“It’s happening, Mellie. Right now. I’m inside of it. I can see it, all the possibilities. You were there, at Kif-Vesely’e. Please stay with me. I want to make sure I come back the right way. I want to travel on the right path. I need your help to return.”
“Sorry, Israel—” there’s more meanness in my voice than I intend. “I was only at the Fens because I thought you could get me high.”
He shakes his head. “Israel. Good one.”
From without, bells are chiming. It’s four o’clock. I’m due back at five oh five for checkbook balancing in Life Skills. Fifty minutes on the T to Wollaston, with an eight-minute walk.
A train is just pulling away as I exit. Fuck the T. I may be a junkie who lives in a halfway house with her bastard child, but I’m still middle class. A taxi waits in front of the Towers and I climb in like I’m the one who called it. The cabbie doesn’t know me from a doctor’s wife; I give him the address, and he pulls into traffic. Four ten. My cloud sense is awake, everything sparking. On my phone, visitors so riveted by the woman in her underwear click yes and yes and invite her sleeper program into their hard drives. Goggle-eyed, they wait for completion, for the countdown, for Found Footage to upload, unaware that the sleeping thing may wake when they do. Somewhere, the man in the SUV is searching for the missing middle. Lew, too, is waiting for the right moment. His part, my part. Something is hidden in the pages of my paperback. Still, there are things I can’t explain. A journey from Los Angeles, a bus ticket from two years ago, why I hid the thing I hid. I want to write this all down in my paperback. I want to tear the pages open and find out what’s inside. I want it to tell me why, when I drew in the driveway man’s smoke, he felt like mine.
I close my eyes, and I remember this woman from my Parenting without Partners class. She’d been a cook, in one of those chain restaurants, had a four-year-old, a baby daddy that was dead. Even in shitty kitchens, there’s a lot of skill involved, a lot of pressure. There are fryolator hazards and sous-chef drama and bus boys fucking each other on their alley cigarette breaks. Naturally, also, there’s a ton of drugs. Anyway, this woman, she lives at home with the four-year-old, her moms and a brother, and it’s her thing with them, within the family, to make Salisbury steak. She’s high, of course, goes absent like junkies do, but then she’ll come back prodigal and make these feasts. This she can do, her one gift to them, even when she’s useless. She gets arrested, does sixty days, and on visitation, in Rehab, it’s all the fam can talk about, how much they miss her Salisbury steaks. But once she’s actually back, it’s like poof! She’s fucking it up, burning, undercooking, forgetting ingredients.
“I can’t even remember: is it a steak? Is it a hamburger? Is it even actual meat?” It’s like someone stole her ability while she was high, like it went to some other woman. “So finally, I go to my family. I’m crying. This thing matters so much to me. It’s all I ever gave them. And I just say, I think I’m done. I have to make you something else, and they’re like quiet for a second, and then they go—you know what they say? They’re like, thank God. We always hated the Salisbury steak.”
You don’t get to just be done with one way of thinking in an instant. You don’t just wake up clear-eyed one beautiful sober day. Things come back in pieces, and you reassemble yourself. I reach into my purse. The key card, the business card, the scrap. I’m collecting again. It’s nothing, brain detritus, Salisbury steak. It’s so clear to me now; whatever I’m looking for; Isaiah, Lew’s video, even the SUV man, they’re on their own paths, chasing their own longings. But the life I want to step inside is already here. It’s the one with Juni in it. I have to stay focused. I consider the scrap: OD TO. 2f. Then, I roll down the window. For a moment, the paper sticks to my fingers, but then the wind gets it, and it floats out into the actual world.
Seven
New York City
1993
I find Paul at Blue and Gold Bar. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, the place empty but for Paul, a couple of men from the construction site down the street and a drunk Ukrainian guy. Paul’s got the dregs of a beer and an empty shot glass in front of him, and he’s rattling his knees against the countertop, drumming his fingertips. It’s not a good mood, and I imagine myself as some older, wiser version of myself, who would turn her back now, who would know how to walk away from whatever I’m about to intersect.
“What’s up?” I ask. My will is a thing in my mouth and it falls out whenever I open up.
