by John Welter
“But it’s just me, the reporter, doing that. Won’t they realize that?”
“They will when they get my letters, which they can use to explain to anyone else who asks, after reading your story today, if everyone at work is just having a lot of damn fun trivializing AIDS. And they will think that, Kurt; just because you introduced the idea. And it doesn’t matter that it’s a harmless, clever idea. People are going to wonder if we’ve diminished the awful seriousness of this disease because it was so important to you to write something that pleased you. Well, it didn’t please me, Kurt. You didn’t even tell me you were doing that. You didn’t call me and say, ‘Hey, guess what I’ve decided to write, Janice. I’ve decided to make your job seem fun and amusing, and screw the world if they don’t like it.’ And damn you for it, too, Kurt. It really hurt me, just goddamn hurt me to pick up the paper and read what you did, with no thought at all how it might affect me at work. So think about it now. I want you to stay away from the apartment for a while and don’t call me. You hurt me, Kurt, and you didn’t even know. Well, know it for a while.”
And she hung up.
I didn’t. I dumbly held the phone to my ear as if she might be there again, even when the phone just buzzed. Before I cried, which I knew was going to happen in its pathetic and pointless way, I thought of praying again, praying that Janice would stop being hurt, that my sentence in the paper would be regarded as harmless by everyone, that Janice wouldn’t leave me, and that I’d learn to know what might hurt Janice so I wouldn’t do it; and even after I did it, prayed that prayer, I knew it wasn’t going to work, that pain always grew and gathered strength in its ordinary duty to smother us, and today I was its creator. It didn’t come from some random force in the world. It came from me.
And then I didn’t cry, possibly because I deserved pain, but not the luxury of my own sadness.
40
The psychiatrist said you aren’t cured. You never are. The people who think they’re cured are the most lethal because, having satisfactorily and wondrously pronounced themselves healed because it’s so awful not to be, they naturally enjoy the delusion of being normal and ordinary and so they have one harmless beer or one harmless glass of wine or an obviously innocent mixed drink. Just one, as a public, celebratory ritual to prove that they aren’t alcoholics because they don’t deserve being alcoholics. Belief supplants fact. I’m well, I’m well. Don’t worry, be happy. Reality only exists when I invent it, and so on. But when you take that drink and recognize its taste and feel that peculiar warm rush resulting in elation or euphoria, it’s no longer a celebration of being cured but a resumption of your slow and ugly suicide. You might as well jump into a blast furnace. It’s quicker.
We don’t have any blast furnaces around here. Will I have to drive to Pittsburgh for that? That’s too far.
She said there will be stresses and fears and sadnesses you can’t avoid, and you’ll want to drink quite badly, like in the wine commercials on TV, with pretty, well-dressed women your age who appear to be so bright and healthy and voluptuous and sane as they chit-chat happily and have their friendly intimacies, and they aren’t dying, they aren’t being crushed with anxiety and depression as they cheerfully drink their delicate wine. But you are. What will you do when there’s a great loss in your life?
Hurt.
Yes, you will. And you’ll be tempted to drink, because it’s the most exquisite painkiller and sedative you know. Do you use any other drugs?
Love.
Love’s not a drug, generally.
It could be. The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t be able to regulate it.
Actually, love can be addictive.
I don’t know why I talk to you. You depress me. Do you need a doctoral degree to depress me, or can less qualified people do it?
At home, which wasn’t really home but just this building I was in filled with the constant absence of Janice, a complex emotional need that, once constructed, now had no source, a beer commercial came on TV with people dancing in the desert and a woman in her long summer dress smiling with love and sex and the personal moisture you could only smell up close, along with Michelob Dry. Everything was a complete, stunning absence, a hollowness in me that was expanding and getting hollower, as if I was overcome by the intense presence of nothing. My head felt swollen and I was afraid and put all the weights I had on my long steel bar, not even adding up the weights to wonder how heavy it was, just symmetrically arranging all of the weights on opposite ends and lifting it all over my head in such pain and wobbling violence to imagine, without hope, that I might exhaust myself enough to sleep, or exterminate my consciousness.
Which failed, and I knew I could go to the store, although Janice would be hurt by this, and buy dry sherry to numb my head and give me a kind of warm tranquillity that couldn’t be shared or even healed. It didn’t seem like Dante put any alcoholics in hell. Maybe this was wise. People who had tranquillity that needed to be healed would have found hell a little bit primitive.
To prevent or at least delay what was looking like the renewed slaughter of myself through incurable tranquillity, I went to an AA meeting. The only requirement you had to meet to attend an AA meeting was that something was wrong with you. I was qualified. When I walked into the room, trying not to seem anxious or not to seem peculiarly calm or not to seem like I was seeming anything, I thought about walking up to one of the people, introducing myself, and saying the only thing I didn’t like about AA meetings was that they let so many alcoholics in.
A few of the people I recognized from the last meeting I’d been to about five months ago, although most of them were strangers to me and probably strangers to each other. Of the thirty or forty people scattered across the room in plastic chairs or going into the little kitchen to fill styro-foam cups with hot coffee to have with their cigarettes, the majority were men, as if men were more reliable alcoholics than women. There were maybe a dozen women, and when I studied them casually and wondered what had happened to them, they looked as if they’d been hurt at least as well as the men. I didn’t think anybody should hurt that well, but the room was filled with them. Us.
