Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I sent letters to Misty’s P.O. box. I wrote that I knew everything and I forgave him.

  “Papi, just come back,” was the hundredth scented letter I mailed.

  He did.

  HE JUST STOOD in the doorway, swaying.

  He was wearing dark glasses, and a black sweater filled with holes.

  As he grabbed for the door frame, I noticed his nail polish was badly chipped.

  I touched his arm and he wrenched it away.

  “I just want to talk,” I said.

  “About him?”

  “Not only him.”

  “I came to tell you to leave me alone,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  I brought him to our bed and rested my head on his shoulder.

  “I feel sick, no more dreams,” he said, swatting at the dark clouds in his eyes.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said.

  I relaxed and fell asleep instantly, dreaming of us rocking a baby from a branch that fell so loudly it woke me up.

  His hands were clenched.

  He was on the floor, foaming at the mouth.

  I packed my gums with Ativan, did an emergency bump, and started to breathe again. Found the Narcan kit and jammed the needle in his thigh.

  I called Luscious, and 911.

  Luscious got to us first. “Get dressed,” he said. I went to the powder room and came back, a little tarted up.

  There would be cameras, obviously.

  When the first paramedic burst in, I looked up from under my lashes and said, “Help us,” so piteously he reached for me first.

  I followed the stretcher into the ambulance, and when his hand twitched, releasing a ball of paper, Luscious grabbed it, skimmed its contents, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Give me that,” I said, and quickly read what he had written about me and Page, and what he planned to do about us.

  I burned it in the parking lot, where I sat smoking, terrified of his intentions.

  When the first flash illuminated me, I let them see the trail of tears that had dried into jagged silver lines, then held up my hand.

  “Please,” I said, and I was crushed as they hurried forward, I was crushed by love.

  WHEN HE WOKE up, he tore the tube and tape off his face and glared at me.

  I knew that I would have to crawl.

  I started at the foot of the bed and inched towards him, then lowered my head.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” he said, soughing quietly as he came in my mouth.

  It tasted bitter and filled me up.

  “Get off,” he said, and I lay in a heap at his feet.

  THE NOTE SAID that anything he did happened after I cheated on him and caused him so much pain that he wanted to die to get rid of it.

  And that his deep secret would die with him.

  The first part made me wince. It might as well have said, “You started it.”

  And the second part scared me. What deep secret?

  It didn’t matter. I had been cruel in my carelessness and greed, and I was willing to take it, to take whatever he had in store for me.

  If it meant not losing him.

  I stopped sleeping because every time I looked away, I thought he was going to kill himself.

  SABLE HEARD ABOUT what happened and called, crying.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I love him too,” she said.

  “Well, that’s too bad, because he hates your guts. And so do I,” I said to a tiny “Oh.”

  I turned off the phone for a while.

  Later, I heard about how she climbed up her fire escape, carrying a bad charcoal picture of him that she’d drawn, and flew to her death.

  Ora pro nobis, avis.

  I HAD LUSCIOUS and an intern watch him the few minutes I would steal to go to the bathroom or catnap.

  When I did happen to see myself, I noticed, dispassionately, that my hair was scraped into a damp ponytail, that my skin was a ghastly sort of green.

  That I was shuffling around in a gigantic Tommy Bahama sweatsuit and dirty paper slippers.

  “Help me,” I texted, and help arrived in a glassine bag that I cut into wobbly lines until I found a spoon, and all the rest of it.

  “Stupid cunt,” someone said.

  I was all alone.

  ON WITH THE body count was the headline, among so many about Sable’s death, Page’s disappearance, and his “accident.”

  It could have been an accident. He may not have meant to slam so much smack; the pills he chased the dope with may have been another miscalculation.

  Misty yelled at me as I sat slumped in the bedside chair: “It wasn’t an accident!”

  “You and I know that,” I said. “But no one else has to.”

  “He was leaving you.”

  “Well, he’s still right here, Misty. So get the fuck out.”

  I watched him say something to Luscious, then the two of them left together. I wanted to know why, but I wasn’t moving.

  “I won’t move until I can handcuff him to my side,” I said to the nurse.

  “I’ll follow him to Hell if I have to.”

  She reminded me of this, archly, when I woke up from a long, contented sleep in a bed of my own.

  HE WAS SITTING on the adjacent chair, wearing a terry robe and red Vans.

  When I saw the tears, I knew I had fucked up again.

  The baby was dead.

  EIGHTEEN

  BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG

  He took my wasted, bleeding ass home.

  Got me into bed and turned to leave.

  “I’ll call your mother,” he said.

  “Don’t.”

  “Honey?” I said, looking at my cell. “Someone maybe found Speck.”

  The message turned out to be a hoax, and anyways, he left right after I called him honey, and slammed the door.

  THERE WERE FLOWERS and cards.

  Q pushed back the show, and booked us time to start recording songs for a project we called Heartless.

  Other than Jenna, who could really play, we were secretly using session musicians. Sasha had been a speeding mess since Sable died, and she hated the random hot girl I replaced her with.

