After a restless night spent alone on the sofa, wondering whether Lucille and I will ultimately conquer her demons – which have become my own – she finally emerges from the bedroom. Her eyes speak volumes: rage, remorse, and the remnants of countless tears. We sit in silence, nursing our coffee, each staring into the cup, as if the answer to our dilemma lies somewhere in its murky depths. After the passage of several hours’ rumination, compressed by my own warped perception into mere moments, the topic of engagement is finally broached. The scene somehow reminds me of the aftermath of a dust-devil that has whipped through the Hill Country, leaving behind no meaning save its own random disorder. The agony of last night’s storm has passed, and the remaining mess feels empty, wounds open and raw.
“Safe and legal,” is all I have to say.
She heads for the door, silently enraged that I can reduce the death of our love to three words of sarcasm. The door is opened. “Didn’t think you’d ever give up on me, baby,” she says.
“Do you even know you have a problem?”
She merely shakes her head, thoroughly crushed. I have failed her in the most fundamental way. The front door closes, and Lucille is once again gone.
When all of my curses have been shouted, all the dishes thrown like Frisbees across the dining room, lamps pushed over, everything is just as it was before. I am left in an empty and silent house among all my scattered things. The last few months might as well have been a dream. All around me lies the physical evidence of my life’s turbulence.
The days pass just as they had before Lucille came back last May, a lifeless routine of work and sleep. When sad, I drink; when brokenhearted, I drink a lot. I undertake the latter course with gusto, leaving the world around me to fend for itself. Then one night, a knock on the door pierces the vacuum. Standing in the doorway is Lucille’s mother. The first words out of her unsmiling mouth are, “You and Lucille have too much between you. You can’t just throw it all away.”
She doesn’t come inside, won’t say another word. She merely turns on her heel and struts back to where her Impala is parked on the street.
Maybe she has a point. The life I began with her daughter has indeed taken on a momentum of its own. So what if the girl I love is a junkie? I am a lush. I’m still buying a house – our house – whether I want to or not. Earnest money has been put down, and earnest money will be paid.
While considering all of this the following evening in my quiet antique house, there’s another knock at the door. It’s Lucille’s mother again, this time with Lucille.
“You two need to talk this out,” her mother says.
Lucille stands at her side, holding on to her mother’s arm as if she would crumble and fall without her support, eyes downcast. Then, as the night before, her mother abruptly leaves, effectively stranding her daughter at my house. Moths gather about the porch light in her absence. Eventually Lucille’s gaze meets mine, and she comes into my arms. This would doubtless make a heartwarming scene in an old movie, but real life is rarely so tidy.
Before I can buy the house, I have to withdraw a down payment of $100,000 from my account in Los Angeles. The simplest way to go about this is to physically go there and get it, as banks prefer to make large transactions the old fashioned way, in person. A few weeks later, just as I’m putting a few things together for my trip – laying out some clothes, getting my financial papers together – I receive a call from Lucille’s mother. She’s stricken with panic. Lucille, she sputters in her raspy voice, has been arrested.
“Arrested for what?”
“Per, per, per – “
“Prescriptions? Lucille’s been arrested for writing prescriptions?”
She grunts an affirmative, then “Kro…Kro…Kro…”
“She was arrested at a Kroger? Where is she now?”
Then she sighs, “Sterling, they took her to jail!”
So the report of Lucille’s activities has made its inevitable rounds, and Lucille has done what she was inevitably going to do. The result was preordained.
Nevertheless, my flight leaves in an hour. If I’m not on that plane, we won’t be buying the house, and the five-thousand dollars earnest money will be lost. I am coolly trying to stay focused on the larger picture here. Lucille, I am thinking, is going to have to spend some time – perhaps the night – in a hot and crowded place with a few of our local lady rummies and felons. Perhaps an unpleasant episode will get her attention. Perhaps that would make the problem real to her.
With these thoughts in mind, I hang up and put a call in to the Montgomery County jail, and within a few minutes I have Lucille on the line. She’s calm, but I can tell by her clotted voice that she’s been crying. Then she says, “You need to come down here right away with the checkbook.” I imagine her standing in the shadowy corner of a basement jail holding a battered pay phone to her ear, a pink butterfly bandage spanning the purple seam of her healing head wound, a physical reminder of how she came to be here.
“You had to know you were going to get caught,” I say.
“I just needed a Xanax,” she chortles.
