Problems (11 page)

“Can I bum one?” Sue asked. There was more to Sue than met the eye.

And then the four of us walked down the lonely, quiet street, me and Sue smoking while Jake and Peter walked ahead of us.

Back at the house, we all stood around the kitchen and retold the day's events. We showed them the things we got at the thrift store. At one point, Jake spilled his apple juice on the floor, and I grabbed a dish towel and wiped it up before Sandy could bend down with her crummy hip.

“So, for Christmas, I want to buy you a winter coat,” Peter's mother said as she handed Peter a catalog for L.L.Bean.

“Let me see.” I snatched it from him. I started to thumb through it and felt Sue looking with me.

“I really like Jake's coat. Where did he get it?”

“I bought it for him,” she said. “Where did Peter get those boots?”

“They're Frye boots. I got them for him when we first got together.”

She nodded.

Oh god, we were two little kids dressing up our Ken dolls.

“I like that one,” she said, pointing at an image of a blond-haired man frozen in midwalk with a dog on a mountain path. He was wearing a brown leather bomber.

“Yeah, I wonder if the dog comes with it.”

“I wonder if the man comes with it,” she said in my ear. Sue was an onion peeling itself in front of me.

“I like this one,” I announced.

Peter's mother came over to look at it. “Oh, honey, five hundred dollars, I don't think we can afford that.” Christ, I had to pick the most expensive thing in the fucking catalog.

I handed the catalog back to Peter.

Everyone went to the enclosed porch. They put on a home movie.

In the movie, Peter was swaying in a doorway in blue jeans and a denim jacket, his brown hair falling over his face. “Whose birthday is it?” his father, holding the camera, asked. “Gracie's birthday,” Peter said. He was looking at the floor. Then we followed him to Sandy, who was sitting on the ground with fat-faced Gracie among wrapped presents. Jake was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Open the presents!” he demanded. Gracie was handed one but looked unsure about what to do. Jake grabbed it from her and ripped it open. Peter interceded, “No, let her do it. No! Mom, it's not fair!” Everyone laughed.

The morning after one of my first nights with Peter, we were late and rushing to the bookstore. We huffed up the subway stairs and saw the electronic board indicating our train would arrive in two minutes. “We don't have to rush,” Peter said, but just then we heard the train come and go before we reached the platform. “It said two minutes! That was like a second!” Peter yelled. He kicked one of the benches, pissed off. “It's just not fair,” he said, shaking his head and doing an excellent impression of a bratty kid. I looked at him, baffled. My jaded, calloused heart flopped around, having a seizure. Peter wasn't hardened to the daily frustrations normal grown-ups shrugged their shoulders at while thinking, “Of course, the board lied, because the world is fucked-up.” Peter's heart was fleshy and pink, and I didn't want anything to hurt it.

Watching other people's home movies was so boring. It was like listening to someone tell you about a dream. Who cares, if you're not in it?

“I'm going to bed,” I announced, and went back to the bedroom. Before I turned on the light, I heard someone come in behind me.

“I want you to know I haven't given up on him.”

Rick was standing there.

“How do I turn this on?” I asked, with my fingers on the lamp's neck.

“There's a switch.” I found the switch and clicked it on and turned to face him.

“I wanted you to know. There's still time. Maybe tomorrow in the car on the ride to the train station I can talk to him.”

Two weeks ago, I had called Rick in hysterics about Peter's drinking.

“Okay,” I said.

“Maya, I don't know how to broach the subject without telling him you called me.”

I sat on the bed. “Look, if you think it will help, I'll tell him.” Peter would kill me, but I couldn't tell his father that, because then it would look like our relationship was fucked-up.

“No, I think you're right. He'll just feel angry, I think.” He scanned the room. “I don't really know what to do. I've always felt like I failed Peter, you know. I didn't help him find a profession. I could have done better.” Oh god, he was confiding in me. Was I supposed to say it wasn't true? That he had been a great father? That I knew Peter adored him? There was a silence during which I should have said something, but I didn't, and then Rick asked, “So, how has his drinking been?”

