DAY SEVEN

THURSDAY, FROM TEN A.M. TO ONE P.M., is visiting day. At a quarter to ten I go to the lounge to wait for Andrew. I sit on a chair by the window and glance outside into the drizzly day, searching for a gray Ford Escort station wagon, trying to will it into the parking lot. I have washed my hair and put on my best T-shirt to appear as normal as possible. I want him to see, if not full success in my recovery, at least potential. I want to promise Andrew, I will get better, I will get better, I will get better. I want to explain to him what I learned last night about myself from writing in my Workbook, and from Ted: that maybe all I ever wanted was a family.

In the lounge, serious parents talk with daughters. Serious husbands talk with wives. Voices are hushed as if someone has died. Sheila sits alone in the corner knitting a mustard-colored sweater. Linda’s husband, short and stocky with close-clipped brown hair, sits on the edge of his chair ready to bolt. He wears a three-piece suit that looks particularly formal next to Linda’s flowing clothes. Her brown hair, streaked with gold, is neatly braided and coiled around her head. She is crying. Her husband makes no move to touch or reassure her. He stares across the room, his lips pressed together. She touches his knee. He pulls his leg back as if singed.

Andrew, I don’t want to scare you.

Except I imagine a little-boy Andy, a boy who should be scared by the adults around him. Andrew, that little boy, grew up with a silent and distant father, frequently absent from home. Andrew didn’t know why.

Andrew’s father was employed in manufacturing. Once, when he was transferred to another state, he left his family behind for several months, claiming he needed to find them a new house by himself. During this time without her husband, Andrew’s mother told Andrew, little-boy Andy, still in elementary school, that he was now the man of the house.

At first, perhaps because he felt lost without his father, Andrew was afraid to go to school. Only when he saw one of his friends walking home with a toy drum made from a Quaker Oatmeal carton did he return to school. He wanted a toy drum, too.

Late one night he discovered his mother crying over a heartbreak song she played over and over on the record player. He tried to comfort her. But Andrew never understood—even though he was now the man of the house—why he couldn’t make her happy.

 

I can’t make Andrew happy, either. I am like his straying father. I am also like his mother, crying over heartbreak men.

 

At eleven-thirty I stand and stare out the window. Maybe Andrew forgot which floor I’m on and is searching the hospital. I scan the rows of cars in the parking lot. I watch the entrance to the hospital. Every time I catch a speck of gray, my heart lurches. But no gray Ford Escort turns into the lot.

No silver pickups, either.

Outside, red, yellow, white umbrellas twirl in windy rain. I press my palms and forehead to the windowpane. I want someone to look up to the sixth floor and see me. I want Andrew to see me.

He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t want to see me here in the hospital.

 

My watch says noon. Today is Thursday. Every Thursday at noon…

Rick. The Rainbow Motel. That bed, those sheets, Rick smoking a cigarette, waiting for me to walk through the door. I think about calling room #213…Rick, wait. Is there time for me to run to the end of the corridor, take the elevator to the lobby, rush to my car, drive to the interstate?

But today, at noon, the room will be vacant.

 

At twelve-thirty the lounge begins to empty. Parents and husbands retrieve raincoats and umbrellas. Without the crowd of people, the air-conditioning seems colder. I return to my room for a sweatshirt. I sit on my bed, forgetting to put it on.

I’m lying down when I hear a faint rap. I open my eyes and sit up. Ted. It’s after three. The rain has stopped. Sunlight, pouring through the window, splashes the floor. A pair of sunglasses is hooked onto the neck of his faded T-shirt. Sweat dampens the material. The shirt isn’t tucked into his jeans, ripped at the left knee. These are not the kind of clothes he wears to work, but since sometimes he works on weekends, this is his day off.

“I heard Andrew didn’t show up,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He pushes the door wider, standing just inside the room. “I’ve got a few minutes. You want to talk?” He removes a bandanna from his pocket and wipes his forehead.

I don’t want to see him like this: sweaty. I don’t want to see the faint shadow of his kneecap behind the rip. I don’t want to see the copper hair on his forearms. I barely want to see him at all. I don’t want him to be male. I don’t really want him to be human. I don’t want to care for him too much.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I say. “Why don’t you just go?”

No, don’t go.

He watches me for a moment. “Like what?”

“Well, dressed like that,” I say.

I’m scared to see you dressed like that. I’m scared to think of you having a body. I don’t want you to be a man who sweats.

“It’s my day off,” he says. “I was at the gym playing volleyball.” I turn my back to him and go to the window. Puddles in the parking lot steam in the heat of asphalt and sun. “What scares you?” he asks.

I shrug, still not looking at him. I watch a man, another man, a doctor in a white jacket with a stethoscope around his neck, walk past a row of cars and open the door to his Jeep. I wonder where he’s going. I think about going with him….

“Nothing does,” I say.

“Sounds like you’re angry. Why not get angry at your addict rather than me?”

I whirl around. “I’m angry because you look like…”

“What?”

“I don’t know—a man.”

