When the Messenger Is Hot (17 page)

Eventually I stopped crying on a daily basis, although to be honest I never felt like I was over Steven, even though I started dating again about a year later. I kind of went the opposite direction at first with the whole artsy/grunge/whatever thing and dated this preppy guy who liked me a lot. He was in some kind of sales, but he chewed his fingernails all the way down to little stumps, which made me not want to have them on me, and also I didn't think we had that much in common. I gave it a few weeks, which I thought was me being open and willing but which maybe backfired because it gave him a chance to like me a lot and when it became obvious that he was not going to break up with me, I finally said something about things just not being right, and he said,
I thought you were everything I was looking for
. Which is among the nicest things anyone's ever said to me, but I wasn't in love with him or really even attracted to him. He was just kind of regular.

I had been back in New York for a while and the money I'd saved from Chicago was starting to run out (it was possible that I had misinterpreted the meaning of the promise that “fear of economic insecurity will leave us”— I'm pretty sure I ignored the words
fear of
because at this time I was having both actual economic insecurity and fear about it) because most of the kids in the family I taught suddenly stopped making movies, and I went to L. A. for a while and worked on a TV series, but I can easily skip the L.A. period because it was everything you hear about how much L.A. sucks and worse. Some of the meetings were okay, but there was this one meeting on the beach where one way to be of service was to be the suntan lotion guy, that you were to believe that if you were dispensing suntan lotion at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous you were somehow serving god, which I just thought, I'm not saying it's not a nice thing but come on.

But I didn't want to be in New York any more than I wanted to be in L.A., although I was starting to not want to be anywhere, and then I started thinking about Chicago again, and I'm sure there were some people who thought my wanting to move to Chicago was a good example of a geographic, which means when you move somewhere because you're not happy with yourself and then nothing changes. I didn't feel like that was the case, because I felt like I had a special emotional connection with Chicago, and then I put on this Dan Fogelberg record that I seriously had not listened to in about fifteen years, and the first two songs were “Illinois” and “Part of the Plan,” which I'm sorry whatever anyone thinks but it was the most clear sign I've ever gotten in my life, and I started packing my suitcases immediately, even though I didn't have a very big plan for what I was going to do after the move.

And I was packing one of my suitcases when Steven called, and I hadn't talked to him for over two years, and I couldn't believe it, and he started basically giving me a qualification over the phone and saying that he had a very bad problem with crack, and that his partners locked him out of the bar and said, Don't
come back until you're off crack
. He said they rhymed it just like that. And he asked me about Alcoholics Anonymous. And I told him about some of the meetings I'd been to in Chicago, and it came up in the course of the conversation that I was actually about to move there and he said that there was an empty apartment in his building and that he would really be grateful if I moved into it, which I interpreted every which way, and I was there twenty-four hours later sitting in an A.A. meeting with him, which I have to tell you was a rather profound moment. Between Dan Fogelberg and the phone call there was not one reservation I had about jumping on the next plane, and even though this long story is far from over, I still have not one regret about having moved to Chicago. I had strong feelings of claustrophobia in the City of New York and was unable to obtain any kind of lasting serenity there. Steven gave me the biggest apartment I'd ever lived in for not very much money, and it had a porch where I immediately planted flowers, and I felt very close to nature that way. I won't say it wasn't a little strange having him for my landlord. So there we were in that meeting and suddenly all that time later I just had the blinding revelation that the real reason Steven and I had met was so that I could help him find the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was just a lucky thing that I happened to get a great apartment out of the deal. And a few weeks after I got there I got a great job teaching preschool, which again happened with very little effort on my part but because I mentioned it to one sober person.

