Drowning In the Next Room
Section Two of Three
Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future.lit.rambler]
Note: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out. This is the most complicated of the three sections because it has an extra speaking part in it (whom I adore) and because it jumps ahead just a little at the end.
*
They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone.
She watched him as he watched the encore presentation football game on the dirty television screen above the top shelf. Its hazy blue-green-red glare matriculated down through the bottles of liquor there, illuminating Captain Morgan and the Grey Goose and backlighting the Bacardi bat through the white label. He complained loudly and tossed an uncracked peanut at the screen. She glanced up and saw that the other team had scored again. She rolled her eyes and took a sip of her Diet Coke.
She didn't know why she bothered trying to be with him, except she did and it didn't matter. She had a life and he had a life, and neither of these lives had a single thing in common besides the fact they were sleeping together to escape them. Her empty world consisted of her boyfriend's shoeboxes full of Percocet and Valium and Vicodin, sometimes cocaine, sometimes OxyContin, whatever. His empty world consisted of his wife's haphazard stacks of medical journals and patient ID files. They both had children in their separate lives-- children they didn't know, children who didn't know them. The only emotional stimulus either of them got in a week was from each other because her boyfriend (who'd never mustered up the decency to marry her after getting her pregnant) and his wife (whose sense of decency had been magnified about a thousand times by her stint in a Seventh Day Adventist university) were both dead inside and closed off to hide the fact.
And, of course, she loved him dearly. Maybe more than she loved herself.
She had answered his telephone call on Christmas Eve, fully expecting it to be her younger sister or her mother or even her grandmother. But it had been him, sounding like he needed her. So she had agreed to meet him at whatever dive bar they ended up at for the little Christmas cheer she'd be getting. She was just as big a junkie for him as any of her boyfriend's customers were for what he sold. The only good thing about living with a dealer was that she didn't have to work and neither of them had to pay taxes. Even if she did feel like her Yale education was going to waste. Even if she did feel mightily unfulfilled.
They'd gotten drunk as they could, gone to his apartment (he had it to get away from his wife and kids at his real it's-a-house-but-not-a-home), and had woken up with matching hangovers. She got up first, had briefly wondered about her son, regretted ruining his Christmas for selfish reasons, but forgot when he stirred and kissed her collarbone. She never wondered if what she was doing was wrong because she had no binding tie to her boyfriend outside of a son none of them cared much about. She wondered all the time about how wrong his part in their affair was, since he had three kids and a doctor wife and a proper, upstanding citizenship to uphold. She was, after all, just the casual live-in girlfriend of a fucking drug dealer.
That whole morning they stayed in bed and did normal, married-people things like not having sex and reading and ignoring each other. At two o'clock he got up and made some canned tomato soup and grilled cheese. She got dressed and after they ate their ever-so-impressive Christmas dinner, they went back to the bar to watch whatever game ESPN was showing.
He glanced over at her and reached out to touch her hand. She moved unconsciously before he could make contact and he only touched her glass, getting nothing but a fingertip covered in condensation. He shifted his attention completely to her and made a move to touch her again. This time she stayed put, watching her hand disappear beneath his.
She had lost a lot of weight, he could tell. Her cheeks seemed hollower. Her hand was bonier. Her clothes were too big and she hated to shop.
"I'm trying to escape something I can't escape," she said in an odd, strangled kind of voice. It wasn't true, though. She could have walked away from it all at any time, not looked back, and never regretted a single step taken.
He shrugged. "Hey, babe, so is everybody else in the world," he told her and leaned over to kiss her temple. She looked down at the bar and then closed her eyes.
"I'm pregnant," she told him. His hand slipped off of her shoulder and she didn't have to look up at his face to know what his expression looked like. "I know, I'm stupid, drinking and all. Really, fetal alcohol syndrome only happens if both parents are severe alcoholics and the mother drinks pretty steadily all through her pregnancy. I've never understood why people are so manic about pregnant women. A baby's going to be fucked up anyway by the time it's done being a baby, so why try to keep it all safe and sequestered, right?" She opened her eyes and glanced up at him. He had a mild, tense look about him-- jaw clenched and eyes blinking rapidly. She smiled to herself and reached over to touch his hand much the way he tried to touch hers. He did not flinch away, just turned his head and looked down at her helplessly.
"Is it mine?" he asked.
She sighed and sat up straight. "I'd assume, since I haven't slept with him-- I mean really slept with him like that-- in months and obviously--" she moved the flap of her coat to one side so he could see exactly how thin she really was "--I'm not months into anything. I've done this before, honey. Don't worry."
"Yeah, I have, too." He blinked again. "I'm married," he said.
She rolled her eyes. "Aware of that. Had the imprint of that etching that's around your gold band on my thigh this morning. Kind of hurt. That ring's abrasive--"
"You don't understand," he said in a tepid voice. "I'm married. This puts a very ugly light on this. What will we tell people? Can we say anything?" He bit his lip and looked at her with troubled eyes.
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at him. She said nothing for a moment as she studied him, letting his comfort level drop until just before she knew he would snap. His jaw was beginning to quiver. She wondered for a moment, nihilistically with a smirk, if this was anything like how he reacted when his wife told him she was pregnant the first time. Then again, it was okay for his wife to be pregnant.
She swirled her Diet Coke around in her glass, for no other reason than she wanted to. "I think I'm going to go home to Connecticut," she said. She felt oddly like she was floating, for all her honesty. She wasn't accustomed to it.