He pushes aside the shot glass, downs the rest of his beer. “Come on. You coming?” He’s red-eyed, a little stage makeup gumming his eyelids. I can tell he hasn’t been crying, but close, like one more thing could make it spill over.
“Where are we going?”
“To your connection, Mellie”—he slings his gas station jacket over his shoulder—“your guy on Avenue D.”
“Are you already done with the—” I start to ask, but he has slapped down his money and is mounting the stairs, two at a time, into the sunlight. On the street, Paul walks fast, steering around dog walkers, between couples. He’s become a New Yorker so quickly. I have to skip stride, to use the pauses at the street corners to catch up. He’s on his third agitated cigarette by the time I figure out how to stay beside him. “What’s going on? Did something happen at rehearsal?”
“It’s so fucking stupid. It’s just so fucking idiotic.”
“I thought you guys were doing tech? All the new lighting cues?”
“Davos told us today. He’s delaying the opening by two weeks. Ellen finalized it with him last night.”
I am in my own head. I am thinking about how this relates to me, what it means for a plus mark between our names and a heart around, but his mood doesn’t have anything to do with sex, or with does Paul like me back. What’s in his mind is all about Vera Woczalski, the review in The Village Voice.
“Come on, now. Really? They have to know that’s not your fault.”
“I don’t even agree with her.” He keeps lengthening his stride. “She’s one critic.”
We are nearing the border between the East Village and Alphabet City. Three high school girls, lovely in long legs and platform sneakers, in knee-high rainbow socks, gaggle at a shop window full of useless Japanese cuterie, cat pencils and pig lanterns and lip balm inside a jeweled ring.
“Let’s stop for a minute,” I say. “Maybe we should slow down.”
Paul wheels. “I’ve been waiting for your ass for three hours, Mellie. I don’t want to slow down. Do you understand?” He punches the walk button, then strides into the traffic before the signal has a chance to change.
“I was at my internship.” I lope along behind. “There’s no phone at the studio.”
“I know,” says Paul. “I know, I’m sorry. I just need a little cloud, OK? Can we get a little cloud before I have to be thoughtful and sensitive?”
We reach the curb, the park, Avenue D. The streets are emptier than in the Village. There are more vacant lots, piles of weather-bleached construction debris, bright fresh tags spray-painted on the boarded windows. The smell is different, too: dry and smoky, with a volatile gaseous edge, like something about to blow. We’re almost there, at my bodega.
I put a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Better stay outside.”
“You can’t introduce me to your connection? Am I like not badass enough to buy my own drugs?”
“Shh. Christ. They’re just cautious. Next time, OK? I’ll mention it today, and then next time.”
“Sure. Whatever. This is your territory.”
I wonder sometimes about the organizational behavior of my bodega. There are cans on the shelves—Chunky Soup, Dinty Moore Chili, a stick or two of Sure Fine deodorant. But the freezer cases are dark and empty. You can pick up a bag of chips, Utz or some other off-brand. You can get a pack of cigarettes or a forty of Colt 45. But no one’s going to walk in here for sandwich fixings without getting a pretty good idea of what drives the transactions behind the ceiling-high bulle
tproof glass.
“Hey, Alek,” I say to the guy with an eyepatch on the other side of the counter.
“Mellie,” he says. No smile, no customer service. “What do you need?”
“A twofer will do me.” A twofer is a dozen; six is a one-off. The lexicon is familiar to me now, but I still take the aficionado’s pleasure in my specialized knowledge.
Alek nods and his cousin or son or whatever disappears into the back. I shift. We listen to the tidy shuffling sound of the bill counting machine, and the boy returns with a rolled-up Post. I have to pay for the paper, even though it’s often two or three days out of date. The boy smiles and I imagine him momentarily in math class with the rainbow socks girls. Before I go, I mention I might bring a friend some time.
Alek shakes his head. “No, don’t do that. We are trying to keep it in the family, limit our reach.”
“Understood,” I tell him, and I rejoin Paul on the street.
“Wait,” I say to Paul’s ravenous expression. “Seriously, wait.”
