Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  When I finish my beer, they’re still at it. There is nothing more disgusting, really, than people enjoying themselves so thoroughly when you’re miserable.

  I toss my bottle cap, which I’ve been clutching so tightly there’s a ring in the center of my palm, out the window and take the last beer from the refrigerator. The blond guy will have to leave soon to go to church, and this makes me feel a little better. I know he’ll hate himself, and he’ll hate her for making him hate himself. In half an hour he’ll be staring at the back of the pretty church girl he likes who is dating someone else, someone stronger than he is, stronger than he could ever be. He’ll look down at his wrinkled khakis and know he’ll never have her.

  I remove the bottle from the window and turn on the air conditioner. Then I call Ben, wake him from a nap. Ben does whatever I say because he’s in love with me and sometimes I sleep with him. He always lets me initiate things, and I do it whenever I feel like what I owe him is more than I want to owe.

  “Let’s go drinking,” I say. “I’m out of beer.”

  He says he’s tired and hungover and then sighs and tells me to give him an hour. An hour is a reasonable amount of time so I agree. I’ll have to shower and find something to wear. I’ll have to put on some eyeliner and smudge concealer under my eyes. I know where we’ll go, where we always go: the karaoke bar where people drink at every hour of the day. It’s a dive but there’s a jukebox with plenty of Johnny Cash and the toilets always flush and they don’t care how drunk you get. Some places will kick you out if they see you fall off a barstool or fold your arms on the bar to have a catnap but not Shenanigan’s.

  The blond guy mumbles something, undershirt going over his head. Maybe he’ll run home and make himself presentable before church. Maybe he’ll punch himself in the chest and tell God how sorry he is for having sex with an atheist from New York City, once again, how he will stop, how he has already stopped because it was the very last time.

  Instead of showering, I lie in bed staring at the tops of trees.

  Our apartment takes up the entire second floor of an old colonial. We each have two large rooms and our own bathroom. We share a kitchen, a dining area, and a small alcove where our washer and dryer are stacked. A man and his dead lover’s son live in the renovated space below—they don’t like each other, but they each own half and it’s a bad time to sell (according to Melinda). I listen for their raised voices, for any voices at all, but it’s always so quiet down there. I imagine them eating and watching television in their house slippers, completely separate, as if the other does not exist.

  Ben calls me from his car. I put on my favorite pair of jeans and a clean shirt, check my face in the mirror, and then stand on the toilet to check my body. I need new clothes and shoes. I have no idea how I’m managing to live off my graduate student assistantship—it is so little money—but I am. My peers take out loans so they can go to fancy dinners, buy dresses and high heels.

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” I say, settling myself into the passenger seat of his gray four-door sedan.

  “No problem. Where do you want to go?”

  “We’re not going to play that game, are we?” I ask, flipping the ashtray closed.

  “Well,” he says.

  Shenanigan’s is less than three miles away but in a town this small that’s far. I keep moving to smaller and smaller towns and the distances grow accordingly. Five miles used to be nothing. Now three seems excessive, ridiculous. And if it’s cold or rainy out, forget it. My most recent ex-boyfriend grew up in Los Angeles and thought nothing of driving fifteen miles to eat sushi, which was one of the reasons it didn’t work out between us. Not the distance, exactly, but the way distances framed our worlds.

  “You sleep all day?” I ask.

  “I stayed up last night.”

  “You were playing that video game again.”

  He opens the ashtray and lights a cigarette.

  I’ve watched him play his game before; it’s just a bunch of code, an indecipherable collection of numbers and signs that made me feel dumb so I made fun of it. And of course there’s a girl on there he likes, a girl who lives a thousand miles away so he can imagine her beautiful and accommodating, so he can imagine they might fall in love.

  We sit at the bar, the side closest to the bathroom and jukebox. Ben hands Michelle his debit card and she brings us two Miller Lites. I know he won’t let me split the bill when it comes, but I don’t feel too bad about it because even if we take shots it won’t be more than thirty dollars.

