When the Messenger Is Hot (15 page)

Plus right after that I got this amazing job. I was thinking about becoming a teacher, and one day I was flipping channels and I landed on a talk show just as this guy was on saying he was a tutor to kids in the movies, and I felt it was a sign that I should do that, and I mentioned it to one connected person that I knew and about five minutes later I was on an airplane to Massachusetts to work on a movie. It happened so easily and quickly that it was clear that it came about because of my having joined Alcoholics Anonymous and my new openness to seeing signs. Also I was feeling much better about myself as a result of the joining, and I believe that came across to the people who hired me. So I flew up to Massachusetts and there I was having my own double-wide trailer! It was the schoolroom. I had a hotel room. But I did think it was a little ironic, because I had a lot of lounging time while my student was doing scenes, and it might as well have been mine. Anyway, I went to some A.A. meetings up there but it was a pretty small town so the meetings were like, me and six of the Gorton's fishermen, and actually they were the only ones I've ever run into who thought I wasn't an alcoholic, before the intervention. They looked at me and said things like,
You're not really one of us
, and,
I spilled more than you drank
, which of course was entirely possible, even though it didn't matter to me. I even related to the Gorton's fishermen.

Then to celebrate my first anniversary I had a little party and all of the cute guys came, and the two other girls, and my friend Michael gave me his one-year coin, which had been given to him by his sponsor, and my friend Jason brought me flowers, and Brian brought me a beautiful card which I felt to be a sincere gesture of friendship even though he was totally in love with the fifteen-dollar girl. Michael stood up and stopped everyone from their conversations for a minute and said,
I just want to tell everyone here that I love them very much
, and I know it was my party and everything, but at first I thought he was just being nice, that there was no way he could have been meaning to include me in that, except for he was almost weeping, and I was moved so far as to actually believe he did have that kind of love for all of us. Everyone else was used to it I guess because they were just like,
Yeah, we love you too, Mikey, sit down
, but I was not used to emotive displays of this sort, and I believe it contributed greatly to the building of my self-esteem. Jason and Michael stayed after everyone else left to watch a movie, and when Michael got up to go to the bathroom, Jason started kissing my neck, which was enjoyable and he too was very cute but I had no idea he was interested in me that way, and Michael was right in the bathroom, so I made him stop, and then the next time I saw him after that at a meeting I asked him what that was all about and he said he had no idea what I was talking about, that it had never happened. I didn't know if he had lost some brain cells in his alcoholic experience, but it did happen. That's a very strange thing, when someone says something didn't happen and you know it did. There's no argument, or there's a very never-ending argument, and I didn't see the point of that so I let it go, and then one day we were at the movies, and not a particularly sexy movie at that, in fact it reminded me a little of Jake because the main character was this kind of abusive/angry father, but then suddenly in the movies Jason had his hand on my thigh, in a high location, and we didn't end up seeing the rest of the movie, really, and then we were the kind of buddies who have sex for a while, although we also talked about god, which made it seem a lot less awful to me, and plus also I learned that my enjoyment with Brian wasn't just a fluke. But then one time we were fooling around in Jason's roommate's bed and something scratched me in the back and it was his roommate's retainer and I thought, Well, maybe it could be better than this. Which was also a lesson in sobriety to me because previously I was of the mind, you might recall, that it couldn't be better than Jake, which, looking back, or if you are someone else, you might think was obviously not true, but if you had been me before I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, you wouldn't have known that.

Shortly after my second anniversary of sobriety, I was hired by the same family to tutor some of their other kids (they had a lot, which was good for me) on another movie, in Chicago. I wasn't all that excited really because I was still feeling so “a part of,” which in A.A. just means the same as what it would mean if you left on the word
something
at the end, and it was going to be a long shoot, but I needed the work, so I went. My hotel room had a kitchen and a fantastic view of Lake Michigan, which helped, but I ran up a hundred-dollar long-distance bill in the first three days I was there. (Although, curiously to me at the time, I did feel a very strong connection with my midwestern roots, and I had always liked Chicago. I felt very much at home there, which I didn't tend to feel much of anywhere, least of all in my hometown of New York, in spite of the recent belonging.) I knew a few people from the crew of the last movie, and one of the other teachers had heard about this hip neighborhood called Wicker Park, so we got in a cab and went there only to find nothing but a grungy-looking coffee shop on Division Street, and I was not very comfortable in this neighborhood that for some reason reminded me of parts of Mexico City I'd passed through, and we'd just gotten paid so I had all of my per diem in my pocket, which was several hundreds of dollars (several hundred more than I would normally ever have, or carry), and I was not at all sure what was so hip that was going on there that I should overlook the feelings of endangerment I was experiencing.

