Philippe was having a coffee with him. They were taking a break from the studio. Philippe played a hell of a bass, was a well-known producer and Evan’s neighbour. They had met on the sidewalk, each with an instrument in hand and became friends over an afternoon Scotch. The night before Annie had gone into full-blown alcohol-driven craziness and Evan was having trouble losing himself in the music. The session was not going well.

“What you doing with her, man?” Philippe asked. “My wife says the same thing: ‘Evan’s a cool guy, and Annie’s so uptight, like what’s her problem?’”

“She’s fucked up,” Evan said. “Just a fucking mess.”

“My first wife, man, crazy, too. Took a knife to me one night, to my throat, man. Always putting me down, always making scenes out of nothing. I told Laurence when we met, way before we had the kid, ‘no more craziness, no more drama. You go psycho on me, I split.’ She’s been cool. I can’t deal with that shit no more. Life’s too short, man. You need anything, let me know.”

“How about a little more bass on the track … a few more notes?”

“Sure man. For you extra notes at no extra charge.” He hugged him. Evan hugged him back. There was comfort in the music, seclusion in the studio, comfort in the company and solace of men. Males were getting the shit kicked out of them but they were there for him. He had always loved women, he thought, strapping on the guitar in the studio, waiting for Philippe to do the dials and switches and he knew not what, but love of women often left bruises and scars. But he could love guys — he watched Philippe give him a thumbs up on the other side of the glass — and he could survive that unscathed. Guys may come and go, too, but they usually didn’t take a piece of you with them.

He heard the track in his ear, first the bass run, then the drums, then the electric guitar intro, his cue. He started singing. Fuck Annie, one part of his brain said as the other part took his voice to some sad place that oddly made him feel all was right with the world. On the other side of the glass Philippe was smiling and nodding to the beat. Maybe, Evan thought, as he sang, he was a masochist, feeding off the pain. He blew a lyric. Philippe drew his finger across his throat. Cut. Maybe not.

Annie was making conciliatory noises about the book cover. Maybe he was right, maybe an artist would be better than a photograph, she was saying, but he tuned out. Tomorrow or the next day, when she felt enough time had passed and the burns had somewhat healed, she would go back to her original position: he didn’t know anything. This was just a peace offering, like the palliative jaunt for ice cream.

He sat at a light at Duluth, watched couples walking, talking, laughing, playing. Girls in summer shorts and light skirts, looking lovely and sexy. Was their joy predicated on making their lovers feel like shit? Were they playing a game the way Annie and he were. Pretending all was fine. He doubted it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

What choice did he have, really? All his money was wrapped up in their little home. Here was the woman late in life he had chosen to ride with. How could he turn back at this age? And where would he turn to? Some one-room dump? Well, that’s where he went when pushed to the wall. But one night was not a life of it. And hadn’t he always run?

Left every woman you’ve ever loved

They were never good enough

Poor you, what were you thinking of?

Live in a room you call home

Three flights up you’re all alone

And she’s fine, she’s living on her own

Now was the time to dig in. Every time they came to the precipice and he stepped back he told himself true love meant riding the waves of the bad times and not letting yourself drown.

“I’m wondering if a control freak can really love,” he told the therapist. She was sporting a new shorter, styled hairdo. Evan told her she was looking good, but she had no patience for his attempts at charm in the therapeutic relationship.

He was on the sofa fiddling with the box of tissues as if it held secrets he could access if only he could find the right door. He stared at her bookcase, avoiding her eyes. It was all so personal.

“Annie loves me but love by definition means giving up some control. I mean, loving is to let yourself go, to trust, to share, to partner. Annie loves me with all her heart. I know that. But I think or wonder if her need to control inevitably pushes her to diminish me, resent me, abuse me. I need to be controlled, in her eyes, for her to maintain control. If I balk, I’m then excoriated for being too sensitive, or sexist or full of unreasonable anger. I feel like a handball being smacked back and forth. ‘I love you so therefore I have to punish you.’ That make sense?”

“It is hard for her to give up the control that love entails,” she said. “Her childhood made it difficult. When you never know what is going to happen the next minute when you’re growing up, then you try to control whatever you can whenever you can. It’s a coping mechanism.”

“Then how the hell can I trust her?”

“Do you?”

Evan took a second to think about it.

“Yes … sometimes … no. Not really.”

