Problems

by Jade Sharma

  I called Ogden. “Hey, miss me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Regret dumping a hot piece of ass since you know you’re closer to death, and you probably won’t have that many chances to have sex?”

  “Every moment of the day.”

  “Good. Drinking more?”

  “Yeah, Maya, I’m completely miserable and live in constant regret.”

  “It’s too bad you ruined a good thing. You’ll never get another chance.”

  “I don’t think I could honestly live with myself if I lost you again, so maybe it’s better we don’t try it again.”

  “What level is your sarcastic meter up to?” I asked.

  “It’s so high it’s almost full circle back to being earnest.”

  “I don’t have time for your old-man mind games. It’s kind of a waste talking to you anyway, since you probably won’t remember anything because, you know, you’re old and probably getting senile. Thank god I won’t have to be there when you have ranch dressing running down your wrinkled varicose-veined chin.”

  “All your jokes and comments about me getting old and senile never get old.”

  “That’s because you don’t remember them because you’re old and senile.”

  “This is tiresome and frustrating.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you’re going to be saying when you’re trying to bang a woman your own age.”

  “Maya, seriously, I have work to do.”

  “Peter is being weird. Like not talking to me or touching me. Ever since we got back from Vermont. I think he’s going to leave me.”

  “You’re the one who might be having memory issues. How many times did you say to me you needed to get out of your marriage? That you were stuck in a rut?”

  “That’s different from him leaving me. I was talking about me leaving him.”

  “So leave him. You’re unhappy with him. You need to get your life back together. Why don’t you ask him to take a break?”

  “A break? That’s stupid. I’m not ready. It was one thing when I had you, but if he leaves . . . I’m just not ready. I need to line up another dude.”

  “Why can’t you be alone for five minutes?”

  “I probably have some kind of personality disorder. I can spend hours alone watching television or listening to music. But being sober, the silence creeps up. I can’t handle it. I can’t handle not having someone around to tell me I look hot or get mad at me or just generally acknowledge my existence. It’s like, what’s the point of being alive if no one is there to see it? If there’s no one to disapprove of my behavior, then why bother doing it?”

  “Your dance card won’t be empty for very long.”

  “God, a new one. Find a new dude, fall in love, and then slowly start to see whatever special, unique, fucked-up hell starts to show itself. Everyone is fucked-up. It’s just a matter of waiting to see what kind it is and if you can put up with it. At least Peter keeps the kitchen clean. He is a good wife.”

  “Maya, I have to go.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m reading.”

  “You mean the old-timey way, with the paper and the binding and stuff?”

  “Yes, Maya, with my magnifying glass because of my old, fucked-up eyes, in my wheelchair, with my catheter bag.”

  “Aww, thanks, I needed that. Your body used to function, and now it’s all fucked-up. Anyway, back to my life. Can you tell me what I can do to get Peter back and then find another dude and then dump him?”

  “Go away for a few days, that might work.”

  “What if when he’s alone he realizes he likes being alone better than being with me?”

  “If there’s any chance of him staying with you, I’m telling you, leaving for a week or two is the best way to get him back.”

  “So, you don’t think crying, threatening suicide, and throwing a nonstop tantrum is the way to go?”

  “As cute as you look blubbering with spit and tears all over your face, I would say not this time.”

  “It usually works when I want him to buy something and we’re in public.”

  “I gotta go, Maya, seriously.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come over? I’ll give you a BJ.”

  “I wish. Not right now. I need to get out from under this pile of papers. I keep waiting for the elves to do it.”

  “So basically my amazing blow jobs don’t top the amount of crazy bitch you have to put up with.”

  “Maya, you’re not a crazy bitch.”

  “God, Ogden, you actually sound sincere when you say that. But then again, you’re so fucking nuts, compared to you, I am probably sane.”

  “Thanks, Maya. Any time I need to feel a little more shitty about myself, I know who to call.”

  “No problem! Love you! Bye!”

  I didn’t leave for a week like Ogden suggested. I didn’t cry and threaten suicide. I went on OkCupid and started dating. I made out with a dork outside a bar. I did coke in a bathroom with a man who allegedly worked in finance but actually worked at a movie theater and had a fake, ambiguously European accent. I never liked coke, but it was something. I learned the world was full of dudes I had absolutely nothing to say to. Peter wasn’t special, but at least we could have a conversation. Once we had kids, everything would be about raising the kids, and then we would be too old to fuck anyway. I waited patiently for the first day off he would have in a week.

  I crawled out of bed and found Peter on the sofa watching television, dipping French fries into a mix of rooster sauce and mayo. Peter loved mayo. Gross.

  “Peter, what the fuck is going on? Please tell me.”

  He turned off the television. “I’ve been looking at apartments, and I found one.”

  “You found what? An apartment?”

  I could already feel the metaphorical luggage of Peter’s leaving weighing me down, fucking up my back, turning me into one of those sad, shitty people who hunch over, don’t look up, and walk around with their plastic bags full of weird things.

