She collapsed into an upholstered chair and spoke in her hoarse whisper, “I got alcohol poisoning.”
“1 thought you just get drunk.”
“No, you can poison yourself,” she said. “I yelled for you for hours. Where the fuck did you go?”
“Just for a walk.”
“Didn’t you find it weird that I wasn’t up?”
“I didn’t think about it.”
“Taking care of number one, is that it?” I didn’t know what to say. I kept silently chanting, she killed Helmsley right? But the hatred that was once hard and tangible was getting harder and harder to hold on to; it was melting in my hands. She rose and went to her bed. Not knowing what else to do, I followed her in.
“I need help,” she said quite matter-of-factly. “Are you going to help me or do I have to find someone else?”
“I guess I’ll help you,” I replied.
“You guess?” she asked, and through squinted eyes she looked at me. “You ungrateful bastard. Just get your things and get out of here—I’ll call back Dana.”
“Fuck that!” I broke. I couldn’t hold it anymore. “Helmsley killed himself because you dumped him. And you couldn’t give two shits. Of course, I hate you!” She rolled over and looked up at me in surprise.
“That shouldn’t come as a shock,” I babbled. “I always hated you. And I’m not vain enough to believe that you love me, so what gives here? What the hell am I here for?”
In a very low, distant tone, and in a very slow cadence, she tried to explain: “I loved him. I really loved that man.” Then she sobbed, “What the fuck did he see in me? Did he ever tell you what he saw in me?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” I said sincerely; I certainly had never seen anything in her.
“Beats the shit out of me, too,” she responded absently.
“You should have had more faith,” I said to her.
“More faith!” she responded. “I remembered when I first met you, imitating the way I was talking, making fun of how stupid I was. I could only imagine what he must’ve thought.”
That ensuing blank of silence filled me with self-disgust.
“I could love slobs and bastards,” she continued. “I’ve had cripples and creeps in the sack, and I’ve bent over backwards for them. But for the first time, I meet a guy who really had it all. Good looking, brainy. The whole time I couldn’t help thinking, What’s the matter with this guy? When’s he gonna dump me? He’s not gonna keep a pig like me around, no way. I felt fucking anxious as hell, like he’s going to get under my skin and bang, drop me from heaven. Well, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I told him I never wanted to see him again. He wouldn’t leave it at that, so I damaged him and finally went off with another guy. The next day, when I heard he offed himself, I realized that he wasn’t fucking around with me, that he really loved me.” She started crying in a painful and frightening way.
“You know, you might have played a part in his suicide, but I don’t think you were the total reason,” I finally said. “He wasn’t writing anymore. I think he was coming to terms with the fact that he couldn’t be what he wanted to be.”
“What was that?”
“Some kind of great towering thinker.”
While she thought about this, her face seemed to brighten, like a dimmer inside was slowly turning up. The pores and lines seemed to vanish. I got up and buttoned the collar of my shirt, which I suppose she misunderstood as some gesture toward departing, because she said, “You don’t have to leave. I owe you one.”
“You owed him one. You don’t owe me shit.”
“Well, maybe not, but he used to talk about you. He used to say he wanted to help you.”
“How?”
“He said that New York was your way of fluctuating yourself. No wait, he said you were flatualating yourself.”
“Flatualating myself?”
“You know, when you hit yourself.” She rolled her eyes. “And when I saw you sitting there in that doorway all zonked out, it was like Helmsley was right there saying, Help him.”
“Did he mention why I was flagellating myself?”
“No.”
I nodded and made a thank you expression. After a while, she asked for a glass of water. I got her a glass, which she drank slowly. Then she closed her eyes and lay back down. I sat on a chair near the bed and watched her sleeping. I was still shocked over how she felt about Helmsley. I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn’t understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn’t as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one’s character affects one’s appearance. Although she wasn’t my type she was attractive. As I thought about her—the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me—she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow—all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.
I must have fallen asleep because at one point I was aware of her stirring me. I climbed into bed with her, fully dressed. And she quickly fell back to sleep in my arms.
I’ve been living with her now for some years. I found a job in a chain bookstore and eventually became the manager. I’ve settled in, acquired new friends, people to console and to be consoled by. In Brooklyn I am content, the closest we can come to a sustained happiness.
ARTHUR NERSESIAN
is the author of a second novel, Manhattan Loverboy. He was the managing editor of the literary magazine, The Portable Lower East Side, and has been teaching English at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College in the South Bronx since 1990.
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