The Alcoholic's Daughter

by David Sherman

  “It’s so easy to see she adores you, the way she looked at you when you played that song,” Franklin said. Other women came up to him and said how lucky Annie was to have a man write her love songs. They were happy. The future looked as bright as a sunrise, their love would conquer all. For two days life was normal. Then she went nuts.

  He was taking up space on the sofa again, reading by the light of the front window, when she started screaming.

  “Marriage was never my idea, I just did it for you,” she said, working herself up the rage index. “I don’t agree with marriage. Feminists have been fighting for years about marriage. It’s sexist! You’re the one who wants to get married. I never wanted to get married.”

  “I never asked you to marry me,” he said, stunned.

  “But that’s what you want. I only did it ‘cause I know that’s what you want.”

  “You’re doing it again,” he said. “Like everything else — the film script, the new book, the renovations, the relationship, the supposed wedding — you’re destroying it. You destroy everything. You can’t be happy. It’s impossible. You take every pleasure and run over it with a tank.”

  The reaction was perhaps not what his therapist would have advised. Or maybe it was. Exactly what did non-accommodation mean?

  He thought for a second he should take her in his arms. But he didn’t. You could maybe dampen the flaming anger, but the pilot light would always glow red hot. He climbed off the sofa and left, getting in the car and driving, just driving, until he pulled over on some side street.

  “What the fuck am I going to do?” he said. But no one heard and no one answered.

  He sat crammed in the back of the police van, hands cuffed behind him, the cop behind the wheel ignoring him. He was too shocked to be embarrassed. The day had started pretty normally. He had received his ration of abuse. But he hadn’t swallowed it this time.

  He thought back to that night at the lake, the two of them having dinner at a friend’s cottage they had rented, one of the few times she actually unglued herself from the house. They had it for three weeks. She had been there for the last four days. She had had too much work to do. This was the last weekend. She had been drinking at dinner and decided they should grow the company they started and since they had no budget to hire people he should do all the “growing.”

  “You could research the proposals,” she said.

  “And write them,” Evan said.

  “You’re the English writer in the family.”

  “And you would pitch them, find the distributor?”

  “I hate doing that,” she said. “You’re so good at it, you charm the women, they love you.”

  “And the grant apps, you’d write the grant apps?”

  “You’re the writer, you write the grant apps. I’m too busy, but I’ll check them.”

  “So I’ll write them and you’ll kind of tell me if they pass muster.”

  “Well, you don’t know anything about publishing so I have to go over them.”

  “I don’t know anything but you want me to do everything?”

  “Well, you don’t,” she said. “You’re getting all sensitive again. You can’t stand the fact that I know more about this than you do. Get over yourself.”

  “Annie, I have a job, I am busy in the theatre, I’m writing and I teach,” Evan said. He was not doing well reining in a familiar escalation of his blood pressure, the tightening of his chest. He was entering Woody Allen territory — a stroke was imminent. “And I got a bunch of gigs coming up and I need time to rehearse and write a song or two. And I spent three years working for a book publisher, managing the editorial department.”

  “That has nothing to do with what we’re doing.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The music is all nice and good but it’s a hobby. It can’t get in the way of what we’re doing. The only way this business will work is if we have several projects in the pipeline at a time. You have to do it. That’s the way it works.”

  “What doesn’t work is me doing all my work, acting as your unpaid production assistant,” Evan said. “I make nothing to put all the projects together and exactly what do you do, once I get the financing and distribution and the idea and the research?”

  “I do the book,” she said. “I’m the one who knows the business. I’m the person they buy.”

  “Everything we’ve tried to do together, you end up telling me what to do, how to do it, whether to do it and then complain about how I do it,” Evan said, his voice rising with the half moon that was ascending over the lake. “And for this I will get the pleasure of earning not a cent. I’m not doing it.”

  It had been a lovely evening, eating on the porch, the call of a loon richocheting off the lake. But the switch clicked in her head.

  “We’re not going to pay someone to do it,” she yelled. “It’s beneath you, or something? Your ego won’t let you work for a woman. You don’t know anything about book publishing. No one pays for this kind of work. You have to work for free to sell the project. You’re too good for it, is that it? You don’t know anything.”

  “Tell you what, since you know everything, you do it,” he said, getting up from the table. “I’m not working for you again. Especially not for nothing.”

  He left the table, but she followed him.

  “You always think you’re such a big deal, that real work is beneath you, you want everything handed to you.”

  “You’re drunk. I’m not talking to you when you’re drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk!” she screamed and pushed him. Behind him was a hassock and he went over it, falling on his back, his head hitting the floor. He missed the cast iron stove by a few inches.

  He pulled himself off the floor and went for her. She stood collapsed inside herself, fear screaming in her eyes. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to push her. He grabbed her by the shoulders. She started kicking at his shins. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to hit her. He realized then he wanted to pick her up and throw her over the railing onto the lawn. But he couldn’t. She was small and frail and sick. He could never hit a woman. He couldn’t remember hitting anyway since he was 14. But he was shaking with rage. She could’ve killed him.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” he shouted.