Although he no longer had long, flowing brown hair (which I guess was no longer cool), I of course fell in love with him all over again, within minutes, and I felt a little bit vindicated, not grateful that he had to go through crack addiction, but that there was now solid evidence that the real reason he broke up with me was because his disease was still progressing, that he did, as I suspected, have a drug and alcohol problem. There were countless moments between us during his early sobriety when I felt his loving feelings toward me, but having a few more twenty-four hours than I did when I first got into the program of A.A. I felt that I did not want to jeopardize his sobriety by even so much as talking about the romantic connection between us, even though it was very hard when he was holding my hand in his truck or standing around my doorway for too long staring at me when he dropped me off or hugging me for too long or crying on my shoulder, literally, every day for weeks, or sitting on my porch wrapped in a blanket in seventy-degree weather when I wasn't even home, or telling me that he felt like I was the only person who understood him, over and over and over again. There was no doubt that we were closer than we had ever been. I did not know, for example, the whole time we were together, that he read books. I knew he was smart but I did not know that he liked to read books. I thought he was more of the kind of mind that just remembered a lot of facts about things like why birds fly in formation (which impressed me but which I could not really contribute to). We also talked often about god, whom we had not previously discussed ever, and for a person newly off crack, he had some enlightened thoughts that had never occurred to me before. I often go back and forth in my mind about everything happening for a reason, and a lot of times it's not an enjoyable mental journey because I can see both why it would and wouldn't be true. Sometimes good things happen with such a forceful serendipity that it seems really true, but then other bad things happen that there seems to be no godly explanation for, which I'm sure is something that greater theological minds than ours had pondered but anyway not being in close touch with any great theological minds, I was in sort of a thing where I was polling people I knew (which I often did on different subjects when I did not know what to do), and when I asked him if he thought everything happened for a reason he said he guessed that he did, and he gave me what I thought was a very deep but simple explanation for why the bad things would happen, which was that we might not necessarily always know the reason. The example he gave was what if I had never met Jake? And it was true that a chain of people joining Alcoholics Anonymous formed because of my having met Jake, and that even if I hadn't moved to Chicago, Steven himself would surely have gone to meetings as a result of having met me, and that all during the bad time I was having when I was with Jake I could not have known that something very positive would come out of it. Steven's idea was that it just happened that I eventually found out the reason, but that sometimes you might not, like, some old guy could crash his car into yours and you would be very upset about having a crashed car, but maybe the old guy would suddenly realize that he should not be driving anymore, but you would have no way of knowing that. I thought it was very enlightened because I had been concentrating very hard on trying to figure things out with regard to this god thing, when maybe I didn't need to worry about it so much. Plus it's just a bonus when you can talk to any guy about god.

There were a lot of times, though, when Steven had things to say that were almost as senseless as things that Jake said, except I knew the difference was that Jake was not newly sober and a lot of times newly sober people say things that they think are startling revelations of life but again come across to anyone listening as a scrambling of sentences, which in New York A.A. they have a totally made-up word for called “mocus,” the origin of which I do not know. Jake was not mocus, and eventually, Steven was mostly not either.

