With or Without You: A Memoir (20 page)

“My girlfriend has a new winter coat. It looks smart on her. Camel wool. Did I buy it for her? Where did I get the money for her coat?”

He was talking about me. I remembered his pleasure when he saw
me in the new winter coat that my mother had bought for me at Filene’s. It was indeed camel-colored wool, knee-length, and in a plain cut that hadn’t gone out of style since the days when Saul was a single man.

“You look swell!” Saul had said the first morning I arrived at the ward wearing it. He reached to me from where he sat at the breakfast table and took my hand in his. “I mean it. That coat looks very smart on you.” After lunch that day, he asked me to go for a walk with him. His spine had permanently frozen in the shape of a lowercase
r;
a walk with Saul meant bearing all the weight of him on one of my arms, because he refused to hold a cane, let alone a walker. We moved together at the speed of sap and stopped every few steps to sit down and rest. The nursing home was equipped with dozens of chairs along every wall for just this purpose. During one of our rests, Saul turned to me and said, “I’m very fond of you.”

“I’m very fond of you, too,” I answered.

When was the last time I’d said something half as kind to my own boyfriend? When was the last time I’d let him touch me while I was sober?

On another note card Saul had written, “How am I going to support my girlfriend? I don’t have a job. Does she have a job? I must contact the hospital. Surely they need a physician. I must find work.” And then, a few cards later, floating solemnly in the white space:

“What ever happened to my mother?”

I closed the book of index cards and stuffed it into my purse. My eyes stung from fighting back so many tears. I ordered two shots of tequila, which I took the only way one can take tequila, like a fast bullet to the brain. Feeling a little warmth in my belly, I ordered another. “And a chicken fajita,” I added, so that I wouldn’t look like a degenerate. I tried to drink the third tequila more slowly. Who was this show for? I wondered. The restaurant was empty except for two waiters and me. When I’d eaten enough food to convince myself that I was sober, I went back to work and gave my two-week notice.

On the bus ride home from work, I got off in front of a hotel where the bar had a good happy-hour menu. Free cheese and crackers
and four-dollar martinis, which was cheap for Boston at the time. It wasn’t the first time I’d stopped at this bar on my way home from work, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I had sat alone at a bar and gotten drunk, but never before that day had I acknowledged precisely what I was doing—running away from my feelings—and then righteously, imperiously, said to myself,
So what?

I would stop at a few more bars that night, drinking alone, realizing, also for the first time, that I didn’t have a single friend in my life besides my boyfriend, who didn’t drink, and Saul, who was now dead. Later that night I threw up on the train, staining the front of my nice wool coat. I took it off before my stop and left it on the subway floor.

SIX WEEKS LATER, I
got a new job teaching English at a small language school in Boston. I wanted to write a collection of short stories, maybe linked stories that I would call a novel. Or perhaps a screenplay about an ESL teacher and her eccentric students. I’d call it
Love as a Second Language
. My plan was to teach classes Monday through Saturday, then devote evenings, weekends, and holidays to writing. Teaching would give me just enough money to pay the bills while I scribbled a salable draft of my masterpiece. It felt like a more legitimate way to make a living than the nursing home. Now if someone at a dinner party asked me what I did, I had an answer that wouldn’t make them step back and wince.

After a year and a half of teaching, I’d written only two stories, though I’d started and abandoned many others. I kept all of them hidden in my desk, holding on to the hope that when I died this cache of fiction would be published and my talent posthumously acknowledged, like some hard-drinking Emily Dickinson.

Dave had gotten a low-paying job at a small film-production company in Boston. He was more talented and experienced than anyone in his office understood, living far below his potential. What he needed, it was clear, was to move to New York. Deep down I knew this, and wanted it for him, but I was too selfish to say so and he was
too scared to go anywhere without me. The line that demarcated him from me had long ago been erased. I couldn’t tell whose fault this was, or what we should do about it. At night I used to whisper into his ear as he slept, hoping to insert myself into his dreams. When we ate together we didn’t bother with separate bowls; instead, we hunched over a still-warm pot of macaroni and cheese with one spoon that we passed back and forth.

