My Education (30 page)

At a quarter past nine in the morning an engine roared up to the curb underneath the redbud and the Volvo's door slammed like a detonation. Then I heard Dutra's heavy boots pounding the boards of the porch and his heavy fist pounding my door.

“Ginny!” he bellowed. The bright cube of saltwater lurched in its box. Country Joe and the chromis stood perfectly still in the storm as if hanging from strings. The door strained in its frame. I remembered shopping with Dutra at the tropical fish store as if it were some rare, squandered moment of heedless existence from childhood, my hand in my father's while climbing a stairs, my mother seated on the edge of my bed radiating her tenderness on me like heat, all my stuff like that suctioned away, all the worse to have ever occurred. Better to have been pitched in the woods like a football at birth. The lock wasn't much, not a bolt, just the cheap little wedge kind that springs in and out. At some point in that night I had drunk my whole bottle of scotch and I couldn't sit upright; I couldn't even raise an arm; creased at the waist by hot pain I inched to the door and raised my arm as if ripping out stitches and did up the door chain and fell heavily back on the floor. I heaved over my knees but again, as with all but the first time, no vomit came out. Now Dutra had heard me. He paused in his pounding and shouting and we both heaved for breath raggedly on our opposite sides of the thin wooden door. And then the whole weight of what seemed like far more than just Dutra flew onto the door as if having been dropped there from miles above. The door stove in, splitting from the doorframe, but the chain caught and held. Dutra's bulging, chapped eye, branched with blood, stared at me through the crack.

That downstairs neighbor of mine, who must have by now had his fill of my door being banged on and screamed at, was a heavyset, unhappy poet named Donald. I heard him open his door and say something. Dutra's eye disappeared.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Dutra barked. After a pause, the door slammed.

“You get out,” I whispered to the bloodshot eye, when it reappeared.

“Please just listen to me.”

“YOU get out.”

“Ginny, I beg of you, listen to me.”

“Did she say it was you all along that she wanted? She noticed you all the way back on that day with the coffee-iced coffee.”

“Ginny, please listen—”

“You want me to
listen
to you!”

“It's like, imagine I was drinking all night. Getting more and more high and fucked up.” His voice squeezed out of him like a paste, stiff and thick with emotion. “And it's like, imagine that I came home, I'm blind drunk coming home, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I am, but you're there, Ginny, you're still living with me, just imagine, and now I come home, and you're upstairs, asleep in your bed,” he was weeping, “asleep in your bed, just imagine, and I come home so drunk, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm
hungry
, like an animal, hungry, no thoughts, and I grab your fish out of their tank and I fry them and
eat
them.” He paused, heaving for breath. “And I don't mean to! I don't want to do it! They're not fish to eat! They don't even taste good but I DO it, I EAT them, and now they're gone and I can't bring them back, I can't fucking undo it!” The bloodshot eye glistered and streamed, alien and repulsive. Of course it was far worse for him than it might be for me. Worse for him, with his strict codes of honor in which he took such inadvisable pride. Now in betraying me he'd betrayed them, and he'd never have quite the same vigorous faith in himself. Time stood still. I stood up, I could not fathom how, soul-sick and exhausted and drunk as I was in my slick tawdry dress, and went so near the broken door Dutra's hot breath dirtied me through the gap, and then, as he had, rammed my shoulder so hard that I slammed the door back in its splintery frame, and perhaps broke his nose, though if so, he did not make a sound. And all my furies burst out of my chest like the fireball out of a bomb, with their thousands of fists and their thousands of tongues, so that even I didn't know all the things that I said, all the ways that I shamed him and smote him, except that the violent migration had vacuumed me clean so I realized in fact I'd said nothing, and might never say something again.

Not even when she came, hours later, though I opened the door. I had sat in my living room, propped on my sofa, tightly wound in a blanket, unable to sleep or wake up. The wretched deathless consciousness: this was why people murdered themselves. Morning might have changed to day and day begun to fade though I can only assume. Yet at the noise of her engine arriving outside I stood up, in a trance, and I undid the chain on the door and sat back down again. In my own shock I must have been shocking, as if it were all physical, entry wounds and soft clots of brain matter strewn into the folds of my limp party dress. Smeared makeup and snarled, de-coiffed hair and unused fancy shoes—I saw her, seeing me, give up on whatever she'd thought she would say. I say I saw her, but she was metamorphosed, the violence she'd done to me making its ricochet back. She was diminished and hardened, as if her restless appetites were a prison that had overnight whittled her down. Her skin gray, her hair heavy and dark with its oils, two fine lines I had never seen scoring her face linking nostrils, mouth corners, and jaw. Dressed in her sour-smelling pool-playing jeans and unraveling sweater and cracked bomber jacket as if she'd been out not all night but for months, on the streets, with the snot-crusted runaway teens on the methadone line. And seeing her so besmirched and exposed I felt choked with fresh love and hatred for her, that she'd so thoroughly ruined herself in my heart, by design and beyond all repair.

