“You’re sick.” Frances was crestfallen.
How dare she be crestfallen if she loved her? No one who was loved was disappointing! “Get away from me, Frances. You’re the drunk.” Like there was only room for one. “Get away.”
“You’re ruining everything,” Frances said.
No one who loved someone said, “You’re ruining everything.” That wasn’t love.
“I don’t care,” Maggie said.
“You have to care. We’re together. We have a child.”
Now, watching Steven Berkley weep in another lifetime, it was so hard to remember what she was really thinking. She had wanted Frances to stop complaining. Was that it? To say that something very wrong was actually okay. She wanted Frances to shut up and go to Al-Anon or something that would make her stop nagging Maggie about her drinking. Actually, what was clear now, two years later, was that Maggie’s number one desire had been for Frances to shut up so that she could drink and nothing else mattered. But at the same weird time, in some deeply denied way, in that exact same moment, Maggie realized that she had also really cared. That was the disease. She could see that now. She just was not able to take the chance to change, to be wrong. To not explode, to not accuse, to not position herself as a victim of abuse because her lover told her that she had to be reliable. That she had to be fair. Maggie had always handled everything with fire. And now she had ashes. Despite having felt two things at once, looking back at that key moment in their bed, together, in their brown sheets, in their bedroom, in their shared life with their beautiful child, Maggie Terry just couldn’t figure out how to be accountable and survive.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
11:00 PM
Maggie was sweating and Steven was pale. There was an unsynchronized suffering, the contours of which were evident. Steven Brinkley was another Frances.
“Yes?” He was exhausted.
“What did you do?”
“When?”
“When you realized that the woman you loved, the young promising actress whom you believed would one day have success and financial security on her own, so that you two could move in together, someday. The one with whom you were careful to not breed dependency, but when her father was exploiting her, you stood up for her and then she made you pay. That woman. When you realized that she was sick . . .”
“Well . . .” Brinkley was stymied or hesitant or confused. “I feel . . .”
“Guilty?” Why couldn’t Frances feel guilty? She was also a little guilty and that is not the same as innocent.
“I feel like smoking a cigarette.”
“It’s your beautiful townhouse.”
Secretly, she doubted he would actually smoke. There was no scent of cigarettes in the air. There were no ashtrays or matches or lighters. Then she wondered if she wanted a cigarette. Had she ever really wanted one? Or was it just a time waster in between highs? She tried to imagine smoking.
“I feel like it, but I won’t do it. What would be the point?”
She had been right but that was an intriguing comment, smoking for a point. Functional man.
He got up and went over to the stereo. He still had records. Did this man ever part with anything? Instead of walking away from the things and people the world had abandoned, he took care of them. Enjoyed them. He gave them value. She watched the way he handled these well-loved records, in excellent condition, and a pristine, well-loved turntable.
“Nothing sounds as good as a record.”
“Is that really true?”
“No.” He laughed, always unwilling to bullshit. “If you have expensive machines and headphones, the new technologies are better. But if you are listening on your iPhone . . .”
“How much are they?”
“Turntables?”
“No, iPhones.”
He thought she was joking. “Funny.” And then he put on John Coltrane’s Blue Train, of course. Exactly what a rich, white, sensitive, middle-aged man with impeccable taste and a depth of feeling would play. “I guess . . .” he faltered. The music emerged. It was too loud. He lowered it. It was too low. “It’s very hard to accept . . .”
“That she’s dead?”
Steven began a sigh that became a whimper and could have turned to a wail if he hadn’t restrained himself for her sake.
“That too. But honestly, I am not there yet. I was referring to the fact that she was mentally ill. That she had . . . conflicts . . . emotional conflicts and they were hurting her life. I mean, we all have emotional conflicts. I am not implying anything about my own superiority or purity.”
“I understand.”
“It’s just that I saw her suffering and loved her and wanted to encourage her to do the work to feel well.”
“Sometimes you can’t fix it.”
“Well, they always tell you that, but”—another cookie—“in fact, people make each other’s lives better all the time, if we let them.” He ate it like he was eating straw.
“So, what was your plan?”
“The first thing was to get Jamie into real therapy and far away from the Devil.”
“Her father?”
He laughed. “I guess you don’t know about Florence.” Steven went to his huge carved dark-wood desk, large enough for two computers and a stack of books. “Here.” He handed over a business card.
Dr. Florence Black
Healing Through Wishes
“She’s a quack ‘energy counselor’ that Jamie was seeing. A failed actress, of course. I told her point blank that she needed to be in real therapy for sexual abuse and depression and Jamie’s reaction was to—”
“Cut you off.”
“Why, yes.” He looked surprised.
Why was he surprised? No one wants to be told that their suffering is not caused by the people they are blaming it on.
“Jamie stopped taking my calls. I’d phone and phone and finally she picked up and yelled, ‘You’re sick. I’m going to call the police!’ She acted like I was hurting her, but the bitter truth is”—Brinkley was so bitter, his lips seemed to dry and split—“that Jamie was being persecuted. But, not by me. By her schizophrenic father. Not by me!” He was insistent. It had wounded him, this accusation. “Florence stood by and did nothing. She let Jamie blame me for pain I had not caused. And now my poor girl is dead.”
