by Ben Peller
As our love affair was busy going from zero to sixty in two and a half seconds, Helena began to get after me for an exclusive one-on-one situation.
“Why don’t you want to submit to a monogamous relationship?” she constantly asked me.
Submit? The very phrasing of her appeal made “monogamous relationship” sound like the equivalent of a professional wrestler’s finishing maneuver.
“I know why,” she would follow up, answering her own question. “It’s because you’re already married to that bottle.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I would counter, making sure to follow this up with a theatrical sip of whatever cocktail I usually happened to have in hand. It felt kind of cool to have these discussions, as they enabled me to behave how I’d always imagined a character in a Tennessee Williams play might. One of my dark secrets as a writer was that I’d never actually read a Tennessee Williams play, but I’d seen Cat On A Hot Tin Roof enough times to gauge this as a reasonably regular scene in his worlds. By sparring with Helena over my alleged overindulgence I figured I was acting out my unfulfilled dreams of being a Theater major indirectly.
“The other night, after you passed out… again.” Helena added needlessly. “You were snoring so loud I couldn’t sleep. So I tried to wake you up. But you were just dead to the world.”
“When that happens, just nudge me a little,” I suggested.
“Ha! Nudge? Nudge? Really, Shawn? I was prodding you, poking you, and then I finally shoved a couple fingers up your anus.”
“Yikes,” I said, trying dimly to recall what might have bubbled up in my dreams that night.
Helena was on a roll now. “And you still didn’t wake up!” she wailed, shaking her head. “I swear I could’ve shoved a crowbar up there, pulled out your intestines, and you would’ve just kept snoring.”
To knock out this rather disturbing visual, I opted for humor, “Maybe you should’ve just given me a blowjob. That would’ve woken me up for sure.”
Helena snorted. “I did start giving you a blowjob, and you still didn’t wake up.”
“Did I at least get hard?” I asked, frankly curious.
“Oh, you got hard all right. And I climbed on top of you and rode myself to three orgasms,” she declared. “Actually it was pretty cool. I didn’t have to hear you rambling on about ‘are you my little whore’ this and ‘aren’t I the best you’ve ever had’ that. Christ, it was a relief. Like taking advantage of a corpse.”
I was trapped between amazement at the human body’s ability to respond to stimuli even when unconscious and the idea of being told that I was a better lover as a dead man than a live one.
“As a matter of fact,” Helena went on. “You might’ve called it a scene of ‘dead man fucking.’”
As Helena cackled away at her own wit, I curled myself into a fetal position, feeling violated.
I promised to try and never pass out around Helena again, and definitely made sure that the crowbar I sometimes used to pry the freezer door open after I’d procrastinated about defrosting the freezer was securely hidden deep in my closet under a pile of blankets I hadn’t used in years.
Meanwhile, in Helena’s mind, my lack of commitment continued to be married to my love of cocktails.
Three weeks later she informed me, “The other day, when you came over to help Toby with his English homework, he said you smelled like a big martini.”
Toby was Helena’s fourteen year old son. I’d met him a few times, and we got along quite well. His comment about me smelling like a martini shook me a bit, not because how her son gauged my smell. If Toby wanted to become a drinker, he’d become one with or without my help. No, I was actually a bit scared that, without my quite realizing it, Helena and I had reached a point in our relationship where I was becoming an important enough player in her life for she and her son to discuss. Until now, I’d been used to being on my own, a loner in a room pouring out words with a blank computer screen and books his only friends. Now here I’d been pulled by my love for Helena into a bog I swore I’d never visit: family drama.
“And Toby isn’t the only one who’s noticed how much you drink,” Helena went on. “My friend Erin said the same thing. She saw you at my party last week, when you pulled your pants down and danced on my table… a two thousand dollar table, I might add.”
“But your cousin requested me to!” I pointed out. He’d also promised to buy one of my books once it was published and leave a positive review on amazon. So, like any ambitious writer, I’d put on the clown’s mask and danced. Though even while I’d been doing it I wondered how often Shakespeare had been reduced to “duty dancing.”