  He hadn’t caught me cheating. I hadn’t done dope since we got back from Vermont except for that one time, and Peter had no clue. I bought a bundle before we left, ten bags, but since I had gone through withdrawal during the trip, I realized the hard part was over, and I didn’t want to go back to doing it every day, figuring out how to get the money and the whole hassle. I put the eight bags between the mattresses. When I didn’t have a supply, I was desperate, but as long as I had those eight bags, I wasn’t using because I didn’t have any; I could use whenever I wanted. It was a choice. When I was fiending, I would look at them. I would think about ripping them open and doing it, but then I would think about how I knew exactly how it would feel, and then I didn’t have to do it. It felt like more of a high not to get high. I thought AA and NA were bullshit because they were all about things having power over you, but one of the things you learn when you starve yourself is that your mind can actually power off your body’s biological need to survive. If I could deny my body what it needed, then there was no doubt I could stop using. I could beat it. I wouldn’t let it take any space or time in my real life. Drugs were for fun or true moments of crisis.

  This was a true moment of crisis. In my mind, I had already ripped opened two bags and snorted them as fast as possible and was leaning back, closing my eyes, waiting for that wall of soothing numbness to hit. I stared at Peter. His mouth was moving, and he was saying words like, “friends,” “love,” “sorry,” “hopeful,” “wishing,” and more words that sounded kind, but I knew if I actually listened to him the words would feel like glass shards slowly tearing my skin. Yeah, Peter. Sure, I’ll play along. This is all reasonable. I nodded. “Oh yeah, that makes sense,” I said, because I was in opposite world, where nothing made sense. Peter leaving me? He was the dude who didn’t leave. Who promised over and over he wouldn’t leave. What the fuck?

  Yeah, I’m the girl who lost the boy after she stopped using drugs and ended her extramarital
affair.

  “You know I stopped using.”

  “I’m so proud of you, but that doesn’t change anything,” he said, rubbing my shoulder.

  Proud of me? I wanted to take the ashtray and bash his face with it. It would have been better if he had said, “Here is all the money I have. You can have it because what I’m doing is fucked-up. It’s assumed because I married you that I wouldn’t say out of the blue that I’m leaving you, since that’s what marriage is. Since I have no words to offer, I will give a bunch of money.” That was the least he could do. But words were all he had. Stupid dumb words that didn’t mean shit to me.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. I got the bags and The Bell Jar (a little on the nose but whatever) from the bedroom and went back to the living room. I did the two bags off the coffee table in front of him because what the fuck was the difference?

  He kept talking in that nice way of his about how he had tried and how it was nobody’s fault. He sighed and said, “We can stop pretending.” What the hell did that mean? He had been pretending? He had tears in his eyes. He was serious.

  “What do you mean, pretending?”

  “Didn’t it feel like we were going through the motions?”

  “No, I love you, and you’re leaving me for no reason.”

  He stared directly at me with tears running down his face, and said, “Fuck you. This is what you wanted.”

  What the fuck was he talking about? I wondered, after I slowly came to from binge watching Don’t Trust the B- - - - in Apartment 23 and doing all the dope I had. I had completely lost my tolerance and kept nodding out. I would jerk awake and find myself bent over, my head almost touching the floor. It sounded like Peter was dragging shit across the bedroom floor.

  This is what you wanted. Oh. What I said to Amy on the phone. “I wish Peter would just leave already. I treat him like shit.” He must have overheard me when I was smoking outside. My stupid mouth saying stupid things. Had I meant it? Was this exactly what I wanted? I snorted another bag. No more being scared that the biggest thrills left for me were buying things at Crate & Barrel. I was free. Anything and nothing could happen.

  In the future everyone will ask me, “Why did your marriage end? What did you do?”

  Peter and I walked over to Elizabeth’s. She sold me five bars of Xanax and gave me a hug. She was strung out. Her apartment told the story. All the lights were off, and there was a candle, and her laptop was playing a show with no laugh track. I wanted to stay, but Peter was outside waiting.

  I’d never learned how to get dumped. I didn’t know how to not take it personally.

  “Peter, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it. I’m not pretending. I love you.”

  “No, Maya, you did mean it. All you do is push yourself away from me. I can feel it.”

  “It’s scary to emotionally depend on someone.”

  “It’s supposed to be hard. That’s why it means something, and that’s why it never meant anything to you,” he said.

  “You don’t want to be alone, Peter, c’mon.”

  “Maya, I started looking as soon as we got back, and I’ve already put the deposit down.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Bushwick.”

  “That’s what fucking happens. You fall in love, and in one way or another, you end up in metaphorical or literal Bushwick. This place of just total shit.”

  “I’d rather live in Bushwick than here,” he said.

  This human being would rather get drunk in a shitty apartment in fucking Bushwick and risk dying alone than be with me.

