Evan noodled on the fret board and told himself: “Everyone has to live with their partner’s health problems, it’s part of it. Hang in there. It’s life.”
“C’mon darlin,’ we got to get going,” he would yell upstairs.
“Don’t rush me,” she’d scream back. The Earth had to move every day or she didn’t. She consumed fibre solutions twice a day.
“My mud,” she said and haunted the aisles of healthfood stores for Bowel Buddy cookies and other remedies, the pharmacy for suppositories.
“It says here you need to drink eight glasses of water a day with this stuff,” he told her reading from the can of fibre powder she mixed with water.
“I drink water.”
“You drink a small bottle of Perrier,” he said. “Without enough water, this fibre turns your bowels to concrete, you’d need dynamite to shit.”
“I drink enough water.”
Wine maybe, but not water. He tried getting her to eat fruit. She wouldn’t. He switched to brown rice and whole grain pastas, grain breads instead of her preferred piece of baguette for toast. She resisted but finally relented. The obsession over the daily dump remained. But the constipation was not only literal.
Turned out she couldn’t work hearing the TV or the humidifier or voices or visitors or the clothes dryer or even if he typed too loud. He pounded on the keys from his days in newspaper offices and typewriters.
“Why do you have to type so hard?” she’d say, over and over again. But she did allow him to play the guitar. “You can always play the guitar. It doesn’t bother me.” He had her permission.
Evan soon was afraid to talk too loud to the cat or talk on the phone or even talk to her. He felt anxious constantly. He became paranoid about coming downstairs from his office and using the kitchen to eat or cook. He found himself hovering upstairs waiting for her to finish work so he could descend, a prisoner to her neuroses in his own home. Was it his home?
“That’s the fourth time you’ve come down for a snack.”
“You’ve been out three times already today.” If he cooked, and he did all the cooking, he fretted over how much noise he was making with plates or cutlery or digging for pots. Finally, he had enough.
“You need to go back to your office upstairs,” he told her. “You’re making me fucking crazy.”
“Why do you need to go up and down so much?” she said. “Why can’t you just stay upstairs during the day and work?”
“When you pay my salary you can tell me how many breaks I’m allowed a day,” he sniped at her. “You can’t stand sound so stay upstairs. It’s a fucking house and I need to live in it, too.”
And then he left. And did something he had never done before. He checked into a cheap sleazy motel and gratefully locked the door behind him. He was free.
In substances there had always been relief. When he was 13 and sprained his neck diving, a doctor prescribed Valium and codeine. He fell in love. Valium softened the world’s edges and he became a lifelong convert. Later it was grass and hash. Mostly for pleasure but sometimes for self-medication, to ease the psychic pain or a tiff with a girlfriend. Later it was a flirtation with cocaine and then came the discovery that cocaine mixed with sex was a whole new world. His wife and he disappeared into the bedroom for years, a few times a week, sex marathons fuelled by cocaine. What could be better? Drug induced, indefatigable sexual hijinks and experimentation that would go on all night, every fantasy played out, all with love and tenderness. They bought toys and handcuffs and oils and vibrators and blindfolds and ties and porn and went to town on each other’s bodies.
The loneliness that had stalked him vaporized. They were partners in this sexual fantasy, a fantasy only because it was secret, often went till dawn and only pleasure mattered. That and how much powder was left.
Reality did not intrude. Sex straight was good, but under the influence there were no boundaries. Sure films and friends and dinners and weekends away were okay, but the combination of sex and drugs was a no-brainer. Nothing came close.
The sex was, in hindsight, another drug. In the delirium of lust and love it took his mind off the same things Annie worked full time to take her mind off. Wounds and scars that had never been treated. The shrinks would certainly disagree, but sex and drugs were a preferable coping mechanism to physical and verbal abuse, control and compulsive work.
He loved his ex-wife and, in those marathons, there was tenderness and intimacy and excitement he had never known again.
He remembered one night he had bought half a gram and they had eaten dinner and bathed and did a line and she lay naked on her stomach. And he kissed her buttocks but he was so turned on he entered her as she lay there, as slowly as he could. And she was wet and ready. She came instantly and began to weep.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said, tears on the pillow, reaching behind to pull his head to hers. “So beautiful.”
He stayed inside her after he came and was able to get hard again and they made love again and they both came quickly and held onto each other. They made love on the washing machine, on the stairs, against the wall, on armchairs and sofas and floors and in the shower and even a ladder. There were nights he came five or six times.
When they sold the house, he was taking a few bags out of the bedroom, taking a last look around. On the wall was an oil stain the shape of her two buttocks. Their love play always involved lots of oil and he remembered the night he had pushed her against the wall and made love to her as she stood there, spread eagled, her rear jammed against the fresh latex paint. The stain, like the memory, was permanent.
They were young and, if it was youthful folly, he would gladly go back and do it again.