Afternoon is deepening, and I get Paul as far as the park before he insists. He sinks onto a bench. Street kids with mutts on rope are gathering in circles to play music now. The drums pound; a guitar twangs. Paul leans back against the bench with a spoon hanging from his full lips.
“Oh, Mellie,” he says. “There’s no point now. No one’s going to come see the play after this.”
I put my arm around him.
He sinks into my embrace. “I thought Davos was going to rip my throat out. And the rest of them, seriously, delighted to see me on the outs, Davos reminding me the Ice Boy role was only ever a trial, everyone else so fucking pleased it was like celebratory in there. Like we were on the verge of that scene from The Bacchae when all the moms are ripping off Pentheus’s limbs. I don’t even agree with her.”
He takes another spoon, and I touch his hair. It isn’t clean, but the day-old pomade and the light smell of sweat are intimately mine. I don’t care what he says, as long as he keeps talking, as long as he lets me hold onto him.
“That feels good,” he says. “Keep doing that.”
“She’s one critic,” I agree. “But that doesn’t actually mean she’s wrong. You probably are more talented than the rest of them. That’s why it pisses them off.”
“I know what you mean,” he says. “I know that. But—”
“Shhh,” I say.
“Jesus, you’re good for me.”
“Remember that,” I tell him. “Try to remember.”
But then I see the pop flare in his eyes, the moment being swallowed, the perfect blankness taking over. He smiles, slips his arm from the sling and stretches it. It’s stiff, and a bit atrophied from four weeks of lack of use, but soon the damage will be invisible, the little line of dirt between his cast and his skin washed away. He turns his attention to a knot of street performers and I watch his afternoon, stripped of feeling, return to him. The Blue and Gold, the rehearsal, the bland girl in glasses who is always at his elbow, always peering at his face as if expecting something.
The beeper vibrates in my pocket. I rise and locate the phone booth at the corner of the park. It’s the AD wanting me uptown. Westie’s back from Boston, he tells me, but it’s an even bigger disaster now. The artist has sided with Ansel at Columbus Circle, while Fat Albert is laying in for siege on 125th. It’s factional warfare. The AD says he needs my help, which is more than I can say of Paul. Under the canopy of elms, he dangles his healed arm from its socket and watches, mouth slightly agape, as a shoeless performer eats fire from a stick. I tap him on the shoulder for goodbye; I know better than to try for a kiss.
Eight
Quincy
2010
The women of Independence House are in the van on our way to the commitment at MCI Framingham. The van smells of hair relaxer and Juicy perfume and the orange Tic Tacs someone’s passing around, but we keep the windows closed because we all took so long doing our ‘dos and don’t want the wind to mess them up. A hot van, on my way to prison: I can’t think of a way I’d rather spend my Friday night.
I’m squashed into the second row between two women, Niani and Althea, both of whom still have the hips of their recent pregnancies. Althea, like several other Independence residents, has done time at Framingham and she’s entertaining us on the two-hour drive with stories about some of the long-term inmates. I can’t stop laughing.
“So this new cellie turns out to be the one that held me up.”
“Serious? You recognize her?”
“Naw, I couldn’t a picked her out of a lineup five minutes after, but she remembers me. Because the minute I saw that gun, I started calling her Madam. Madam. What the fuck? Who says Madam even in normal circumstances? But I see that nine-mil, and it’s like we’re in Gone with the Wind. I start offering helpful suggestions, too.”
“You’re being robbed and you’re trying to be useful,” I say.
“Yeah, I point out the pricey necklace, I’m suggesting other places on the block she could hit, showing her the safe.”
Marisa shakes her head. “You don’t know who you are until you got a gun in your face.”
“Now I know,” says Althea, “I’m a class-A suck-up.”
“I take it back,” says Marisa, “we knew that all along.”
I’m almost a month in at Quincy. No one thinks I’m part of the club, but it’s like a baby in a famine zone. Now that they think I might last, they’re willing to invest a little love in me. It’s equalizing, desperation and degradation, and how hard it is to climb back out, and you can’t be in this place long without recognizing that. I don’t have what Emily has, not a full bench, but I’m beginning to catch a hint of what it would be like, having people.
“What about you, Wellesley?” Niani asks me. “You ever done time?”
