13
The Lake Sumner motel breezeway
I took the arm Wesley offered as Haas ushered us out of the room. The sunlight stung my eyes after the cool dimness, and I was quiet as we returned to next door.
Wesley had a spring in his step. I nudged him genially in the side. “Cat got the cream?”
“He really likes you,” Wesley muttered, singsong. We stopped at number five, and he dug into his pocket for the key with a self-assured smile hitching up one corner of his mouth.
“When did he tell you that,” I muttered, “was it while you had him on yo—”
“Stop,” Wesley scoffed, laughing, wrestling an arm around my waist to hurry me into privacy.
In the silence of the door falling shut again, I didn’t let go of him. I turned to hold Wesley from the front, and I buried my face briefly in his collar. He smelled of shampoo, with no evident trace of Haas.
“I’m still thinking about it,” I muttered against his skin.
“What, sharing?”
I nodded. Wesley rubbed my back briskly. “Take your time, Jack. We’ve got all summer.”
Edie would have sound advice. I collected my clutch and made for the phone booth sticking up at the side of the empty main road. As I waited for the line to connect from the collect exchange—which was more expensive than I’d expected—I stared at Haas’s door and turned the sensation of his weighty gaze over and over in my head like a worry stone.
“Hello?” Edie said, sounding exasperated.
“Edie, it’s Margaret.”
“Oh good, I was wondering whether you’d fallen into a sinkhole somewhere.”
“Do you have time?”
“I’ve got five minutes.”
“That’s fine.” I crowded myself up into the corner of the booth and shut my eyes. “Heading out?”
Edie made a suffering sound. “Meeting over drinks with some visiting upstart from Illinois. How is it out there?”
I regarded my thumbnail, the chipped pearl-pink paint I’d reapplied the other afternoon in an effort to cheer myself up. It hadn’t worked. “I’m so bored I’m going to turn to dust.”
“Your excitement is absolutely infectious.”
“Wesley is having a wonderful time.”
“Is he now? What sort is it this time, an actor who thinks he’s Gregory Peck or one of the crew?”
“Crew, with a Gregory Peck garnish.”
Edie made an amused sound. “Good for him.”
A quick silence fell between us.
“I can tell when you’re miserable even without looking at you,” Edie said gently. “What’s got you, poss?”
I opened my mouth to tell her about my spiraling attachment to the powder, how it was starting to scare me that I could hardly go an hour without feeling peeled-back from my own body, but asked instead, “How do you tolerate being off the stage?”
“Oh, I don’t know if ‘tolerate’ is the right word.” The clatter of cosmetics rattled softly on Edie’s end. I imagined her daubing her cheeks with rouge, dragging a thick mascara wand along her lashes. “Do you really miss the work so much?”
“I do. I didn’t think it…well.” I scowled at the faint shape of my face warbling back at me from the glass across the booth. “I always knew it had a hold on me, but not like this.”
Edie paused for only the briefest moment. “Are you going to be okay out there?”
I swallowed. “I should go.”
“Margaret.”
“I’ll be fine, Edie,” I said evenly, and waited to find whether or not I even believed myself. I couldn’t tell.
“I can’t tell if you’re being honest, or if your penchant for lying is getting rusty without practice.”
“Give Ezra my regards.”
Edie sighed. “Let’s catch up when you’re back in town,” she said. “Alright? You’ll be fine. We’ll figure out what comes next.”
“We will,” I said, and gave her my best before hanging up.
I could get through this summer. I had chosen this, I had asserted myself to get here, and I would be just fine.
I would only need a touch of help.
In the pocket of my robe, digging for a cigarette, my fingers bumped against a foreign object. I lifted it out and found a small plastic sachet of fine white powder.
Haas—when he kissed me goodbye, that hand light on my waist. Stronger stuff. Crafty of him.
I held it up to the threads of sunlight pushing in through the phone booth and examined it: finer than sand, more like powdered sugar, light and so white it was nearly blue.
