Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  But usually we rolled around on the floor, I listened to him talk, I begged for it, then I’d give up and go take a shower and he’d watch me start to finish, hand me the towel. Once he said You got a body too. Baby Rie-rie, lil M, look at those big nipples she got. Ugh. I could work with those big gumdrops and that bush. Real woman got a bushy bush like that, don’t know what all this mess with some naked pussy lips is for.

  Don’t talk about it if you don’t want it, I said. You’re not for real. I’m for real. I’m ready.

  You sure not ready for work, he said, looking at his watch, changing the subject. Looking at his fingernails. He got them buffed every Saturday, they were always shiny. His shoes too. He’d drop off one pair and pick up another. He had some military standards. He believed in the power of systems and order to manifest success. He believed in every clichéd thing about the power of belief. He believed in believing in belief. I tell my baby she not allowed to use the word can’t, he said. And he said I don’t get sick cause I just refuse to. You tell yourself Oh I’m sick—he said this in a whiny puny voice, screwing up his face—you sure enough will be.

  That swaggering, who knew it wasn’t his belief in himself that made it all go. That it did work if you worked it. I was never that certain about anything. That’s your problem, he said, you doubt yourself. You got to want it. I do want it, I said. Nah you don’t. Not if you don’t know you want it. What’s that big dark thing behind you? he said, and I said I don’t know, what, showing him I was impatient with whatever lesson was coming. That’s the shadow of a doubt and you best deal with it right here right now.

  What I wanted was some jack. Make that jack, baby, make that jack. Another of his mantras. I got to get out there and make that jack, he said in the back station at The Restaurant, taking a long draw of his protein-ginseng-vitamin smoothie before heading out into the dining room with purpose. I wanted to know how to do what he did. Conjury. Turning dinner into livelihood, wealth, stability. My girl lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her dad, she slept on a futon in the living room. Cal’s daughter lived in a giant suburban house with both her parents and took ballet. It’s not that I even wanted a giant suburban house for her. I just wanted her to have something from me, anything better than absence.

  Cal’s daughter Elena, he got her in with this modeling agency. That was him—that belief in the most pressing uniqueness of his own life. No question. My daughter was beautiful too, at three she had flossy red hair down to her waist and strangers would use adult beauty words to describe her, like gorgeous. But I was always thinking something like Nothing is really all that special.

  Cal was always thinking the opposite. And his daughter was what modeling agencies look for these days, a mixed-race child with fluffy hair and skin that one caramel Polynesian shade. She was tall, five feet when she was eight, with long delicate bones. Like Cal’s having her in ballet and modeling from the time she was small made her that way or something. Like he willed it. He said Man, Maxine will not have that talk with her and I keep getting on to her, telling her it should be a young lady’s mother has that talk. She’s dangerous, she looks too old, boys gonna be after her in a minute and she so young inside still. I told Max she don’t talk to her by her next birthday I’m gonna do it my own self, he said.

  Max was Mexican, from Laredo. Cal said After my first marriage I knew the next one would be outside my race, but he never explained that or how he knew. His first wife Tamara was a black woman; they had a baby that was stillborn and took the marriage with it. Angeline, tattooed on his heart, scroll, script.

  I was always moving the furniture around in that apartment. Couldn’t get situated. There was a beige velvet loveseat from 1974, which my parents bought the year they married and kept for thirty more. With that kind of example you’d think I wouldn’t have turned out so transient, you’d think I’d have been more like Cal, rooted, a straight line from point of origin up. There wasn’t anything wrong with the couch when I got it and it seemed like I should have had that kind of unblemished momentum too, considering who I came from. I put it in the dining room until I made enough jack to get a tiny bistro table at a restaurant supply store. By then I felt like I had been living in restaurants forever and would never escape so I don’t know why I wanted to feel restaurant at home too. I had thick ceramic café mugs and those standard restaurant highballs and pint glasses. I had those bar towels, white with the single red stripe. The aesthetics of high volume are usually durable and plain I suppose. Plain itself is durable and that appealed to me, so I didn’t deploy the theater that Calvin unfurled on his tables. I didn’t even give them my card at the end of the meal. I never said Ask for me next time. Cal was pushy about that, made them feel like they’d be dumb if they didn’t.