“Better,” I said. I never should have said anything. “He went through that period of drinking every day, and it was a nightmare, but then he stopped. Probably it was only a phase.” Was it better to justify why I'd called Peter's parents, so they didn't think I was being a drama queen, or to act like I had overreacted, so
I wouldn't have to have this awkward conversation? I shouldn't have ever called. Every time you think you should do the right thing, you probably shouldn't do anything. And if we started talking about drinking with Peter, after Peter's rage against me subsided, it would only be a hop and a skip to him telling them about my drug thing. God, I wanted a bag. As soon as I got home. “Do you think he has a drinking problem?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, I do. I visited him once at college, and we went to a grocery store, and he bought a bottle of gin at ten in the morning, and I thought,
There's something wrong here
.”

What the fuck? He saw his kid buying a bottle of hard alcohol in front of him before breakfast and did absolutely nothing about it? If it had been my mother, the bottle would never have made it to the register. I felt torn between how Peter's and my parents were on opposite sides of the spectrum. Peter's parents only said nice things or nothing; my mother only said awful things all the time. Finally I said, “If it gets bad again, I'll call you.” Rick left. I popped a Xanax and got into bed.

Even though the whole talk with Peter's dad was awkward, I couldn't help but resent Peter. There was no one asking about me. There was no one whispering about how I was doing, trying to spare my feelings.

What was the difference between Peter drinking and me using? Maybe I resented Peter because his addiction was something legal and mainstream and pretty much accepted. Most people could relate to wanting a stiff drink at the end of the night. People thought hangovers were funny. It was easy for Peter to hide in plain sight with his obvious addiction.
Sideways
was about appreciating wine, not a pathetic alcoholic who stole money from his mother. But no film director wanted to pretend dope wasn't a big deal.

When I drank for the first time at age thirteen, I thought,
Why don't people do this all the time?
I loved it. I chugged whiskey
for fifteen seconds longer than all the boys. But once I discovered dope, alcohol just made me clumsy and dumb, and the hangover was so dark. Elizabeth called anxious hungover thoughts the “creeping fear.” With dope, I could function. It was like wearing armor. You went through the world and nothing could touch you.

Tomorrow night I would be in my own bed with my old problems. I switched off the light.

I couldn't sleep. I should have lain there in bed and thought weird thoughts or masturbated. But I didn't. I went back out and joined the others. Everyone had found themselves weirdly awake and wanted to hang out more.

“Why don't we play a game?”

“Why don't we watch a movie?”

And then I unwittingly destroyed everything by suggesting we watch the Netflix film I'd received in the mail the day before. It was about a man who had grown up in a rural town, who brings home his sophisticated girlfriend from the city. She does not fit in. I popped it into the
DVD
player. Five minutes later, all hell broke loose.

I had seen it in the theater when it first came out, and I didn't remember anything dirty. But during the opening credits, as the couple was driving to meet the guy's parents, she started rubbing his leg, and then they got frisky while he was trying to drive and he swerved.

Peter's father freaked out. He screamed, “I think we've seen enough of this!” and turned it off. Then I was faced with two angry, conservative faces. Rick's was red. Sandy looked concerned, as though she wasn't sure I was mentally capable of standing trial. Peter, who had been right beside me, had vanished. “I didn't remember that,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“How could you not remember?” his father screamed. I was not used to other people's parents screaming at me. My own parents
had been easy enough. When they'd yelled, I walked away. Sandy shook her head. Jake came to my rescue.

“C'mon, Dad, I'm sure the whole movie isn't like that. Sometimes movies start out like . . .” but Rick was pissed. An hour ago we were allies and he was caring and loving, and now he was enraged. My face was frozen in a question mark. I didn't understand. On the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw Peter in the bedroom. His back was turned so I couldn't gesture for him to come out and save me. Bastard. I wanted to say, “That was just the credits. It's not porn.” I didn't say anything except, “I'm sorry.”

Then anger. I was angry with Peter, who should have shielded me from his parents. I was angry with his parents for making me feel like an asshole. I was angry with the movie. I was mostly angry with myself for suggesting anything. Why put yourself in the line of fire? I was only trying to put on a stupid movie so we could have a fucking pleasant time, and these people were acting like I had ripped up a Bible. Hadn't his father's whole Thanksgiving prayer been about not judging? Didn't Jesus hang out with some whore?

Grace put on a nature documentary. “I have to go out,” I said, and made Peter come with me.