I figured it out quickly, though, when our waiter came over and he was wearing a very Seattle worn-flannel kind of outfit, torn dungarees and long johns, and his hair, in a ponytail, was longer than even mine was at the time, and he had one of those goatee beards that doesn't have a mustache, which on any but the cutest guys makes them look like a leprechaun, and this guy did not lean to the leprechaun side in any way, and I was pretty sure the waiters in Chicago weren't all actors, that maybe he was just a waiter, or in a rock band. Anyway, he was very cute, and very hip, his name was Steven, and I decided that he would be my boyfriend, and I went back a couple of days later to ask him out for coffee and he said yes, and then he called sooner than he even said he'd call, and asked if I wanted to go to dinner, which of course I did. He picked me up at my hotel room very dressed up, which I had not expected, wearing actual pants, and a white shirt, and a vest and a jacket, and his hair was loose and all brushed, and it turned out that it was the first time he'd had a trim in four years, which I thought was kind of sweet, and he had flowers, a bunch of wildflowers, not wilted. I was just wearing jeans and a cardigan, having hardly expected the Seattle guy to be looking so fancy, but it was fine, really, and he took me to a very hip new restaurant in the meat-packing district, which was on the expensive side, and it was for sure the best most fancy date I'd ever had. Plus I was really surprised at how cool Chicago was, and I was thinking right away that if he gave me a good reason I'd move there in about three seconds.

He asked if I wanted to order a bottle of wine, but I said I didn't drink, and he asked me about it, so I told him that I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he asked if I minded if he drank, which I didn't, so he ordered a scotch and had a couple more before the end of the night, but he never seemed drunk to me at all. He asked me a few questions about being in A.A. but not so many that it was weird at all, and then he told me this story about how one time he was on a date with this girl and they were driving around looking for a restaurant and ended up sitting down at what they first thought was an outdoor cafe but later realized (when they asked the people at the table next to them for a menu, to quite a bit of laughter) was really just some tables set up outside of a church basement where they were having an A.A. meeting, which they also thought was funny and even more funny when she later did end up going to A.A. not accidentally but because of a drinking problem. (Although I did file this anecdote away mentally because in A.A. it's said that no one gets there by accident, even though a lot of people who end up there have similarly amusing anecdotes.) He never asked me about A.A. after that, really, which was fine, and we had things to talk about, and the restaurant was closing so we went to this bar where he also works called Dr. Bob's, which he's also part owner of and which I should also say went into my mental notes because Dr. Bob is the name of the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

He asked me if I wanted to have kids. On the first date. You know, that's the thing we're not supposed to bring up on any date, ever. He said he very much wanted to have kids one day. We talked a lot about our families, and I gathered his wasn't any more normal than mine, and we ended up talking until around two A.M., which was very late for me although not for him, because he told me the next day he actually went back to Dr. Bob's after he dropped me off, which I didn't think much of because he said he was wide awake from having had such a great time on his date with me, and that he wanted to see me again as soon as possible, which I thought was very sweet. He had theater tickets and seemed almost shy about asking me out again, which seemed crazy to me, because he was totally cute and it was hard to believe he didn't have lots of girlfriends, but anyway, I was in love already, and either my psychic abilities weren't working or he was really different from all the previous bad boyfriends, that he was by all appearances going to be a good boyfriend. I must admit to having had some trepidations, having been so used to bad boyfriends, and there's a certain thing about having bad boyfriends whereby it's just not that big of a disappointment if you break up with them, and I had some concerns about what it would be like to break up with someone I was in such instantaneous true love with, now that I was becoming more in touch with my feelings as a result of having quit drinking. (They tell you in A.A. that your feelings are a gift, and it's not like you don't get the point, but on the other hand, sometimes it doesn't seem so true, and you look the horse bringing that particular gift directly in the mouth and say,
No thank you to that, gift horse
.) Anyway, it was a risk I was willing to take, and I would say for that first month I was absolutely certain that I was going to move to Chicago and spend the rest of my life with him.