  First the loveseat was in the dining room, that’s where Cal told me about Angeline and I told him about how I’d married my daughter’s dad when I was seventeen because my own dad hit me for the first and only time. Whacked the side of my head and said we needed to plan a wedding before I started showing. I went along but when she was three I left. Her dad’s a good guy and I love her like nothing. Neither of those changed the fact that I’d felt crazy since she was born, like I wasn’t meant for it. I just woke up one day and said I can’t do this. This isn’t real. I’m in the wrong life. It was that abrupt, overnight, like a snake molting out of a skin. Leaving it behind, slithering away cold-blooded.

  When I got the table for the dining room I moved the loveseat into the living room, canted to face the corner. But after Ryan Doak broke my bed frame trying to fuck Iraq out of himself I moved the mattress into the living room as if the place were a loft and put the loveseat in my bedroom. The bed that broke I got from my parents too, and it was an antique mahogany four-poster, even older than the loveseat. I’d been staring at the geometric inlay on that headboard since I could remember.

  It was when the mattress was there in the living room, its last stop, that I had to talk to Max on the phone. Cal called me and said Listen I need you to talk to Max. He said it in such a way that I knew she was right there and it was over. I talked to her on my back on the mattress and I’m afraid I sounded like a junkie. Laconic. In a call center you’re not supposed to lean back in your chair if you’re trying to sell something, you’re supposed to sit up straight and pretend the person can see you. It affects how you talk. I should have sat up. I think I said what I was supposed to say to her but my rebellion was lying down so she’d hear some other thing in my voice, hear some tip tap of the truth.

  I was supposed to say and did say Nothing is going on with me and your husband even though he had a $600 cell phone bill last month, and it was all calls to me. The thing I shake my head over now is how for probably $589 worth of that $600 I couldn’t understand what he was saying, I was just listening. He would talk, he would fall into a chant, and something about his mellow voice and his way of speaking and the connection combined to make him unintelligible. I just said Uh huh and Oh yeah? or whatever was called for by the tone. But I didn’t think it would make sense if I said to Max I’m sorry the phone bill was so high but trust me I don’t even know what he said to me. And I couldn’t say Yes—your instincts—what you cannot think on has most definitely occurred, I have been heavily petted by Calvin D. Colson every day for three months, and your husband was in his underwear, but he wouldn’t let me touch his cock. I didn’t figure that last would give any comfort. And I knew Cal would kill me if I said anything real.

  That was the contradiction, that’s what I’m trying to get at. He took it for granted that you would do some things that just weren’t straight, and he took it for granted that that was justified. I guess that’s corruption. Riding those actions like a boss. One afternoon before the afternoons ended he brought me a twenty-bag. He knew I’d gone back to coke even if I wasn’t giving it up to everybody anymore. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t gotten pregnant or caught something during all that. Young lady, you got some kind of angel looking out for you, h
e said. But the main reason I was keeping it to myself was so I could have a chance with him, because I knew he would never go there with me if he caught the scent of anybody else. I let him think I was learning how to be a woman, as he put it, instead of just trying to get what I wanted from him.

  He said the coke was from the Baron. The Baron was this Turkish guy who pretended to be Italian and dropped by The Restaurant once or twice a year. He’d show up like we’d been waiting for him and no one else through all that intervening time, each of us frozen in uniform, in place, until his presence disseminated some magic dust to make us come alive again so we could fulfill our destinies of serving him. The magic dust was some green and some white and all handshook. I’m sure Cal got the don’s share of both and he told me he kept the bags to pass on to his people, just like he kept cigarettes and disposable cameras in his locker for when they ran out of smokes or got engaged. Once I even saw him fix a lady’s dress with a safety pin he had in his pocket.

