Death Will Help You Leave Him (3 page)

“I know it’s not.” And I did, really. The habit of irreverence is hard to break.

“And another time? He said he’d sweated blood in rehab so he could start a new life, and he was damned if he was going to do it with a stupid bitch like her clinging to his ankles and dragging him down.”

Not exactly the spirit of recovery.

“A guy like that gives sobriety a bad name,” Jimmy said. “I could have killed the asshole myself.”

“Now, there’s a motive,” I said. “Suspects, two million sober alcoholics.”

“Don’t even joke about it,” Barbara said. “To tell the truth, I used to worry that he would kill her. He had a terrible temper. No impulse control.” Barbara can never resist the clinical term. “I didn’t even like it that he knew I was her sponsor. I was afraid he’d decide it was my fault she wasn’t submissive enough and come after me.”

“What did Luz have to say about that?” I asked.

“Oh, she kept assuring me he was harmless. It gave me chills every time she said it. Talk about denial.”

“And what about the wife?” Jimmy asked. “Was Luz lying? Deluded? Or what?”

“Good question,” Barbara said. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

I woke up early, too wired to go back to sleep. My body was zonked, but my brain was wide awake. Sleeping in got harder when I gave up passing out. I thought a little about Luz and her problem and a lot about what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I did office temp work to pay the rent, but that was a recovery job, not a career. In AA, they suggested no relationships the first year. So I was single. I wasn’t lonely. How could I be? I had Jimmy and Barbara, my AA sponsor, and two million recovering alcoholics breathing down my neck.

When the phone rang at nine, I was cleaning my apartment. Sobriety, housework, up at the crack of dawn. I hardly recognized myself. I had made a few improvements in the place since I got out of detox. I had exchanged the mattress on the floor for a futon on a pale wood platform. The boxes of neglected possessions that had stuck to me like moss the last few years of my drinking were gone. Some stuff had ended up in the worthy-cause thrift shop on the corner, the rest in the nearest Dumpster. I didn’t miss any of it. I’m not a moose. I don’t need moss.

The phone kept ringing. Probably Barbara, to tell me the game was afoot. She had a theory that playing detective would keep me from getting so bored with sobriety that I relapsed. Now I just had to locate the phone. Barbara, in a fit of helping, had organized the crap out of the whole apartment. I couldn’t find anything. I was baffled until I had the bright idea of following the cord away from the phone jack. I finally unearthed the phone in a tangled pile of clothes destined for the Laundromat. I didn’t have to pick them up to smell them.

“Yeah.”

“Bruce! Are you really up at this hour or is that a clone with a different childhood?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Laura.” I hadn’t seen my ex-wife or heard from her since I got out of detox. I’d left a message on her machine, telling her I’d stayed sober. Her deep, throaty voice still turned me on. “What are you doing up yourself?” Laura and I had spent much of our marriage in bed. I’d say the percentages of time spent making love, getting high, and in a stupor ran about even.

“I haven’t been to bed.”

“Did you take your lithium?”

“I’m much more fun without it.”

She had a point. The beginning of Laura’s manic swings felt like carnival in Rio. On the other hand, the later stages could get scary.

“Besides, the lithium was making me depressed.” It had a certain logic. The suicidal end of her depressions had scared me more than the psychotic mania once or twice.

“It might not do that if you took it in the dose the doctor ordered.”

“Oh, Bruce, you’re no fun since you stopped drinking.” She had always delighted in jerking my chain. “Why don’t you come over?”

“If you promise not to try to get me high. And I’m serious.” That had been our catchphrase in the bad old days. “I’m serious” meant time to stop being playful. Put down the kitchen knife. Unlock the handcuffs. Give me back my underpants. Get away from the ledge.

“Okay, okay. I’m allowed to seduce you, I hope. You haven’t gone and joined one of those sexaholic programs while you’re at it?”

“Not even on my list,” I assured her. It was about the only one that wasn’t.

“Come out and play, Bruce.” The deep voice managed to sound like a wistful little girl’s. “I want to see if those reformed drunks have ruined you.”

“Recovering,” I corrected automatically. “All right, I’ll be there in a couple of hours. I have to finish vacuuming.”