All that was irrelevant in the face of Helena’s immediate fury. “Face it, Shawn!” she implored. “You’re an alcoholic and you need help. Erin and I have already talked about this, and we think what you need is an intervention.”
Intervention. This sounded dubious. There are cool words such as marquee, radiant, or angora. But intervention? The word’s reliance on so many hardened syllables has always made its pronunciation too official for my taste.
It turned out Helena had the perfect date in mind, as well as what she termed as “the perfect mate to help you ambush your demons.” His name was Dudley, and he was one of nearly two thousand friends Helena had accumulated on Facebook, most of them fellow artists scattered around the world. Painters from Czechoslovakia, sculptors from Brazil, even a dancer who listed their hometown as “Worlds Beyond.”
Helena’s house was known throughout the Facebook community as a crash pad for other artists when they came into town to peddle their wares at a festival, do an exhibit, etc. My “perfect mate,” Dudley, was due to be in town the weekend of my planned intervention. Dudley was in his sixties, and according to his Facebook page, composed portraits mirroring the rise and fall of humanity’s tide in the face of God’s impartial gaze. He’d been addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and was currently on lithium for bipolar disorder. Not to mention he was from Indiana. Being from the Midwest myself, I’ve always been suspicious that the majority of people who grow up in that area wanting to be crazy artists are usually just crazy. When I suggested to Helena it might not be the greatest idea in the world to let someone with such a troubled past stay in her house just solely based on knowing him as an “artist” through Facebook, she laughed. “Not all artists are crazy, Shawn,” she wagged a finger at me. “Besides, not only will my friend Erin be here, but Dudley’s going to be a super great person to have at your intervention. He can tell you about his past struggles with addictions. We’re going to help you, Shawn. And you can feel free to invite any friends and family you may want present.”
This suggestion was ludicrous, being that I didn’t have any friends and I had no desire for the few remaining family members that still spoke to me to have to undergo some wild woman bemoaning that I chose with liberal judgment which occasions (i.e. the sun rising) I found appropriate to pour a cocktail. I sighed, “I just don’t like the idea of people judging me. I mean, you’re one thing. You’ve known me for almost five months so chances are I’ve made a fool of myself in front of you on at least a few occasions. But some stranger from Indiana? And your friend, who I barely know-“
Helena played her trump card. “If you agree to come to this intervention, I’ll personally buy twenty more copies of your manuscript. For fifteen dollars apiece.”
Reassuring myself that I wasn’t acting like a whore but instead as merely an artist, I proposed I come to Helena’s house that Saturday at four in the afternoon.
“No, make it eight o’clock,” she responded.
“Just warning you, I’ll have to take the last bus down to your place,” I said. “At that time of night, on a Saturday night, there are no buses coming back up here. I’ll have to spend the night.”
“So spend it,” she said. “I’d like to see what you’re like in bed sober. Besides, Erin won’t be able to be here until seven.”
If Helena thought I was arriving at an “
intervention” sober, she was crazy. Nonetheless I agreed to eight o’clock.
Over the coming days, as Saturday evening neared, I grew more and more guilty. Here this woman was willing to shell out three hundred dollars for a ritual that, although I thought unnecessary, she really wanted to put me through. Obviously she was doing it out of some sort of love, and I wanted to return that love. Therefore, I decided not to bother bringing over any books to sell her.
That Saturday night Helena answered the door at five minutes before eight. “Baby!” she exclaimed. “You showed!”
“I promised I would,” I said.
She weaved a little slightly, and I caught the sharp scent of white wine. “Are you… drunk?” I asked.
“Dudley and I have been celebrating,” she announced, waving me in.
There Dudley sat on a chair in the living room. He was pudgy, with thin lips that graduated to an even thinner hairline. After shaking his hand and making small talk for two minutes he’d patted the top of his head with an expectant look about a dozen times, as though he expected to find a full head of hair there. He seemed a reasonable enough sort, and also seemed almost as drunk as Helena, who by now had snatched a nearly empty bottle of wine from the table and was knocking it back.