The doorbell rang.
“Excuse me, it’s my Whole Foods delivery.”
Maggie looked at her watch. “Can I use your phone?”
“Of course.”
Once he stepped out of the room, Maggie dialed the old-fashioned landline, a push-button telephone in perfect condition. Expecting a recording, she was surprised to hear a person actually answer.
“Hello?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to call so late. I was expecting your answering service.”
“No, you got me. Can I help you?”
“Yes, I would like to make an appointment.”
Ten minutes later, Steven returned with two bottles of what he explained to be kale juice, offering her one like it was a Heineken.
“Kale juice. I see it everywhere,” Maggie said.
“Carrot juice is just sugar. Tamari almonds?”
She took an almond. It was salty and sweet. If she ate any more she would be drinking kale juice to wash them down. Is that something she really wanted to do? It was very late. Time for getting home and taking a shower and drinking hot water like she did every night, and would continue to do until she finally remembered to buy some tea bags.
“I’m tired.” She handed back the business card.
“Don’t you need that for your investigation?”
“Okay, thanks.” She made a show of putting it in her pocket.
“Would you like to have a late dinner somewhere?”
That came out of nowhere. He had tried to deliver the invitation with a casual quality, like it didn’t matter and didn’t mean anything and nothing would come of it. Just eating. But these two human shadows were so endangered t
hat nothing could happen between them without implication.
Maggie understood. He could smell her loneliness. Or else was too lonely himself to care. It was the blond hair. It was always the blond hair that they saw, but this guy also craved the damage.
“I’m so sorry. I have to go.” She watched the sadness in his face, the slack shame of having his one and only plan for redemption thwarted by someone else’s whim. No point in using her homosexuality as an excuse. She didn’t know what role it played in her present bare existence, but she did know the history of her heart. “Listen,” she said with mercy. “You don’t want to go out with me. It will just be more of the same. You need to change your type. Find someone who can work things out. You know, an equal.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
11:55 PM
On the thankfully air-conditioned 1 train home, people were tired. They were forgiving. They were thinking. They remembered and were exhausted by the memory. They shuffled and wished. The train rocked; its lights were bright. The seats provided a respite. Alone together. All of them were at the end and at the start of the day. They shared that.
Maggie and Julio had covered a lot of crimes that took place on the subway. An Arab woman was pushed in front of the 7 train. Her family wept and wept. They had come all the way to America for this? Every week or so someone jumped. The jumpers had an interesting psychology. They viewed the subway as part of the mechanics of the city itself. They didn’t see it as tired, hardworking, and underpaid people having to clean up mangled torsos and severed heads while the rats feasted on their boiling blood. In their pain, they depersonalized their fellow New Yorkers and made the A train into a roving hospice, only there to serve their suffering. Subways were also for stabbings. Shootings during robberies or murder between friends. Lots of overdoses. People were using because they had no work, because they had too much work, because they were on their way to look for work, or because they hated work. And then she remembered that conductor who sold little bags of dope from station to station out of the window of the motorman’s cab.
Maggie hauled her own carcass up the station’s steps, emerging onto the concrete where those steps always lead. There was a light rain, not threatening. No need to react. She walked home, lost in her own throbbing sadness, finding her body leading her somewhere. Where was she going? Suddenly, she looked up and saw an unfamiliar row of wooden planks hammered over broken plate-glass windows. It was confusing . . . What? It did not compute.
And then she realized . . . that Georgie’s Bar was gone. It had shut down, recently. And in its place sat another dark, empty storefront. Her unconscious had brought her to a drink that was no longer an option.
Maggie stepped into the new expensive Asian/Alsatian fusion restaurant next door with an unpronounceable name. Loud pop music she couldn’t recognize, the lights too dim. No seeing, no hearing, no thinking, communicating, or feeling. The hostess awaited, menu in hand.
“Hi, excuse me.”
“Just one? I can sit you at the bar.”
“I have a question. What happened to Georgie’s next door?”
“Lost their lease. The rent went up.”
Very pretty, this young woman. Very correct, a sophisticated black woman, severe, too good for this job.
“Sad.”
“Yes, but, they were a nuisance anyway.” Jay-Z came on the sound system. “None of the businesses on the block cared for them. Wrong crowd. Can I seat you?” She was probably going to business school during the day.
Maggie looked over at the bar. It was inviting. The stools had backs, the drinks were tall. There were long exotic snakes laid out in tinted glass. Small batch bourbons from Kentucky, the kind that taste like slippery elm and oak and enlivened the soul. But what was that on the television? Trump in a wrestling arena, approaching the ring. One of the fighters was a cartoon figure with a CNN logo posted to his skull. Trump punched him repeatedly in the head. What was that? The president of the United States of America had tweeted this to the world. The world was confused. The world needed a drink. When was the last time Maggie had sipped good alcohol for the sake of taste instead of getting blotto? Maybe not for decades. Would Trump make her drink? No one would know.
