Problems (13 page)

“No, I love you, and you're leaving me for no reason.”

He stared directly at me with tears running down his face, and said, “Fuck you. This is what you wanted.”

What the fuck was he talking about?
I wondered, after I slowly came to from binge watching
Don't Trust the B- - - - in Apartment 23
and doing all the dope I had. I had completely lost my tolerance and kept nodding out. I would jerk awake and find myself bent over, my head almost touching the floor. It sounded like Peter was dragging shit across the bedroom floor.

This is what you wanted
. Oh. What I said to Amy on the phone. “I wish Peter would just leave already. I treat him like shit.” He must have overheard me when I was smoking outside. My stupid mouth saying stupid things. Had I meant it? Was this exactly what I wanted? I snorted another bag. No more being scared that the biggest thrills left for me were buying things at Crate & Barrel. I was free. Anything and nothing could happen.

In the future everyone will ask me, “Why did your marriage end? What did
you
do?”

Peter and I walked over to Elizabeth's. She sold me five bars of Xanax and gave me a hug. She was strung out. Her apartment told the story. All the lights were off, and there was a candle, and her
laptop was playing a show with no laugh track. I wanted to stay, but Peter was outside waiting.

I'd never learned how to get dumped. I didn't know how to not take it personally.

“Peter, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean any of it. I'm not pretending. I love you.”

“No, Maya, you did mean it. All you do is push yourself away from me. I can feel it.”

“It's scary to emotionally depend on someone.”

“It's supposed to be hard. That's why it means something, and that's why it never meant anything to you,” he said.

“You don't want to be alone, Peter, c'mon.”

“Maya, I started looking as soon as we got back, and I've already put the deposit down.”

“Where is it?”

“Bushwick.”

“That's what fucking happens. You fall in love, and in one way or another, you end up in metaphorical or literal Bushwick. This place of just total shit.”

“I'd rather live in Bushwick than here,” he said.

This human being would rather get drunk in a shitty apartment in fucking Bushwick and risk dying alone than be with me.

One day I'll be strong enough
, I thought.
One day I'll just go and jump off a bridge
.

The following weeks were the opposite of a blur. Raw and sharp. I cried so much I didn't even know what I was crying about. I forgot to eat. Dread was the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes. Peter gave me money all the time, and I took Xanax and heroin all the time. We both knew it was the only way he would get any sleep.

I told him I would kill myself, because no one was allowed to just leave someone like that. He didn't respond. Was I actually going to have to kill myself to prove a point?

I looked out the window at a child wearing an oversized book bag in the courtyard, waiting for the bus. There was a world where kids went to schools and the postal service mailed letters so people could communicate, and there were train conductors conducting trains and buses picking people up so they could get from one place to another, and there were nurses using wet
Q
-tips to moisten the lips of people in comas and people who volunteered to cradle babies who didn't have parents. And there were wars, and people died. And I was always in a room, crying.

I lost my job at the bookstore. This douchebag had shown up, who was supposed to be the one to supervise textbooks but was put in charge of the whole staff instead. This made Michelle quit. And then, one by one, he fired everyone. We had all been friends, and now we were like a slowly dying family. We talked a lot of smack, but no one actually wrote nasty letters to the owners. No one quit. We each waited our turn. We looked at the douchebag's blog and laughed at him for being a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast and groaned at what an awful human being he was. In one post he wrote, “Had to fire a girl today. But she couldn't get with the program.” He said things like, “Get with the program.” People who worked there for years were booted and replaced by eighteen-year-old girls the douchebag called “sweetheart.”

I don't know why it is that when some men call you “sweetheart” or “honey,” it makes you blush, yet when other men do it, you want to hurl.

There was no order or reason to it. He fired everyone, the hard working along with the lazy. After the firings got underway, every
time a customer asked about a book, I would go on Amazon and show them how much cheaper they could buy it from there.

I stole everything I could get my hands on.

I watched everyone get replaced before the e-mail arrived at two in the morning informing me I didn't need to bother coming in the next day.

I looked on craigslist for jobs.

I finally landed a temp job at a labor union in the East Twenties. The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone, or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city . . .”), and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was cross-eyed, so he could check on both. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv.

I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.

Boys wearing headphones inhabited the beige cubicles dividing the office floor. Nobody talked. I wanted work to be around people. But I was always alone there.

I told Peter to pack while I was at work, but he didn't. He did it right in front of me instead. He stood in front of the bookshelf with his eyes squinted, looking for his books. When we got married, we threw out duplicate copies of the books we owned.

“Just give me the shittier pots and pans, but don't take them all,” I begged him. He told me I should have felt lucky he was taking
as little as he was. He didn't have to be nice anymore. It really didn't fucking matter what we said or did to each other now.

All the best memories suddenly rematerialized the moment he told me he was leaving. Those fuzzy memories of the beginning. Going to the beach, laughing in bed, making love while Steve Earle blared on the stereo. The way he always held the umbrella to completely cover me. The human mind plays the worst tricks.

Everyone thought his leaving was the right thing. “Just let him go. Believe me, it's a blessing,” Ogden said.

I did dope in the bathroom at least three times a day.

Somewhere along the way my sleeve snagged. Using was my life. Not using was my life. One or the other, I couldn't get out of the cycle. Everything revolved around it. My life was one boring game of heads-or-tails. I could only use or not use. I could never be totally free from the whole fucking thing.

It wasn't like it slowly happened. It wasn't something that gradually took over my life. But when Peter left I thought to myself,
Just be a junkie now
.

Heads.

Get high all the time. Why not? Pure hedonistic joy, and then when I found a man, I would clean up for him.

Tails.

