I don’t understand. You said the hiccups went away. When I called you on Sunday, you said you felt fine. You said it was some twenty-four hour thing.” I’m sitting in my office, stabbing a pen into a pad of yellow stickies. Panic has made me angry. Greer is hovering in the doorway.
“I was fine. But then last night, they started again. They didn’t stop all night. I called my doctor this morning and she told me she wanted me to check into St. Vincent’s for some tests.”
“How long are you going to be there?”
“Just a couple of days. She says.”
“Well . . . what . . . what are they doing, what tests? What do they think it is?” I ram the tip of a bent paperclip under my fingernail, making it bleed. Nobody goes into a hospital for hiccups.
“They don’t have any idea. They’ve been—hic—sucking blood out of me all day long.” He pauses. I can hear him breathing. Then another hiccup.
“Well, I’ll come over right after work.”
“No, don’t bother. There’s nothing you can do.”
In a way I feel rejected that he doesn’t think there’s anything I can do. But I feel an almost greater relief that he doesn’t expect this from me. And I’m ashamed. I ask, “What about Virgil?”
“My brother’s taking care of him.”
“What about work, weren’t you supposed to go back today?”
“I said I had a family emergency.”
I can hear something in the background, voices, commotion.
“I gotta go. They want to me to go downstairs for an MRI. Look, I’ll talk to you later, okay—bye.” There’s strain in his voice and hearing it rubs my heart a little raw. I want to protect him from the doctors. I don’t want the doctors taking his Valium.
I hang up the phone in slow motion, just sit there for a minute. Finally, I look at Greer. “I don’t know what’s going on. Neither does he.”
Greer sits in the chair across from my desk, her legs tightly crossed. “Well, is he okay?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
She gives me a look she has never given me before. I don’t like that this moment warrants a new look.
Foster told the group he kicked the alcoholic abusive illegal alien Brit out of his apartment. He gave him a check for ten thousand dollars and instructions to get out of his life and stay out of his life. When asked why he finally made this big move, Foster looked at me for one brief though ninety-proof instant before looking away and saying vaguely, “I just realized what I might be missing.”
I talked about Pighead. Not that there was much to say. “Is lost a feeling?” I asked the group.
“I’m sorry, Auggie,” Foster says once we’re outside on the sidewalk.
“Thanks,” I say. I feel small. A Disney dwarf miscast in Terminator 5.
“I wish I knew you better,” he says softly, “so I could give you a hug.”
“You don’t have to,” I tell him. Pause. “Know me better, I mean.”
Foster opens his arms and I move into them, rest my head on his shoulder. He doesn’t hug me like I’ve seen alcoholics hug each other after AA meetings. He doesn’t hug me like a crack addict I have known for three group therapy sessions and one meeting over coffee. Foster hugs me like he has known me all my life.
He doesn’t pat my back or pull away after four or five seconds. He hugs me tightly and takes deep, slow breaths, almost like he is teaching me how to breathe.
“I’m afraid,” I say into his shoulder.
“Of what?” he asks.
“Of everything.”
“You know what you need?”
I can feel it coming. He’s going to say, A blowjob. He’s just another pig, after all. Just another typical gay guy who wants to get his rocks off, disguised as somebody I can imagine myself caring about, despite the fact that I can’t.
“What?” I ask, not wanting to know.
He gently pushes away from me so he can see my face.
“You need a Cheez Whiz and pimento sandwich with potato chips. And not the low-fat baked chips either, the real ones.”
Foster’s apartment is on the forty-seventh floor of an East Side high-rise only a few blocks from my office. It’s a beautiful space, furnished with boxes and bookshelves overflowing with books, dust rabbits—not bunnies—and various pairs of khakis strewn about. We obviously have the same decorator.
His machine is blinking and he walks over to it. “Oh God, now what?” he says, punching the PLAY button. “You have fifteen new messages . . . first message today at . . .” Foster pushes STOP, then ERASE. The machine, an old-fashioned cassette-tape version, whirrs into motion.
“That’s Kyle. Ever since I kicked him out, he calls me twenty times a day asking to move back, and then asking for more money when I tell him to leave me alone.”
“Man, I’m sorry,” I say, understanding completely what could lead a person to stalk Foster.
He goes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator, pulling out the ingredients of the Southern white trash sandwich.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Sure, go ahead,” he says with his head in the refrigerator.
“You . . . are . . . where?” Hayden asks like the parent I have turned him into.
