curtis did was worse," Emma declared, glancing at Isabel. "I mean, in a way. Don't you think? Sure, he's sick, but no amount of psychosis can forgive what he's done to -Rudy. Gary thought with his dick and then lied about it. I hope he rots in hell for that, but it's not really evil." "But Curtis-" Rudy closed her mouth. "No, I'm not saying anything, I'm not defending him." "Better not," Emma warned darkly. - "Well," said Isabel, and we all looked at her. "The point I was trying to make is, Gary broke faith with me. I don't want to say he 'sinned'-"

   "He didn't live up to his human potential? He wasn't sufficiently self-actualized?" "Thank you," Isabel said. "Whatever you want to call it, he never had to confront it, and he should have had to pay something. A recompense. And so should Curtis." "You're damn right." "Not for revenge," Isabel cautioned, catching the gleam in Emma's eyes.-"For balance." - "Whatever." - - "She's right, Rudy," I said. "For whatever reason, you owe it to yourself to get him out of there. Is he home now?" - "No, he's on a trip. He'll be back tonight." "When?" "Late." We thought.
"I'm a little afraid of him," Rudy said in a small voice.
The temperature in the room dropped; Isabel and I exchanged a sick glance. "Why?" I asked casually.
"He's never really hit me or anything. Well, one time, but that was so long ago. It's more-it's probably just me, but-" We shifted in our chairs, made impatient noises. Rudy closed her eyes. "God, listen to me. I don't know what he does, how he gets me to do what he wants, It's not by violence. But I'm afraid of him anyway. He scares me, and I'm so ashamed to say that to you." I put my hand on her arm. "Tell the truth, Rudy. Do you still love him?" "I don't know, Lee. How could I?" Her nose turned pink. "I think it's dying. Right now. I can feel it. It's like a miscarriage." - Emma broke the bleak silence to say, "I'll go home with you if you want. Because the sonofabitch doesn't scare me." - - "Me, either," I said. But I'd call Henry first. "We'll all go." Isabel leaned on her cane and struggled up. "We'd better take two cars." We looked at her quizzically. "Since Rudy-won't be going back to Emma's afterward. She'll be staying home."
I went wild in graduate school. Not college-for some reason all the poison I ingested in childhood didn't hit my bloodstream until I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. It's a wonder I'm alive. No one who knows me now (except Curtis) knows what I was like then-I hadn't met Emma yet, and I've never told her, not all of it. I had to laugh that night Lee blurted out, "I had a one-night stand!" She looked so cute to me, all defiant and ashamed of herself. If I had a nickel for every one-night stand, every one-hour stand...
It's funny nobody thought of me as a tramp in those days-at least I don't think they did. For some reason I never got a reputation, as we used to call it. It might be because of the way I look (respectable), but I think it's also a knack I inherited from my mother, a way of projecting a sort of New England propriety in the midst of complete emotional chaos and breakdown. My mother-try to imagine if they'd cast Katharine Hepburn instead of Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. You can't, I know, that's the point.
It wasn't just sex I O.D.'d on either, although that excess was the showiest one. I had sex with abusive men, wild men, married men, crazy men. I used it as an analgesic - and I even knew it, knew that word, understood the therapeutic context, got it all. Did it anyway. It helped that men really wanted me and I could have anyone I liked. It never occurred to me to stay to myself, not give it away. And as I said, it wasn't only sex; don't forget drugs and alcohol. I was in therapy-I've been in therapy since I was thirteen-but the shrinkl had in those days in -Durham was especially incompetent. He was always good for psycho drugs, though, so I took a lot of legal stuff along with the illegal.
What I was doing was running as fast as I could, using prescriptions for white noise, sex for distraction, alcohol for oblivion, all to escape a growing terror that I either was or soon would be schizophrenic or full-blown manic-depressive. That was no paranoid delusion -both illnesses run in my family. But what a crazy way I chose to avoid craziness, you're thinking. I think so, too, but do you know, I haven't really changed that much. Eric says I have, but I don't believe him. My biggest fear-no, I don't even want to say it. But it's the same, it's always the same. Nothing's really changed.
Here's how I met Curtis. I was going out with a man named Jean-Etienne Leutze, a Swiss national supposedly studying drama at Duke, but what he -was really doing was drinking himself to death. Naturally I was drawn to him. We made quite a couple. "Fiery," our smattering of friends in common called us, but they didn't know the half. One night we had a row in JeanEtienne's cramped, filthy, one-bedroom apartment in a colorfully run-down student neighborhood nowhere near campus. Until that night we'd thrived on our fights, been really creative, I thought, with the insults we traded and the heavy objects we threw at each other. I had an exhilarating sense of breaking out, of opening windows and breathing in fresh, dangerous air. Jean-Etienne was the perfect man for me, I thought, at least in that place, that time. It couldn't last. Violence always escalates. One night he beat me up and threw me out of his apartment-literally, out the door in a rush, smash, up against the wall in the stair landing. I wasn't hurt, no broken bones or anything, but I was very drunk and- this is embarrassing-naked except for my underpants.
Curtis lived next door. I'd seen him once or twice, briefly and only in passing, but long enough to think, You don't look like you belong here. Too clean-cut and wholesome. Blond, blue-eyed, and serious, always carrying a stack of books or a briefcase. He'd noticed me, too, but I assumed it was because he'd heard the - racket through the wall, always either sex or yelling, and was curious about Jean-Etienne's partner in decadence.