I wondered where Janice was, if she was having dinner at home or if she went out, maybe to talk with a more sane and pleasant man than me who would smile at her and not be a sudden and bewildering injury to her like I was, which was going to make me cry but I was trying to believe that being sad wasn’t a privilege of mine anymore. I was the only one who knew about this drama, pretending I couldn’t hurt because Janice did. Being crazy and fractured was for me just too convenient. I wanted Janice to see me there and love me, to walk in the room and pull me out. That was just magic, and I never had magic.
The room was loud with private chatter and mumbling and some laughter before the meeting began, with people split up like at a party in their personal groups, or with solitary people sitting in pure quiet in all this noise, holding themselves in or holding themselves down, some of them looking as wounded and frantic as I was the night I quit drinking and had nothing to occupy me but endless panic. Nothing would actually characterize the whole group or be its identifying description. There was always too much detail, most of it hidden and never spoken, but in the two times I’d been to meetings before and this time, I always thought of the people as pretty brave to gather there with their common disease, one that was still despised and maligned as if they had knowingly and premeditatedly become ill, satisfying the public’s desire for a contemptible enemy. I thought they were pretty brave just to look at each other. And me. I was one of them, too, although I had a neat psychological tendency, and I assumed others did also, to imagine myself to be among the best of the alcoholics, whatever that meant; as if in our fraternity of controlled illness, my disease wasn’t quite as severe as other people’s, or I was blessed with an ability to endure my disease more admirably and with less effort, like I’d get a fucking prize for the complexity and grace of my pain. Pain could be funny, if you did it right.
I didn’t even know why I was there, unless it was the unbearable absence of Janice. And suddenly a concealed part of me, the demon who is just me, assumes it’s now time to resume drinking because it gives you peace when no one else does. And even when you defeat that, it always comes back, waiting to placidly seduce you, which isn’t hard. There is the sense that even when you are okay, you really aren’t.
The man, some leader of the group, called for everyone’s attention and established the beginning of the meeting, which was no more than everyone being quiet now, as anyone at all talked for a while about what was hurting them and scaring them, or some successes they were having. The ritual was to say your first name only and say you were an alcoholic, then begin talking about anything you wanted, which could get awfully sad, such as when a young woman named Dolores explained to us that she was already manic-depressive and one week ago she drank a quart of Tequila and began vomiting blood. It was like listening to ghosts, listening to characters from Dante’s Inferno who’d been temporarily excused from hell to come to this room and describe what they hoped to escape, if something would only work. And we didn’t know what was supposed to work, except the religion of not doing. I wouldn’t really call it a church, since you couldn’t look in a phone book and find the First Church of Not Doing, or Our Lady of Not Doing. But that was our religion, in a primitive and desperate sense. The veterans there, the guardians of the AA doctrine, probably would’ve said Not Doing certainly wasn’t a religion because actually they wanted you to have faith in Christ, insisting that this faith was the single power that could defeat alcoholism, but even so, that still made Not Doing a religion. The Church of Last Resort. It was odd to me that Christianity was this haven for alcoholics when you considered that during communion in Christian churches, you drank wine. I wondered if you could kneel at the altar one Sunday and, as the priest bent over to you with the wine in the chalice, say, “Don’t tell me Christ’s blood has alcohol in it.”
Something that began to annoy me was the ritual in which each speaker said only their first name and always added “and I’m an alcoholic.” The whole point of us being there was that all of us were alcoholics, and I found it kind of dumbly dramatic to make everyone say “and I’m an alcoholic.” Maybe this was good for some of us, to publicly acknowledge being an alcoholic, as if saying so in front of several dozen people cleansed them or helped make them brave. But it still annoyed me. It made me want to act as if it were my turn to speak, and I’d stand up, glance around the room to acknowledge the presence of everyone there, then say, “My name’s Kurt, and I’m a Sagittarian.”
Janice would have liked that, unless I was never going to see her again.
41
Janice was holding her gun when I walked into her apartment carrying a tree. It was the eighth day of our estrangement and an attempt at our reunion, a moment made particularly odd when I noticed, as Janice closed the door and smiled at me in a kind of tentative way, that she had the Beretta in her hand, dangling it loosely toward the floor. Holding the little potted tree in front of my chest with both hands, I said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said in a cheerful but subdued way, as if we both were hiding our emotions, planning on bringing them out one by one, but guarding them now.
“You have a gun,” I said.
“You have a tree,” she replied, smiling at the Norfolk pine and then at me, where my face was visible behind the tree.
“Are you going to shoot me?”
Her smile became a little more serious now, and she shook her head from side to side. “No,” she said dreamily, as if remembering something far away. I wondered if it was me, right there but so distant I was gone. “I invited you here for dinner and to talk. I think it would be impolite to shoot you.”
“Why are you holding the gun?”