“I’m at Foster’s apartment. We’re just having a little sandwich and talking some.”
“You’re at the crack addict’s apartment? Having a little sandwich?” he says. From the tone of his voice, you’d think I’d just told him I was hanging out at a playground wearing a NAMBLA T-shirt.
“Anyway, I didn’t want you to wonder, worry about where I am. I’ll be home soon.”
I hang up before he gets the chance to guilt-trip me.
Foster appears from the kitchen with two sandwiches, each with a little pile of Ruffles next to them. “You can’t eat Cheez Whiz and pimento sandwiches off china; you have to use paper plates,” he says, sliding the plates onto the coffee table. I’m sitting on the sofa. He sits in the chair.
Foster talks about Kyle. How crazy Kyle is, how he hopes the phone calls stop soon. He talks about how much he wants a dog. How he misses South Carolina. He tells me about his job as a waiter at Time Café and how even though he doesn’t need the money, the job keeps him occupied at night, which is when he most wants to smoke crack. Foster talks so much that I have finished my entire sandwich, plus all the Ruffles, before he has even finished half of his. His knee bobs up and down really fast. His eyes twitch. Suddenly he looks less like a rough-around-the-edges movie star and more like a crack addict.
And for some strange reason, I find this incredibly comforting. He’s such a distracting mess, that I’m able to get outside myself. Like watching a really strange art film at the Quad Cinema on East Thirteenth.
“Do you wanna talk about Pighead?” he asks finally.
I swallow a potato chip. “No.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
I smile and eat another chip. I don’t want to talk because talking makes things real.
“You know, the minute I walked into Group, that day when I was late, I saw you immediately.”
I swallow, but when I do my throat makes a noise. A little gulp sound. It was loud enough for him to hear.
“I saw you immediately, too,” I say. “I mean, obviously I saw you too because you came in late.” I am as articulate as a log of petrified wood. With as much common sense.
There’s this long and uncomfortable silence where we both make an effort not to look at each other. The phone rings. “Aw, damn it all.” He reaches for the receiver. “What do you want, Kyle?” he growls. He rolls his eyes. “No, Kyle.”
Silence.
“I said no.”
More silence. “Good-bye, Kyle.” Foster hangs up the phone and then reaches behind him and unplugs it from the wall. “Sorry, where were we?”
We were at the part where we start making out and you tell me that you’ve been lying all along. That you’re not really a crack addict mess. That you really are as sweet and warm as you seem and that your movie-star good looks have nothing to do with the real you.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. The sandwich was great though—thanks.”
“You’re very welcome. You feel better, a little?”
“I feel a lot better, I really do. The feeling passed, the panic.”
“Good.”
“I should get going.”
“Aw, already?” he asks, puppy-dog style. Even if he is a crack-addict mess, I feel fairly certain that this is the only time in my life somebody who is better looking than Mel Gibson will hint for me to stay a little longer.
“Well, soon,” I amend.
“Good,” Foster says. “Soon is better than now.”
He excuses himself, says he needs to change his shirt. The tag on the back of the collar is driving him nuts, he’ll be right back, do I mind?
“I don’t mind,” I say. Instead of, Can I do it?
He disappears down the hallway. A second later, I see him walking back, carrying a white T-shirt. He goes into the bathroom, flicks on the light. I can see his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror which for some reason is open, creating this bee-line to my retinas. I don’t think he can see that I’m watching him. And I do watch him. I watch him lean into the mirror, I suppose quickly checking his nose for blackheads. I watch him unbutton the white shirt, take it off, drape it over the shower curtain rod. His muscular chest has a spread of black hair across it. A trail of hair leads straight down to the lip of his jeans, a perfect line. His abs contract as he slides the T-shirt over his torso. This is a guy that even a straight guy would watch. Would pay nine-fifty plus another seven dollars for popcorn and a small Coke to watch.
He flicks the light switch off and comes romping back into the room. This time he sits on the couch, but at the far end away from me. “Much better,” he breezes.
The arms of the white T-shirt are stretched tightly across his biceps. His nipples poke through the cotton. I can see a shadow of the hair underneath.
“You wanna see my photo album?” he asks.
“Sure.”