“Try to see me. Not an object. I’m a man who won’t hurt you or abandon you. I’d be angry, too, and frightened, not to be able to talk to someone who cares about you—and not your addict.”

“I only know how to talk to men about sex.”

“Your addict only knows how to talk about sex.” He nods toward my Workbook on the nightstand, suggesting I do the exercise where I’m to write a description of my addict. “I think that’ll help you see its power,” he adds. “And will help you diminish it.”

He turns to go. Quickly, I call him back.

He pauses, nodding.

Again, I think about what I learned from writing last night: that all I really wanted was to live—not just with Forrest, but with Shirley and Scottie, with a family. And Rick—that day at his house—I wanted to care for his sick son. I never figured out how to do something that simple. That hard.

“I think maybe my whole life has been a mistake,” I whisper.

He takes a deep breath. “You were hurt. Be patient with yourself. You will get better.”

“But…I really believe a man will never love me, or even like me, unless I have sex with him.”

“I like you.”

“You don’t count!”

Ted smiles. “Thanks a lot.”

After he leaves, I look out the window again. A moment later Ted crosses the lot.

Volleyball.

Ted plays volleyball on Thursdays. I obsess about men on Thursdays. I meet men in motels on Thursdays.

Ted, when he stood in the doorway, looked too alive, full of life. To play volleyball on Thursday is to choose life.

I’m jealous, I think.

But, okay, I can do this. I can do ordinary things, too.

I pick up the phone. Maybe Andrew forgot about visiting day. Maybe he got absorbed grading papers. I need to tell him who I am now—well, the woman I’m becoming. The phone begins to ring. No answer. We don’t have an answering machine. I let it continue ringing. I wish my cat, Quizzle, could answer. I want to hear her purr. I want to throw ping-pong balls across the floor and let her chase them, her favorite game. I imagine my house. The velvet couch. All Andrew’s books. The hat rack with his Atlanta Braves baseball cap.

Still no answer. No one home.

I am not an ordinary woman.

He doesn’t want to see this unordinary woman here in the hospital.

He doesn’t see me at home, either. Yes, I told him the reason I was coming here to the hospital was to attend to an eating disorder. Yet…just a month or so ago he walked into my bedroom and saw me reading a book on sex addiction, a book Ted had loaned me.

Andrew never asked about it.

I’ve also mentioned to him, seemingly casually, that I might have a few sexual issues to work out.

He never asked questions about this, either.

Just like he never asks about my addict clothes. Or where I disappear to on Thursdays. Why dinner (such as it is) is always late Thursday evenings.

He doesn’t see what he sees…or know what he knows.

Andrew: a conveniently remote and distant husband. I deliberately selected him, my addict deliberately chose him, to ensure it has an excuse for an affair, an excuse to act out. My husband doesn’t see me. Therefore, I need you and you and you to make me feel better.

I always thought I didn’t want him to see me, didn’t want him to know. Except I drop so many hints, leave so many clues. Clothes. Flirting with men at parties. Letters from men appear in our post office box—and he usually picks up the mail. A trail of clues leading straight to this addiction.

Maybe I want him to discover me. Find me. I can confess. Be forgiven. Maybe I want this…as much as it terrifies me.

Suddenly I realize I can’t remember the color of Andrew’s eyes. Okay, not brown. Greenish? Kind of gray-green?

So—maybe I don’t see or know him, either.

Maybe Andrew didn’t show up today because he thinks I don’t see him.

I don’t see him.

Maybe he’s angry I don’t pay enough attention to him.

I don’t pay enough attention to him.

So many issues: the addiction, my family, men, me. How can I try to save my marriage when I can barely save myself?

WORKBOOK

I open the Workbook to the section Ted told me about, where I’m to write a description of my addict.

 

I write: Liquid hot steel night wild dark ice steaming, voice dying, like you could melt glass bone hard, devour a blue universe, prisoner for eternity.

This image inhabits my mind. Sometimes it remains covert and seething. Other times it is the impetus, the mental stimulus that ultimately results in overt bad behavior.

This image has always been with me. Even as a child, bored with the ordinary, bored with school, bored with childhood games, bored with friends who aren’t truly boring, I mentally evaporate from my surroundings. I appear before you, and I am skilled at seeming to be present, but I am not present. As teachers discuss history, as girls discuss boys, I am in a liquid hot steel night wild dark…where effaced men breathe shadows, where air is harder than grit, and where I crave these men, romanticize them. Believe I love them.

It is danger hot enough to melt bone, rageful and wild enough to devour a peaceful blue universe. It imprisons me for eternity.

 

What does it take for mayhem of the mind to emerge into behavior? What does it take to reach territories so distant there is no turning back? What is the flash point, the confluence of forces that slam together at that irretrievable moment? A crescent moon on the wane, doldrums flattening over the equator, the Gulf Stream rising, glaciers cracking…just as we think about squeezing a trigger, just as we lust for a glint of a knife on the first frigid night of the year.

My own flash point is not just a dangerous man discovering my body. When my flash point is seconds from igniting, I will also find you, the predator with radar capable of discovering the one “me” in order for your own liquid hot steel night to become reality. The selection is not random. With one scent you know who I am. With one scent of you, my most trusted senses convince me to go with you.