Outside, I let him have it. “This is your house. These are your parents. What the fuck? You just leave me there?”

“Why didn't you follow me into the bedroom?” he asked.

“That's weird. You're weird. You were supposed to stand up for me. I didn't know you were going to get up and leave like that! And then I was stuck there and they were screaming.”

“I'm sorry. My dad was being a jerk.”

“I bet they wish I were this white girl with a cross around my neck who has conservative white parents. I will always be, like, ‘the other.'”

“I'm going to talk to him. They were wrong to do that, but they're not racist.” He hugged me. “Why would you bring that movie?”

“I swear that must be the only sex scene, if you can even call it that. All it showed was a married couple fooling around. How is that unchristian?”

Everyone in the room was an adult, so what was the problem? Was the problem that people made movies like that? I didn't understand who they were fighting for and what the fight was about. The movie had already been made. Sometimes I wished I could have talked to them openly about these ultra-Christian beliefs, just so I could wrap my mind around them.

Sandy left a Post-it on the sliding glass door. “I'm sorry, but we're prudes.” Wasn't much of an apology.

From then until recorded history ended, I could never recommend a movie again.

I took my last three Xanaxes. Oblivion. Sleep.

I sat up and took a long gulp of warm, flat seltzer from the uncapped bottle on the coffee table.

I was going to see Ogden today.

After digging through pockets and looking in books, I found half a bag of dope from the night before. Elizabeth had told me methadone stayed in your system for three to five days and blocked the effects of the dope. Thanksgiving was only three or four days ago. It was a waste to take it.

I snorted two fat lines off an Easton leather-bound copy of
Moby-Dick
with a rolled fifty. I didn't feel less or more like shit.

Peter's father called after we'd gotten back home. He said he was sorry. He had prayed about it, and he realized he shouldn't have judged me. Sandy's fingerprints were all over the phone call. God bless her sweet heart. I imagined her saying, “You really should
call her and apologize.” She probably felt like if she alienated me she would be alienating her own son. It still took a lot for a grown man to call up his son's wife, whom he had been living in sin with before they eloped in Vegas, and say he was sorry. It was like when your mother cried. All of a sudden, whatever justification you had for whatever shitty thing you had done disappeared.

After he apologized, there was an awkward silence.

“How are the goats?”

“Great. The mother gave birth. Goats aren't the brightest animals,” he said.

“How dumb are they?” I said, in that cheesy comedian way. He didn't laugh. He thought I was just suddenly talking like a silly man. It really would be better if I stopped talking all together.

Peter appeared in his running shorts with the elastic waistband, the ones that always made me think of his cock somewhere in there, curled up. Men with their stupid balls always hanging there. When they run, their balls must bounce a little, and when they pee and shake it, the pee couldn't all come off, so there must always be little spots of pee on their underwear.

“Love you, hon. Text me and let me know what happened at the doctor's, okay?” he said before he left.

His kiss felt like nothing. The same thing that used to get the serotonin charging through my body left me empty.

“Be back soon.” Door slam. The ring stood in the air for a minute.

Last week I watched Peter stand in front of a mirror and put his sunglasses on different points of his nose for fifteen minutes, and I thought,
This is the person I am spending the rest of my life with
.

I watched Peter pick his nose. I watched Peter really itch his ass, like get all up in there. I watched Peter burn warts off his feet. I
watched him spread mayonnaise and hot sauce and peanut butter on a single piece of bread and eat it.

Droplets of sweat ran down Peter's nose as we lay in bed and watched Stephen Colbert.

Once, Peter got angry and said he wondered why I didn't get bedsores because he hardly ever saw me move. I knew by the way he said it he had thought it a million times.

The bottom of the bathtub was grimy and sticky because the water took forever to drain. The hot water made me feel cold and then warm. Soaped up my chest and stomach and face. Got soap in my eye. Stung. Imagined the rabbits the Johnson & Johnson people tortured
Clockwork Orange
–style with soap just so they knew you couldn't go blind that way. Soaped up my pussy, legs, and ass. Wished I had a cock. I had to rub myself on stuff. Bet it would be fun to jerk off in the shower. Took the razor and put my leg up on the side of the tub, shaved, and then shaved the other one. My sinuses started to clear. I blew snot out of my nose. Shaved the outside of my pussy, covered my clit with a finger and shaved inside at the top where there was always hair and inside the lips and then all the way through the middle and then all inside the ass. Kept feeling with my fingers for those stubborn hairs I had to keep going over. The water felt like someone spitting at me.