He stands up, goes to the bookshelf, comes back and sits right next to me. His knee is touching mine. He opens the album across our laps. As he flips the pages, he explains the pictures: Aunt so-and-so from somewhere, Uncle what’s-his-name, Cousin this and that, etc. I don’t hear a word he is saying because I am watching his hands, his arms. I’m caught up in the hair that covers his forearms and tapers sparingly to the middle of each finger. Basically, I am a frat boy at a Nymphomaniac Supermodels Anonymous meeting.
I haven’t felt this attracted to anybody in my entire life. It’s like every cell in my body is magnetically drawn to him. My mitochondria want to make friends with his mitochondria. And as soon as I become aware of this powerful attraction, I remember something from when I was thirteen.
After Bookman raped me, he became my friend. We used to go on walks every night.After a week, he told me I had turned his world upside down, that he realized he was in love with me. He said he was sorry for what happened that night when I came over to his apartment to look at his photos.
After midnight, he would sneak into my room and we would have sex. His mouth tasted like walnuts. There were always tears in his eyes when he looked at me. “So beautiful, you are so beautiful.”
I was thirteen and he was all I had. I hated school, never went. I spent all my time with him. And he became insane with obsession.
After two years, it all boiled over. “I’m either going to kill you or myself.” He went out to get film for his camera one night, and never came back.
Nobody ever heard from him again. Everything I had, as much as I hated it, him, was instantly gone. It all seemed so normal at the time.
“Auggie, are you okay?” Foster is asking me, looking concerned.
“What?”
“Are you okay? You seem so distant. I hope I’m not boring you with the photos. I’ll put it away.” He closes the album, gets up and puts it back on the bookshelf.
“No, I’m sorry, it’s not that, it’s something else. I was just thinking.” Strange, but ever since I stopped drinking, my brain sometimes hands me these memories to deal with. It’s like my fucked-up inner child wants attention, wants me to know he’s still in there.
“About what? What were you thinking?
“I don’t want to talk about it, just old stuff. Some memory, it’s nothing. One of those pictures I saw made me remember something. I sorta spaced out for a minute, I guess.”
He sits back down on the couch next to me. “C’mere,” he says, pulling me into him, his hand stroking my head. “Don’t think,” he soothes, “just close your eyes.”
Uh-oh.
I waited by the phone all day long, every day, for more than a year. Every time it rang, I was sure it was him. I reread the love letters he had written to me, each in perfect penmanship on white lined paper:
“I believe you are God. Not a mythical Greek god, not the idealization, but the essence, the truth, the only God. And yet, you continue to abuse me, try to destroy me with one glance from your jewel eyes, one of your winning smiles, thrown to somebody else but me. I am insane for my love for you, yet you beat it and beat it and beat it down.You make every effort to crush me. At thirteen, you have already lived many lifetimes and you use your wisdom of your past to toy with my emotions, you create me, I exist for you and only you. And I hate you now. I hate you for abusing your power.”
Foster’s hands move from my head to my chest. He spiders his fingers over me, pressing gently. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t let this happen. I’m not supposed to date somebody from group therapy. There is almost no worse crime a recovering alcoholic can commit. Second would be cooking the head of another alcoholic in wine.
“I need to get going now, I really do.” It feels impossible for me to sit still another moment. Better to leave than be left.
“You going to be okay?”
“Uh huh.”
We stand. I place my hand on the brass doorknob, turn and pull. Nothing happens. He reaches over and twists the deadbolt; the door opens. For an awkward moment, we stand there.
He gives me a hug. I don’t fight it.
“You smell good,” he tells me.
“You do, too,” I say, reduced now to single-syllable words.
The hug goes on longer than casual hugs do.
“And you feel good, too.”
“So do you.”
We both feel it, it would be impossible not to. But neither of us will mention it.
I pull back and say, “Okay, see you later. Thanks for the sandwich and everything.”
“I’m glad I got to be with you some.”
I walk down the hall toward the elevator bank. I turn back in the direction of his door, and he’s still standing there, watching me. I want to run back to him and tell him everything that was going through my mind. But I don’t. I leave. He’s a crack addict from my group therapy. I can’t have these feelings about him.
In the cab home, I feel like I have been sniffing glue all night. High and guilty. The fumes of him still trapped in my nose.
“It’s obvious what you’re doing,” Hayden says. He dunks and redunks the chamomile tea bag in his mug. “You’re defocusing.”
To “defocus” is to focus on someone else, or something else other than your sobriety. Your sobriety should, at all times, remain your number one priority. Alcoholics instinctively defocus. I am a perfect example. With three hundred bottles of Dewar’s in my apartment, all I could see was the wall. Now all I can see is Foster.