  “I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re always sorry but you always act like a lunatic!. Keep the fuck away from me!” He thought his heart would burst. He was breathing deep, adrenaline pumping furiously, head pounding.

  “I’m going back to town,” he said. “Take a bus.” And he drove to Montreal and left her there in the cabin by the lake with her bottle of wine still on the balcony, the loon silenced by their screams. Somehow, in a little while, it didn’t matter so much that she had almost killed him. It was just one more anecdote from the great love that would last forever.

  A friend’s ex decided to take a job in Toronto but wanted their son with her. Then after a bit of counselling, she didn’t seem to really want custody of her son at all. She had a lover in Toronto. And refused to pay any support. Then the doctors told his friend he needed valve replacement surgery.

  A friend of a friend found out he had cancer the same time he discovered his wife was having an affair. He was running between doctors and chemo and smoking more dope than most humans could tolerate. And lawyers were sending him bills every month, a simple letter somehow cost $1,000.

  “You hear the one about the woman goes to see her doctor?” Stan asked Evan one evening over the phone. “Says: ‘Doc, can you get pregnant through anal intercourse?’ Doctors says: ‘But of course, Madam. How do you think lawyers are born?’”

  His friend’s brother bought him a drink at a gig and told him about his wife who he discovered was a closet hardcore gambler, working the slots, VLTs, poker, anyplace she could find them, losing about three hundred thousand dollars, always promising to quit but never able to.

  He moved out for several months.

  “I st
arted smoking hash, my kids couldn’t even visit the place was too small, then I got throat cancer; couldn’t even smoke the damn hash,” he said. “I moved back, I was too damn lonely.”

  “That’s a hell of a hit, three hundred thousand dollars,” Evan said.

  “I don’t give a shit about the money. I just don’t trust her anymore. Look around here, man, everyone has shit just fucking raining down on them. What can you do?” He walked back to his table.

  Michael’s wife started losing weight, going dancing, disappearing for weekends, stopped having sex with him, then sent him a lawyer’s letter, demanding a divorce. Couldn’t tell him in person. Then she kept insisting he had more money. She wanted more than the house and the car and joint custody of the two kids. And more than her head nurse job was paying her.

  “You’re Jewish,” he told him. “You all have money hidden away. I know, don’t worry. I know.”

  As his relationship frayed and he began to discuss it more, others came out of the closet. Yeah, guys were always at fault, guys were always criminal, women were always victims, except, it turned out, when they weren’t. There was nothing PC about it but there it was, men were under siege, the enemy was everywhere — age, circumstance, hard luck, cops — but often it was right there in bed beside them. Women could, in fact, be assholes, too.

  He told the therapist it was like living with his mother. “When I was a kid, if I did all the right things, washed all the dishes, peeled the potatoes and maybe scrubbed the sink and cleaned the stove top, my mother would hug me, hysterics would be avoided, life would be calm at least for a time. Fifty or so years later, I feel I’m at the same place.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  “Anyone can run,” he said. “I’ve done it a dozen, two dozen times. I always kill relationships, the breasts are always softer in someone else’s bed, or the smile, or the intellect is greater, or the nagging is less, or whatever. I’m sick of chasing women, sick of falling in love, sick of falling out of love, tired of packing and unpacking. Tired of failing.”

  “When a relationship doesn’t work, you think it’s your fault?”

  “Maybe it’s no one’s fault. I don’t know. Maybe I make lousy choices. Maybe I’m looking for the mother I never had, the unconditional love.”

  “Annie is a pathological narcissist. You know that. She’s ill. And she’ll never be well. If she gets some help, she can learn to moderate or modulate her reactions to stress and her need to have her needs first. They have pretty good meds now, too, that might help.”

  Annie said there was no money for therapy, she didn’t think the therapist knew what she was talking about, she wasn’t taking any meds, but she was glad he was seeing someone. It would maybe help control his anger and drug abuse.

  “What drug abuse?” he asked. “What’re you talking about? You know I stopped using coke more than three years ago and you promised you would stop using my past as a cudgel.”

  “I have a lot of work to do.”

  “How do you do it? How do you hide the craziness?”

  “Not easily,” she said, laughing. “It’s fucking exhausting, darlin’.” And she giggled. And leaned her head on his chest for a beat and then trudged upstairs to her office.

  Evan suggested that maybe they go away for the weekend and she immediately bristled.

  “You always want to go out or go away or eat out or go to a film. Why can’t you just stay in your office and work? You’re irresponsible. We have no money.”

  “Funny we always have money for a case of wine, fine cheese, theatre tickets when you want to go to the theatre, concert tickets if you want to go to a concert.”

  “Art is life,” she screamed. “You just waste money.”

  “You know,” he said, his guitar in one hand and his computer in another, ready to head north for another great escape. “You spend your day upstairs stuck at your desk, then you spend your night in the garden behind ten-foot walls that you had built so no one could see you and you wouldn’t have to see anyone. If I let you, you’d eat salad with the same salad dressing and pasta and cheese and wine every day of your life, see no one and speak to no one, except maybe your two or three friends when you don’t have a lot of work to do. Then you sleep. What kind of life is that?”