  I never knew anybody who kept coke though, which is the main fissure in my Cal wall. It’s a terrible habit but I tend to believe what people tell me, so when he told me the story of how years ago he quit using crack and coke I believed it. Then he gives me that twenty-bag and tells me he got it from the Baron and he’s been keeping it under the floor mat in his BMW. I looked at him and thought You don’t make your daughter breakfast and you’re fucking Cassandra Melton and you didn’t quit partying and you’re not going to make it. I looked at him and looked away and I cut it into lines on top of a drawing my daughter made, the two of us portrayed as lean and grinning neighbors in one of those stick-figure sketches that seemed more a demand for normalcy than a depiction of the actual. This is the kind of obstinate I was. I thought it was bad form to lay it out on her little picture like that, like it seemed too obvious a send-up of my failings, like I ought to keep her effort sacred if only out of superstition. But that’s what I wanted to face down—mine was an inversion of Cal’s just got to be you and bring it. I wouldn’t let myself look away from what I was doing and to punish myself for seeing it I wouldn’t let myself fix it. Sometimes I would get home from work and I would get stuck in the car, just sitting there in the carport looking out over the steering wheel. An hour could pass as I watched the security light come on and go off as the bars let out, flushing cars up Greenville Avenue.

  I did one line and Cal told me not to touch the rest till I saw what happened, said it was real shit and all I’d ever had was baby laxative because he knew I got it from the Mexicans at work. I don’t know why I listened to him, that wasn’t my practice usually, but within about thirty seconds my brain had melted. Why did you just do that to me, I said, sounding to myself like the gigantic demented rabbit in Donnie Darko. Why did you do that why did you do that why did you do that, I said. My face was falling apart. My face is falling off, I said to him, my face is falling falling you fucking cunt. You did that to me on purpose.

  I didn’t do shit, he said, you the one did the line just now when you know you got to be at work! How you gonna work now? How you gonna drive?

  What is all your talk about coming through for yourself, showing up, flying right if you’re gonna sabotage me like this?

  You sabotaged yourself! Coulda waited till after work or done anything in the world with that. I asked you if you wanted it and you coulda said no! Don’t blame this on me. You do gotta show up and fly right in your own life or you gonna lose everything.

  How can somebody who rubs his fingers all over every woman he passes and wonders why his wife won’t put out talk to me about fly right?

  This contorted exchange continued until Cal said Look I got to go, I got to get ready myself. You better get it together. You shouldn’t be doin that stuff you don’t know how to snap out.

  Get the fuck out with your goddamned I can be sober if I want cause I’m such a badass voodoo! I said.

  He left. I went into the kitchen and turned on a burner. I had slipped into such synesthesia that the clicking of the pilot made me have an orgasm. Propped on the back of the stove was a piece of a broken mirror, a mirror I broke when I moved into that apartment. In the piece of mirror, which was shaped like Tennessee, my irises were gone. All-pupil looks vacant and deadly. And my movements had contrails as I looked away from the mirror and opened a drawer to find a steak knife. I heated the blade over the flame and then raised my cocktail dress—this was back when I still worked mostly in the bar at The Restaurant—and pulled down my panty hose to get to my abdomen. I burned Cal’s initials into the skin to the right of my navel, each about one inch square and made of straight lines, like letters carved into a tree. I felt and did not feel the pain. Skin melts like wax. I cut a big hole in the waist of the pantyhose so I could pull them back up and they wouldn’t stick to the wound.

  I don’t know how I drove to work, all I remember is I had to sit down with Danny in the office and explain to him why I couldn’t close my mouth or stop crying. I said something about my daughter. What I said was true, in the sense that it’s true that that kind of coke will napalm your emotional synapses and whatever you care about most will suddenly be getting a sky’s worth of air.

  Why isn’t she with you? Cal had asked me on one of the first afternoons when we were getting to know each other. I don’t know what to give her, I said. Bullshit, he said, you give her love, you give her time, you give her attention. Is that what you give Elena, I asked. Much as I can, he said. I want to do it right, I said, not much as I can right, just right.