It became weird, though, after a while of living in his building. We saw each other every single day, either in the building, or at a meeting, or socializing with our sober friends, many of whom we were both friends with and who did not have bones through their noses although I had the feeling that the way I felt uncomfortable around the bone people was similar to how Steven felt around most of the nonbone people. As a result of the discomfort (I thought), he showed up at my apartment one afternoon with bleached-blond hair and a bad tattoo (I thought he was having an early midlife-crisis thing due to having joined mostly nonbone people in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous) that was meant to be a yin/yang symbol (him still being very much in touch with his 10 percent gay side — his words, not mine) but which, it was agreed upon by most people, looked more like a turtle, which held no particular meaning for him, saying,
You're the only one who understands me
, when the truth was even though he was right, I wasn't necessarily even telling him all my understandings about his psychological development because it wouldn't have been polite. Anyway, living in the building of your ex-boyfriend tends to foster any latent penchant for stalking inside a person, whereby if you're the sort of person who might obsess endlessly about what went wrong in a relationship but would never drive over to their house, and suddenly you're at their house all the time because it's where you live, I'm pretty sure only the very strongest person would be able to avoid looking out the window every time they heard a car door slam, or remembering the exact particular sound of someone's car starting, or interpreting the movements of the car (including nonstressful movements like times when you know he's going to work, and more emotionally testing movements like the car is not there in the morning when you go to work and trying to know that even though eight
A.M
. is among the times of day when he could just very well still be out from the night before, it could also be a time when he is out from the night before and sleeping at his new girlfriend's house), or knowing all the regularly parked cars on your street and when one comes that looks exactly like the one your girlfriend Sarah drives, who you remembered he said was cute that one time, and you imagine their entire secret romance and the ensuing confrontation you will have with the guy who hasn't been your boyfriend for three years. One time when he was between broken-down cars I lent him my car to go do something or other and he didn't come back until three in the morning, which I realized was probably a mistake when I remembered the time I lent Brian fifteen dollars, and I couldn't get the image of Steven and some girl kissing in my car out of my head, which I guess was not what happened anyway, but I didn't offer my car to him after that, and when he sold the building and finally moved out I was glad to be relieved of my stalking tendencies. But over time it was almost an exact duplication of our original romance with numerous boundary crossings but absolutely without any actual sexual contact for two years, during which time I stopped speaking to him at least twice in an effort to remember that he was not going to be my future husband. I cut eight inches off my hair and got a tattoo myself (of a butterfly, symbolizing transformation, and mine came out perfectly the first time).

Almost on the day of his first anniversary of being sober, Steven started dating a girl who had a bone through her forehead (at the front, between her eyebrows), and she was again tall and although she was not a supermodel I knew that in his mind she was, and I was very despondent about it. I asked him how she felt about his being 10 percent gay and he said that he wasn't 10 percent gay, that I made him say that and that his making out with a guy now and then didn't constitute a percentage of homosexuality but a sense of fun, and she was totally cool with it and that theirs was not a relationship that had to have conventional limitations anyway, although I guess I was supposed to understand that it was some kind of monogamy. I said many prayers for their greatest happiness, which is a suggestion they give you in A.A. for occasions like this when they think you are really the one with the problem and not the other people. One of the kids in my class at school was this very advanced two-year-old girl named Arabia (their language skills ranged from having 500-word vocabularies to grunting) who listened to Coltrane and woke up from a nap one day and said,
I am having the most miserable day of my life, and I will never be happy again
. I said,
I dig that, Arabia
, and we sat there on her cot nodding our heads at the floor for a while sharing the misery. She was eventually happy again and miserable again about twenty more times during the course of any given day, which you'd think might have been some kind of lesson to me but I was very much focused on obtaining an overall happiness. Anyway, it was very obvious then that I was no longer the only person Steven could talk to, because he was hardly ever calling me, and I met the girlfriend a few times and she impressed me as being way more unhappy than was even possible for me to imagine (I'm just saying that for me, it wouldn't be a celebration of my greatest joyfulness to stick something sharp into my face, and if the reverse is true among bone-wearing people, then, you know, my bad). I was figuring out that in Steven's cool world it was not very cool to be happy, and I knew that life had a lot of experiences to offer but I desired to be more happy than unhappy if at all possible and felt that I was making steady progress toward that goal. And then one day I stopped by Dr. Bob's to say hi and I had some trepidations about his girlfriend maybe being there, which she was, but on that day she engaged me in conversation and although I wouldn't have changed the unhappy impression I had of her she didn't seem as totally horrible a person as would have made it much easier for me to fully hate her, and also she was displaying some of the mocus quality I had seen in Steven earlier (even though she was not sober at all and I wouldn't have known if she was drunk, although there is some similarity between being drunk and being mocus; mocus people don't slur their words, but their meaning is just as unclear) and I thought well maybe they are really right for each other since they seem to share the mocus language, and I felt like it was a positive experience for me because I was not feeling jealous at all, and I had a few really good months of believing I was over it.