I sit on the piano bench. There used to be a chair, a good one, mahogany with green leather upholstery (Mr. and Mrs. Richter brought it over from Germany), but Abel gave it to the manicurist across the hall after her only chair collapsed under the weight of a hefty client. The gold velvet loveseat that he picked up a few weeks later at a thrift shop lasted only a day before the superintendent made some passing comment about how nice it would look in the lobby. So that’s where it got moved to.
Why Abel stays on in this small, rundown basement apartment is a mystery to the Richters, especially as they’re always offering to help pay the rent on a bigger apartment in a better part of town. They can’t understand that he stays on precisely because it is small and rundown. But it’s not a hovel—hardly that with all the cleaning he does—and it’s not empty, either. His books are here, three floor-to-ceiling cases of them. Also his piano, his desk, his old four-poster bed and the tea trolley and Oriental carpet that used to be in his parents’ dining room. I myself like the effect of all this. The suggestion of genteel poverty, of a scholarly indifference to comfort.
It’s Saturday, late morning, and I’ve dropped by on my way to lunch with a friend. Abel sits across from me, on the bed, leaning one shoulder against the wall whose network of cracks he likes to speculate describes the river system on a distant planet. Nudging each other for space on his bony lap are his two stray cats: three-legged Peg and drooling Flo. The bed is made, the bottles hidden somewhere. I notice that since I was here last the tea trolley, where he keeps his pills and vitamins, plus the medical paraphernalia his father bought for him (thermometer, stethoscope, blood-pressure gauge), has had its shelves lined with white paper. Normally, at this time of day, he’d be in jeans and a clean shirt, but I got him out of the shower, so he’s wearing his bathrobe. His nails have been cut, probably by the manicurist, what’s her name, something helpless-sounding: Nell or Cindy. Absurdly, I am jealous of her. If Abel was still in any condition to have a type, a fading beauty with a flagging nail-cutting business would be it.
I cope with the jealousy by never bringing up her name. The sense I have in this apartment of sexy angels fluttering around the windows, I never talk about, either, I couldn’t say why. It’s certainly not being afraid he’d think I was crazy. Nobody is crazy in his books, and he’d be only too happy to talk about something other than the dried blood in the pleats of his lips, the flaking skin on his neck. He’s dehydrated again, he must be. I won’t ask, but when he brings a shuddering hand to his neck, I can’t resist alluding to it, saying,“Whoever thought an alcoholic could end up dying of thirst?”
The hand moves to his chest. Is the skin there coming away as well? I haven’t seen him naked in over six months, he won’t let me. We still lie down together, and he touches me all over, but subtle flinches give me to understand I am to confine myself to his head. Everything up there, above the neck, still works perfectly. His teeth are white and straight, and despite a yellowish tinge to the whites of his eyes he can still see an ant across the room. All this vigour upsets me when I think of the waste. If he lets himself die, it all dies, his whole body.
He keeps glancing toward the bathroom. He probably has a bottle stashed in there and can’t wait to get to it. Since signing himself out of the Marwood Clinic, he won’t drink in front of me or his parents. Of course, we aren’t fooled, or, at least, I’m not. His mother, finding him at home and sociable, will say that he’s “off the wagon,” by which she means “on.” She tells him what she wants to hear. ‘You’re getting better!” she announces, and takes his silence for affirmation. (I do this, too, although not where his drinking is concerned. It’s his feelings, specifically his feelings for me, that I decree.)
“So, do you need money?” I say, returning to the subject of why he had his phone disconnected, and why I raced over. When the operator said his number was no longer in service, I panicked.
“It isn’t the money. The ringing …”
“What about the ringing?”
“It’s loud.”
I decide not to pursue that.
“I’m fine,” he says. He takes a clean, folded handkerchief from his bathrobe pocket and dabs at the puddle of drool Flo has deposited on his leg. “Everything’s fine.”
“If you say so.”
“Louise.”
“I think you should go now.”
Two days later. I’ve brought groceries: Cream of Wheat, applesauce, Gerber baby food, ginger ale. As recommended by the doctor. He puts everything in the refrigerator rather than in the cupboard, which tells me that last night Mr. and Mrs. Richter came by with more or less the same things and he doesn’t want me to see this and feel I wasted my time. Except I have wasted it, and so have they. We all know that most of what we give him ends up in the garbage.