  But we looked good together, Q insisted, and that was that.

  “I want to take a razor to what I can’t erase” — the lyrics keep discharging into my notebook; Joy Division stayed on all the time and the heroin helped my intrepidness, shaken and dizzy, to stand up again.

  I WROTE TO him about the holiness of “Atmosphere.”

  About the sound of clementines tumbling from a bag and the gunshot in “May Day” and the vamp of a vintage Prada shoe.

  When I finished a letter, I sealed it in an envelope that I sprayed with my perfume and added it to a stack.

  Each one was addressed “LISTEN TO ME.”

  FINALLY, I STEAMED a stamp from a bill and erased the postage marks with a white eyeliner.

  “He lived for three months inside me,” I wrote.

  “Surely he carved our names there, or left a message for the one who will make it, someday.”

  I taped the stamp to a postcard and walked it to the mailbox, in the middle of the night.

  On the front was a picture of Snoopy, skiing down Mount Rainier, in goggles and a striped scarf.

  It was returned to me in an envelope addressed to “Insane Occupant.”

  I WASN’T REALLY alive anymore.

  Undead.

  I STARTED MAKING a quilt.

  I embroidered our names, then Speck’s and Flip’s, and DEAD BABY BOY.

  The centre-square was a piece of the sheet I lost my cherry on, the night he impaled me and I figured out what well-hung meant and he realized I had never even been properly kissed.
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  The rest were his clothes and mine: I had been cutting them apart for days.

  Checkers then lilacs. Brushed cotton, calico, raw silk. Puppy-patterned flannel, nude chiffon.

  Him kissing someone else, my atrophied heart.

  Lies and opiates, a little wooden cross.

  Ground glass and poison.

  My hands moved in my sleep, making this portrait of us.

  WHY DOES NO ONE HELP ME?

  My mother tried, but I wouldn’t let her in, or take her calls. She left milk and fruit, which spoiled on the counter.

  He hated my guts.

  The last thing I heard from him was a formal letter about divorcing me, attached to a drawing so cruel I destroyed it immediately.

  And Luscious?

  The last night I saw him, he had been drinking and he sat on the edge of my bed.

  “I am a farmer’s son, and a motherless child,” he said. “I have seen things I can’t bear to remember, and have known true suffering.”

  “I feel a little uncomfortable,” I said. “Please sit over there, on the chair?”

  I had never noticed the raised filigree of tissue on his face; that his eyes were pure topaz, and so hard.

  He stood up and thanked me.

  “I should thank you,” I said as I fell onto the dope foam.

  “Your eyes are wild,” I said, falling deeper.

  He padded out and away.

  The next day, I woke up to find he had sold his story of working for me, and the suicide note, for a lot of money. He also released a couple of our private, highly compromising pictures.

  Luscious didn’t say anything about Page. He either missed that part or didn’t have the stomach for that kind of telling.

  Someone sent him a link to the Mr. Skin site, and he saw the pictures, which infuriated him so much he started making appearances with a high-end model.

  “But you look so porn-star,” I said.

  My anger towards Luscious was cut with acute chagrin.

  Once, he had started to talk about the village he lived in as a child, and I cut him off.

  “I’m not paying you to depress me,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said, and his face reverted to a blank mask as he painted my nails with silver glitter, and we danced around to DMX.

  That was the time he taught me the Crip Walk.

  I think I was glad he did it. That he took what he needed.

  Yeah, I spelled that out with my arched feet, GLAD!

  let it rain let it drip

  I MOSTLY LAY in bed listening to “Supernature” and watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop with the sound off, holding on to my computer like a bodyboard.

  I began reading, as gospel, Joan Crawford’s My Way of Life.

  She looks so drunk and lonely in the pictures; the text is round with hollow bravura.

  I underlined the five canons of her sartorial religion, and highlighted my two favourites about having the courage to stick to your own style and taking care of your clothes “like the good friends they are!”

  I pulled out a pink taffeta dress and spot-cleaned and mended it, then propped it beside me on a pillow with a plate of marshmallow cookies.

  I had just seen him at a red-carpet opening with the gazelle; I saw his hand graze the small of her back and felt nothing.

  This was the best, most productive time of my life, I decided, as I opened my notebook and started drawing happy clams, hotfooting around a squiggle of surf.

  NINETEEN

  WITH THE PERSIAN SEAS RUNNING THROUGH YOUR VEINS

  I was demonized as a junkie murderer.

  The best was a shot Luscious took of me cutting Page’s head from a magazine picture, while smoking and obviously pregnant.

  “For her sick collection?” the story inquired about an alleged scrapbook of Page-heads that I kept under my pillow.

  Misty wouldn’t respond to me at all anymore, so I tried James and Mercury answered.

  “No one wants to talk to you,” he said.

  PAGE WAS STILL missing.

  He was rumoured to be living in Palm Beach with an elderly male companion; to be meditating in Nepal; to have crashed his Porsche Spyder into a guardrail.

  I was missing too, in a manner of speaking.