In later years, his partners did not have an appetite for cocaine and preferred alcohol but when he needed to unplug, assignments done, deadlines brokered, or when work or a relationship was getting to him, white powder would be the escape of choice. It shut down the worries, blew away the exhaustion, and when the powder was done, you popped a few whatevers, washed down with a glass or two of wine and slept the sleep of an angel. Sometimes he figured the merciful sleep of the dead was a prime motivator to get high. He found relief both when he was up and then when he was down for the count. During that half a night and half a day, anxieties over films, plays, stories, relationship, money, future, were gratefully locked away.
He couldn’t stand being in the house with Annie anymore. He took a cheap motel room, but not before stopping at his old friend, the cocaine retailer. The room for the solitude, the drug to take the anger and pain away. He knew this was a big fuck up. He didn’t know what was wrong with her exactly, but this was why she had lived alone for 40 years. This was why all the other men had walked. Except he was tied to her through a mortgage, tied to her through sheer obstinacy. He was not going to give up. Hadn’t he always given up? Wasn’t it always easier to jump overboard and swim to shore rather than fight the squalls? Not this time, Relationships were about work, hadn’t he heard that a hundred times. So he would. Just not tonight.
The motel room was ugly as hell but it seemed to be an antidote. It was his ugly-as-hell room. He clicked through the channels, stopped at the porn on the small fuzzy screen chained to the ceiling, watched for a minute then moved on. Nothing really cut through the haze, but he didn’t care. Here life was suspended.
But he loved her. He had gone all in on this relationship. Where the hell was he going to walk to?
Yes he loved her, but he resented the hell out of her. Annie found his drug use revolting. She understood addiction, she said, being a fellow traveller, and was curious about cocaine, said she’d like to try it some time, but couldn’t understand him being up half the night happily by himself, lost in thought or surfing the web or working and playing guitar, going places she would not go and contentedly sleeping half the day away. This did not fit with her ethos of work will make you free. His indulgences became her cudgel, even after he stopped using, she still used the fact that he ha
d indulged as a hammer.
“You never told me you were a cocaine user!”
“You never told me you were an obsessive compulsive, verbally abusive, alcoholic control freak.”
She agreed to go back upstairs and let him use the downstairs office. Unfortunately, she had designed it for her.
“The desk doesn’t work for me, there are no drawers and it’s too small and the sofa is for you,” he said. “I can’t even fit on it. It’s for a midget.”
“The office is beautiful,” she said. “We have no room to put the desk anywhere else and that was my mother’s desk and what am I going to do with it? You don’t need to change anything, everyone that comes here loves that office.”
“They don’t work in it. And I don’t like Japanese art.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said, her anger rising. “You don’t know anything about art.”
He left the office as it was. He didn’t have the energy. He would accommodate. It was simpler. As long as there was scotch at 3 a.m. and friends he could bitch at.
“I love beauty,” she would say.
“For design it’s form and function,” he’d reply. “It’s supposed to work.”
“Not if it’s beautiful.”
She could only work with the radio on. It was her soundscape. And her office upstairs was entirely open, a throwback to her life alone. No closed doors for her, an office that took up half the top floor and sucked up any noise from downstairs. Meant living and working below felt like walking on shattered glass. There was no way to relax inside his home.
Over Auschwitz was the sign “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work will set you free” and for Annie this was the gospel. It was maybe her only relief from the demons that stalked her.
“It gives me control,” she said of her affinity for planting herself in front of her computer screen 10-11 hours a day, six-seven days a week. She would take assignments gratefully on Friday and promise them for Monday. Sequestered behind her computer, protected from mundane affairs like food shopping, the post office, seeing people, going for walks or thinking about how she was living, made her feel safe. In front of the computer she could fashion order out of her internal chaos, protect herself from the challenges of enjoying life … and love. And keep her nightmares at bay.
“Before I met you I could spend days not talking to anyone or going out,” she said. “Just working. You’re good for me. You’ll make me a better person.” She meant it when she said it.
In the series of shabby motel rooms or late, late nights on the sofa, succoured by scotch, Evan would try and reconcile the woman snoring upstairs, the woman who was quick to explode, abuse, insult, threaten and control with the laughing girl who would stick his underwear on his head.
She loved to fold his clothes straight from the basket, in part because she needed the house to be perfect, no unseemly laundry in a basket lying around for her, but also because the novelty of looking after a man, even in this small way, thrilled her. It was her attempt to adopt a tad of domesticity.
“I like folding your underwear,” she said.
“I won’t tell the feminists,” he said.
This was the intolerant tortured soul who treated him to a beautiful guitar. And when he took her to the Apple store to buy her a computer for Christmas, she told him she had already ordered him a MacBook.
“Don’t ever let me go,” she’d say in bed, time and again. “Promise you won’t ever let me go.”
Evan turned off the TV and pulled the bedspread off the bed. He figured they washed the sheets but doubted they bothered with the spread too often. And he doubted whether the regular clientele of the Bon Nuits motel bothered taking it off while they were doing whatever they had come to do and, from the sounds coming through the walls, they did quite a lot with quite a few.
