by Ben Peller
Silence and I have always shared an uneasy relationship, if only because when confronted with too much silence I tend to think too much. This almost always leads me to questioning where exactly we go when we die, why God allows so much torture to exist in the world He allegedly created and watches over, and other questions only foolishly curious people may consider. Hence, even when alone I’m constantly talking aloud to one of the five or six people running around in my head, discussing wonderfully mundane subjects such as the latest sandwich special at Jack In the Box or which celebrity’s going to have naked pictures popping up on the Internet next (I call it “The Naked Pool”).
When with a woman I find silence a challenge. I’m curious about what she’s thinking. Did I smell? Was I an asshole last night? Did she think Brad Pitt was better looking than me? Even though the Brad Pitt question is a bit of a no-brainer, my ego manages to work it into my mind on occasion. One of the many cool things about being with Helena was that when with her I didn’t question myself all that much. I’d always been content to feel that she was thinking good thoughts, if not about me, then about something. Now, for the half an hour ride back to my place, the silence between Helena and I was agony. Her imagined thoughts were torture. Dudley was better in bed than me, he was a better lover, a better artist, a better everything. She loved him now, not me.
As we pulled up to my apartment building, she said slowly, “Will I-”
I opened the door and jumped out of the car, even though we hadn’t stopped. I stumbled, fell, and skinned my elbow on the pavement. I didn’t want to hear her question, didn’t want to think about an answer. All I wanted was to get the hell away from her, to someplace where I could be alone to ramble to myself and not be tortured by thoughts about how much love could hurt.
I spent the next several hours in my rocking chair, cocktailing away and listening to my iPod, consciously avoiding any Air Supply or Chicago songs I’d downloaded while in my first weeks with Helena. Lost In Love, Even the Nights Are Better, You’re the Inspiration. My ass. Tonight belonged to every broken hearted country singer I’d ever downloaded. I dozed off to B.J. Thomas’ Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.
I awoke to the ringing of the phone. It was dark outside. I glanced at the caller ID. Helena. Don’t answer, I declared to myself firmly. Never talk to her again.
It took just three rings for my heart to overrule this verdict. “Hello,” I answered.
“Shawn, I want to come over,” she said in a quiet voice. “Dudley and I are walking around here, trying not to look each other in the eye. We both feel bad about what happened last night. You’ve got to understand, I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t even remember anything. We’re both so embarrassed.”
“Fine,” I snorted. “Come over.” I hung up the phone, vowing that once she arrived I’d give her a piece of my mind.
By the time she arrived and knocked on my door I’d worked myself into a proper “somebody did me wrong” rage. As soon as Helena came in I fell upon her, kissing her face all over, enraged at my own weakness. How was it possible for me to be in love with someone who’d hurt me so deeply?
“Why…?” I asked out loud. “Why did-“
Helena gripped my cheeks with her left hand. “Just please shut up and fuck me,” she said.
Within three minutes we were both naked and on my bed. Our motions were frenzied enough to already cause the silk sheets to lose their hold on three of the four corners of the mattress. She climbed on top of me and gasped as I entered her.
Her cries both excited and angered me. Not less than twenty-four hours ago I’d heard her express the same passion with another man while I’d been locked out. It wasn’t that she’d shared her body with someone else; it was that she’d made me feel like garbage while doing so. She’d wanted to hurt me. She’d wanted to carve a hole in my heart.
“Ow! Jesus, Shawn! Stop! You’re hurting me!”
I realized I was slapping her on her rear flank, but the contact was several steps more severe than the usual playful spanking type we’d often indulged in. Still she stayed on top of me as I tried to stop but continued to slap her flesh. She deserved it, after all. She’d betrayed me.
“You fucking whore,” I heard myself say. “You’re a slut!”
She lowered her head into my shoulder and whispered, “Yes. But I’m your whore.”
As if this were a password of some sort, we both came. I shot myself deep inside of her, and knew I’d never feel the same about her or myself again.
