TO MY SLEEPING EARS the sound registers as sharp, yet muffled. I listen for it to be repeated. I want to fall back to sleep, but I can’t. Fainter sounds now reach me from the bathroom. Jill is not in bed. The bathroom door is closed. I get out of bed, tap, then open the door.
Jill has thrown a bottle of body lotion. Yellow cream is splattered across the tiled walls and floor. Shards of glass are in the sink, on the closed lid of the toilet, in the tub, on the floor. The top of the bottle has rolled beneath the sink.
Jill sits on the edge of the tub. Her mouth is tight with rage, while her cheeks are flushed. She breathes sharply. All the curlers she wears to bed have been yanked and tossed in the tub. She holds a shard of glass in her hand.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“I am so fucking angry,” she whispers back.
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. I feel like taking a hammer and smashing every fucking pink tile in this bathroom.”
Something that happened at the zoo? I wonder. The elephants? That girl in pigtails who resembled Jesse? I look at the shard of glass.
“Well, you want me to help you clean this up? You know what the staff’s going to think if they see all this glass.”
“What—that I’m trying to off myself? If I really wanted to, which I don’t, I wouldn’t do it here.”
I pull on my sneakers and pick up Jill’s slippers. To clean up the glass, I get a T-shirt and one of the baggies Jill uses for curlers.
With the shirt wrapped around my hand, I crouch beside the sink and the toilet, sweeping the slivers. I brush glass along the edge of the wall and the base of the tub. It makes scratching noises against the tile.
“I think I just wanted an oil tanker full of vodka,” Jill says.
She means this is why she got angry and smashed the bottle of lotion.
I take the broken glass from Jill’s hand, drop it in the baggie, then scoop up the rest. I dampen toilet paper and scrub the floor for the last traces, then wipe the lotion off the walls.
“Actually, I really wanted to fuck this man I saw at the zoo.”
“Yeah, but after, you’d just have to find another one.” I dump the paper into the toilet and flush. “Aren’t you sick of this? Christ, I’m getting so sick of this. Why don’t we make a pact and just stop? Cold turkey. Right now.”
I have a long-standing prediction for myself: if I don’t quit the addiction I will end up abandoned by everyone, a homeless person. At one point I had even staked out my personal subway grate in New York City and imagined living over it in a refrigerator carton. “I mean, you want to be doing this when you’re seventy?” I ask.
“I’ve been doing it my whole life,” she says. “Like Sheila says about food: ‘There’s never enough.’ It’s true. It’s just that…” She turns on the faucets and splashes water on her face. Without looking at me, staring at the water rushing down the drain, she says, “So, you want to know what really happened when I left here?”
“I thought you got drunk and picked up some guy.”
“Except that…” She grips the faucets. “I tried to. But it didn’t work.”
“What didn’t?”
“This asshole dork of a man said he wouldn’t have sex with me. He turned me down cold. No man has ever turned me down. He said I was too drunk and didn’t know what I was doing. And he just left me sitting there at the bar all by myself. I was mortified.”
She turns off the faucets. Water drips from her fingers and chin. I nudge a towel into her hand.
“I think it’s possible for that to be seen as a kind of compliment,” I say. “I mean, I know that’s a stretch—”
“A compliment?” She flings the towel into the sink. “I took it as a full-scale total rejection of every cell in my entire body.”
“Maybe he respected you.”
“Respect?” Jill shivers. “That is a horrifying thought.”
“Don’t you ever want love, respect, a family—”
“I’ve already ‘done’ family.”
“Well, maybe you could limit yourself to love and respect, then—”
“Like who even knows where my stupid sister Jesse is?” she interrupts me. She picks up the towel and drapes it over her head. “Except, you know, there is this one really clear picture I have of her.” Her voice is muffled through the terry cloth. Jill tells me she remembers a white shirt, the back of a white shirt, shoulder blades, all moving away from her, until Jesse is gone.
Jill yanks off the towel, sweeping her bangs straight up from her forehead. “But what really gets me about that guy in the bar is that I didn’t even want to have sex with him. I was doing him a favor.”
She walks past me into the bedroom. I follow her and slide under the covers.
I am about to close my eyes when I understand the significance of Jill’s story about the man in the bar. “But you came back here,” I say, sitting up. “I mean, because of that man. Because he wouldn’t have sex with you, you came back. So you must want something different. So that’s good.”
“You are so damn blind,” she says. “I came back here to fuck Gabriel.”
And then, even though I don’t know whether to believe her or not, I know it is over. Even as I don’t know how to define the word it, I know it is over. It is over. With Jill. With Gabriel. All of them. I am too enraged to speak. There is nothing to say anyway. It is over. I can never allow myself to feel this way again. Simply, it is over.