The bikini area was a bitch. Ingrown hairs or razor burn. Those lucky bitches back in the seventies could let it all grow out into a giant bush.

Sometimes the present seemed just as dumb as the past if you imagined what it would sound like in the future:
In ancient times, the female would rub a bladed tool over her genitalia to slice the hair growing from the body even with the surface of the skin, from where it would grow again
.
I plugged in the laptop and brought it from the coffee table to the couch to watch porn.

The way they characterized the women like different breeds. Black bitch. White cunt. Asian slut.

The line of spit from the cock to the woman's mouth.

A woman blew two guys. When she took them both in her mouth at the same time, the cocks touched. I wondered if that made the men feel a little gay.

A gangbang scene. The men looked pathetic, jerking off as they waited their turn, and then this one dude rubbed his cock in the woman's hair and then wrapped some of her hair around his cock and jerked off with it. Men are so weird.

A girl swallowed and then opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue so you could see she really did swallow it all.

An asshole, a wrinkled, gaping hole spitting back the come like an awful little volcano, and you thought to yourself,
Why would anyone on Earth want to see that?
And yet there it was. Someone on Earth wanted to see just that.

The men were bullies. Pulling, slapping, ordering the women around.

I put the throw pillow underneath me and started to fuck it.

I liked watching the scenes where the women really didn't look like they wanted it. Like they were just doing it for the money or drugs or whatever.

When I came, I came wanting it all. In one way or another, I wanted to be the men, and I wanted to hurt the woman. I wanted to hurt like the woman, and I wanted to hate the men for hurting me. I wanted to be the man at home jerking off wanting to be the man wanting to hurt the woman. And then I wanted to hurt more.

Isn't it a little sad we can't do a little of everything there is to do? I'll never know what it feels like to jam my cock into a tight little asshole.

I woke up and looked at the clock to see how late I was. Every time I looked at a clock, I hated myself. I grabbed my iPod, threw it in my purse, put on my big purple sunglasses, and ran out and got into a cab. Put my headphones on. Lucinda Williams sang, “Lemon trees don't make a sound.” Then the iPod died.

Should have showered after I masturbated. My jeans rubbed against my shaved pussy and made me feel wet and gross.

In high school, I went down on a girl at a party in a field. Her hairy, gnarly pussy on my face and the pussy juice all running down my neck. It tasted like pennies.

After I stood there forever, smoking cigarettes and calling Ogden's phone and getting sent to voicemail, Ogden finally turned the street corner. It always felt like he came out of nowhere, like it was some kind of magic trick when he appeared.

He said he was sorry. He looked like he hadn't slept in a hundred years. It felt nice to be pressed against the cool leather of his jacket. When love came easy, it felt like it would last forever.

“What's wrong?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. He took out a pack of American Spirits. “Want to smoke?”

“Sure,” I said. I tried smiling. My teeth felt soft.

We walked down the street. When his hand came near mine, I held it, but then he pulled his away and put it in his jacket pocket.

Robert Lowell wrote, “What woman has the measure of man / who only has to care about himself / and follow the stars' / extravagant, useless journey across the sky . . . / Because they cannot love, they need no love.” The stars don't need anything. Men do, though. Just because they can't love doesn't mean they don't need love. They need more, usually.

The first time I spent the night with Ogden, I lay on the sofa drinking wine while he hung paintings. All of the paintings looked as much like nothing as you could think of. He stepped back and asked me if one was crooked. I asked him if I could watch television, and he said, “Whatever.”

I passed out at some point. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch, freezing. The streetlight shone through a window. I couldn't find the light switch. I walked down the hallway with my hand against the wall. The floor was cold. I woke him up by punching him in the shoulder. “How do you leave me on the sofa with no blanket or sheet or pillow or anything? Why didn't you wake me up and take me to bed?”

“Sorry,” he mumbled into the pillow.