“Vacuuming?” When she squealed, her voice went up an octave. Peals of laughter followed. “Oh, Bruce, my sides ache. I don’t know when I last laughed so hard.”

“Thank you for sharing.” That’s right, call me a clown and laugh at me. “Don’t bust a gut. I’ll see you later.”

I took the subway down to lower Manhattan. Didn’t jump the turnstile. I had an awful feeling that when I got to Step Nine, the amends step, my sponsor would tell me I had to make restitution to the MTA for all the times I had.

Laura had a loft in SoHo. One of those New York institutions, like my rent-controlled apartment. The glass half empty kind of guy that I used to be might say a loft was just a big open space the size of a warehouse with all the pipes showing on the ceiling and no privacy except in the bathroom. Glass half full told another story. The place was vast and airy and flooded with light from the high windows on all four sides. Laura had the whole fourth floor and the luck to be surrounded by lower buildings.

Nobody else I knew could still afford SoHo. The starving artists had all moved on. But Laura was a trust fund baby. She made arty jewelry, using feathers and crystals and copper wire and industrial detritus. But she didn’t have to work. Just as well. She was usually either shuttling through bipolar swings or high as a kite. She could afford Chivas Regal. And she got all the pills she wanted from a tame doctor known throughout the tristate area as Dr. Feelgood.

The entrance to Laura’s building was a scarred narrow door squeezed in between a chichi gallery and the kind of clothing store that displays no more than three garments, all black, and never has any customers. Above the lintel someone had painted “The Gates of Heaven.” It used to say “Enjoy the dope, all ye who enter here.” But the tenants were aging, and they’d developed a little discretion. The buzzer hadn’t worked at any time since the day I met her. I backed into the street and squinted up at her windows. Saturday was tourist day in SoHo, and traffic was moving slowly.

I put two fingers in my mouth and gave a piercing whistle.

“Laura!” I bellowed.

One pane in the wall of windows swung open. The rusty handle she used to crank it open fell off and plummeted to the street. It narrowly missed the heads of a passing family from Wichita. I knew they were from Wichita because their T-shirts said so. The handle hit the ground at some velocity and bounced into the gutter, where I intercepted it. When I looked back up, Laura’s head was sticking out the window. She shook her fluffy mane of hair. Oh Lord, she had dyed it magenta again. Laura on a manic swing took looking like a SoHo artist to an extreme. The Wichita family had stopped dead in their tracks, blocking foot traffic. They craned their necks upward. One of the kids, an acned preteen, snapped off a shot on his iPhone. We had made their day.

“Sorry!” Laura shouted. “It always falls off. Here, catch!”

She tossed a clanking bunch of keys my way. The gawking tourists took a hasty step backward. They needn’t have worried. I had had plenty of practice. I had never had my own key. Even when we were married, Laura had insisted on what she called her freedom. One man’s cheatin’ woman is another’s free spirit. I had gone along with it without much thought.

Laura’s building had an elevator, grit-encrusted and sour-smelling. The battered old cage creaked and whined as it took me up to the loft. When Jimmy used to visit me here, he would ride up and down, pretending he was a Welsh miner. Down into the pit, he would intone. And now back up into the light again. Laura bought him a canary one Christmas.

The elevator door opened directly into the loft. As always, I blinked coming into the light. It was kind of like coming out of a mine. I hadn’t been here for a while. I looked around. Nothing had changed. The king size water bed still stood in the middle of the room. Laura might be the last person in New York who still had one. The time it sprang a leak was a night to remember.

Laura met me at the elevator door. I stumbled over a familiar gap in the oversized shaft right into her arms.

“Let me look at you.” Laura’s idea of looking involved hands, teeth, and tongue.

“Hey, hold it. You’re not reading Braille.” Her bare feet, decorated with magenta nail polish and coin-silver Indian rings she might have bought on the street, balanced on mine like a life-size dancing doll’s. I kind of shook her off me. I circled her upper arms with my fingers and held her at arm’s length.

“You’ve lost weight.” Her arms felt like matchsticks. “Have you been doing H?”

“No!” She looked at me with wounded outrage. An alibi face. I knew it well. I’d worn it many times myself. I grabbed her left wrist and turned the arm smooth side out. I knew exactly where to find her veins. No fresh track marks. Good.