“Oh,” she said, lightly laughing at herself. “I guess it does look threatening. I’m sort of absentminded for some reason. Before you got here and I was straightening up, I put some papers in the desk drawer and saw the gun. I took it out because my father said I need to clean it sometime. And then you were here. What are you doing with that tree?”
“It’s for you. I thought of getting you some flowers but all men bring flowers to women, and I never do what all men do. So I got you a tree. It’s a Norfolk pine. I’ll give you this tree if you put the gun away. Or, you could just rob me.”
“How much money do you have?”
“About twenty-five dollars.”
“That’s not enough for a good robbery,” she said, walking to the desk to put the gun away. “Do I still get the tree?”
“Yes. Do you like Norfolk pines?”
“They’re beautiful. And why do you want me to have a tree?” she said as she took the tree from my hands and carried it to the end of the couch, placing it on the floor there.
“I want to be nice to you. I want to stop hurting you, and I want to be forgiven, if that’s possible, and I realize it might not be. I want this maddening pain to end for both of us and to be your lover and your friend again, or at least your friend, if nothing else is possible. So I got you a tree. Even if you don’t keep me, you get to keep the tree.”
She was turned sideways in the room, staring down at the tree and holding her fingers to her cheeks as if thinking again of something that wasn’t there. Something was gone. Me, it seemed.
“What do you mean it might not be possible to be forgiven?” she said in a puzzled and somewhat irritated voice, still staring at the tree. “Are you realizing my choices for me, in case I won’t do that? I get to think up all my choices.”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“Don’t tell me what you didn’t mean. Tell me what you did mean. If I don’t keep you, I still get the tree?” she said curiously, not looking at me yet.
“It was a joke.”
“Your choices are so limited. You, or a tree. Maybe I’ll just keep the tree. All I have to do is water it and give it light. Maintaining you is a lot harder,” she said, walking into the kitchen to look at something in a pan on the stove. “I have my tree. You can go, now.”
Without knowing how, we’d confused and deepened our pain. What was supposed to have been our reunion dinner resulted in my being replaced by a tree. This silliness was starting to hurt too much. I thought that whatever I’d say next would be wrong, and whatever I didn’t say would also be wrong. Janice poured herself a glass of red wine and took a big drink, which I knew was meant to relax her. I didn’t get to relax.
“I’d give you some wine, but you don’t drink,” she said in a quiet and calm voice, still not looking at me as she held a wooden spoon and slowly stirred the sauce or something in the pan. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“No. You’re not. We’re having a fight.”
“I know. I wish we’d have something else. I went to an AA meeting a few nights ago.”
“You did?”
“I was afraid I might go buy some beer, or I was at least thinking of it, not very seriously, so I went to the AA meeting.”
“How was it?”
“It was pretty casual. They let a bunch of alcoholics in.”
She looked over at me curiously. It seemed like she was going to smile but decided against it, then resumed not looking at me and stirring whatever was in the pan. I kept standing in front of the coffee table, right where I’d been when I handed her the tree, as if nothing was safe or known or proper enough for me to move, like I might have to leave suddenly because I didn’t belong there anymore, or because we were so hurt, it wouldn’t be right to sit down and be comfortable, but it wouldn’t be right to walk into the kitchen and be near her, because it was being decided if we could have each other. She opened a cabinet and got a glass out. I watched her the way you might watch a priest or a doctor at work, as if every movement was a crucial and precise act leading to a new future controlled by them. She opened the freezer and put ice into the glass. She opened the refrigerator and to
ok out a big bottle of Coke, then unscrewed the cap and filled the glass with Coke.
“Come get your Coke,” she said, holding the glass out to me and making me walk into the kitchen to be near her. I wouldn’t look at her eyes, as if that were too private, an intimate privilege I’d lost. I took the glass from her hand, being careful not to touch her fingers. She put her other hand on my chest, just lightly resting the palm of her hand and her fingers on my chest. I was glad, but didn’t know if I should say so. Everything I did was a potential error, one more being enough to hurt her again and make her decide to get rid of me. The way we were now, I was already gone. We were in the same room together, but missing. She patted my chest and turned around to study things on the stove. It was tomato sauce.
“I’ll tell you what hurt me,” she said, and sipped some red wine. “You didn’t even think, when you wrote your story, that my job mattered or that you could have an effect on me. You did what you often do at work, which was to take an entire story and its relevant facts, which you got correctly, and reduce them to a form of amusement for yourself. I know that’s your style, and sometimes you do it brilliantly, but sometimes things are more important than that and don’t deserve to be just one more witty, sardonic amusement for yourself. And especially me, Kurt,” she said, stopping to scrape some tomato sauce from the sides of the pan with the wooden spoon. “You weren’t writing about some abstract, remote meeting, or a government policy or some high-altitude bureaucrats you’d never even see so it didn’t matter what you said about them or how you subtly or blatantly constructed a description to have fun. You were writing about me, Kurt. My job. My career. My concerns, and my goddamn emotions. But you couldn’t tell it when the story came out. When I picked that paper up and read the first line, it was like I was being attacked and ridiculed by you,” she said, stirring the tomato sauce a little more violently.