How do you end something like that? I tried to leave Dave honestly at first, then I went back and tried to make it work. We adopted a dog, we made a 35-mm short film, we accrued thousands of dollars of debt on a shared credit card. I knew it was over, but when I tried to imagine falling asleep without him it felt like being shipwrecked all alone on the moon. Four years after finishing college, I applied to graduate writing programs in the hope that a university could furnish the direction and structure that my life seemed to lack. After several unceremonious rejections, I was offered a place at one school in Manhattan and one in Austin. Texas was a place I’d seen only in movies; it seemed very, very far away. I was so excited by these simple facts that I skimmed over the part of the letter that said I’d get a scholarship and a stipend.

“I’m coming with you,” Dave said when I made my decision, his eyes brimming with tears.

“Of course,” I answered.

We fought for the entire nineteen-hundred-mile drive from Massachusetts to Texas, and our car broke down three times. For a few days we stopped in New Orleans. It became a spontaneous honeymoon for the wedding that we were always putting off. We went to rock shows and got drunk together and made love as if we meant it. Almost as soon as we got back into the car we started fighting again, tossing all the cruel and tiresome scraps of barbed wire you have left when something is over but you refuse to give it up. Once in Austin, as we were unpacking our collective belongings, I accidentally threw away the ring he had given me to tide me over until we became officially engaged. Later that day, Hurricane Katrina pounded her fists on the city where we had briefly fallen back in love.

In Austin I met other graduate-school writers, people who read and drank as much as I did, including a twenty-two-year-old guy with a Freddie Mercury mustache that he sported as shamelessly as the dark-green girl bike he rode to class. This young man liked to drink, but he liked to go to the movies even more, and in Austin you could do both of those things in the same place, thanks to a local chain of movie theaters called the Alamo Drafthouse. While Dave was making lattes at a miserable coffee chain—the only job he could find in a big college town—I was skipping off to matinees with my new writer friend. Even cross-eyed drunk, this boy was a genius. He could twirl out breathtaking sentences with the speed and flair of a majorette’s baton, and this was after eight or nine glasses of Drambuie. Moments before puking, he would offer me a slurry insight into the craft of fiction that was more useful and enduring than anything any teacher has ever said. I didn’t want to fall in love with him, but something happened to us in the dark of the movie theater sitting side by side, sometimes the only two people in the audience, our faces awash in the same coil of reflected light, our arms almost touching, then actually touching; then a transmission, a seizure, a curse.

It was just as awful as my mother had said it would be. It was even worse that she was right.

Two writers who drink are about as safe together in the same bed as a can of gasoline and a box of matches. When this boyfriend disappointed me, as any human being inevitably will, I deserted him ruthlessly for another man who drank even more. In less than a month, this replacement man hated me so much that he dumped me and drove across the country with a broken foot. I quickly found a replacement, whom I tortured for the next few weeks. Then I did it all over again with another guy. Then another and another.

Throughout it all, I would call my mother for advice and support. I wanted her to send me care packages with cookies. I wanted her to tell me to forget all these guys and just buy a vibrator. In the screenplay I never wrote about my life, my movie mom strokes my hair and says, “It’s okay, Honey. Life is long. And, while relationships don’t last forever, I promise you, true love can never die.”

That didn’t happen. Kathi was disgusted with me. She was angrier than the boyfriends I was backstabbing and throwing away.

“I don’t understand how you can just turn your back on people, Nikki,” she said. “How did you—how did
my daughter
—ever become so cold?”

———

I
WAS LIVING ALONE IN AN APARTMENT IN AUSTIN. MY BOYFRIEND
of the past eight years had moved to New York. My mother didn’t trust me to survive without him, and she didn’t trust my new boyfriend, who lived down the street.

“Someone could rape you, attack you, and I’m too far away to help,” she said.

I ignored her perverted impulse to protect me
now
, bit my tongue before screaming,
“Too late for that!”

“Mum, I’m twenty-six. This isn’t the first time I’ve lived on my own.”