“How long have you two been drinking?” I asked.
Helena shrugged. “Around noon.”
Dudley nodded. “Congratulations on your sobriety, Shawn!”
In fact, I’d been drinking since around ten in the morning myself, on the grounds that if by some miracle this “intervention” succeeded in making me want to stop drinking, I should get at least one last good buzz under my belt. But I was nowhere near as tanked as these two.
“How many bottles of wine have you two gone through?” I asked.
Helena shrugged. “Three?”
“Where’s Erin?” I asked.
“Couldn’t make it,” Helena nodded. “I called her and told her to bother not to.”
“What happened to the intervention?” I asked, actually semi-disappointed. I’d been looking forward to justifying my alcoholism.
“Dudley and I decided that we should stay in. Celebrate together,” Helena slurred, and even though she was obviously blitzed her voice managed to ooze a blatantly suggestive tone that made me uneasy. Celebrate together?
“I’ll be right back,” she went on. “I have to go bathroom. Show him artwork, Dudley…”
As soon as Helena stumbled from the room, Dudley struggled to his feet. “Man,” he said. “She’s a piece of work.”
“Agreed,” I nodded.
“Lemme show you some of my stuff,” he said. “It’s in the kitchen.”
As he swayed past, a specific aroma assaulted me, one that although familiar I couldn’t quite place. Or, looking back, I didn’t quite want to place. I followed him into the kitchen and was greeted by the sight of an array of postcard sized cards lined on the kitchen floor. They were the infamous works of art his Facebook page described. Postcard sized portraits decorated with magic marker scrawls, glitter, and lint. To top off the effect of these works of art representing God’s impartiality, many of them had been glued together by those annoying things that come in packing boxes and wind up getting all over your floor the minute you open the box. They looked like something out of a second grade art class. Not that that was necessarily an insult. Some second graders are much better artists than so-called “professionals” that manage to pull the wool over the eyes of wealthy patrons.
“Not bad,” I said. “They seem really… honest.”
“Thanks, man,” Dudley replied. “I do canvases as well, but I like to think of these as my,” he clasped his chest, “little darlings.”
“Little darlings,” I repeated, staring at one that featured a dancing brown and red figure wearing a dress made of lint amidst a cloud of matchsticks. “They do seem darling.”
”You seem like a pretty cool guy.” Dudley said, and then he reached out and hugged me. It was then that it was impossible to deny exactly what scent he was wearing. The same sweet odor I’d had on me every time Helena and I had made love.
“Dude,” I pushed him off me with a little more force than necessary. “Did you and Helena sleep together today?”
“My God,” he moaned. “Did we ever.”
A strange note struck my heart. The vision of Georgette’s insides strewn all over the street infiltrated me and I quickly shook it away. After all, Helena and I certainly didn’t have any formal agreement of exclusivity with one another. But it seemed wrong that some stranger from Indiana she’d met on fucking Facebook could come waltzing into town and within hours of meeting her have his penis inside of her. She and I hadn’t had sex on our first meeting (though granted it had taken place in a rather exposed area of a public college campus), but for that matter we hadn’t had sex or even fondled one another during my first visit to her house. As I stared at Dudley delicately arranging and rearranging his little darlings, I became more and more confused. What did this man have that I didn’t have?
Helena came into the kitchen clad in nothing but a negligee. Her body looked magnificent, and there was lust in her eyes. “Ah,” she said. “A bad boy and a bad man.”
So maybe this was her plan. She’d proposed to me on previous occasions that she wanted to have a threesome with two men she’d trusted who came from, as she put it, varying generations. I’d thought she was kidding at the time, but apparently she hadn’t been. This was starting to make sense. I was the younger one, and now she’d recruited the older one. Feelings were mocking one another inside of me; my mind was battling my heart. Part of me wanted to concede to Helena how uncomfortable I was, that I had tripped into love with her without even realizing it until this moment. Still another, more pragmatic part acknowledged that this was a chance to help fulfill a fantasy of Helena’s and… hell, it was Saturday night. Besides, the planned intervention had obviously gone seriously off the tracks.