We fell asleep that night, not wrapped in each other’s arms like we usually did. We lay opposite each other, but still made sure that our bodies were touching. Before I drifted off I reached back and groped for her hand. When I found it, she squeezed back.
My dreams that night were a jumble of scenarios that would’ve given Sigmund Freud an orgasm. The ones I remember the most clearly were watching my mother getting fucked by a cow while I watched bound in chains. Another, more hazy one, featured me walking through a forest while cats darted in and out of bushes, none of them Georgette. The champion, though, was the one in which I was swimming through some kind of ocean and there were a bunch of little Shawns surrounding me, and they were chanting “you’ll never catch us, you’ll never catch us.”
This was the one that I awakened screaming to. Helena was already shaking me. “Shawn, what’s wrong?”
“Jesus,” I said, thinking of her, of us. “What isn’t?”
I got up and made coffee. We shared a cup in accursed silence, and then she said, “I’d better go.”
“Fine, go back to your big Daddy Dudley.” I said sulkily, pissed at myself for sounding like a wounded child but unable to sound otherwise. “Your Facebook fairy!” I added.
“You know why I did what I did last night? You would tell me about how you used to have sex with so many other people… swinger parties, alleyways, and God knows where else… but you would call me a whore when we had sex. It’s like you wanted me to be a whore, while you’re the one who’s been a whore. You’re the biggest whore in all of Los Angeles!”
It was hard to tell which was more bitter, the coffee I was sipping or the pill Helena was jamming down my throat. It was true. During the early stages of our relationship I’d been open with Helena and had revealed to her that I’d sometimes attended an occasional swinger’s party (“research,” I called it) and that in the decade I’d lived in Los Angeles I’d engaged in threesomes, foursomes, and even fivesomes on occasion.
“The biggest whore in all of Los Angeles?” I asked timidly, biting back an urge to ask her if she was including San Fernando Valley, the official porn capital of the nation. Or Orange County, the unofficial freak capital of the nation.
“The biggest whore I’ve ever met out here,” she snorted. “And to think I fell so in love with you.”
“But I fell in love with you, too!” I maintained. “I just had trouble realizing it…”
“Ha!” she shrieked. “I admit the other night I was drunk. I was fucking plastered. And I wanted to show you, Shawn Michals, what a whore I could be! I did it to hurt you, you sonofabitch!”
She had her coffee cup cocked and I tensed up, again sensing the disturbing similarities between this woman who I loved and my mother, who used to let fly with objects aimed at my head on a regular basis.
But the only motion Helena made was to set down her coffee cup, then swipe at her eyes. “And I hate myself for it,” she said quietly.
“You really don’t remember any of it?” I asked, setting my own cup down.
“No,” she sighed. “I was drunk. I was blacked out.”
“Maybe you should go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” I said. “You could share and tell a roomful of fellow alcoholics that when you get drunk you act like a fucking whore!”
As soon as these words escaped me I knew I had no excuse; even I knew how cruel they were.
Helena stood quickly and tripped over a stray sneaker as
she ran to the door. “Goodbye, Shawn!” she cried. “I never want to see you again!”
I wanted to call back to her, tell her I wanted her to stay, but a stupid pride held my tongue.
Good, I told myself with the kind of manufactured anger that’s usually based on justifying one’s behaving like an asshole. She’s gone.
I poured another cocktail but didn’t drink it. I didn’t feel like drinking. The biggest whore in all of Los Angeles? In a land where so many careers have been advanced and so many take advantage of or get taken advantage of by others in a sexual manner on a daily basis, “the biggest whore” was a big shoe to fill.
I tried talking to myself in an effort to negate all the thoughts bombarding me, but couldn’t. Helena had fallen in love with me, as I had with her. But for some reason it had taken her having sex with another guy and humiliating me in the process to make me realize just how much I’d plunged into the void of affection, one in which I’d sworn at the age of eight never to chance again.
Was this love? No wonder I tried to run from it every chance I got.