And I must go.

For I have not learned to read or translate environments accurately. Harsh whispers of wind seep under doors, and I believe the breeze is gentle. No sane thought can find me. My heart is sealed from my mind. Stars are snuffed out across my liquid hot steel sky…while my breath is a drugged pulse, dying. I am grafted to night, to your night, dulled by sounds until all I can hear is a dangerous man’s name.

Yet I am not a victim.

I am a predator.

I am not your victim because you are not a predator any more than a bottle of scotch stalks an alcoholic.

There are no victims.

We are men without mothers and girls with serial fathers. Repeat offenders.

No one here gets out alive.

 

In my liquid hot steel nights I must must must endlessly duplicate the familiarity of my dangerous childhood as closely as possible…re-create a past that scratches like the blade of a razor, a slit that is thin, but deep.

 

“His orgasm is more important than your life.”

A therapist I once saw on television explained Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer and cannibal from Milwaukee, in this manner. He is the ultimate mayhem of liquid hot steel nights of addictive rage.

What is his flash point?

In a specific bar he meets a specific kind of man on a specific kind of night who reminds him of his soul’s devastation.

He must lure this man home: to kill him; to eat him. Because the only way for Dahmer to feel loved or to live a nourishing life is for him to eat his companion.

Cannibalism, therefore, is the ultimate eating disorder. Since, in a food addiction, food is a substitute for spirituality, then Jeffrey Dahmer, who once worked in a chocolate factory, is the most destitute, the hungriest, the most spiritually starved of all.

He devours love. He devours sex. He wants to control and dominate and devour you. He boils flesh from bone. He chews slowly, swallowing body parts, in order to absorb them into his own being. He stores heads in his freezer, mementos from dates, killing his lovers so they won’t leave him, eating his lovers to prevent abandonment. His most cherished souvenirs are Polaroids of dismembered bodies. He is a lover craving not Chanel No. 5 but the scent of blood. He collects body parts the way I collect maroon scarves, books by rageful writers…the way Rick will always treasure that photo of me.

Why the repetition? The serial? Surely the rehearsed, imagined fantasy is more enticing, more intriguing than the actual act. Nevertheless, from that fantasy, actual crimes and seductions are implemented as if following a script. Except the event is never as perfect as the controlled version in our heads. We must try the kill, the seduction, the binge, again and again, this time hoping to get it perfect. Just one more time and the conquest, the fuck, the murder, the kiss, the rape, will be the one perfect event in a life.

Except it isn’t.

Something’s not quite right.

Since all addicts are serial, the ritual must begin again. The fuck, the murder, the bottle of scotch, the Oreo cookie, do not provide everlasting love or solace, so we must try it, hope for it, with the next seductive fuck, murder, drink, piece of cake. Just one more time. Again and again.

Even though next time might push us over the edge. Even though next time we might fall into a vat of liquid hot steel and never recover.

 

If an ultimate fix is to control/destroy/seduce the world, then murderers, rapists, terrorists are the extreme addicts.

But you—you who do not murder or maim, what do you do when it’s too painful to hear what you don’t want to know? What is your drug of choice in this landscape zoned for addiction? Is your addictive rage turned outward on others? Do you turn it inward on yourself, mayhem minus behavior? There is a continuum of bad behavior, but the impulse is the same.

I murder my lover therefore I am.

I shop therefore I am.

I eat therefore I am.

I don’t eat therefore I am not.

I am bulimic therefore I both am and am not.

I am powerful, wealthy, famous, therefore I am.

I am addicted to the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, therefore I am…or am not, fantasizing celebrities’ lives in order to ignore my own.

I fuck therefore I am.

 

SEX FOOD MONEY MAYHEM

IS (ARE)

HERE

EVERY

DAY!

 

We see the world with eyes closed and mouths open. Feed me. Feed my hungry heart until I feel better. Feed me until I am hungover. Then feed me again. Until I am drunk or unconscious. You can feed me anything as long as you call it love. Or happiness. Or success. Even though our kind of love lasts only as long as it takes for the word sex to be spoken. Even though our kind of happiness insists reality be stricken from the record.

We hear the message of sex in subliminal whispers as well as bombarded across airwaves. We smell it, hear it, touch it, taste it: in movies and music, in advertisements selling cars, cigarettes, clothes, alcohol, makeup, soap.

We sexualize nature, are taught to believe setting suns and moonlit beaches cannot be noticed unless we are lovers.

There is no escape from sex. It is a machine razing our minds, our vocabularies, our bodies.

Addiction lays our souls bare for an invasion of the body snatchers. All our nights are nights of the living dead.

We crave the artificial, the spangly glitz of addiction.

Swallow a potion: SEX. Smooth a balm on your skin: SUCCESS. Instant. Luscious. Inhale Elixir of Happiness. All I need to be gratified is a charm, a balm, an unguent, a pill, a wink, a glance, a smile. Desire. Love medicine. “Love Potion Number Nine.”