  “You want to play pool?” he asks.

  “No way.”

  He goes to the bathroom while I drink my beer and try not to make eye contact with anyone. The other grad students only come on Thursdays because it’s steak night: a slab of meat, a baked potato, and a salad for seven dollars.

  When he returns, I tell him that I listened to Melinda have sex for an hour earlier, that I thought it would go on forever.

  “Were you just standing outside her door?” he asks.

  “Pretty much.”

  “How would you feel if she did that to you?”

  “You don’t like her, what do you care?”

  “I just think it’s rude,” he says.

  “People in New York share everything—they hang a curtain in the middle of a room and pretend they’re alone.”

  Like Melinda, Ben is also a poet, but he doesn’t write about fruit or trees. He writes about McRibs and factories and Walmart. He writes about me. There’s a poem about the time I threw his I Ching at Crescent City, another about the afternoon we met at a Waffle House in Memphis and how he knew by the texture of my skin I’d slept with someone else. And then there’s the one where I’m in my panties reading Don DeLillo while he makes lasagna. He gives me ways of seeing myself differently, provides me with images I wouldn’t otherwise have. I wouldn’t remember reading Don DeLillo in my panties, wouldn’t remember any of the things he has deemed important. It’s like I get to have my own memories and his too.

  I rest a hand on his knee, my fingers searching out the hole in his jeans so I can feel his skin. A guy in a wheelchair rolls through the door. He looks at me and I look away because one time he told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and I was embarrassed for both of us because I’m not that pretty, because he was only able to approach me in that way because I’d never be with him.

  We order shots of whiskey and another round of beers, but when karaoke starts I ask him to take me home.

  Ben pulls up to my house and we sit there for a minute with his car running. The basketball that’s been rolling around in his trunk is finally still. As we kiss, I wonder what it would be like to want to fuck someone so badly you’d do it even though it goes against everything you truly desire.

  I climb the stairs and find Melinda at the dining room table with a glass of red wine and a full plate: half a chicken, vegetables, and spinach in a separate bowl. She never allows herself more than one glass of wine and only with a meal.

  “You’re like a European,” I say. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know—nine? Ten? Where’d you go?” she asks, but I don’t want to tell her. She would never go to Shenanigan’s, would never be friends with Ben, and can’t understand why I would. Anytime I date anyone at all, for even a minute, she tells me I’m too good for him.

  In the morning, I listen to Melinda bang around: opening cabinets and slamming them, pots clanking. I can’t believe how loud she is, how little regard she has for me. It is seven-thirty and already painfully bright outside. I need curtains but this seems completely beyond the realm of possibility—where would I get them and would they be long enough? I’d probably have to have them made. I watch the occasional big-winged bird fly by and think about what I have to do today. I don’t have class until six. I have a few stories to read but that shouldn’t take me longer than thirty or forty minutes. Despite my teaching schedule and three classes a semester, there is so much time.

/>   I call my ex-husband. He picks up on the third ring. He always makes me wonder if he’s going to pick up but he always does.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “On my way to work,” he says, taking a sip of something. And then he says, “Guess who died?”

  “What?”

  “Guess who died?”

  “Mrs. White.”

  “Mrs. White already died.”

  “Oh yeah.” She was old, ninety-seven or ninety-eight, our next-door neighbor. “Who then?”

  “Jonah,” he says.

  “Jonah?”

  “Jonah,” he repeats. “One night he drank too much and didn’t wake up.” He sounds excited about it.

  “Wait, what are you talking about?”

  “He drank too much one night and didn’t wake up.”

  Jonah was our closest friend, though I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I left Meridian. I’ve hardly even thought of him because I’ve done my best to put everyone and everything in that town behind me. It hasn’t been difficult. Once you leave a place like that, so long as it isn’t your hometown, you know you won’t ever have to see any of those people again.