“Thanks,” Maggie said, heading toward the bar, like it was the easiest and most natural move in the world. That slide onto the stool. The gleaming bottles, their gorgeous sizes, the colors of the glass. The way bourbon was warm and tequila looked cool. The lovely ladies with their low-cut dresses, and catching the bartender’s eye—and then panicking, pivoting, and running out the front door, back onto the street where it was really raining now. She had no protection. That wasn’t a close call, she assured herself, stepping into the messy night. That was okay, she lied, back on the sidewalk that lay between her and safety.
The neighborhood had become boring. There were still some poor people there and some working-class people, but for the most part it was generic rich kids and the worst gay men. There was something reassuring about the blandness. Being cool was impossible. These people did drugs inside their apartments. They texted their dealers and the doormen let them in. Less temptation. Less opportunity. Less danger. People, Places, and Things. Stay away from People, Places, and Things if you want to stay sober. That’s what they say in Program. Stay away. She was so far away. She was lost. How much more away could one person be?
Maggie’s hair was soaking now. She looked like an idiot. Turning the corner to her street, she noticed a man standing alone in the doorway of someone else’s expensive ground-floor apartment. He was standing out of the rain. He, too, looked miserable. His eye caught hers; he didn’t care who knew. He lit his pipe. She saw the glow. He stared. There was no safe space. Not inside and not out. She rushed past him, stomping through the puddles, made a point to hold her breath.
Finally, Maggie made it to her front door and entered the hallway with her key like she was supposed to. Everything was a mockery, her ruined shoes. There was something she was supposed to attempt before ringing for the elevator. What do people do when they come home from work and stand in their own lobby? Something was missing. Oh yeah, pick up the mail.
Maggie wasn’t expecting anything; she didn’t have any subscriptions and letters no longer exist. But she had a mail key, and there might be a bill or a notice about the plumbing or something. She found her apartment’s assigned box, turned the key in the tiny lock, and opened its little door. Nothing. Then she sloshed to the elevator, rang the bell. Tense, anxious, desperate, she waited, watching the light as it passed down five flights to her wet, drowned, hopeless emptiness. She kept going back to the man lighting his pipe. His lack of shame. Would he still be there? Would she be able to score? There was a moment of silence, then, inside, where all was suspended, she inhaled. Held the air. Until a hand landed on her shoulder, and she screamed.
Fingers clamped onto her skeleton and then released.
“I’m sorry,” a man’s voice murmured, filled with regret at his own actions. But it was too late.
Maggie lost control of her fear. She leaped back, hit the wall, turned to face her assailant, and then reached for the missing gun that she was no longer allowed to carry or own. Grasping again at nothing, she knew she was done. She would lose. Braced for the shot, the stab, the rope around her neck, the penis down her throat, she looked up, staring right into Steven Brinkley, also dripping rain, standing before her in the lobby of her own building. He was the man who had followed her home.
Not only was Maggie terrified at the threat standing before her, but she realized that her professional instinct was in a state of severe malfunction. She had been wrong about him. Dead wrong. This wasn’t a nice guy. He was dangerous. He was a liar and a killer. Jamie was right; he was a stalker.
“I’m so sorry, I just had to talk to you.”
The elevator arrived.
“Call me at the office, how did you get this address?”
The elevator door opened.
“Maggie, I have to talk to
you, I feel so guilty. I feel so guilty. I should have tried harder.”
Maggie backed into the elevator.
“I should have tried harder,” he was weeping. “Please help me.”
She pressed three.
He was fully sobbing, hopelessly wiping off his suffering with his hands. “Why did I let Jamie hurt me? She’s sick. Why couldn’t I understand that?”
The door closed. She could see his tortured face through the window, contorted with pain.
“Why?” he sobbed. “Why?”
The elevator departed. She was stunned. Anyone could find her. She could not hide; she could not protect herself. She was in danger at all times. She was weak and stupid and . . . The elevator stopped at three.
Maggie stepped out and ran toward the stairs. She looked down the corridor, listened closely to be sure that no one was coming, and then quietly went up two more flights, making sure that her footsteps no longer tracked water. On the fifth floor, she exited, called for the elevator. It arrived empty. She took it down one story to four, leaned out of the box. Empty. She walked slowly down her hallway and then slid into her bleak room. Something like Jamie Wagner’s room, but without the fold-out couch.
Maggie trembled in the dark. Keeping the lights off, she stepped softly to the window and looked out through a tear in the newspapers Rachel had taped to the glass in lieu of the curtains Maggie was supposed to get to take care of herself. The street was covered in rain, and she saw no one. He seemed to have gone, but one could never be sure. She dragged some still-unpacked boxes over to barricade the door. There was so much grief in her heart; she was nothing but grief. Alone, because she was stupid, and in danger because she was alone, and stupid because she was herself. There was just no one to talk to. No place to share the reality of her stupid, stupid fate. Maggie fell to the floor, because she had to go somewhere. It was devastating, not knowing how to get out of this pit of terror. She wished, she wished, she found herself wishing for one thing. She needed one thing. If she could have anything, just one thing in the entire past or future, she knew what it would be. Maggie Terry staked all her dreams on the deepest dream she could find in her heart, the wish that she could have a beer.
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