Later. I would save it for when I really needed it.
If. If I really needed it.
Very carefully, I scraped a half-measure of Dr. French’s powder from my compact. I recalled how I used to ration my sardines in the early days of the Christopher Street apartment. This wasn’t much different; sustenance could be many things.
I lingered in the phone booth until it hit again. When I returned to the room, Wesley was dozing as he watched the daytime news. I settled down against him, curled up on my side, and let him pull me close with a cloudy, pleased whuff against the back of my neck.
I stared at the shape of us in the vanity mirror across the room. I wondered if it was Wesley who held Haas, or Haas who held Wesley. I wondered how affection might stretch to hold three instead of two, and whether or not that was something I truly wanted.
Sliding my hand into the pocket of my robe, I ran my thumb along the secret gift from Haas and promised myself I would be patient with all of it: myself, my time, my medicine.
Hunched in front of the vanity, I was alone in the room. Wesley was at a morning rehearsal. We would get lunch together in town when he was back, but until then I was on my own.
The persistent headaches wouldn’t chase themselves away without more. The highs lasted for less and less time. I presented an unbothered mask, but on the inside I was a jittering wreck of jellied, sandblasted nerves.
I tried to take less, which made me feel sick. So I took more to feel normal, and more, and further more. I was staring over the edge of a chasm with no foreseeable end, and for what? To languish in my own stale sweat in nothing but my underwear, hoping I would feel better?
I’d given up on getting dressed and was instead staring at what was left of the powder, trying to estimate how much I had to supply my current pace. I tallied and re-divvied the last of it out to six more days—eight, if I stretched it.
And beyond that, nothing but my own misery.
Except: the small packet of Haas’s product.
I’d kept it sandwiched in the pages of my pocket calendar in my suitcase, like an ornery dog that didn’t play well with others and needed to be kenneled separately. And still it beckoned with a desperation I could feel in the root of my tongue. I wanted to hold off. I wanted to save it. It was a last resort.
But I’d been made weak by loneliness. If the only person I had to watch after me was myself, I knew how that would end.
I flipped to the sachet in the agenda book and stared at the drug. It looked harmless.
Easy.
Haas seemed to know exactly what I needed, without my even asking. It felt nice to be looked after.
I took half the sachet.
It hit with stunning immediacy. Soft as silk, far more distilled, the tingling euphoria of being vaulted farther from my own body than ever before rushed up through my head. My eyes fluttered, and I stumbled back into the vanity seat. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.
It had never felt this good before.
This was amazing. This was— Did everyone but me feel like this? If the drug was an interruption of my own bullshit patterns, at least by Dr. French’s definition, then was Haas’s product what a truly happy person felt like all of the time?
When I looked up again, blinking rapidly in the mirror, I was no longer alone. The Lady was perched on the foot of the bed, peering at me curiously.
I gasped, a flat hand flying to my chest in automatic shock. The Lady didn’t flinch. “Jesus. What are you doing here?”
“Observing.”
“I thought you— Why didn’t you stay in New York?”
I’d figured my brief sightings of her were a figment of direct aftermath, a sad manifestation of me missing the role too dearly and the sharp pain of recalling my breakdown. I had hoped with distance she would have faded.
The Lady cast a dry look at the vanity top, where the compact and the unused rest of Haas’s sachet sat like half-finished hors d’oeuvres. “Why have you allowed them to remove you from your own presence?”
Self-conscious, I tucked the powders away in my clutch. “You had your remedies, I have mine,” I muttered. I blinked owlishly. God, I could feel everything—my pulse had dimension, and my thoughts ran in sprinting byways like liquid mercury, and there was nothing on this earth that made sense anymore if I could feel this endless and not wake up dead at the end of it.
The Lady gave me a curious look. “That was practical witchcraft. An honorable art.”
I stared at her in the mirror. I drew myself up by a fraction, heightening my posture to match her own commanding stature. “It helps me.”