Evan couldn’t find his squash racket. He was about to leave and it wasn’t hanging on the front closet handle as it usually was. He was running late for his court time.

“Annie, where’s my squash racket?” he yelled upstairs where she was ensconced in front of her screen. They began the hunt, and if she joined in it meant she had disappeared it in a tidying frenzy but couldn’t remember where. Every closet opened, every corner, every shelf, under every bed, searched.

The real complaint, voiced often, was that he existed. “You take up a lot of room,” she said repeatedly, usually if he was reading or working on the new sofa by the living room window. Not being upright, at a desk, when the sun was shining, was one of the deadly sins — sloth — the only prohibition she abided.

Evan knew she resented the spores he left throughout her showcase of a house. Books, magazines, shoes, mail, gloves, everything had to be put in a place, even if that place was immediately forgotten. Only newspapers, her morning pablum, were abided. The idea was for beauty to reign, reality to be hidden.

Annie, embarrassed at having disappeared his racket, became frantic. As she was peeking under beds, looking in drawers — why the hell would she put a racket in a drawer? — he found it stashed in the one inch slot between a piece of furniture and the wall. She had dropped it there during a manic cleanup, so it wouldn’t sully the closet or the entrance and promptly forgot where she had put it. After all, it wasn’t hers and therefore immaterial. Each morning he found her jogging bra and shorts soaking in the downstairs sink until he rinsed them out so he could use the sink. That was permissible. Hanging his racket on a hook was not. Like the toothbrush wire. The tools of life had to be out of sight. If they were his.

“Not her fault,” he said, as he got into the car, late for his court time. “Just another one of her idiosyncrasies. She doesn’t do it on purpose.”

A few weeks before it had been: “Where are all my birthday cards?” They had been displayed on the side table in the kitchen.

“I threw them out,” she said, emptying the dishwasher.

“Why?”

“You had them long enough,” she said. “You want to keep them till you die?”

“It’s not for you to decide,” he said.

“Sorry, they were just cluttering up the table and … you’ll get more next year.”

She would sometimes apologize, but the frequent apologies weren’t soothing or a harbinger of change or realization. On a whim, shoes went from downstairs to upstairs, clothes moved from one closet to another. Evan was always looking for things. Then he stopped looking and found it easier to just ask her where she had put them, save him the trouble of tearing the house apart.

“I don’t want you to say you’re sorry,” he said. “It’s not about apologies. It’s about stopping the weirdness.”

But there were also times where no apologies were forthcoming. Instead there would be more abuse.

“You can’t stand listening to a woman,” she railed. “Your precious male ego won’t stand for it. You’re so used to women who blindly adore you.” Or there was also: “You’re too sensitive. You can’t stand criticism.”

After dinner and her habitual dose of wine, she said: “I think you should pay me extra for the antiques I have in the house.”

“What?”

“Most of the furniture is mine, why shouldn’t you pay extra?” she said. “All the linen are mine. You didn’t bring any sheets.”

“I gave Danny whatever she wanted when I left her,” Evan said.

Her eyes were glowing and rage was bubbling up. The volcano would soon erupt.

“You need to get another job. You’re not making enough money.”

He went upstairs to the spare room and closed the door. When he heard her come up and go into the washroom, he went downstairs. He opened the freezer and found a bottle of vodka that someone had given him for a birthday present. He opened it and drank it icy and straight. He was off to the races, joining that ancient fraternity that embraced alcohol as the panacea for all of life’s wounds, real or perceived. Alcohol became Evan’s mother’s breast.

A few months later, as autumn moved in, he discovered scotch and the pleasures of drinking alone. It reassured him, told him he was a good person with good skills, good friends and good life. No, he wasn’t rich, but he had money in the bank, a new car, unlimited credit.

There was nothing wrong with him, Evan told the cat. It was Annie. Yes, the booze did what Annie couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Make him feel good about himself. Fuck her.

“I have a recording contract,” he told himself. “I’m performing. My plays have been produced. I’m writing newspaper stories on anything I want. I’m working on a big travel book, though it sometimes feels I’m in Dante’s Inferno. I’m always working on a new play or two. I have friends I love. They love me. Exactly what is wrong? What the fuck is wrong? And why am I sitting alone at 3 a.m. justifying my life to the cat?”