“I can’t stand it,” she said. “You’re too far away from me. It’s different this time. I can’t explain it. I hurt. How far away you are—it physically pains me.”

What’s different, I thought silently, was that she no longer had the money to come to visit. Even if she could find the one credit card that she hadn’t maxed out, her addictions kept her more or less housebound. There was no way she could get through airport security with all the syringes and plastic baggies and vials that she would need to survive even a long weekend away from home.

Every time my phone rang, a hot stone rose in my throat, that familiar dilemma felt by everyone who loves a junkie: Please don’t be her. Please be her. Please be someone telling me she’s dead. Please don’t be someone telling me she’s dead.

“Honey! I had a dream you died!” she told me.

“Well, I didn’t.”

“How will I know if something happens to you? You never call me!”

“I called you last night,” I said, not mentioning that she had nodded off in the middle of our conversation. I was telling her a funny story when I heard her begin to snore, then cough, then wake herself up.

“No, you didn’t. I haven’t heard the sound of your voice in weeks. Weeks!”

I could feel the earth shake nineteen hundred miles away. The surface cracked open like an egg and the mucus of her hatred began to spew.

“You think I’m no good,” she shrieked. “You think you’re so much better than me. I’m a loser! I’m a loser! My own daughter won’t call me anymore because she thinks I’m a loser.”

I heard the sound of her wailing, then the whack of the phone repeatedly striking a table or countertop. If I was lucky, she would hang up, fall asleep, and call me later, having completely forgotten the previous hour of her life. We’d talk about my dog, a consolation prize for the grandchild I was still refusing to give her. I would try to make her laugh at least once before we hung up, as much for my benefit as for hers. Kathi’s joy was like a vitamin that I needed in order to survive and could get from one source only, the unruly crow of her laughter.

Usually she would call back to tell me she was dying. That same old promise I knew she wouldn’t keep.

I COMPLETED MY FIRST
year of graduate school in Austin with neither success nor disgrace. That summer I’d received a grant that could be spent only on academic study, so I signed up for a writing course being taught by American novelists in St. Petersburg. I decided to bookend my two-week trip to Russia with a few days in Danvers.

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to go home,” my mustachioed boyfriend said to me. “Your mother’s a flesh-eating virus. I’m scared for you, baby.”

“The flight is much cheaper out of Boston,” I said. That was only half the reason.

I MADE IT TO
Danvers by the end of June. My mother was waiting for me on the back steps when I pulled into the driveway. She took a last drag from her cigarette, then threw it into the yard. I noticed the trash bags piled up against the side of the house and the scraggly blades of grass sprouting in patches over what could have been a lawn. Mum’s arms clamped around me. She squeezed so tight I started to choke. I pulled away and took a good look at her. She was wearing Michael’s clothes, a pair of his gray cotton shorts and a big white T-shirt. Either she or Michael had cut off the sleeves, offering a glimpse of her large, sagging breasts. She hadn’t bothered to put on a bra, and her sallow skin was covered with scabs. Her once glossy hair was wiry and streaked with white. Pulled back in a rubber band, it reached all the way down her back like the tail of a mangy horse.

“You didn’t say anything about how skinny I am.”

Kathi reached into her pocket for another cigarette. She had bragged on the phone about all the weight she’d been losing, but I didn’t understand what this meant until I saw her a full year later. “I lost fifty pounds!” she said. Which meant that she was still a solid one hundred pounds overweight. Nevertheless, this weight loss was significant to her. And to me as well.

“What happened to your arms?” I asked. There were large, crusty yellow sores on the tops and backs of her wrists, as well as the undersides of her elbows.

“Arthritis.” She glared at me. “Not that you care …”

I followed her into the house, and she collapsed into a reclining chair facing an enormous television. Oliver the sober drug dealer was gone. He must have realized before the rest of us where Kathi was headed and given up on her. There was a new entourage of drug
dealers, skinny junkies younger than me, who came in and out of the house over the next couple of days. My mother tried to introduce me to her new “friends,” but I couldn’t be bothered to look them in the eye, let alone shake their hands.