Finally I managed to establish a debate with myself on the advantages and disadvantages of soy burgers versus hamburgers. I was interrupted by a phone call. My caller ID pegged it as Helena’s number. The strange thing was that I had absolutely no desire to answer it. I had a feeling that any reunion of ours would be like inviting a hurricane and a tornado to dance with one another.
The answering machine beeped to life. “Shawn, I just wanted you to know, Shawn, that last night you actually broke a vein in my leg. It’s swelling up. I just want you to know that, because you did this. And don’t try to get out of it, either. And I just want you to know that you really hurt my body!”
I snapped up the phone. “No way,” I said.
“You did!”
“I don’t believe you!”
“I can come over there and show you!”
“Fine!” I replied, and banged my finger into the OFF button of my phone.
Helena arrived twenty minutes later. She limped into my apartment cursing. I assumed this was for effect.
“So,” I declared. “Let’s see the battle scars.”
She glared at me, then lifted up her skirt. I gasped. There were two massive bruises on the upper flank of her thigh.
“God,” I said, taking a big swallow of my drink. “What the hell happened to you?”
“You happened to me, you asshole!” she yelled. “You did this to me.”
She grabbed my free hand and ran it along her upper thigh. Sure enough, one of the bruises was swollen, evidence of some kind of burst vessel. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. These weren’t the slight marks left by light open handed slaps. These were wounds. If Helena were to show these bruises to a District Attorney, it was quite possible that assault and battery charges might be filed.
I sank into a chair, thoroughly ashamed. I’d been guilty of a lot of things in my life. Acting like an asshole, being too loud, too arrogant, too everything. But I’d never thought I’d be capable of inflicting this kind of abuse on a woman I claimed to love.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her.
Helena leaned into me. “I’m sorry, too,” she whispered into my ear. “I hurt you. So you hurt me back. But I wanted to come here to make amends.”
I leaned back. “Amends?” I asked. “That sounds a bit Alcoholics Anonymousish.”
She smiled. “Where do you think I just came from? It was my first meeting in a long time. Now I want to not only make amends but apologize. And thank you, Shawn. You’ve helped remind me that I’m an alcoholic-“
“Wait a minute,” I objected bewilderedly. “I thought I was supposed to be the alcoholic.”
Helena’s smile remained rigidly pleasant. “I’ve had issues with it in the past I didn’t tell you about, but with this… well, I’m ready to accept that I’m powerless over alcohol. I was kind of a blackout drunk in college.”
I smiled back at her. “Were you ‘sorta’ pregnant, too?”
Her smile exploded into a short guffaw. “God, I’m gonna miss you making me laugh so much.”
“Miss me…?” I ventured.
Helena gripped my hand. Her eyes were a tauntingly flourishing brown. “Shawn, I can’t be in a relationship with another alcoholic. I just can’t.”
“What if I stopped drinking?” I challenged, although this possibility was admittedly slim.
“You’d still be an alcoholic,” she shook her head. “And we alcoholics just aren’t good as far as intimacy goes. You know the saying: we alcoholics don’t have relationships. We take hostages.”
“Funny,” I agreed. “Did you just hear that at the meeting you came from?”
She nodded.
So I walked Helena to the door and wished her well, honestly, on her path to sobriety.
“It’s not a path to sobriety, Shawn,” she corrected me. “It’s a path of sobriety.”
“A path of sobriety,” I repeated with a straight face, then kissed her on the forehead. “Take it easy, Helena.” I said. “And stay off Facebook, for chrissakes.”
This time she didn’t laugh, as I’d hoped she would. On the contrary she reached out and ran her fingers down my cheek. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she whispered, as sober tears welled in her eyes.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said. We stood there for many seconds, touching for what we both knew would most likely be the final time, even though there was still a well of love inside each of us for the other.
Then, as if on the same team, we turned away from one another simultaneously.
I closed the door softly, then retired to my rocking chair and began to talk to myself. Then I told myself to shut the fuck up because I had some thinking to do.