A comic mused in the Times why would-be funny men were willing to stand behind a microphone and try to make people laugh. Comedians, the writer said, are “all messed up people. You have to have something missing to want to go up and be judged in front of people, seek their approval. We are all wounded losers.”

“Are all of us with guitars and songs to sing and stories to write just another version of the comic?” Evan wondered.

Was that what the writing, the singing, the plays, the teaching were about? A wounded loser seeking approval? Is that what he sought from Annie? Approval? The way he had sought it from his mother, who was a little too much like Annie — distant, hysterical, judgmental, prone to violent mood swings and abuse.

Maybe he was spending too much time in therapy, he mused. Maybe he was thinking too damn much. If it was about being a wounded loser, then it was another defect they shared, Annie and he, though they seemed to forage for the applause with markedly different levels of ferocity.

“I’m a loser, I’m taking the abuse because I deserve it, is that it? Is this where my parents’ and brother’s abuse has left me? Drinking scotch by myself in the middle of the night with a cat while a chronic abuser and control freak is snoring in my bed upstairs, a chronic abuser and control freak that I still love. Love maybe because she is, in fact, not well, and therefore needy like the women that came before her. And I need to be needed, be indispensable, need to know I’m of use. Maybe I’ve not had enough therapy.”

The conversation annoyed Fritz. He jumped off his belly and skulked up the stairs to sleep in peace.

“I want to be needed and to assuage my own needs I put up with being kicked around. Maybe I need more therapy. Or maybe I need another finger or two to take the edge off.”

When the bottle’s full

You’ve always been so kind

Leave the lights on when you leave

Puts steel in my spine

When the bottle’s full

With a glass in my hand

I’m a happy single man

So long, so long,

I don’t love you anymore

One half nourished him, one half slowly eviscerated him. One half he loved, one he hated. Was this what Mao meant when he wrote On Contradiction?

She came into the bathroom without knocking, came into his office when he was working, ranted at him when he was on the phone. He was working, in his office, trying to book an interview for a story and there she was, standing next to him, lecturing him.

“Mais est ce que tu est disponible mardi, M. Lemieux?”

“You have to say vous, you can’t call him tu, he’s an older man, too.” She was speaking in a loud whisper into his other ear.

“I’m on the phone.” Evan tried covering the receiver but it was a cell phone, there was nothing to cover. “Go away.”

“You can’t tu him, it’s an insult.”

“Annie, go away. Qu’est ce que tu as dit, M. Lemieux? Excuse moi, ma femme parle.” Evan wrapped the phone in his hand … “Annie get the hell out of here.”

“You need to take French lessons, you can’t talk that way to him.”

“Get out of here,” Evan said, pushing her out of the office. “Excuse moi, M. Lemieux. “Mardi à dix heures?”

“You’re insulting him,” she kept on as he tried to understand the guy and push her out the door. It would’ve been funny had he not had to call the guy back and find out what he said while Annie was railing at him. The literature said children of alcoholics had difficulties with boundaries. Did that mean walking into the washroom when he was in it storming his office when he was working? It would seem.

On the sofa, an hour before summer dawn, was the only place to escape one obsession or another. It was that or the motel room. Or the country. But under their roof, there was no place to go, no place to hide, except when she slept. When he tried to sleep without benefit of alcohol or pills, the darkness intruded. Was it reality or just his distorted view of it? Everyone else seemed to love her. She loved him. Maybe it was his fault.

She turned to him and, as he tried to sleep on his side, imagining driving through the Keys to play at some clam shack, pressed her body against his, wrapped her arms around him, whispered in his ear.

“You feel like you’re drifting away,” she said. “You’re distant.”

“Just preoccupied,” he said, lying.

“Promise you’ll never let me go.”

“I’ll never let you go.” He was holding on for dear life.

It was all about work, day and night, in and out of bed, at the dinner table, in the car. Work, seven days a week. And Evan became swallowed by it, too. It was a new strategy. He talked of the songs, the shows, the plays, the stories, the book proposals, trying to mollify her. Yes, yes, I’m working too, all the time. We will be free. Work will make us happy and drive your anxiety away, like the hum of the fan in the bedroom that keeps your mind from going places you don’t want it to. The fan at night; the radio during the day; the TV in between. Silence was not only golden but irretrievable.

He didn’t want to accept it but the woman he fell in love with was not there anymore. Maybe she never was. She had been a carefully constructed illusion. And there was nothing he could do about it.