“I'm sorry, babe,” she said, her voice pitched too high, her eyes redly damp, her jaw clenched. “I couldn't do it. I couldn't walk into that party with you.

“Every hour all night I kept thinking, It isn't too late. But I already knew when I left to play pool that I'd never get there.

“I couldn't let you believe we'd keep going, when we'd already lasted too long.

“I don't suppose you'd come out for a drink. Talk a little about it.”

Into the silence came a rattling noise I realized was my teeth chattering. My window was still standing open. I did not feel the cold.

“No. I didn't think so,” she finally answered for me.

Perhaps she thought my silence was strength, and not a helpless condition, as if she had pulled out my tongue.

“I kept trying to tell you I couldn't give you what you wanted. I don't think you ever understood—could have understood—how different my life is from yours. You're
twenty-one
, Regina,” as if it were a self-indulgence, a foible. “I'm almost thirty-four.”

But in the absence of ready assent with her thoughtful self-justifications, in the presence of ongoing silence, she swiftly lost patience. “At least with Dutra, we already realize we need different things. That didn't take long. In fact, at risk of betraying to you that you weren't my first choice, I can tell you he won't have a drink with me, either.” A ticlike tremor, of regret or self-pity, for a moment distorted her face. “You should have seen him bolt awake and come running to you to confess. Then he came back and said, ‘Get the fuck out.' Just like you. Though you're saying so in not so many words.

“Go ahead. Tell me what a cunt I am.

“Go ahead! Oh, poor fucking you! So fucking wounded you can't even speak!”

Yes, I was. Though as she wept and raged at me—for I'd cornered her into it, hadn't I, and I loved her too needily, didn't I, and would always want more from her, wouldn't I—my desire to speak, if it had even still been there, pilot light for the flame of my voice, softly snuffed itself out. The thread of smoke melted away. No, I would not speak again. Such a promise of peace.

At last, solitary and wronged, she turned her back on me. “I get it,” she shot over her shoulder as she went out the door. “No one drinks with the bitch. The bitch drinks by herself.”

T
hat winter, I destroyed what was left of Casper's struggling career as a scholar. Grief made me coarse, a perverse predator. I snared Casper as sidekick in part with my lurid confessions of passion, but more with the sheer force that madness exerts on the sane. The raving bereaved have an awful charisma, to which such an amiable soul as Casper—long on compassion, short on self-serving ambition—was destined to be vulnerable. Soon Casper and I were consuming a liter of bourbon a day.

Work began around noon, at a vile pizzeria where we'd meet for a hangover pitcher of beer and cheese slices for Casper. I might gnaw on his discarded crusts for the taste of damp starch, but I rarely could eat. My unwashed jeans hung from my hip bones as if I might shed like a snake. That year's birthday gift from my mother was a turquoise-and-silver bracelet, sent air mail from the Navajo country, which fell off my skeletal hand and was lost the first evening I wore it.

Down the block from the vile pizzeria was a bar called the Red Rooster Inn in which Dutra, one late night the previous summer, had gravely offended a volatile man in a misunderstanding that seemed to have stemmed from a pile of quarters. Their disagreement rising quickly to threats, Martha and I, who'd been with him, had run with him breathlessly out the back door, collapsing once safety was reached in a gale of laughter. But while Dutra had been smirking and facetious in combat, afterward he'd grown as outraged as his enemy had been, and told Martha and me the Red Rooster would never be graced with his presence again. So far as I knew, he had kept to his vow. Now it was the one downtown bar I would drink in, for my vow was to never see Dutra again—never grace him, as he'd said of the Red Rooster Inn, with my presence. I would not even grant him a place in my thoughts. I had rubberized him: the rare times he entered my mind he went hurtling back out to the most inhospitable reaches of space, and sometimes I drank in the Red Rooster Inn all night long without even recalling the reason it held such a privileged position with me.