  “Jonah’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s really messed up that you would tell me like this. Why didn’t you call me? And why would you say it like that—guess who died?”

  He explains that Jonah had been going downhill for the past year. He’d stopped coming over to the house; he hadn’t even seen him in months.

  “When?”

  “Three or four weeks ago.”

  “Well this is all very upsetting.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else so I hang up. I won’t contact him again—there is no news he could give me that might make me glad I called. Jonah. Jesus. There was a time when I thought I might have been in love with him, though I was just unhappy and had wanted someone to do something about it and he’d been the likeliest candidate. I can see him in our kitchen with one of his girlfriends, an older divorced lady who didn’t want to hang out with us so we’d been seeing him less frequently. They’d come from the tennis court, were wearing their tennis whites. I try to picture him at the Mexican restaurant we frequented or sitting next to me in a lawn chair while my ex grilled hamburgers, but I can’t remember him with any specificity at any time or in any place other than this one. It makes me wonder how my closest friends will remember me when I’m gone—what completely insignificant moment will they recall?

  He used to burn CDs for me, music he thought I’d like interspersed with the songs he’d written. I don’t know where they are; there were so many and I had thought so little of them.

  When I hear Melinda run down the stairs, I put on a pair of shorts and rummage around in my purse for a cigarette. Then I go outside and sit on the stoop. Across the street there’s a crack house with a blue-tarp roof. I’m not sure how many people live there—a cast of characters come and go, cackling and drinking, tossing bottles into a trash can full of bottles: smash! But they’re quiet now.

  I unlock my car, check the console and glove box. I find one of Jonah’s CDs in the passenger side door, still in its envelope with his small script: SONGS FOR L. I take it upstairs and download it to my computer, listen to “Rhinestone Lady,” “Porno King from New Orleans,” “Monkey Lover.” The lyrics I used to think were funny now seem seriously fucked up, but the melodies are nice. I might have loved Jonah. But if I loved him, why haven’t I thought of him? I imagine that I’m the one who might have saved him. For every man who commits suicide, there must be a dozen women who convince themselves that they were the only one with the power to save him and they failed.

  In the kitchen, I take an energy bar out of the cabinet and chew it slowly, laboriously.

  Melinda’s doors are open—they’re always wide open when she leaves. I walk into her bedroom and look at the comforter on the floor and the piles of books scattered about. A couple of wooden fish hang from the ceiling; brightly colored tapestries are tacked to the walls. There’s a medal from a marathon and half a dozen framed pictures on her dresser. I only have two pictures in the apartment: an elementary school photo of my sister, back when she was thin-limbed and straight-haired, and one with the L.A. boyfriend. They are pictures from past lives that have no bearing on this one at all. I might as well have my wedding album on display.

  I never touch anything of Melinda’s. I just stand in her space feeling like an intruder.

  When I get out of class, I drive to Ben’s. He lives on the second floor of a ten-unit, slum apartment building. From what I can tell, only men live here, though sometimes a woman visits and there’ll be a fight in the parking lot. If it disrupts whatever Ben’s doing, he’ll hang his head out the window and yell at the couple, or offer advice.

  He opens the door and I hand him a twelve-pack. “I’m making you meatballs,” he says.

  I follow him into the kitchen and sit on the counter, but the space is too small and I’m just getting in his way. He reaches behind me for the bread crumbs, shakes them into a bowl. He never measures anything.

  “I called my ex-husband earlier and he told me that our best friend drank himself to death.” He stops what he’s doing. “I haven’t seen him since I left Meridian but we were really close.” I’m upset about it, but mostly I want someone to be upset for me. It’s tragic—a tragedy. Or perhaps I just want an excuse to get drunk.

  He puts his forearm on my leg because his hands are coated in ground beef and egg, and looks at me too seriously.

  “I’m fine—I just hate that he didn’t tell me. I have to call his mom. I used to work with her at Curves for Women.”

  “You worked at Curves for Women?”