  You got to do it some kinda way to start, he said.

  Danny let me go home the day I did the Baron’s line—it wasn’t the first time he granted me some clemency when he knew what was up, I don’t know why. He’d fire anybody for nothing. I guess he could keep people around on the same capriciousness but he said to me once that I was golden there. I was worried because we fucked up Doc Melton’s sea bass and his mom’s pork loin all in one night. Neither was my fault but that never mattered. Honey, you’re golden here, Danny said to me, don’t worry about it. We could have served that old bitch cat meat and she probably would have loved it.

  Cal wouldn’t look at me as I passed him on my way out the day I went home blitzed. He pulled this junk where we’d be cuddling and playing and necking and laughing at three p.m. upstairs on the corner of Morningside and Greenville and at six p.m. under the domed ceiling of The Restaurant suddenly he was tired, he was busy, he was clipped and distant. I think it was even worse that day because he didn’t want to acknowledge any connection to the wreck of me. He did not shift his gaze to look at me as I left; he was looking up at the specials board dutifully copying down the features and counts. Made that look like the most important thing a body could be doing. I saw his fingers roll the pen slightly and that was what said I see you but I want you to know I’m not looking at you. I imagined slapping his waiter book from his hand on my way out. It would fly down on the floor, he’d suck his teeth and bend over like a man who’d been working in restaurants for three decades, because he had. Mindful of the back, a slow careful squat of the legs. He’d give me a disgusted look over his shoulder, a shake of his head, eternal dismissal. I would never be loved again. At least until tomorrow afternoon. I knew his routine by then, but I didn’t whack the book because I thought I might fall down.

  On the nights that Cal and I were both at The Restaurant it was agreed between us that we couldn’t leave without tracking down the other to say good night. I did it once, just finished my shit and left, and he called me the next day. Said What you think you doin walking out without saying good night to me? I couldn’t find you, I said. Lame, he said, that’s a weak-ass excuse. You got any more weak-ass excuses for me today? No sir, I said. Good, he said, you can walk out whenever you want I’m not there, and I don’t care who else you don’t say good night to but don’t be like that with me. Okay, I said. All right missy, I got to run back into this bank, will I see you tonight? Yes, I said, love you. Love you back, he said. I always knew
I was good with him if he said I love you back, not I love you too. If he ever said I love you too it meant I’m unhappy with you, I don’t feel it, it meant I’m just talking to you, meant My mouth is making some meaningless sounds. I love you too meant nothing so much it almost meant I don’t love you.

  I didn’t even try to speak to him as I walked out that day. If I’d said Bye Cal, love you see you later he probably wouldn’t have even said I love you too. He would have said Mm-hmm. Or just Mm.

  Fuck him. Fuck him back and fuck him too and fuck him, I thought. I called my friend Clark, a beautiful specimen of a man who used to be a licensed chemical dependency counselor before he left that behind to deal the most divine hydro. I wanted to come down as fast as possible and I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted to hide my self somewhere where I couldn’t get to it. I wanted someone to take it from me, let me think it was safe. How dumb. He got me stoned but it didn’t put my face back together at all. I still felt razed. I almost latched on to a Shirley Horn album but missed. I sat in the bottom of the shower forever, water running over me and taking nothing with it. He left for a previously arranged dinner with a friend and I felt abandoned. My teeth sang.

  I did not sleep. I stared at the ceiling in Clark’s place, to which was affixed a tapestry with a giant embroidered om character. Clark came home from the dinner around three a.m. and I begged him to get me some narcotics so I could have eyelids again. He said he didn’t know where to get any. I was lying naked on the bed, covered partly by a towel and partly by the clothes I was clutching but hadn’t been able to put on. He asked me what happened here, where CDC was illegible for blisters I knew would deflate and turn to pus the next day, from having branded myself with lesser, simpler marks in other places. I said Calvin D. Colson, Calvin D. Colson, ochre, terra-cotta, golden Colson.