by Mary Karr
Warren is lying on his back, and his face mesmerizes me—the patrician nose, Germanic jaw.
Do they like me? I say.
You want everybody to like you, he says.
You don’t? I say.
Only you, he says. And Tiger.
Not Sammy?
Sammy’s common, Warren says, referring to something his mother said about a cousin’s wife.
I’m common, I say.
I always fancied an affair with a scullery maid, he says. I’m propped on an elbow studying him. He fails to open his eyes, as he says, Aren’t you even a little sleepy?
I’m pouting, I say. Can’t you hear me pouting with your eyes shut?
He reaches up a hand to pinch my pouting mouth with two fingers. Okay, duck lips, he says, rolling over. My father thinks you’re smart and funny—both uncommon virtues. My mother thinks if you keep jogging, you’ll damage your female organs and fail to reproduce.
Do they think I’m cute?
He’s half blind. She wants to dress you in hot pink or lime green.
Tell me they like me and I’ll sneak back to your sister’s room.
As much as they like anybody, he says. Don’t worry about it, sweetie.
The next morning I’m wide-eyed before dawn, half waiting for some Inquisitor to roust me from the ruffled covers of the type Little Bo Peep probably slept in. I bathe with French-milled soap and brush my short hair.
In the library, I find a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems autographed to some illegible forebear. I’m perusing when a voice from the stair causes Tiger Three to rise shakily on his ancient hips and trot out. Mr. Whitbread says, I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake.
Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off.
7
The Constant Lovers
The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time
It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it
because it requires such long performance,
and because there is nothing, by definition,
between the acts…
—Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli”
It would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave.
Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery cult—none of this entirely untrue. I would’ve preferred that my ex vet this manuscript and correct the glaring flaws. Wisely, he balked—I’d have hated to see his version, too.
How to write it without self deceit? I set out to forge a family, but it fell apart. Know any divorcée who ever stops weighing fault for a marriage’s implosion on some divine scales?
There’s also a psychological phenomenon that messes with my ability to depict our nuptial collapse—the normally crisp film of my memory has, in this period, more mysterious blanks than the Nixon tapes. Maybe the agony of our demise was too harrowing for my head to hold on to, or my maternal psyche is shielding my son from the ugly bits. Or I was too shitfaced at the end.
Whatever the case, those years only filter back through the self I had at the time, when I was most certainly—even by my yardstick then—a certain species of crazy. But inside that was a girl starving for stability and in love with a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to.
Decades ago, I trained myself to mistrust that girl’s perceptions. No doubt she projected as many pixels onto the world’s screen as she took in. So while I trust the stories I recall in broad outline, their interpretation through my old self is suspect. Forget reporting the external events right, try judging them when you’re an alumna of custodial care. When I reach to grasp a solid truth from that time, smoke pours through my fingers.
Yet driving east with all my belongings wedged into Warren’s small white car, I feel swept off my feet as any storybook maiden by her champion. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the holiday burger taken at a roadside diner is a feast.
We move into a bleached-out neo-ghetto apartment, which we pack with books and our two rickety desks laden with separate typewriters. December, a potted fern going brown gets hung with cardboard angels we cover in foil. On their heads I glue faces torn out of newspaper or off postcards—the Three Stooges, a poet or two, movie stars. On one, I fix Cary Grant, for that’s who Warren is to me—the preoccupied professor in Bringing Up Baby, ignorant of how his patrician profile could make Katharine Hepburn trail him down the street in her convertible, holding her hat on with one kid-gloved hand.
The weak spots in our union are there from the git-go—aren’t they always? But every difference lures me, for if I can yield to Warren’s way of being, his cool certainty can replace my ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around.
Like any traveler from a ruined land, I try to adapt to the new customs, part of some ineffable mystery that compromises the man whose photo I carry in my wallet like an amulet against the squalor I was born to. I yearn for transformation, and Warren is its catalyst. What I don’t understand, I try to yield to, though I’m genetically disinclined to follow instruction.
Like we never, ever discuss finances. Some tiny trust pays his half of our meager rent and keeps him bobbing at the poverty level. How much was it? I’d never know.
We keep separate accounts and split bills. I try to absorb his reticence in this as I try to mimic his gargantuan work ethic—how early he rises to write, the number of sit-ups he grunts through at night. Without a paying post at first, he volunteers afternoons in the poetry library with its archive.