“Is this your first day on Earth?” I asked him. I found the light, which made him sit up with his eyes squinting. He picked up his glasses from the bedside table, like, “Let me put these glasses on so I can deal with this bullshit.” He asked me to lower my voice. How many times in my life was someone asking me to lower my voice?

“I came here so we could spend some quality time together, not to watch you hang up paintings and then leave me passed out on the sofa. This is the most boring masochistic thing ever.”

“Maybe I didn't want to deal with whatever crisis you have this week and then have sex with you. I am an actual person,” he said.

“I'm an actual person too. Not a thing you leave on a sofa, for Chrissake. And why is this fucking house so cold?” And then I broke down crying. Then there was silence, and I said, “I want a father figure, not an actual replacement for my actual father who actually neglected me. This isn't Freudian. It is retarded.”

Sometimes I thought the only natural ending to our relationship would be a homicide/suicide. Anything else would feel like a letdown.

That afternoon after Thanksgiving, we went to a bistro on Eighty-First and Park. He asked the host about sitting at the bar, but I said I wanted a table and pointed to the corner booth, only for the host to walk us past it.

“That's a four top,” Ogden explained. We had a choice between three different tables.

“Want to hide behind the column?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you want to hear the specials?” the waitress asked. He didn't answer. She picked up the specials menu and pointed at each item while she read it out loud. After she left, he looked at me and said, “What the fuck was that about? She read what was on the menu.”

“How's your dog?” I asked.

Ogden went on about his car breaking down instead. All the crying messages I had left for him echoed in my head. I wanted to run out of the restaurant and throw myself into traffic.

“The car broke down and I had the dog and the cat with me and I had to take them to a motel . . .”

After we ate, we ordered another round of drinks and then went outside to smoke. It looked like it was going to rain. I had always loved dismal weather. I found it comforting. I wrapped my arms around him.

“Let's go back to your place,” I said.

He stared at me

“Do you have any pot? I want to get stoned and do it,” I said, almost whining.

“No, I don't think you should come back with me tonight.”

“Why not?”

“I think we should cool it for a while.”

“Why? Peter doesn't know anything, I swear.”

He shook his head. “That's not it.”

“What did I do?”

“You didn't do anything.”

“When did you decide this?”

“A while ago.”

“We can't just fuck?”

“Nope.”

“We can't even make out?”

“No.”

“Do you love me?” I asked.

“No,” he said. Extras passed us by, glancing at us. What was the story line they imagined? That old man was hurting that young woman.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” My voice rose.

“I'm not being cryptic.”

“You never did?”

“Why do you think I never said it back to you?”

“I thought you didn't want to confuse everything because I'm married.”

“I'm sorry. I thought you knew.”

“Do you care that I love you?”

He looked at me like I should have already known the answer. He looked at me like he didn't want to have to say it, and then he said it. “No.” Right on cue: the lump in my throat and the tears down my face. He looked at me like he really didn't want to be going through this bullshit right now.

“Are you attracted to me?” I asked. Throw me a fucking bone.

“Not as much as I probably should be.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

He opened the door for some woman with a stroller and then nodded at me. “Let's go back inside.”

We sat down. I cried. There was no point in trying to hold it together anymore.

This is life: You walk down this path and people join you. Then they leave, and you're alone again, and you keep replacing them. Then those people leave too.

“I don't want to be with you. You need to accept that,” he said.

“I learned it a second ago,” I said.

“Look, I'm not abandoning you. I do care about you.” This was part of the speech he had rehearsed so he could come out as clean as possible. So he could say to himself, “I didn't just abandon her.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

“There isn't another woman,” he said.

“Give me another chance.”

“Believe me, it's better if it ends like this than if we had a big blowup or if Peter found out. This way we can always be friends, okay?” He smiled.

“I thought you loved me.”

“I didn't love you and I never have,” he said, staring directly into my eyes. “I didn't chase you. I didn't lie to you.” He was being
a lawyer. He had all this evidence. “I never said I loved you or made you any promises. I've always been honest with you.”

“Stop it. Look, I only like to be treated badly in a hot way.”

“I'm sorry, but I'm not your husband. I didn't make any vows to you.”

“You're a great teacher, by the way. Some of the lessons were repetitive, like what a giant fucking asshole you are.”