  One day I’ll be strong enough, I thought. One day I’ll just go and jump off a bridge.

  The following weeks were the opposite of a blur. Raw and sharp. I cried so much I didn’t even know what I was crying about. I forgot to eat. Dread was the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes. Peter gave me money all the time, and I took Xanax and heroin all the time. We both knew it was the only way he would get any sleep.

  I told him I would kill myself, because no one was allowed to just leave someone like that. He didn’t respond. Was I actually going to have to kill myself to prove a point?

  I looked out the window at a child wearing an oversized book bag in the courtyard, waiting for the bus. There was a world where kids went to schools and the postal service mailed letters so people could communicate, and there were train conductors conducting trains and buses picking people up so they could get from one place to another, and there were nurses using wet Q-tips to moisten the lips of people in comas and people who volunteered to cradle babies who didn’t have parents. And there were wars, and people died. And I was always in a room, crying.

  I lost my job at the bookstore. This douchebag had shown up, who was supposed to be the one to supervise textbooks but was put in charge of the whole staff instead. This made Michelle quit. And then, one by one, he fired everyone. We had all been friends, and now we were like a slowly dying family. We talked a lot of smack, but no one actually wrote nasty letters to the owners. No one quit. We each waited our turn. We looked at the douchebag’s blog and laughed at him for being a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast and groaned at what an awful human being he was. In one post he wrote, “Had to fire a girl today. But she couldn’t get with the program.” He said things like, “Get with the program.” People who worked there for years were booted and replaced by eighteen-year-old girls the douchebag called “sweetheart.”

  I don’t know why it is that when some men call you “sweetheart” or “honey,” it makes you blush, yet when other men do it, you want to hurl.

  There was no order or reason to it. He fired everyone, the hard working along with the lazy. After the firings got underway, every time a customer asked about a book, I would go on Amazon and show them how much cheaper they could buy it from there.

  I stole everything I could get my hands on.

  I watched everyone get replaced before the e-mail arrived at two in the morning informing me I didn’t need to bother coming in the next day.

  I looked on craigslist for jobs.

  I finally landed a temp job at a labor union in the East Twenties. The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone, or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city . . .”), and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was cross-eyed, so he could check on both. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv.

  I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.

  Boys wearing headphones inhabited the beige cubicles dividing the office floor. Nobody talked. I wanted work to be around people. But I was always alone there.

  I told Peter to pack while I was at work, but he didn’t. He did it right in front of me instead. He stood in front of the bookshelf with his eyes squinted, looking for his books. When we got married, we threw out duplicate copies of the books we owned.

  “Just give me the shittier pots and pans, but don’t take them all,” I begged him. He told me I should have felt lucky he was taking as little as he was. He didn’t have to be nice anymore. It really didn’t fucking matter what we said or did to each other now.

  All the best memories suddenly rematerialized the moment he told me he was leaving. Those fuzzy memories of the beginning. Going to the beach, laughing in bed, making love while Steve Earle blared on the stereo. The way he always held the umbrella to completely cover me. The human mind plays the worst tricks.

  Everyone thought his leaving was the right thing. “Just let him go. Believe me, it’s a blessing,” Ogden said.

  I did dope in the bathroom at least three times a day.

  Somewhere along the way my sleeve snagged. Using was my life. Not using was my life. One or the other, I couldn’t get out of the cycle. Everything revolved around it. My lif
e was one boring game of heads-or-tails. I could only use or not use. I could never be totally free from the whole fucking thing.

  It wasn’t like it slowly happened. It wasn’t something that gradually took over my life. But when Peter left I thought to myself, Just be a junkie now.

  Heads.

  Get high all the time. Why not? Pure hedonistic joy, and then when I found a man, I would clean up for him.

  Tails.

  Sometimes I stretched out in bed reading books. Sometimes I wrote poetry. Sometimes I tried on clothes. Sometimes I cleaned the whole apartment and ate a pint of ice cream.

  Douglass, Elizabeth’s ex, moved in right after Peter left. Douglass was in his fifties, and I had never liked him, but anything was better than being alone. He walked like a caveman, spoke in a deep voice, and used big words just to make you feel dumb. He had always been dismissive of me. But once I gave him a free place to live, I started seeing what Elizabeth saw in him. He could be kind. He would make me food. He would come back after disappearing for hours with cookies or a bag of oranges. Women swooned over him. He had a ripped body, even though the only exercise he got was walking to and from a drug dealer. The gray in his dreads didn’t age him; it really did make him look distinguished. He wore beat-up jeans that hung from his hips. He had spent his life being supported by some poor girl who had really thought she could change him. As long as I had money, he didn’t mind running for me.

  The reasons people have runners are: they don’t have a connection themselves, they don’t want to take the risk of scoring and walking around with dope actually on them, or they are lazy. Normally, you pay a runner twenty bucks, which is two bags. I bought Douglass more than I should have for running. If I didn’t, he would just steal more of my bags.