From the pizzeria Casper and I strode to the Red Rooster with great purpose, for all the world like two regular people who could only spare limited time from our wonderful lives for a quick game of pool. But no regular people lined up at that bar at that hour of the day, and our pretense would fade with the sun. Night would steal over the slotlike irrelevant windows, unnoticed by us. Perhaps we might leave and come back with hot dogs from the Hobo, for I sometimes could eat while blind drunk, and our bartender, that eminent, fatherly, featureless man who was Eddie or Jackie or Joey or John, who was cozy to me as a bed, whom I knew best of all men in the world, whom I wouldn't have recognized out on the street, would reserve our stools for us with two brimming doubles, and dole out paper plates for us when we returned, and with a three-point wrist-flick toss us two bags of chips free of charge from the wire carousel. Every fourth drink was free. If I played “Captain Jack” on the jukebox all lustily sang. Even Casper was embraced as a regular here, his urbane bespectacled feyness his required and ennobling impairment—like Big Tom's milky sightless left eye, or Little Tim's cortisone overdose that squeezed yellow crumbles of pus from his skin; or like my presumably erstwhile, presumably cured lesbianism. I could only assume they remembered me well, from when Martha and I, arrogant aliens, had brashly groped and gasped over each other in the jukebox's nimbus of light. Those ghosts never left me, as if some molecular error had splintered me off from my life; as if Martha and I still continued to gloat along gaily without me; some mornings I bolted awake almost trembling with joy, for I'd dreamed of her love, heard her voice chuckling intimately in my ear. Sometimes, at the height or the trough of a marathon evening, I briefly passed out of myself. A black shutter dropped. For an increment, consciousness died, there was only the surface of objects spread under my gaze, and the feeble drowned lights. I would forget. That she had left me. Even that there was me, separate and alone. And then, as if as a chastisement, the fact I was no longer wanted would rear up again with redoubled and terrible force, and I whimpered out loud from the physical pain of remembering.

“Gottlieb,” came the chastising voice, but this night when I turned toward the sound she was actually there.

I felt Casper, on my other side, pass between solid and vaporous states, awaiting my signal of how to behave, but I was too helpless to signal. Hot tears flooded my eyes and a fist of incipient vomit indented my guts. From the well of my throat rose a powerful, noiseless vibration; its note might have shattered the bottles and glasses that walled the back side of the bar, but I didn't allow it to sound. A harsh desperation for her that was almost instinctive, like the homely abject little amputee hermit crab finally locating its shell. But this was all, this disabling interior storm. I didn't seize her taut milky neck in my hands. I didn't suction my lampreylike mouth to her breast. I didn't smash the butt of my lowball glass into her face. Because I still loved her: I could have stopped my own heart with my mind if it meant she'd come back.

“Come outside,” she said. Helplessly I slid off my stool and hooked my jacket off its seat and followed her out the door.

It was deep winter now, the season when suicides rained down like apples from the limbs of the gorge-spanning bridges; when it was so cold it no longer snowed, and so cold that people stopped wearing their coats because coats didn't make any difference. Students from the community college roamed the streets in their T-shirts, their bare forearms marbled with blue, their sneakers slipping on the laminated ice. I was wearing my autumn-weight jacket, Martha her cracked leather bomber; neither of us zipped up and the cold struck my flesh through my sweater as if I were naked. We walked quickly, the searing cold synchronizing us like lovers, if lovers enraged beyond words. Wordlessly we passed into the street where bare patches more often stood out of the ice and allowed us to walk even faster. Down two blocks and she threw open the door of the fluorescent-lit late-night salad-bar place, with its crocks of lentil soup filmed by wrinkly soup skin and its stainless-steel tubs of gray, matted alfalfa sprouts. Inside she loaded a Styrofoam plate with vegetarian lasagna, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and rice pudding, every species of comfort glop in evidence, paid the stupefied teenage cashier, and led me upstairs, her violent footfalls making the whole structure quake, to a squalid mezzanine region of tables and chairs.

“Sit,” she said, and when I did, she dropped the plate of grown-up baby food onto the table in front of me and herself into the chair opposite. “Eat.”

I gazed at her, at the violet stains under her eyes, each with its reddened, slightly swollen canthus; and at her bloodless, chapped lips. Love me, I willed her. Just admit that you love me and rescue us both.

“You've got to eat, Gottlieb,” she said.

“Fuck you.”

“Look at you. You look like a skeleton. Your jeans that used to be tight are about to fall off.”

“You look like shit too.”

“Just fucking eat.”

We were alone in the livid fluorescence of almost-closing time, sticky plastic trays and fork-dented Styrofoam plates smeared with half-eaten food crowding most of the tables. I swiped the full plate off our table and it sailed several feet, its load spiraling off in fine spatters and chunkier globs. “You're a fucking child,” Martha said, shoving back from the table and descending the stairs, so swiftly I almost had to run to stay with her, down the stairs and back out the front door.

“You're the child!” I cried. We were rushing again down the sidewalk, back toward the Red Rooster where I had left Casper, skittering so quickly on the shoe-polished patches of filth-colored ice we were practically skating. “You're always lording your age over me, so why can't you be an adult? You don't make decisions, you just make a mess! You got tired of me so you fucked the
one
person we shared as a friend. You got tired of your husband and so you fucked me. Why can't you just say what you're doing? Why can't you be honest?”

“Oh, listen to the saint! Every time I was honest with you, you would cover your ears.”