An old habit of his reared its ugly, misshapen head. He would rescue Annie, make her happy, bring life to her life. He would save the damsel in distress and thereby save himself. Cast off the eternal loneliness that plagued him. They would cure each other. Her alcoholic father had ruined her. Or so she said. His crazy mother had ruined him. Least that’s what the therapist concluded. They were adrift together and, if they put their shoulders into the oars, they would make it to some safe shore. He had to believe that. He got off the bed and bent over to the desk, shoving a 20-dollar bill up his nostril. He was so happy to be behind a locked door, to have a room of his own. He was on vacation. He was free. He’d worry about what to do with Annie tomorrow.
They had started a small publishing business. Why give the cut to the publisher when they could publish themselves? He had worked for book publishers and Evan and Annie figured they could find a distributor so how hard could it be? With print on demand, they only had to pay a printer for what was ordered, didn’t need to warehouse books. And with government grants and a good distributor, the profits could be used to pay off the mortgage and debt which was like a toothache burrowing through her brain.
He was on his way to rehearsal when he pulled the car over and called her.
“Can you send the distributor in France a link to our distributors’ web page here so they know we’re dealing with a reputable guy?”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“I’m in the car, on the way to rehearsal. It’ll take you 15 seconds. It’s just a cut and paste of a web link.”
“You know how busy I am? I haven’t got time to start sending stuff. I got a lot of work to do. You should do it. If you want it done, do it yourself. I’m not your secretary. I haven’t got time.”
“I’m in the car by the side of the road,” he said. “I’m going to rehearsal. I have a show tomorrow night. I can’t right now.”
“Besides, why do they need it for?” she was yelling now. “There’s no point. You do it. I’m too busy.”
He had figured she had spent two minutes yelling that she was too busy to take the 15 seconds to e-mail the link. He killed the phone and went to rehearsal.
She was in the kitchen when he got home.
“Why can’t you do a simple thing if I ask you?” Evan said. He had been chewing on this during the rehearsal and the drive home. “It would’ve taken all of 15 seconds and you have to rant and rave about it for 10 minutes.”
“Why should I do it just because you ask me to?” she screamed. “I don’t have to do what you tell me to do. I got a thousand things to do.”
“We’re partners,” he yelled back, in the throes again. “I asked you to send one lousy e-mail that I think is important and you have to go to war! Why do you always have to make everything so crazy?”
“‘Cause I don’t think it’s important,” she said, a defiant smirk on her face. “And if it’s not important to me, I’m not going to do it.”
He looked at her, loathing rising in him like bile. She looked so smug. She’ll only do what’s important to her, not just in work, Evan realized, but in everything. In one sentence she had summed up their partnership. Later, she said: “I never said that.”
It occurred to him maybe she was not up to being rescued. Evan was in rehearsal at the theatre and Franklin was talking to Shona about her hair. He didn’t like it and she did so they began to spar, with Franklin giving no ground. Evan tuned out. And when he tuned out his mind often drifted to home. And home life had become a haemorrhoid — move the wrong way and it stabbed you where you lived.
To allow herself to be rescued required a degree of introspection and analysis she would not suffer. It meant a break from the security of what she knew to the insecurity of the unplanned. It meant trusting someone else. It meant breaking a lifelong routine. It meant giving up total control.
Shona finally consented to wear her hair back as Franklin had demanded. Rehearsal resumed. Well, Evan thought, he’d have to rescue the damsel despite himself, despite the damsel. Otherwise … shit, he didn’t want to think of the alternative. He’d have to save her for the both of them.
“How about every day, say around three,
we take a break and take a little walk, get some air, chat a bit, break up the day?” he said.
“I have a lot of work to do.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun.”
They grabbed coats and scarves and boots and gloves and headed out to the park and then stopped at Metro for groceries for dinner. It was a sunny, brittle afternoon, a perfect winter day.
They talked about the latest politician caught with his dick in the wrong place.
“Who cares if he’s gay,” she said.
“I know. Some of your best friends are gay. But it’s not that he was caught with a man, he was caught with a page; the kid was maybe just 18, probably learning about government for some civics course, not realizing Vaseline was part of the necessary equipment for good governance.”
“Well, he just learned,” she said, adopting a Yiddish accent. “He learned about government.”
He laughed and grabbed her hand and they waltzed down the street, all was right with the universe.
They got home and she wrapped his scarf around his neck and said: “That was great. You’re right. I feel totally refreshed and ready to attack my computer. I’ll make a coffee. You want a coffee? I feel on top of the world. You’re so smart, my lover. Let’s do it every day. Get some oxygen in the lungs,” she sang, entering a manic phase. “Fresh air, eh Fritz, you fat cat. You can use some too. You should go for a walk.”
She looked at him as she fired up the espresso machine.
“You know darlin’, you’re going to make me a better person,” she said. “You’re good for me. Why should I sit all day like a lump staring at that fucking screen? It’s good to take a break and get out and see the world. You’d make a woman a good husband.” She kissed him, jumping into his arms.
The Alcoholic's Daughter Page 5