Instead of pulling away, she reeled herself in, bringing us chest to chest. She ground her pelvis against me.

“That’s not the most alert part of me any more,” I remarked.

“Wanna bet?”

She bent her head forward and shook the flyaway magenta mane so it just brushed my face and neck. My skin sprang to attention. To be honest, so did that other part. She had always had that effect on me.

I drew back to the boundary of my personal space and made eye contact.

“Admit I look good,” I said.

“Let’s go to bed.” No more foreplay. To be fair, she had refrained from offering me a joint.

“A little conversation first?” I pleaded. “A cup of tea?”

“Bed,” she insisted.

That extra octave down lent her the authority to get what she wanted. I’d have needed a special twelve-step program to resist. Laura Anonymous. Step One: I’m powerless over Laura, and my life has become unmanageable. Her voice, her hair, that breakable quality. Her wild manic energy. Nothing about Laura felt wholesome. I think we got legally married to spice things up with the biggest contrast we could find.

I surrendered.

Twenty minutes later, I floated on my back, sated and drowsy. The water bed rocked me with a barely detectable sloshing motion. I managed to find my lips with the cigarette without opening my eyes. Laura’s bed would never be a no-smoking zone, thank God. The phone rang. Let it. It wasn’t for me. The body of water beneath me sloshed left, then right as Laura heaved herself out of bed. Her toe rings jingled as she ran across the polished floor. Imagine a New York apartment you could run in.

In the old days, Laura had kept the phone right by the bed. She didn’t like to stop what she was doing. Like almost everybody else, she’d switched to cell. It played the first line of “Yellow Submarine.” I began to get tired of it as the clatter and clang of flying aluminum told me she’d mislaid it last while cooking.

Stubbing out the cigarette, I rolled over on my stomach and pulled a pillow over my head. One of the few things Laura was careful about was keeping ashtrays by the bed. You really don’t want to burn a hole in a water bed. The clattering and the Beatles-esque electronics stopped, but I couldn’t hear her voice. I decided I wanted to. I raised a lethargic hand and knocked the pillow off the back of my head. I could still barely hear Laura’s voice. She was whispering. Something else I’d forgotten: Laura whispering meant Laura cheating.

I didn’t know how I felt about that. Marriage gives you a license to have sex with that person that never expires. Divorce didn’t seem to change that. But the vows we’d made were void. Besides, Laura and I had never been monogamous. Both of us had times when we weren’t interested at all. Hers came during her depressive swings, mine at moments when Jack Daniel’s and King Chivas took all of my attention. Each of us assumed the other found comfort elsewhere. Still, I didn’t much like the idea of Laura talking to a boyfriend with my body fluids still slick on her thighs.

“Laura!” I called, deliberately loud. “Come back to bed.” She didn’t answer. I propped myself up on one elbow. She still stood naked in the kitchen, clutching the cell phone to one ear and making shushing motions toward me with her free hand.

“Get off the phone.” I took a perverse pleasure in insisting. “Come on back to bed.”

She stamped her foot and flapped an emphatic hand. I could read the signals: Leave me alone. Pipe down. I would have kept prodding, but she pointed to her lips. Without sound, she enunciated, “I’m serious.” I collapsed back onto the bed and waited for her to come back.

I had almost dozed off when she slid under the covers. She snuggled in next to me. Her skin had cooled in the wide open spaces of the loft. I could feel her sharp bones. She tugged at the antique Amish quilt that had cost as much as I made in a month of temping. Only a husband— in this case, an ex— would have tugged back, grumbling wordlessly about having to share. She wouldn’t give up. I rolled over to face her. Locked in each other’s arms, we had plenty of room. The magenta hair tickled my nose. I didn’t mind. She smelled of patchouli. The faint breath of the Sixties reminded me how much I’d liked hallucinogens before things started going irrevocably bad.

“So who was it?”

“Do you really need to know?” She sounded defensive.

“Just making conversation.”

A silence fell. I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator. Somebody flushing. What sounded like a herd of buffalo thundering across the ceiling. That would be the upstairs neighbor’s Great Dane, who got to play whenever he wanted to.

“I’ve been seeing someone.”

“Uh, do we talk about these things now?”

Her arm tightened around me. She walked her fingers up my spine.

“I don’t know. Do we?”