I’d consulted a counselor a few years back, after my first DUI. We’d discussed the difference between “heavy drinkers” and “alcoholics.” Heavy drinkers could drink and still function. The Rat Pack, William Faulkner, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who knows how many assorted strippers, lawyers, and professional gamblers… the list seemed endless.
Then too, there were alcoholics. The Montgomery Clifts, F. Scott Fitzgeralds, the people whose lives were cut short. Where in hell was the difference?
“If you can go a month without drinking and still write, still feel a passion for life, chances are you’re simply a heavy drinker who likes to drink. Either way, you have to decide for yourself if you’re addicted to alcohol or not,” the counselor had told me. She’d been eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Eighty years old. She’d been around, she knew her stuff.
So I’d gone a month without drinking. It had been okay. I’d written, inhaled and exhaled, and gradually found myself becoming more pissed off at the world, one day at a time. So I’d had a cocktail and then all seemed right again. Maybe I was addicted to alcohol, maybe not.
I did know this. If I hadn’t been a little buzzed at the L.A. Festival of Books, I never would’ve had the nerve to take over a booth and begin selling copies of my manuscript. As a result, I probably never would’ve met Helena. Hence, I never would’ve plowed into one of the most invigorating and agonizing experiences of my life. Was alcohol to thank? Curse?
I reached out now, not for a drink but for my iPod. I rocked slowly in my chair and played the songs I’d downloaded during my relationship with Helena, songs that had seemed to be not just music but blueprints to a relationship that promised everlasting love. As Kenny Chesney’s Anything But Mine flowed with a sickly sweetness into my ears, I pondered if it were possible that I in fact was addicted to something other than alcohol, something that my relationship with Helena had truly opened me up to. Love. In A.A. meetings alcohol was termed as “cunning, baffling, and powerful.” To me, this was a more accurate description of a super villain than an elixir I’d always considered nothing more than a very dear friend. But love… now that was another thing entirely. The word we defined as love had a supernatural power; it could tear one’s heart in two. I’d r
ead somewhere that upon falling under the spell of love one’s brain releases an avalanche of endorphins, and this lasts for approximately two years before the brain builds up an immunity of sorts and stops dishing out its “love drug.” Once that happens, lovers are on their own; it’s like their dealer just got busted and they’re forced to truly look at one another through chemically un-heightened eyes. Kind of like asking an acid freak to look at a flower while straight and not see galaxies imploding within its pedals and little eyes peeking out of its stem, but instead simply the beauty of a flower.
I thought back to the intervention Helena had planned for me. The sounds of her meowing to Dudley still looted my heart and elevated a wish to die, so that I would never run the risk of falling in love again. Lords have mercy, I was ashamed, shattered, rocking in a rocking chair, too depressed to even drink. I felt trapped in a Conway Twitty song. ***Two?
My voices came to my rescue, pointing out that at least Helena had gotten sober as a result of that night. Helena knew now she was an alcoholic. And was taking her steps. Good for her.
Well, why not me, too?
I could get sober as well, I concluded, rocking rapidly now. After all, I was certainly powerless over love and it certainly had made my life unmanageable. There were people who could handle the power of love, its wild ups and downs and seemingly incomprehensible grasp. I just wasn’t one of them.
Could it be that there were “heavy lovers” just as there could be “heavy drinkers?”
I picked up my drink and toasted my decision. “My name is Shawn,” I said. “And I’m a lovaholic.”
I took a sip and embraced my newfound sobriety from the demon called love.
I had three weeks sober until I met Eileen at a bookstore. Purely innocent, I told myself, as we made a dinner date. She was a struggling author as well.
The night of our dinner date I noted the way her voice sparked as she pronounced panache with just the right intonation, the manner in which her fingers danced as she scanned the menu, and the habit she had of saying, “but that’s just me” in a way that made it sound like that was just her and she was cool with that. We ordered a bottle of wine, then another, and talked for hours before winding up back at my apartment…