My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (23 page)

The productivity and the creative hangover would usually leave me in a great mood, and I'd wander the evergreened, pine-needley, no-sidewalk-having neighborhood back to the grimy rental just in time to meet Steph, who was more often than not in an abysmal mood from her return commute. She was growing taciturn, resented that I no longer had to show up to an office, or present myself anywhere, really, and had two days a week free, plus weekends. I was good at what I did and could consolidate other people's forty-hour week into about ten good hours if I was left alone, and that's what I did, and that's what I felt was appropriate to what I was doing.

I wasn't about to apologize or negotiate my way out of it; if I was to remain labor, then my labor was to be dear. It was art, and they were lucky to have me.

In the meantime, I was writing this damned book.

Steph fumed. Threw an odd assortment of outfits together and managed to get to work and be superior at what she did in her field, as she was incredibly intelligent, which is what drew me to her in the beginning. But my trouble with her was that I could never catch up to which of her insecurities was running the roost at the time. She was never with others who she was with me, and I had not the stamina to keep running after her and figuring out what she needed, which is another component of love I couldn't deliver for her. I just didn't know it at the time, and I'm not sure I had the energy. I was fat now. Maybe if we were both still twenty-five, but not at thirty-nine.

And so every time she returned home and found me beaming and tipsy and maybe cooking dinner or playing with the dog, or just going on and on about what I'd written that day, she would settle into a funk.

One night, I wandered off from the local swill dump without my credit card, and I noticed it only after Steph and I had been in a particularly bitter argument.

The wine was in, I suppose, and I decided to make the drive back to the bar, which was less than a mile away and without stop signs, just the one turn.

“No!” Steph said. “You're drunk!”

“I am,” I agreed, “but I have to get my card back. Otherwise that bartendress, Old Beryl, puts another 15 percent charge on it or something. Anyhow, I need it. For credit cardy stuff. Stand aside.”

I blundered left right left right back to where my car was parked in the front yard—this was the custom in that neighborhood—and intended to coast the small distance to the bar, as it was just around the corner, and Steph came howling out of the house as I turned the engine over, and she jumped on the hood of my car, spread eagle on the windshield.

I yelled out my window, “Are you fucking serious?”

“I won't let you!”

“Seriously, get the fuck off my car. It's just down the street and I don't feel like walking.”

She would not remove herself from my hood.

We were at an impasse.

“Fine. I'll walk,” I said. I turned off the car and emerged from the driver's side, and when I put my keys back in my pocket, I found my missing credit card.

“That turned out all right,” I said the next day, and Steph pointed out some deep bruises she had acquired from flinging herself onto the hood of my car, to keep me from killing children and dog walkers between the dilapidated house and the shabby bar, and I thought,
Well, shit, this isn't Texas
. I'd never thought of that before. You wouldn't have people walking in Texas, let alone walking their dogs. Anyway, in Texas, neighborhoods have sidewalks, and you're expected to have a few DUIs. It drives the economy. Mind the pun.

I didn't think I was drinking too much, or more than necessary. I thought, more than anything, that I drank like a British person. Or an Australian, when I'd really take it too far. Maybe I was just living in the wrong hemisphere.

Steph felt my drinking was entirely out of control.

I, well, didn't. I drank like labor. I drank like a working man, five days a week. Maybe six. Three of them acutely. I drank like a lord. I had every analogy available to put it into a context; she was the outlier.

She couldn't drink steadily; you put her in front of booze, and she drank it all, right at once. Then she had a seizure or a “life event” and wouldn't drink again for years.

“Who's the dangerous drunk, when you compare the two patterns?” I asked her.

So one morning, I was up pretty early, a bit sleep deprived—I'd been writing
a lot
lately—and Steph was in the shower, getting ready for her day at work. I knocked on the mildewed door to the bathroom with the mildewed shower stall and the undignified toilet where you had to pull up your knees to your chin to take a proper poo, and I said, “Hey, Steph! I got your coffee going, and I've walked Cleo,” and I could hear her crying, in the shower.

“Steph, are you ... ” I asked through the door. I'm a bit lightheaded, sure, but I could swear I heard her crying.

“Darling, are you crying?”

The shower cut off with a squeak, and then a rumble. The listing vinyl platform we called a floor groaned as she stepped out and grabbed a thin, nasty towel off the floor, because the towel racks didn't hold into the linoleum, so we had the two swinging towel rack sides, but no bar joining them. Even the towels in that house were substandard, made of a tired, resistant fiber that moved the water around your body rather than soaked it up.

“Darling?”

And she opened the door, bright as a shiny day.

“I'm great!” she said. “I'm just fine! I don't know what you heard.”

“Hunh,” I said, “Because I could swear I heard you crying.”

“No, no,” she said. “Not at all.”

“It's funny because I can still see tears on your face. But all right, well, I have your coffee going. I'm going back to the bar to finish writing this fantastic story about my grandmother and these ocelots—”

And I turned around here and she punched me, bare, sharp, white girl knuckly, right in the eyeball—
BAM!

“You fucking bastard!” she yelled. “You goddamn lazy Mexican drunk motherfucker! You don't fuck me for weeks and all you do is drink and pretend to write and you're surprised that I'm
crying
!”

I took a step back as soon as I was hit.

She was standing there, so thin and wet and well, pale, with a towel wrapped around her torso, her eyes crazy and her shoulders bare and glistening with that toxic water from the mildewed shower, and she glowered at me with all the righteous indignation of a mother with a baby walker waiting in a crosswalk in Seattle.

My head was humming, and not from her blow.

It hadn't been much, but it had been received as terms.

We were done.

She had hit me, and my physiological response had been to hit right back, that very second.

But I hadn't.

I took that step back, made an instant assessment of the situation, and, while my eye was watering, I turned right around, grabbed my keys, and within a few hours was signing rental documents on an oversize studio on the same block I lived on when I met Steph, the only thought pumping through my head telling me to pick up where I left off, before I met her, try to pick up again where I was two years ago.

That was the end for me.

You don't hit people you love.

You do not hit people you love.

About a month later, and against any sort of good judgment, we attempted an assuagement to the end of the relationship instead of a clean, cauterizing break. We were both sentimental like that and arrested in our adolescent dating phase.

The closest I can now explain it from the safety of this distance and this keyboard is that we both pitied one another as a bad fit for this world: What we saw and understood of the other made us sad for both the other person and ourselves, and if we could make it better for the other, well, it might be better for me, for us.

At least, that's what I thought: If she could make the adjustment and function, then so could I. I mean, Jesus—she was
way
more fucked up than I was, right? Sympathy and compassion are not love, though. There needs to be someone there, at the end of the compassion and sympathy, that you respect.

So I would help bring her to shore, help her feel better about our separation.

But Dear Lord: Get me hence, after.

And so it started when I bought her that camping book, the one with the best hikes in Washington State, for dogs. And their owners, of course.

Her boss had kindly presented Steph with a book on her birthday some time before for the best alpine hikes in Washington, and that was a lovely gift, except that Steph took her dog, Cleo, with her everywhere, especially when she hiked, and dogs are not allowed in most state-sanctioned parks because of their “ecological footprint” on those heavily trodden and sterile experiences, where you meet one hundred other weekend hikers in their North Face polar fleece headed back down the same gravel path you've just trudged, smiling politely after going quiet when they notice you so their conversation doesn't intrude into your “wildlife experience.”