“I hope you still have some, because you have put me in one hell of a predicament.”
“Just come pick me up.”
“You’re going to have to spend the night where you are.” The connection is silent for a very long time. “And now I have to get off the phone,” I add.
With that, she hangs up. I throw whatever I have on the bed into a bag, and it’s out to the car and off to the airport. Upon approaching the ticket counter, I am whisked off to the gate and onto the plane. A flight attendant of Scandinavian descent floats down the aisle with a sweat-beaded bottle of champagne and asks if I’d care for any. If she only knew….Ten minutes later, the pilot announces that we’re at 35,000 feet and heading for Los Angeles at eighty-five percent of the speed of sound. The moment my champagne glass is emptied, the attendant reappears to refill it.
“So you’re heading to L.A.,” she says. “Business or pleasure?”
I think about this for a long moment. “It was supposed to be all business,” I confide to this beautiful stranger. “See, I’m going to get some money for the down-payment on a house, but my fiancée’s in jail back in Houston.”
She laughs. I’m a real card. A fella with a sense of humor and a vivid imagination.
“Say, you wouldn’t have any vodka, would you?” I ask. The introduction of spirits distorts space and time, lending the day a much needed sense of unreality. What seems but a moment later, we’re descending into LAX, and I find myself in a cab heading for a hotel. That night, I sit up in bed watching movies. A whole host of attendants ferry up sandwiches, vodka, and soda water while I let my mind wander through a half-dozen movie plots. Early in the night, the tug of responsibility becomes too powerful to ignore, and I call Lucille’s mother for some ballast, a link to abandoned reality. Her voice dripping with disdain for this lout who has abandoned her precious child, she informs me that Lucille will be out tomorrow evening, courtesy of Mom and Dad. Then she adds, “Why didn’t you bail her out?”
“I thought it important to get her attention.”
“Get her attention? What for?”
In very measured detail, I explain, in essence saying we don’t want our Lucille developing a problem, gotta nip things in the bud, tough love, blah, blah, blah. Sincerity and resolve aside, I think that I must sound like one of those cheesy pseudo-shrinks on the Springer show.
The rest of the conversation is a series of long cool silences.
The business of getting the money from the bank in the form of cashiers’ checks is simple enough, and by ten the following morning I have what I came for. My return flight to Houston leaves in two hours, but as I climb back in the cab for the hotel I realize I don’t want to return. I call Dustin and talk for an hour or two about this new hyper-life of mine. All Dustin can say is, “Do not marry her, man. Not until she’s been through rehab, anyway.”
Immediately upon arrival, I drive from the airport to Lucille’s apartment, where I find her on the living room floor playing with Damien. Her eyes are bloodshot from crying, although she isn’t crying now. Not exactly serene, but more or less fine. She knows why I didn’t bail her out, and at least says she understands. She wouldn’t have bailed herself out. Finally the topic of wedding plans comes up, and I buck myself up to tell her, “We’ve got too much going on with buying the house, these new legal matters…”
Then comes a torrent of tears.
“We’ll just postpone it till the spring,” I say.
This only calms her down enough to sputter out, “If you don’t marry me now, you never will.”
“That’s not true.”
She recovers somewhat, and, pinching her eyes shut, says, “I’ve got to get my head together.”
“We can get you into the best rehab on the planet, Lucille.”
Wiping the tears from her eyes, she cries out, “I can’t.”
“The judge will like it. You know, show him you’re serious about getting better.”
“Not right now.”
“Why not?”
She takes my hand and brings it to her breasts. She squeezes it as though words alone cannot convey her depth of feeling and conviction, as though what she needs to communicate can only be transmitted by way of some synaptic pathway. “Day after tomorrow’s my surgery,” she whispers.
I look her in the eyes. “Postpone the surgery, Lucille.”
“You can’t postpone elective surgery. Not without paying for it – you know, it’s like earnest money.”
“You can postpone a marriage.”
She pinches her eyes shut against the sound of my voice, as though doing so will cancel out all that has been said and done.
“I’ve worked so hard – all those double shifts… Let me do this one thing, then I’ll do anything you ask. Anything.”
It occurs to me once again how far removed from reality she must be. Her world is in shambles, she faces the very real potential of going to prison, she is hopelessly addicted to drugs, yet her highest priority remains her desire for larger breasts. I wonder – not for the first time – what kind of asylum a marriage to her would be. But somehow it seems too late to turn back from this course I’m on.