He offers me a glass of the ginger ale. “That’s for you,” I say, exasperated. I sit, as before, on the piano bench, him across from me on the edge of the bed, the cats on his lap. He isn’t agitated, he must have been drinking before I arrived. He is considering my question: does he ever pray? Through the ceiling we can hear the upstairs tenant screaming,“God almighty! Lord Jesus!” The first time I heard her carrying on like this I thought she was having sex. I say,“I don’t believe in God but sometimes I catch myself begging Him, ‘Please God, please God,’ and I only went to church the one time.”
Abel taps out a beat on the bedpost and then stops and looks at his hand as if startled by its dexterity. He has told me he still occasionally “fools around” on the piano, but whenever I’m here the lid is down and there are books and an ashtray on top. “Yeah,” he says. “Every once in a while I pray.”
“To God?”
“No. No, not God.”
“To who, then?”
“To the ether, I guess.”
“Give me faith.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. Give me faith.”
“In what?”
“Faith in whatever is happening.”
“Why don’t you ask for strength?” In one form or another we’ve been having this argument for years. Me on the side of fighting, him on the side of surrendering.
“God would know you need strength,” he says,“if His plan is for you to survive. If that’s not His plan, it’s faith you need. You need it anyway.”
“Except you don’t believe in God.”
“No, I don’t.”
From upstairs comes a scream.
Abel looks at the ceiling. “Okay,” he says,“I do.” He smiles.
I won’t smile back. “So what do you believe in, then? Other than giving up.”
“Giving in.”
“To weakness,” I say miserably. I don’t even have the satisfaction of offending him. You can’t offend him with personal insults, other than in the roundabout way of signalling you’re upset. “Just giving in to what comes easiest.”
“Giving in to what is.”
“Oh, come on. What is, is what you decide it should be.”
“Did you decide to be born? To be a girl?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“But those are the facts of your life. They are what is. Did you decide you’d have a mother who’d walk out on you? Did you decide you and I would live down the street from each other? Did you—?” He falters.
Did I decide I would get pregnant? Was that the next question?
Maybe not, but a list of the big events in my life is bound to invoke the ones we try not to talk about. As he must have just realized. “I decided I would punish you,” I say. “I decided to act as badly as I felt.”
He frowns. I can’t offend him but I can hurt him.
He leans toward the desk, careful not to disturb the cats, opens the drawer and pulls out the cigar box in which he keeps his tobacco pouch and a few emergency joints. On the bed, using the surface of the box, he starts to roll a cigarette. He has the bowed back of an old man. The trembling of his hands, because it seems sure to defeat him, makes a performance of the activity.
“Did you decide to be an alcoholic?” I ask.
He smiles. “Was I born an alcoholic, did I achieve alcoholism or was alcoholism thrust upon me?”
“Why do you joke about it?”
“I don’t know if I made any conscious decision. I don’t think I did.”
“You’ve decided to kill yourself, though.”
“No.”
“All right, you’ve decided to die.” When he offers no response, I say,“You’ve decided not to live. By not saving yourself, you’ve decided not to live.”
He gets the cigarette lit. “I haven’t decided anything,” he says, looking at the ceiling. The woman is moaning now, or singing.
“There’s one thing you have decided,” I say. “Which is to let the people who love you suffer.”
He looks down and strokes Flo’s head.
“It’s true,” I say.
“I don’t want that.”
“Are you happy?”
“It isn’t a question of happiness or unhappiness.”
“Then what is it a question of?”
He shrugs.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. Giving in. We’re back to that. You know what I think? I think it’s a question of your wanting to drink no matter what. You don’t want to stop, so you’re not going to. It doesn’t make any difference what I say, what your parents say, what the doctors say. You don’t care. You can’t care. You’re an addict.”
“Maybe.” He sighs. “Maybe that’s it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
No, we aren’t. If he can agree with me so readily, then I don’t agree with myself. This could just be him surrendering on another front: giving up trying to explain. Giving up, at least temporarily, his own complicated ideas of himself.