As I was ready to acknowledge that perhaps a threesome might be in order, thus fulfilling both my love for Helena plus my admiration for her as a free spirit, she grabbed Dudley’s arm and turned to me. “I’m really into this guy,” she said. “So wait out here, junior. He and I are gonna be real busy for a while.”
“But…” I began, and found I didn’t know what else to say.
Helena had no such problem. “You’re dismissed, got it?”
This was enough of a stunner to root me to the kitchen floor as she led Dudley out the door and down the hallway toward her bedroom. I knew that hallway; I could recall every painting Helena had hung up on the walls leading to her bedroom where we’d spent so many nights sleeping in each other’s arms. Knowing she was walking in there with some fresh partner seconds after telling me I was dismissed made me feel real low.
I felt low enough to trudge down the hallway, still clinging to a vague hope that this was just part of Helena’s elaborate scenario for an impromptu threesome. I was surprised to find the door to her bedroom wide open, and the room empty. Then I heard some moans of pleasure coming from behind the door of her son’s room.
Her son’s room? It seemed a bit strange they’d chosen that particular room. But then this whole thing was fucking strange. However, I figured, in for a penny…
So I went to open the door. And it was locked.
I wanted to knock. But then I heard Helena crying out, “I can’t believe I got this from Facebook. Oh, thank God for Facebook. I love you, Dudley. More than anyone. Ever.”
She’d expressed the same gratitude to God when we’d been having sex, but it had been for His creating an L.A. Festival of Books. She’d also told me I was special, how she loved me more than she’d ever loved anyone else. In light of ongoing events, these declarations had been reduced to cheap campaign promises soon to be broken. I’d gone from being special to being just another actor in the performance of her life.
Then I heard her meowing softly. If she’d rampaged out of the room aiming a gun at me, I coul
dn’t have fled down the hall any faster. A couple women in my past had accused me of using the words “I love you” as a weapon. Now, as I wandered out into the living room, Helena’s mews of pleasure like knives in my back, I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of karmic payback.
Maybe, I decided as I sank onto the sofa, I deserved to die alone in a small room somewhere.
I heard a door open. Helena walked out into the living room. “Don’t bother getting up,” she said. “I just came to get some water. He’s wearing me out. I’ve already come four times. Why stop now, right?”
I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the faucet running in the kitchen. She could’ve gone into her bathroom for water, I thought. She didn’t have to come and rub this in my face. I wanted to bolt up and plead with her not to go back in there, but I wasn’t strong enough. I kept my eyes closed tight as her footsteps on the carpet passed me. Then the door of her son’s bedroom closed again. I couldn’t hear if she locked it or not, but by then I didn’t have to.
The buses were no longer running and I didn’t have enough money for a taxi. A passionate man would’ve broken her son’s bedroom door down and pulled the woman he’d just realized how much he loved out of there. A vengeful man would’ve drawn a moustache on one of Helena’s paintings in the hallway and then gone into the kitchen and put all of Dudley’s artwork out of their misery by tearing them to shreds. A true card-carrying alcoholic would’ve cleaned out Helena’s liquor cabinet, downing one bottle after another.
All I could do was, for the first time in a long time, silently cry myself to sleep while trying not to think about a cat’s purr.
I awakened to something prodding me. It was Helena. Her hair was disheveled and there were streaks from where she’d sweated off her makeup. I swore silently at myself for thinking she still looked beautiful.
“I should take you home now,” she said.
I glanced at the clock. 8:15. Amazing how much could happen in just a little more than twelve hours. Suns set and rose, people died and were born, hearts were cracked open and deserted to bleed alone. We left her house and got in her car. It was a grey morning, a thin sheet of fog trapped in the air.