“By blunting your teeth?”
“I’d rather them blunted than use them to gnaw off my own leg,” I said.
The Lady regarded me coolly. “And who set the trap in which you’ve been snared?”
“Who?”
“An animal does not bite unless it has been made desperate. It is not in the nature of wolves to hunt men unprovoked.”
I stared at her, unblinking. “I’m not a man.”
“And yet here you sit, filled with bolder humors than they.”
A chill ran through me—not unwelcome for the prickling sweat that had come up along my skin. “You and I are not the same,” I whispered.
The Lady’s gaze flashed. “Aren’t we?”
We stared at each other for a long while through the mirror. Neither of us blinked—until my lashes stung with dry impatience, and I broke the moment. The edges of my vision blurred to a soft pink with the sun coming through the red curtains.
“You are more like me than you care to acknowledge,” the Lady said.
“Why, because we’ve both taken the blade to someone?” I spat. Dizziness pitched me softly. I gripped at the edge of the table and managed not to swoon. I shut my eyes. “Leave me be. I don’t want to think about you right now.”
The Lady said nothing else.
When I opened my eyes again, she was gone.
I stared at my reflection for a long time, finding new amusements in my face to which I hadn’t been privy before the revelation of Haas’s drug—the alluring little mole at the very edge of my top lip, the prettiness of my nostrils curving where they met my cheek, the shape of my mouth half-parted with desire.
An urgent pulse of need lit up between my legs. I pressed my thighs together and considered addressing it. I looked toward Haas’s room, and thought perhaps—well, he was still at the theater, but…nothing. No coherence. I couldn’t keep a thought together. All I could feel was my own swollen pulse.
I went outside, through the back door, the ground only dotted spare with anemic little sprigs of grass along the edge of the concrete basin. The sun had baked the earth to a hard and unyielding crust, but it was warm to the touch. I lowered myself down onto my back, my face tipped up to the sun, and felt held for the first time since before I knew what to call myself.
When a full sheen of sweat had bloomed across my body, clinging my clothing to my skin, I rose carefully to sit on the edge of the swimming pool with my feet dangling into the yawn of the diving end. I juggled my lighter from my pocket and smoked a cigarette before returning to the room.
I shed my dress and stepped into the welcome shock of a cold shower, shivering with a feeling like champagne bubbles moving along the back of my neck, the sides of my jaw, the backs of my eyes.
Damp and sated, I wrestled into a clean slip and switched the television on. I sprawled across the bed and stared at the flickering picture, some talk show with a spirited guest who had a lot to say about nothing, and felt myself return to tangibility in slow, small increments.
Wesley returned however long later—I looked at the clock on the bedside table when the lock rattled. It had only been forty-five minutes since I took the dose. It felt as though years had passed. I was entirely chemically different.
And yet here you sit, filled with bolder humors than they.
“Well, th— Oh, Jack, are you ill?”
Frowning, Wesley came over to the side of the bed.
“I’m fine. I took a nap,” I rasped. I stared at him and wondered if he’d ever seen the edge of the earth like I had. Honesty took me before I could stop it: “Let me come to rehearsal tomorrow.” I shut my eyes. “I can handle it.”
Wesley plucked blithely at a flake of stale mascara stuck to my cheek. “It really is stunning; they got the construction dead to rights. I think you’ll like it.” He searched my face for a moment as I levered up carefully into a seat, rubbing at my eyes and fussing uselessly with my hair. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“I didn’t want to bother you. You’re having a lot of fun, and—”
“You come first, Jack,” Wesley cut in gently. He smoothed his hand over my brow, as if checking for a fever. “You always come first.”
I said nothing, but I gave him a sleepy smile. I searched inside for anxiety, fear, anger, and found nothing. Only silence.
He peered at me, looking distantly amused. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” I kissed him on the cheek and buttoned up the last button he’d forgotten on his shirt. “I promise.”