For my part, I’m rebuffed from any pseudo-literary job I catch the faintest rumor of—part-time teaching or poets-in-the-schools. Hell, the dudes working the registers in the bookstores have Ph.D.’s. At a chichi restaurant, I take a job busing tables at lunch—a steep fall for the former poet laureate of Minneapolis. On day one, a particularly snide waiter scoffs at my ignorance of a fish knife, along with how sloppy I am at embossing the tiny butter terrines. He’s a waspish guy who—at regular wine tastings for the staff—makes such phony remarks that the other waiters fight back with goofy comments, such as: Fruity but not screaming; or A surly adolescent wine that loiters in your mouth.
One day I take a double shift, and a famous novelist I’d been passingly introduced to in grad school—the bone-breakingly handsome John Irving—appears as if lowered by butterflies into my station. After filling his water glass once, I hide in the kitchen or bathroom for much of the remaining shift, derangedly imagining he’ll recognize me.
At shift’s end, the manager threatens to fire me for malingering, so I quit, for which gift he pumps my hand like I’ve given him the winning lottery ticket. In the glass window behind him, snow starts down. Soon as he leaves the dining room, I set every single place with knives, one silver blade after another, while through the sliding glass and across the night sky, the wind sends slim white stitches.
The dining room lights dim just as I clock out, and I make out strains of some symphony piped into the bar. My head cants like a blue tick hound’s. Maybe I owe myself a drink.
I’ve been dug in on Warren’s one-or-
two-beer policy, part of re-forming myself to fit him. As for doing with so little alcohol, so safely squirreled away do I feel in our book-lined rooms, undergoing my willed overhaul, that I could almost subsist on his breath alone.
In my old life, I never kept liquor in my apartment, for—while I could go without for weeks—I never knew when I’d wind up draining anything around. And around the punk bars where I hung out in grad school, if I got lured into the alley and offered cocaine, I could snuffle up the stuff, but I lacked both the money and the recklessness to be a bona fide cokehead. Only once did I incur a debt, and having to sell a TV to pay it back curbed future coke binges. At a few all night parties, I sat among half-strangers in a screaming sweat on a sagging couch—jaw clenched, eyelids stapled to my forehead—while some leering dealer suggested I go back to his place. A small point of pride: I never said yes. The scene scared me. I scared me.
I wouldn’t call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn’t leave my apartment, I didn’t drink.
In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I’m internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren’s steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she’ll be mist.
I stand at the bar, its tiered bottles like a shiny choir about to burst into song. With only five or six dollars in tips, how much trouble can I get in? Warren will pick me up soon, and the bar’s on the cusp of closing early. At one end, a man in evening clothes with long gray hair swept back sits behind a sherry glass. On the stool next to him, a tipped violin case. Across from him is the despicable waiter, cradling a brandy snifter. His normally pony-tailed hair’s undone. The waiter says, Buy you a farewell cognac?
I say thanks and settle in with coat covering my grease-spattered uniform. The waiter downs his own drink. Standing, he slides spare bills across the bar, adding—before he flips his cashmere scarf around his neck Lautrec-style—At least I’ve helped you to master the fish knife.
I hold the glass globe in my hand as the dim yellow lights slide off its perimeter, and boy, does that drink slide down like scorched sunshine. I’m just draining it when the manager—no doubt eager to see me leaving—flies up and buys me another. And right before Warren comes, I ponder a third. What the hell, right? I’m unemployed, with school loans I can’t pay, an invalid dad whose nursing I need to start chipping in on.
When I lift my index finger, the barman wipes his hands and refills my snifter. I’m the sole customer—the barman having just covered his olives and cherries with cling film—when he nonchalantly slides a white slip of paper to me. I nonchalantly flip it over. The bill comes to twenty dollars.
Hold it, I say, those two bought my other drinks.
I’m well buzzed by then, wavering.
I know, he says. This is for the third one.
I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars?
He nods.
I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now?
His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers.
He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it.
I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till.
Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money.
So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in.
In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter. Pretty soon Warren comes in wearing a down jacket, looking tall enough to offset my busgirl scumminess.
I draw him aside and explain, perhaps slurrily, why I need a twenty, just till the next day. I want to pay off the glaring barman posthaste.
But Warren stares in disbelief, saying, When Tom and I drink with his friend for four hours, the whole bill isn’t twenty dollars.
By this time the manager has set his coffee cup on the bar alongside his keys.
Warren says, Why didn’t you go to the machine?
I haven’t gotten an ATM card yet, I say.
Where’s your credit card?