  “That’s a very pretty picture you’re painting of me,” she said, the wind suddenly out of her rage, looking sad and shrivelled, realization dawning that her life was perhaps lacking in … life.

  “It’s not a picture I’m painting,” he said. “It’s a photograph. It’s fucking boring. Life is to live, it’s not to sit behind a computer then sit surrounded by walls until the next day of sitting behind a computer. The high point of your life is your bowel movement.”

  A friend of a friend had asked Evan to use her country house. She wasn’t using it. She had no luck selling it and she didn’t want her son partying there. She told Evan to spend as much time as he could there. It had a sauna and a Jacuzzi, an outdoor hot tub, an industrial-size kitchen with a six-burner Garland, a fireplace, three bedrooms. It was a mansion and she was afraid her son and his friends would destroy it if there wasn’t anyone using it. Annie said it didn’t have enough light, was too far down the road, she didn’t like to be away from her garden and her training. He was grateful. She came once a week, they talked on the phone almost every day. Some days she called but he wouldn’t answer. He was free.

  “Can’t you get rid of some of these shoes?”

  “Can’t we get rid of some of these sweaters?”

  “Can’t we get rid of some of this underwear?”

  “You take up too much room.”

  “Can’t you stay in your office?”

  “You made too much food.”

  In the mountains he ate when he wanted, what he wanted, worked on the table and left papers there, wrote songs and plays and stories, took up room on the sofa, watched movies that made him smile, went for walks, drove into the next town, played the guitar at any hour, luxuriated under the stars in the hot tub in the middle of winter, invited women for dinner, friends for a game, or a cup of coffee. Living exalted him again. In the mountains, his shoes did not walk by themselves from one closet to another, things didn’t disappear, his toothbrush stayed plugged in, the house was not brimming with electric stress. Life was good.

  “When you’re on your death bed, you’re not going to say I wish I had worked more,” he said, on the sofa, her hand in his. “You will not say I wished I had sent more e-mails, kept my kitchen cleaner. You will remember that you never got to Thailand and didn’t spend enough time with the kids.”

  “Or with you,” she said. “I don’t have a choice. Really. I don’t have a choice.”

  “You’re going to be lying there saying I wish I had learned to have vaginal orgasms.”

  She smiled.

  “My orgasms are great as they are,” she said, putting her head on his shoulder. “I have to work. There’s so much we need. I’d like to fix up the back garden and the house needs painting and the …”

  “You’re working more but you’re not making more money,” he said. “You’re taking on stuff that doesn’t pay, you’re exhausted all the time and you’re always worried. We’re getting older, the clock is ticking,”

  “I need clothes, I’d love to go shopping,” she said. “It’s not like we have the money to do anything or go anywhere. I’m in control of things when I work.”

  “Every one of your friends, rich and poor, takes a few weeks off, takes weekends, relaxes, it’s normal, you recharge.”

  “I have too much work to do,” she said. He nodded.

  He sat downstairs after she retired and took stock. Early morning excursions, which he loved, were impossible. She had to run and wait for her bowel movement. There were no night time walks, rides, movies, or dinners ‘cause she was either too tired, had to eat at seven ‘cause she didn’t eat lunch and had no appetite or energy to go out at night. There were no excursions to Chinatown, a place he loved
, the restaurants were too bright, they had lousy wine, the food was not up to her standards, unless her niece and nephew wanted to go. Greasy spoons for a pizza or club sandwiches or burgers were out. A smoked meat sandwich in the city famous for smoked meat was unthinkable, again, unless friends wanted to go. There were no weekends away, no vacations, no days in the country. There were no forays to the market, no late nights at jazz and blues clubs, she didn’t like either form of music and she had to get up early to run.

  Spontaneity was out: “I need to plan, I need to know what I’m going to be doing.” There was work, of course, they were trying to finish a book, but that had been mostly hell and he wasn’t convinced it wasn’t going to return to that dark fiery place again.

  They shared no breakfast, shared no lunch and dinner was a treat made ponderous by the phobias of too much food and too much bustling and the attack switch that would sometimes click after her glasses of wine. But they had dinner and then the cleanup and then maybe a half hour staring at the tube. That was their life together. He preferred his time alone in the office with his guitar.

  She was slowly, inevitably, sapping away who he was. The great love of his life was taking his life away. And he was letting her. Fritz crawled out of nowhere and joined him on the sofa. “And there are the 10-minute walks with you but she seems to find that less and less inviting,” he told the cat, who didn’t seem offended.

  As for weekends or vacations, plans were impossible. She usually cancelled. She had too much work, but sometimes there would be the five o’clock film or maybe a play. If they were lucky, they might spend a few hours in the dark together as their recreation and then discuss the film or play over a quick meal at home of take out Indian or Chinese which cooled in its containers as she made a cheese plate and a salad and opened and poured wine for her nightly two or three glasses.

  But by this time she had bought herself smaller wine glasses and since they were smaller, she could have four or five glasses, she said, smiling.

  “You’ve been lonely all your life,” the therapist told him. “Your parents weren’t there for you, your brother wasn’t there for you. You’ve been spending your life trying to build the family you never had. And you’ve done quite well at it. You have a good group of friends that support you.”