“She has a friend on the inside,” says Marisa. “That’s why she’s gracing us with her ladyship, but she’s never visited. Right?”
“Oh, honey,” says Althea. “You got to visit.”
I hedge. “We’re not really friends.”
“What your friend do,” Marisa asks, “to get in Framingham? Rob Bloomingdale’s?”
Niani laughs. “What do they call it when rich people steal? Embezzlement?”
“Hey,” says Althea, “that’s what I got sent up for. Worked for a visiting nurse outfit, and I embezzled. I’m high-end for low-end.”
“Seriously, Mellie,” says Marisa. “What’d your friend do?”
I’m sucking on one of the Tic Tacs, so it takes me a minute to respond. “It was an art crime.”
“That can’t be past a misdemeanor.”
“She white?” says Niani. “You white, you have to murder a granny.”
“Naw, it was a painting, yeah? She stole like a Picasso or some shit.”
“We’re not really friends,” I say again. “But, it was forgery.”
Marisa laughs. “Now that, you deserve a bid. You got skills; you can do insurance, loans, real estate, and you do a painting?”
Niani shakes her head. “There’s one I’d take a copy of. It’s got a little white dog in it, this dead bird. I always liked that one. Could your friend copy me that?”
“I saw one once with these little girls? I would hang that on my wall. It’s good to look at shit like that. I think, for your brain.”
Three of us have phone privileges, and so somehow, for most of the rest of the trip to MCI Framingham, we’re passing around images of our favorite paintings and discussing art. Conversation falls off as we come into sight of the gates, then Marisa picks up an earlier thread.
“It seems obvious to say it, Wellesley, but prepare yourself. It can feel normal in there, for a few minutes. Just you talking to another human. But watch out, because something’s about to whack you in the gut with a wooden baton.”
“Got it,” I say, but I’m certain that I don’t, that I can’t imagine.
“Check it here, see? This scar? That’s what they do to you in the
re.”
“Bitch, those are stretch marks.”
“Fuck you. This is brutality.”
“Well, I got brutality on my thighs, on my ass, and all around where I carried my baby.”
They continue, giving each other a hard time, working off the nerves that come from returning, the inevitable anxiety that somehow you’ll get stuck inside.
After the encounter with the documentarian, I had squeaked in with two minutes to spare. The taxi hit traffic on 93 and for the next twenty-three minutes, I was sure I’d get discharged. People show up sometimes, moms with trash bags and two-year-olds wedged into doll strollers, just hoping we have room. I am aware, constantly, of the women on the waiting list, of the children for whom our little efficiencies with the in-room laundry unit would be heaven.
Someone had called for me, in the days following, a man, on the Independence payphone, but I was in session.
“This guy’s your ex?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, he was sorry like he wants you back. He’s all: tell her she was right. I shouldn’t have involved her. If he’s letting you go, I asked, why’s he still calling? You get right, and they start to smell the money on you. Who wouldn’t want it? Someone to cook the meals and pay the bills?”
“He’s got that, maybe. This old woman he’s staying with.”
“He says, he’s figured it all out. He has something to tell you. But that’s a familiar tune. What he’s figured out maybe is that he can trade up from this old lady, get a little, along with the meal ticket.” says Marisa, “If he’s from the life, it’s nine out of ten he ain’t changed.”
Anyway, there are plenty of other things to worry about: Juni’s test results from the medical check, for example. My finances, which I know aren’t good. In quiet moments, I’ll look down at my lap and catch my fingers twitching like they’re scribbling on the pages of a book. My thoughts will drift toward the SUV man; where is he searching now? Or I will wonder about the thing in my paperback, whether it’s what he wants and what it would mean if he had it; I will think of Lew, and the sleeper program that perhaps I have promised to awaken—but, only once have I sneaked down in the middle of the night to gaze at the woman pacing back and forth. The documentarian hadn’t been lying. I found the link which led me to my name, to Lew’s and Valerie Weston’s. There were more videos there, art films of Valerie’s, but I didn’t click through. The view count had reached almost three hundred thousand. Still, when I watched, I could only feel sickness, could not understand what compelled about a woman in her underwear.
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