  “It was basically a sales job and I was terrible at it. I didn’t know why anyone would want to join. And it was right next to Papa John’s so you had to smell pizza the whole time you’re working out.” I recall the unpleasantness of measuring the older women: my hands touching their inner thighs and breasts, their bodies warm and slightly damp.

  I take a beer from the box and sit at his card table, which holds his laptop and a bunch of precariously stacked papers. When he turns on the fan and the window is open, they fly everywhere. I log onto Facebook and of course my cousin has written me, but as soon as I respond he’ll write me back and I’ll be in the same boat. It’s an ongoing nuisance, this pressure to engage in tedious conversations about dating and work when all I want to do is watch animal videos and stalk my exes. I consider the items in my Amazon cart, wonder if I still want them.

  “I got you some of those chips you like,” he says, tossing me a bag of Gardetto’s.

  “I love you.” I open it and pick out the crunchy brown pieces, eyeing his bottle of Klonopin. Sometimes he pours the pills into his hand and counts how many are left, and we discuss whether the doctor will believe he lost them or someone stole them and how clichéd that is.

  A bottle cap hits the counter; he’s already on his second beer. Twelve is not going to be nearly enough.

  “It smells so good,” I say. Whenever he makes meatballs, I eat them. I don’t think about cows or blood or Melinda. “I’m glad you’re cooking. I don’t have any food at home and I don’t go to the grocery store on Friday because it’s a madhouse.”

  “It’s a madhouse!” he says, shaking his fist in the air. “A madhouse!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve never seen Planet of the Apes?”

  “No.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m horrified to think how many Planet of the Apes references you’ve missed in your lifetime.”

  After we’ve consumed huge plates of meatballs and spaghetti, along with all of the beer and a couple of Jack and Diet Cokes, we get into his bed.

  “I’m full as a tick,” I say, running a hand over my body, trying to feel my hip bones and ribs; I should start weighing myself, keep a check on things. He rests a hand on my stom
ach and I wonder if he’s imagining a baby, if he wants to impregnate me so we’ll be stuck together forever, but then he gets up and stumbles into the bathroom. I run my fingers through my hair, untangling knots while he vomits.

  “The last time I threw up it was pink from red wine,” I say, as he’s brushing his teeth. “It was kind of pretty.”

  “I threw up pink one time from sweet and sour chicken, but it wasn’t pretty. It was chunky and it tasted bad.”

  We adjust our pillows and watch Intervention on his laptop, the woman addicted to pills and bingo. Her husband is about to leave her and she has a lonely, closet-hiding kid. When she’s passed out on the floor in broken glass and casserole, Ben says he feels a little better. Then he says, “Seriously, though,” as if it’s a conversation we’ve been having all night, “what percent chance do I have?”

  We’ve been over this so many times, it’s just a game we play: what is the chance that I’ll be with him, that our relationship will ever be more than a friendship stretched to its breaking point?

  I think about it and say, “Thirty-seven percent.”

  “In baseball if you hit the ball thirty-seven percent of the time it’s pretty good.”

  “If you have a thirty-seven percent chance of living it’s bad.”

  “If you have a thirty-seven percent chance of winning the lottery,” he counters, “it would be fucking excellent.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “I’ve always been lucky,” he says, which isn’t true.

  We watch another episode of Intervention, a heroin-addicted prostitute. I’ve seen this one twice already—it’s one of my favorites because the girl is so beautiful. She paints her face in bright colors, twists sections of her hair around a curling iron. Her boyfriend shoots the heroin straight into her jugular.

  Ben falls asleep and then jerks himself awake.

  “Do you want some water? Can I get you anything?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I’m okay.”

  I lie in the crook of his arm and say soothing things and it is eleventh grade all over again and I’m in love with a boy who carves things into his arms with the sharp edges of beer cans. I rub Neosporin on his cuts, brush his hair. I hide with him in bedrooms at parties, behind bushes—the world slows, stops. But everything that happened between us could easily be counted in minutes.