"Why?" he asked. It never occurred to him that maybe she just wanted him to suddenly think he'd never known her at all.
"I don't like who I am right now. I mean, I don't even recognize myself at all. Do you know how annoying that is?" She smiled darkly at him and passed him the rest of her glass. His bottle of Michelob was empty. "I don't even like Diet Coke all that much."
He drained her glass and looked at her seriously. "Do you want me to come with you?"
She raised her eyebrow at him and her dark smile faded a little. She hadn't spoken to her mother on the phone in a month. She hadn't seen her mother's face in person since before her son was born. The woman was probably still horribly disappointed in her for not living up to all the great expectations the family had had for her, still angry that she'd gone and followed in her footsteps with this second baby. Her mother had married one man and had gotten pregnant by another a year later. It was all too fucking nauseating. Then, that might have just been the Diet Coke. She was really starting to hate Diet Coke.
Diet cocaine, though-- that would be a novel and welcome concept. She wondered briefly if her boyfriend could get her some of that, then she remembered she would have to wait a few months until after she gave birth because cocaine does wonky things to fetuses.
"Tell Lane I said hello," she said sadly; he nodded. "And that I won't be able to make our lunch date next Tuesday. I hope she'll understand." She stood up. "I'm going to go." She pulled her white leather jacket on and smoothed her dark hair behind her ears. He stood up too and awkwardly put his arms around her. He wasn't sure what else to do. He thought there ought to be a manual telling men what to do when their mistresses informed them of a pregnancy.
Adultery for Dummies, maybe.
"Why didn't you tell me last night?" he whispered in her ear. She shivered, because she'd been wondering the same thing since she'd woken up. He held her tightly. She was tempted to rest her head against his shoulder but she knew that they had reached their ending and it would do no good for her to do anything but take her bow.
She mustered up her best marzipan smile and pulled back. "I forgot," she said simply. "I wasn't thinking about me, you know. I was thinking about you last night. I was thinking about how nice you are and how good in bed you are. And how much I wanted to just be with you. It just slipped my mind."
He stared at her with blank disbelief. She picked up her purse and slipped past him and out into the California sunlight.
She walked home, it wasn't too far away, thinking about what had brought her out west and coming up with no definitive answer. She'd gotten pregnant with her son right after her Yale graduation, completely by accident, which is how all decent human beings are conceived. It's the planned ones that go awry later in life. She was an accident herself. She liked to think of herself as a normal, if somewhat amoral, creature. She supposed often that she should have just given the baby up. He might have gotten the family he deserved, a mommy and a daddy who were normal and who were never too preoccupied or too afraid to tell him how much they loved him.
She stayed so her son could know his father. She had never really known her own father until she was in her early teens, and she knew that no matter how amazing her mother was in everyway, there were blue-moon times when she wished she had a daddy. She'd been six months pregnant and on the phone with the baby's father for the first time since the conception when she took a deep breath and told him what she had previously been to afraid to do. He'd taken it rather well, considering. She moved cross-country for her baby; endured six days of train stations and cafeteria car food and a berth half the size of her Yale dormitory mattress.
When she turned the corner to the block her apartment building was on, she wasn't incredibly surprised to see her son sitting on the bench outside, watching the unusually sparse traffic. Their building was on the only residential property in an otherwise commercially zoned area. The intricate wrought iron bench was small and painted a purplish mauve by an unsteady hand. It matched the silk flowers in the window boxes to the first floor offices. He had his feet up on the bench and his arms wrapped around his knees. She wondered if Curtis had been sitting with him for a while. The two boys liked to do that, just sitting and watching cars go by. Sometimes her son would read out loud the only literature Curtis was likely to have ever heard. Sometimes they would play their GameBoys.
She came up the walk and sat down beside her son's feet. "Afternoon," she greeted him pleasantly.
He glanced up and squinted at her even though the sun was on the other side of the building. She looked up at her bedroom window and sighed when all she saw was darkened ceiling and the fluttering of lima bean green curtains. "Afternoon," he replied.
The two of them sat like that for quite a while. She wondered if the surf was more tempestuous than usual or if it was always that way and she just never noticed but for the noise made by visitors to the beach. She supposed the little boy next to her would know but she couldn't work out a way to ask him and not sound like a stranger. Even though it was on the other side of the building and two football field lengths from the edge of the yard, she could hear every crash. It just didn't feel like Christmas in California, a place utterly without snow, a place with its blue cellophane sky and particleboard palm trees. She had a hard time feeling jolly about anything and a horrible time convincing herself that this was the holiday she'd grown up with being simply for the construction of snowmen and her mother's abundant consumption of little splashes of eggnog in tall glasses of rum.
"Forecast's for a storm," the boy said in his typical monotone. She put her hand on the top of his sandal and smiled at him.
"We should go in, then," she said. He shrugged and hopped to his feet. She followed him up the two flights of stairs to the tiled hall between their door and their neighbors'. The sounds of a family celebrating the holiday by singing carols in loud, tone-deaf voices permeated the whole floor. She had always envied the people across the hall for getting the ocean view, but her boyfriend loved the view of the city.
"Okay," he agreed and they went inside.
It wasn't until very late that night when she was sitting in a hospital corridor with her back pressed hard up against a smooth white plaster wall and her tailbone ground into a liquid nitrogen tile floor that she realized she had left the bar without saying goodbye, without telling him how much he was loved.
Cowardice is the only true form of security. Even more so than malice.
*****
[posted] le 28 décembre 2003
[t. henneth]