Sometimes I stretched out in bed reading books. Sometimes I wrote poetry. Sometimes I tried on clothes. Sometimes I cleaned the whole apartment and ate a pint of ice cream.

Douglass, Elizabeth's ex, moved in right after Peter left. Douglass was in his fifties, and I had never liked him, but anything was better than being alone. He walked like a caveman, spoke in a deep voice, and used big words just to make you feel dumb. He had always been dismissive of me. But once I gave him a free place to live, I started seeing what Elizabeth saw in him. He could be kind. He would make me food. He would come back after disappearing for hours with cookies or a bag of oranges. Women swooned over him. He had a ripped body, even though the only exercise he got was walking to and from a drug dealer. The gray in his dreads didn't age him; it really did make him look distinguished. He wore beat-up jeans that hung from his hips. He had spent his life being supported by some poor girl who had really thought she could change him. As long as I had money, he didn't mind running for me.

The reasons people have runners are: they don't have a connection themselves, they don't want to take the risk of scoring and walking around with dope actually on them, or they are lazy. Normally, you pay a runner twenty bucks, which is two bags. I bought Douglass more than I should have for running. If I didn't, he would just steal more of my bags.

Amy had sent me a five-hundred-dollar check. Ogden sent me a grand. Everyone sent me money because they felt bad, and it all went up my nose, not to mention the money from my job. I barely looked at food. Whenever I did eat a cookie or a slice of pizza, my body would ache for more, but I wanted to be skinny almost more than I wanted to get high.

There was a guy, one of the cubicle boys with the headphones, who made the mistake of flirting with me. He took me to lunch. I came in the next day and got so high I told him I was high. Later that night, he texted me to leave him alone forever.

Peter was gone. Ogden was gone. They just kept leaving.

“This is what you wanted,” my psychiatrist reminded me. I knew I had sat in that office with those plants I was pretty sure were fake (I kept reminding myself to touch them to see) and said how much better off I would be if we broke up. But there had always been a part of me that got off on shit talking Peter. It was a kind of showing off: look, I can have this thing and not even care I have it. Having a man wasn't everything when you had a man. Maybe I took him for granted, or maybe he was kind of shitty. I couldn't remember.

“I just want to die,” I wailed to Douglass as he was putting on his shoes to go score for me.

Douglass and I watched movies constantly and got high till we passed out. Sometimes Douglass made food. One time, he did the laundry. He never showered. His body reeked of musk, and it was like a cartoon stink cloud followed him. He left dishes right on the floor in front of the couch. He left syringes without caps on the sofa, on the floor, in piles of garbage. When someone was supposed to come over, I would scan the room and de-syringe it, fuming with rage at how stupid and dangerous he could be. If we had had a pet, it would be dead.

I chain-smoked in a thin black slip and slippers. I was content in my bubble. Nothing in this bubble could hurt me, if you didn't count me. Life was going to be awesome and awful, beautiful and ugly. The most exciting things that were going to happen to me would not be anywhere near Crate & Barrel. They would be in bars and streets and dark places. I would wake up in bright places and laugh at sad things and cry over dumb things. I would never get married again. I would never get stuck.

* * *

The first time I had sex after Peter was with a woman, in front of the man who had paid me.

I had always looked at those ads on craigslist. Sugar daddy ones. I already liked older men. I was kind of a masochist. I loved sex. I needed money. So what if there was a male counterpart who wanted to spoil me? To treat me like a little girl? Sure, it sounded a little creepy. But creepy things turned me on.

Someone said to me once, “Don't ever think with your crotch.”

I was going to think with my crotch. I wanted to feel hot and have men buy me shit. That could be a life, right? That could be a pretty cool life.

The first time I was nervous. He told me his name was Brian. He sounded normal enough: lived in Connecticut, married, two kids. A daughter my age. I lied and said I was twenty-five. I could have passed for younger but decided not to push it. His voice was nasal, and his picture was a vacation picture of him on a ship wearing a loud shirt. He looked so corny. I went back and forth with Douglass about whether or not to do it. Safety-wise it seemed all right: condoms and a hotel room. The only advice Douglass gave me was not to invite anyone from craigslist over to the apartment. Hotels seemed safe. A lot of people saw you. If you screamed bloody murder, someone would probably hear you.

I felt better when Brian said there would be another girl. She went to Columbia. He saw her regularly. Could both of them be weirdo psychos, like the couple that abducted that Jaycee Lee Dugard girl? Probably not. Then he texted that he found a third girl. I would be one of three girls, meaning a lot less of the actual action and safety in numbers. He hadn't seen this other girl before either.

“I'm not normally like this. I don't want you to think I just have three girls at once. This is so rare, like the moon aligned with the stars or something.”

Douglass was going to come with me in a cab and stand around like an extra so he could get a look at the guy, and then he would wait at a Starbucks nearby. If something shady went down, I would text
“OK,”
and then we weren't sure what. Douglass said he would call the police at that point, because what was one dude going to do?

I never actually anticipated that Brian would be pretty hot. He didn't look like his picture. He was wearing an expensive suit. His smile was disarming. He moved his hands when he talked, like Woody Allen.

There was no way the Columbia girl was twenty-two, but who the hell was I to out her?

He brought five condoms. She said, “You wish you could use all of those.”

“I know,” Brian said. “I do. One and I'm done. That's what happens when you get to be my age.”

I went to the bathroom and turned on the water. I did a line and then another. Then I realized I wasn't sure I was going to be alone again. I did most of the bag.

The Columbia girl told me her story while we smoked a cigarette outside, waiting for girl #3. “I was just checking out the ads. So I answered one, and then I met him at a Starbucks, but I couldn't go through with it, so I actually just bailed on him. But he kept insisting I meet him again, so I did, and then I don't know. He doesn't take long. And he's okay.”