He came out of his apartment and found me huddled on the staircase, half nude, hurting, very confused. It was late, well after midnight, but Curtis was fully dressed in chinos, polo shirt, and loafers-he'd been studying. All the time he looked at me, touched me, helped me to stand and stagger into his apartment, he never seemed to regard me in any sexual way whatsoever. This was novel in my experience. And seductive. It's a power he possesses that he's fully aware of and has put to good use any number of times since then. But it was new to me that night, and I fell under its spell without a thought. He gave me his bathrobe to put on and coffee to sober me up. He wanted to call the police, I remember, and that moved me, made me feel so grateful, as if I had a knight looking after me. We talked for hours-I talked, rather, and he listened with complete absorption: again, very seductive. He was thinner in those days, and more callow, less all-knowing, but already he had a fine quality of self-restraint that attracted me powerfully. I had so little of it myself.
When it was time to go to bed, I assumed we would sleep together. But he surprised me by bringing sheets, blanket, and a pillow, and tucking me up all nice and neat on his sofa. He didn't even kiss me.
In the morning, I woke up first. I took a shower in his pristine bathroom-quite a contrast to Jean-Etienne's sty-and then I went into Curtis's room and slipped into bed beside him. This was my idea of a thank-you gift. A small favor for a small favor.
He rejected me, He wanted me-he slept naked, so that was obvious-but he wouldn't take me, and the way he put me away from him-no words, just a small, scrupulous smile, his hands kind but firm and somehow practical -made me feel ashamed of myself. And in his power.
A pattern began-I see it so clearly now-of me offending and Curtis forgiving. Me being outré, he disapproving, then relenting. We didn't become lovers for weeks. He made me wild with wanting him first, and even while it was happening I knew he was doing it on purpose. I liked it. I entered the game willingly, denying and disciplining myself because it pleased him, and getting addicted fast to his control over me. He wasn't like any man I'd ever known; he had single-mindedness and focus, and unlike me, he knew exactly what he wanted: a political career. The law he was studying was only to be a stepping-stone.
Our relationship never went smoothly, not even at the start. It looked one-sided to outsiders, Curtis in charge, me in thrall. But things aren't always what they seem, and they're never simple.
Just before we left Durham, I told him I didn't want to live with him anymore, that when we moved to D.C. I wanted to find a place of my own. I wasn't breaking up, I just needed some space, as we used to say. I wanted to slow things down. In a rare moment of self-knowledge, I understood that his possessiveness was hurtful, and that my complicity was borderline pathological.
Then, too, I simply wasn't prepared for total commitment. I still needed a lot of room to act out, a lot of freedom to self-destruct, and I didn't want all that stability Curtis's good side represented-well, I wanted it, but I was afraid of reverting to type and blowing it in some huge, spectacular way.
I couldn't believe what happened next. He tried to talk me out of it, of course, being very reasonable and methodical as only Curtis can be, but for once I stood firm. Then he mocked me and ridiculed me, and that was harder to take, but somehow I did. I wouldn't give in.
So he started drinking. - - It's the Lloyd family vice. It's a bad one, no question, but what a luxury, I've always thought, to come from a family with only one serious flaw. But Curtis didn't drink, or hardly at all, maybe a beer on Saturday afternoon or one glass of wine in a restaurant, and I'd end up finishing it for him. He was supposed to take the D.C. bar exam in three weeks, and he'd been studying for it like a monk for months. The day after our big blowup over living together, I came home from school (I was still doing an art history master's then) and found him passed out on the couch. I thought he was sick-it just didn't register, not even when I saw the whiskey bottie sticking up between the cushions. When I figured it out, I thought, Oh, this is just an aberration, and I scoffed at him, gave him a stern, disapproving lecture while I poured coffee down his throat and pushed him into the shower. He never said anything, not one word: blind drunk, he could still control himself.
When he sobered up enough to function, he-put on clean clothes and went out, still not speaking. (What a potent weapon silence is.) He came back with four fifths of vodka, and for the next six days proceeded to drink them behind the locked bedroom door.
I was- frantic. As I've said, we had very few mutual friends, and no one I felt comfortable calling. I called his parents in Savannah. It was futile, the conversation surreal, like trying to interest a fish in the fact that its offspring is drowning. Once when Curtis was in the bathroom, I ran in the bedroom and tried to steal his booze stash. I thought he might die-I thought he was poisoning himself. He was-he looked like death, smelly and foul and unkempt, doubly shocking in a man who's usually so fastidious. He caught me before I could escape with the bottles, and for the first and only time in our lives, he struck me. Not a hard blow, he was too drunk, but I lost my balance and cut my forehead on the doorpost.
Curtis saw the blood and started to weep. He went back in the bathroom and vomited. I thought it was over, that that would end it, but he staggered back to his room and started drinking again.
I gave up.
"I won't leave you," I told him, both of us crying like children. "We'll find a place in Washington, a wonderful apartment on the Hill, and we'll be rich and happy and you'll be famous, you'll be president and I'll be first lady, and we'll always be together." He had the shakes, he couldn't stop sobbing, dry, racking barks of pain that I'll never forget, although nothing like that, - nothing close to that, ever happened again. His life, once he recovered, went back to normal, and he was completely his old serious, sober, focused self. - That terrified me and thrilled me, the unimaginable notion that I might have power over him-that I could ruin his life by simply taking myself out of it. An awesome responsibility, I thought. I would have to be so careful and loving, so delicate with him.
It took years to see-and then I only saw it in blurred flashes, never clearly, never for long-that it was just another game, that he was still the one with the power, not me. Like a child holding his breath to get his way.
Well, that analogy is even truer now, isn't it-Curtis threatening his own death to get his way. But this time he's gone too far. His truecolors are visible at last even to me, the blind woman. It's over. I think it's over. How could I stay with a man that much crazier than I am?