  I would get up in the afternoon, grab some warm ginger ale and a Pop-Tart, get high, and carry my breakfast back upstairs.

  I would sit in bed and plan adventures for the day, including checking the mail, microwaving a bag of beans, and calling a maid — the room was dense with trash; the bed dirty and filled with clothes, magazines, and my arts and crafts projects.

  One day I got an email from James. He was worried, he wrote. And a bunch of other stuff that blurred into buckshot.

  I boiled my phone in a pan of water.

  I was so angry, but I couldn’t say why.

  I had thrown my laptop down a flight of stairs, and I only used the cellphone I bought him after seeing an ad on TV for vexed seniors who “just want to make a call!”

  It had huge number buttons and nothing else.

  I made enfeebled calls to Misty and James, and when I got voice mail, I asked, “But what about you?”

  When I coughed, I sprayed the pillows with blood.

  It was Q who found, and saved, me.

  “I SAW HIM,” I said.

  Q had broken in after catching the first flight to Seattle, and was horrified, he told me later, by the smell and the garbage everywhere.

  When he discovered me lying on the bathroom floor like a rotten ear of corn in my grimy green sheet, he called for an ambulance.

  “I’m not going back to the fucking hospital,” I said, but it came out sounding like this: “Chirp.”

  The sound and lights came closer.

  “My son looked like a hairless squirrel,” I told him.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  I saw such a creature once, huddled in the cold beneath a car, wringing his hands.

  “We buried him with the wild daisies,” I said, then let my head fall, at last.

  I STARTED TAKING methadone again, which I made into orange juleps.

  I ate potato bread and peanut butter, and worked on the quilt, adding pieces of baby clothes as Il Delicioso wandered the darkened grounds of his magnificent estate in a jewelled robe, baying at the moon.

  When I could get up, I went to the backyard and said a prayer beneath three effulgent stars.

  “IF HE CALLS, tell him that the Devil won. Tell him we gave up our souls —”

  I was working on another song about him, and could hardly see my ribs anymore.

  I was almost healthy again.

  I let my mother visit now and then, who was always anxious to leave.

  Jenna came over and gave me a rainbow manicure as we talked about men.

  I pretended to be sophisticated, but when she told me about accidentally making a bukkake video, I blanked completely.

  “What’s it like?” she said. “With him and Page?”

  “There’s only him. And it’s private.”

  “Tell me one little thing. Is it good, at least?”

  “So good,” I said morosely, and we went back to eating M&M cookies, hotboxing in the powder room, and making new Missing signs for Speck, and a few for him while we were at it.

  JENNA CONVINCED ME to do the much-postponed New Orleans show at the Howlin’ Wolf.

  I packed, and called a limo.

  I dressed up, screwed on my big ruby earrings — a rare lavish gift from him I found inside a bowl of Jell-O — and sprayed on my perfume.

  My mother came to say goodbye. It felt like forever: I hugged her, and she cried.

  “Look at you,” she said as I got into the car.

  We took off and she stood there waving like an
inflated Air Dancer, then we turned a corner and she was gone.

  “WHAT?”

  I pushed my bowl away and spit out a red blob.

  “There’s a rat foot or something in this!”

  He took it apart and handed me the earrings.

  He had never given me jewellery.

  As he was screwing them to my ears, he said that he went looking for something that reminded him of my lips.

  He also had an amaryllis, a pincushion, a tomato, and Chinese firecrackers.

  This memory filled the back seat like smoke. As I touched the posts, I felt his fingers, twitching the straps of my dress and sliding it off me.

  “Just sit still,” he says, because he is opening my legs with his mouth like a chili pepper, and also, cherry slice.

  When the old man told me we were at the airport, he had to shout it.

  “Arbab, I was dreaming,” I complained. I was dreaming of the earrings rocking back and forth with us as we hung from the bed, falling as we finished.

  THE POSH GUY in first class didn’t mind, he said, that I was leaning on him and telling him my story in frantic bursts.

  “Imagine your house is on fire. What do you take?”

  “Well — ”

  “One night I fell asleep holding a lit cigarette, and when we woke up, the room was filled with fire.

  “We grabbed each other: we took everything we had.”

  His suit was damp by then.

  “There’s something on your face,” he said. “Powder?”

  I looked in my compact: busted. I was just doing a few lines, to take the edge off and blunt the pain.

  But I was always in pain. On top of everything else, I had started falling down a lot, as if I had misplaced my centre of gravity.

  I didn’t sleep as much as sidestep into a mildly distorted version of my life, which confused and upset me enough that I left index cards everywhere with facts (day, month, year) and normal conversational remarks: “I am fine, how are you?” and “I’m a little congested” and/or “This phone is the worst!”

  I had lost interest in sex, food, and bathing, while he excelled at all of these endeavours.

  “It’s so unfair,” I groused at the suit beside me, as I smoothed my face and checked in on the MISSING SPECK web site until the stewardess practically had an aneurism.

  “Please. Turn Off. Your Electronic. Devices,” she said in a voice like a rodeo lasso.