“Bullshit! That's a lie. Even this is a lie. Why are you here, anyway? Why are you trying to make me eat dinner?”

“To keep you from starving to death.”

“To congratulate yourself on how caring you are. Everything that you do, it's to make you feel better. All those meals you cooked me and flowers you picked me—”

“Even when I was kind I committed a crime? How the fuck could I ever win with you? I always cared deeply about you. I hoped to keep you as my friend—”

“I was
never
your friend.”

“Gottlieb—”

“Stop calling me Gottlieb!” I shrieked. “Stop acting as if we were pals! I
loved
you. I
love
you.”

“Always the trump card! You love me, that entitles you to something? You
love
me, so we move in together, adopt a crack baby—”

We were standing so near to each other that when I threw my weight into her chest, shoving hard with my palms, she almost took me down as her boots pedaled out and she fell backward hard on the ice. But I windmilled and stayed on my feet, my blood roaring and thrown a notch higher and roaring yet more as the admonitory whoop of a siren immobilized us and a police car materialized out of nowhere and pulled to the curb. Its near window rolled down. “You,” the cop said to me, “step over here.” His door swung open and by instinct I took a step closer to Martha, still gingerly getting herself to her feet, her bloodless chapped hands finger-splayed on the ice for support. “Step away from her,” the cop barked, each of his words like a stick breaking.

“I think we can handle this,” Martha said, upright again.

“I didn't ask what you thought. You, last chance. Step to the car. Don't look at her.” When I had obeyed and stood numbly before him he said, “You want to be booked for assault?” He was young, his face stone-eyed and thin-lipped and pale with distaste beneath his dark uniform hat and above his dark uniform bomber and perforated gloves and billy club and sidearm and side-striped slacks and laced leather boots. I could feel the parching heat pouring out of the cruiser's dashboard, its leading edge lapping me like a blanket. As if to deny me that comfort the officer stretched and stood out of the car, his gaze pinioning me, and slammed the door shut behind him, at the same time as his partner, his double, got out on his side and slammed his own door and came around the nose of the car. At the edge of my vision I sensed a loose ring of spectators. “I said, you want to be booked for assault?” the officer said again, his tone pitching the slightest bit higher.

“No,” I scraped out, just audible enough to escape his reproof.

“ID?” As I struggled with spasming fingers to dig out my wallet he added, over my shoulder to Martha, “Please stay where you are, Miss,” his inflection just noticeably altered for her, as if she were a meddling bystander, in danger of hurting herself. To me he said, in another, now lower, very cold and yet intimate tone, “You intoxicated?”

“No.”

“You're not drunk? Had a couple too many? Got a little too high?” He handed my university-issue ID to his partner, who disappeared with it into the car.

“No.”

“You think it's okay to attack people?”

“No.”

“I didn't hear that.”

“No.”

“‘No,' what? No, you don't think it's okay?”

“I don't think it's okay.”

His partner signaled from inside the car and he turned his back on me, leaning into the reopened door. Across the car's roof I saw Casper, watching from the middle of a small knot of patrons in the Red Rooster's propped-open door. The cop rose up before me again, obscuring Casper, holding out my ID. I closed my fist around it and the blunt plastic edge seamed my palm. Lifting his chin at Martha, inviting her now to approach, the cop said, “You want to press charges?”

“Of course not,” she said, to which he responded by staring at her as if she hadn't yet spoken. “No,” she said after a moment.

“My advice is, you girls go home. Don't let me come across you again.” He and his partner got back in their car and as it drove off our audience, smirking or cold, drifted off except Casper, now alone, with a cigarette lit, in the Red Rooster doorway. When neither I nor Martha moved, he dropped the cigarette, ground it out, and went in. My humiliation felt like a gag in my throat. I couldn't look at her. My tears couldn't fall. My numb hands couldn't crawl in my pockets. She'd even denied me the solace of being her victim.

“Lucky girl,” she said quietly. “You don't know how lucky you are. How much you love me, how painful your pain. You don't know. Maybe someday you will. I hope not.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, pressing my face on my fists, for my body had started to shake with such violence I almost bit off my own tongue.

“I don't feel the way you do. I don't mean I don't share your emotions. That when you feel happy I'm sad. I mean something more basic. Not type but degree. Whatever I feel, I don't
feel
it the
way
that you do. Not for you. Not for Nicholas. Not for my son. And it's not that I'm cold, or abnormal. It's just that the way that you love never lasts, Regina. That's why people in your time of life and in mine just can't manage together.”

“I don't believe that,” I said, but it came out in disjointed shards, as if the jouncing cartload of my words had flipped over and scattered its load.

“Go back to your friend,” she said, walking away.

Then they must have heard my sobs even through the Red Rooster's brick walls. Casper came back out and led me inside.

•   •   •