He said the nicest things. Things I had never in my life heard before. On the second date he asked me if anyone ever asked me to marry them, and I said,
um, no
, and he said he found that astonishing, and he asked me how I felt about Wednesday, and I thought he was meaning if I was available for a date the next Wednesday, and he said, No,
I mean about our date
(which had been on the last Wednesday), and I didn't think there was any doubt that I was madly in love, so I was kinda like,
Are you kidding?
and he said that he had felt like he was in a bubble, that if I hadn't pointed out that the waiters were putting the chairs on the tables and mopping the floors, that he could have just stayed there and talked to me forever. Forever.

I somehow managed to not sleep with him until the third date, but it didn't really matter. I was in love. He wore those kind of long Calvin Klein underwear, which seemed uncharacteristic given the Seattle thing he had going on, but they looked totally sexy on him. The sex was great and I felt that my continued satisfaction in that area was indicative of my growing emotional progress.

It went like this for a month. Day after day he called when he said he'd call, and said things I'd never heard before. He said,
I like you, Alice. I'd rather be with you than just about anywhere
. He remembered that I don't like nuts with my sweets. He carried around the notes I left him when I went to work in the morning, that just said like, “That was fun, make yourself some coffee if you want.” I met his friends. That was maybe the first bad sign, though. I felt a little different. They had tattoos. (I wanted one tattoo, but these were, you know, tattoo people. Purple hair. Facial piercings. This one guy seriously had a bone through his nose. And he was actually pretty nice to me, I'm not saying anything about what kind of people they were, just that I was back to that thing of feeling totally not cool.) Steven didn't even have a tattoo, which I thought he was a ripe candidate for, and he said he'd thought about it but he was Jewish and was worried about what his parents would think, which did not at all seem characteristic due to his having long hair and an earring and a general attitude of rebellion. I think his friends liked me fine, because one of them once told him right while I was standing there that if Steven didn't marry me he was going to. I realize now, because of my time in the program, that feeling not a part of isn't necessarily the reality of what's going on. Feelings aren't facts, is a saying they have. But I still felt a little out of my element, even though Steven was always attentive and included me in everything.

Except for he never had me over to his apartment, which was another one of the first ways in which I felt like something wasn't quite right, even though he swore that the only reason was that it was more his dogs' apartment than his, and that it smelled like pit bull no matter what he did, and I couldn't reassure him that I didn't care, and so I never saw it even one time. I made one more mental note, though, the one time I met him in front of his apartment, because it was the first time in my entire life I had ever heard gunshots, which some people might think was surprising due to my having lived in New York my whole life, but you know, I didn't grow up in the South Bronx. I was standing out there waiting for him to come down and he shouted out the window that he'd be right there, and right when he opened the door I heard these popping sounds,
so
not like it sounds in the movies, but still, even when you haven't ever heard gunshots before, you have a pretty good idea what it is, and I said,
Okay, what was that?
and he said very casually,
Oh, the little bangers are having some fun
, like it was funny to him, like he was totally used to it, which I'm sure he was, because he told me he came home one time and there was a bullet hole in his window and a shell on his bed, and he lives on the second floor. So I was like, okay, note to self, when you move to Chicago, don't live here, which would later be ironic. Anyway, I also finally got the nerve to ask him why he wore a wedding band. I knew he wasn't married, he told me on the first date he'd never been married, but he did say that he was very serious with this one woman and they wore rings, and I didn't want to be rude in pointing out that they had broken up a year before, but he could probably tell that's what I was thinking, and he said it was just kind of a reminder, but he never really said of what, which made me think it was a reminder of
her
, only not the mistake of her. It was obvious he'd been madly in love with her, which made me psychically know that she was a tall dark-haired supermodel, which he said she pretty much was, and I began feeling totally less than, which is another thing they say in A.A. that leaves off the end of the sentence, meaning less important than fill-in-the-blank, it could be anything or anyone you think is better than you or you think someone thinks is better than you, which for me is often everything and everyone, which I found out in A.A. is very alcoholic. This supermodel was described to me as being a very strong person, which I would in the course of his sad tale of heartbreak discover really meant she had a strong personality, because in fact, this girl had partly gone out with Steven because she couldn't leave her last relationship, and I learned that she had broken a lot of hearts up to and including his, when she finally cheated on him in the end with little remorse.