I lost it, I lie, for I couldn’t tell him the one I’d used to pay for a hotel once had long since been snipped in half at some cash register. This debt wasn’t just recklessly come by, being due to last-minute plane tickets when Daddy had one stroke after another.
You’re not out of money, are you?
I’m not. Though I’m within a month of it.
Warren opens his wallet and draws out the twenty, handing it over like a radioactive item with tongs. The mild unease I expected is (did I imagine this?) the scrutiny a thief draws. Since our romance started, I’ve gone months devoid of shame, maybe even deceiving myself that I’ve been cleansed of it, till its icy bucket dumps over me from scalp to foot soles.
Outside, we walk a cobbled sidewalk toward his car, the snow spatting on the hood of my parka. Along the curving streets of Cambridge, the silence carries us past the tightly clipped hedges. The colonial houses in white and canary yellow and smoky blue with lacquered black shutters are like magazine houses—clean places I want to disappear into the safe bricks of. When I can’t bear the weight of Warren’s silence anymore, I burst out with, What’s the big deal? I’ll pay you tomorrow.
He shushes me and looks around.
I tug his sleeve so he faces me, but he’s looking over my head for spectators. I say, Who’ll hear us? It’s an empty street.
He takes his arm from me and walks on. At the car door, he says, My cousin owns that restaurant.
Which I’d forgotten.
Nothing deflates a righteous drunk like the pinprick of reality. The air rushes out of me as I climb in the car. He buckles in, and I remind him the cousin doesn’t even know I worked there. The job came through a college pal on the waitstaff. Warren cranks up.
Sitting alongside him, I sense that his finger is fixed to some invisible eject button about to vault me from his side. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel myself spinning away, growing smaller and smaller. I shrink like a spider on a coal.
The snow spits on the windows and slides off. Warren’s gloveless fingers, so long and finely shaped, grip the wheel.
What I did, I don’t exactly know. Maybe I reached for his hand. Maybe I gave him shit for being conventional. My methods for clinging to him were varied and pitiful. Eventually, I needed him badly enough that I said whatever I had to, push him away. Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating.
I’m not preppie enough for you, I say.
His silence holds as we drive. I amplify my rhetoric and volume. Maybe I should be wearing a kilt with a fucking gold safety pin, I say.
He parks the car outside our apartment. As he’s locking up, he says—color blazing high on his flared cheekbones—And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy?
This is a buzzword with me, since deep down I know I’m crazy, my chief fear being that everybody’ll find out.
So I do the only thing I can think of: I run. I run onto the sidew
alk and drop to my knees, sobbing like a banshee. A bratty move, but Warren takes the bait and comes to help me up. Then a few things happen in an order I can’t recall. He asks me please to go inside. I start to vomit in the snow—three cognacs in those days being a heavy dose. A policeman shows up to check out the seedy scene, and from Warren’s arms, I jabber, I’m fine, Officer, just too much to drink. My boyfriend’s taking me home.
Back in the apartment, I lie in bed next to him, circled by the night’s chaos as if by gnats. Our fight’s antithetical to Warren’s penchant for order and routine—his alphabetical file folders and meticulously typed drafts, the paper clip always in the same spot. (How like my daddy that was.) If he hates a book on page one, he’ll nonetheless finish it, for he’s made the commitment. And I hope he’ll commit to me that way and be as loath to leave me undone.
I lie there pondering his fiscal prickliness, wholly mysterious to me. Back home, nobody had any money, so we swapped the same few bucks back and forth with open hands. (Those without money don’t grasp right off having to discipline yourself against sycophants.)
Listening to his even breath, I sense the oppressive weight of my old self inside me pressing to run wild again. My old mother I’m trying to keep in. Snow pecks at the window screens.
And then the sound of our upstairs neighbor playing the ukelele—plunka plunka plunka. There is no instrument goofier nor more insidious. The guy can play for hours, and while I can sack out during a train wreck, Warren heaves over and swears. He reaches his arm out and flips on the white noise machine that blocks all sound. It makes a cocoon of rushing noise meant to mimic an air conditioner or waterfall. To me, it sounds like the sucking of a dentist’s drain. Warren needs absolute silence, absolute dark to sleep, and with the entire racket in my head, I know myself to be an inadvertent force for pandemonium.
For a long time, I lie studying in the blue dark Warren’s angled jaw and ski-slope cheekbones. It’s shallow, I confess, but the architecture of his face never fails to transfix me. It’s the kind of face people on the street invariably asked for directions—the face of the army officer, the team captain, the star professor.