“I know. I mean, I think that’s part of it.”
“I don’t like the sound of this at all, you getting involved with a crack addict from your group therapy. That’s really addict behavior.”
“We’re not involved,” I say in my own defense.
“You told me he was hugging you on his couch.”
“Because I was upset. He’s a nice guy.”
“Look, I’m not here to make judgments, but I just think this is, well, crazy.”
I wish Hayden would vanish in a cloud of smoke. “Hayden, you’re gonna have to stop with this mental health stuff. Or I’ll have to take a cheese grater across your face.”
“You’re obsessing on him,” he says, unfazed.
This is true, I am. “I am not,” I say.
“This is your addict talking. Your addict needs something to fill it up. Your addict is hungry. It’s trying to feed.” He sounds as though he is describing the plot of a science fiction horror film.
“I’m just upset about Pighead being in the hospital. Foster was only being nice, helping me out. That’s all.”
“What do you mean? Pighead is in the hospital?”
I want a beer. A six-pack. And then I want to go out for drinks. “Yeah, hospital. He called me at work today. His doctor checked him in. They’re doing tests, that’s all I know. Hiccups that won’t go away.”
“Dear God, I’m sorry. Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. They’re still trying to find out what’s wrong. I mean, yeah, he’s okay, I’m sure he’s okay. They just need to figure out this hiccup thing.”
Hayden looks at me with utter compassion; the long-lost son of Mother Teresa.
For some reason, the fact that Pighead is in the hospital lets me off the hook with Hayden. And then, this awful feeling. I feel happy that Pighead is in the hospital, deflecting the attention. And I’m a monster again.
Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don’t go there alone, Rae once said.
My office door is unlocked. Immediately, this makes me suspicious. I always lock my door. And if I don’t, the cleaning lady does. I throw my stuff on the sofa and go over to my desk. There is a yellow sticky note on my computer screen. DRINKS. ODEON NINE TONIGHT—BE THERE. Beneath this is another line: (ONE GLASS OF WINE NEVER HURT ANYBODY.)
I pick up the phone and dial Greer’s extension, but she’s not in yet. I walk over to the bookcase, and I notice that the storyboards we did for the Pizza Hut pitch have been rearranged. These are boards we presented last year, and we just keep them because we never got around to throwing them out. As a result, I’ve been staring at this pan of Deep Dish pizza for the past twelve months, and now it’s gone. I thumb through the boards, and it’s clear that somebody has been snooping. It then occurs to me that this is something Rick would do. Rick would look through our old Pizza Hut boards because he needs ideas. And sometimes you can take an idea from one place and use it somewhere else.
Ideas come easy to me. But this is not so for Rick. He struggles. I can write a script—and a really good one—in a few minutes. I’ve created campaigns over tuna sandwiches with Greer. But Rick needs to fester for a while. He needs days, sometimes weeks. And even then, he often doesn’t come up with anything that great. Usually something he’s recycled from some old issue of Communication Arts magazine.
And all of a sudden I can picture him in my office after I have left for the day. I can see him fingering the boards. That faggot. He thinks he’s so good. He’s just a fucking lush, he would say. And then he’d leave the sticky note.
“I can’t believe you got here before I did,” Greer says, suddenly standing in my doorway, winded from her brisk walk from the train.
“Check it out,” I say, gesturing toward the computer.
She walks around the desk and looks at the note. She leans in to read it. “Maybe somebody has a crush on you,” she says, looking up.
“A crush?” I say. I pull the Pizza Hut board back out and place it in the front. I stack the boards neatly against the wall.
“Well, yeah. Maybe somebody likes you.” She smiles slyly. “Maybe it’s that new account guy,” she says. “You know, the one with the goatee.”
“Greer, this isn’t about a crush. It’s somebody being a jerk.”
Greer plucks the note off the screen. “Why do you always have to be so cynical?” she says. “Maybe it’s not some big joke. Maybe somebody really does want to meet you for drinks. Maybe you should go.”
I tell her about the storyboards being examined.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “The cleaning woman probably moved them to dust. God knows you never clean in here.”
“I think it’s Rick,” I say.
“Rick? Why would he do something like that?”
“Think about it, Greer. The beer ads, the fake concerned looks, and now this. You and I both know what a pathetic loser he is. He’s not above doing something like this. He’s looking for ideas to steal.”
Greer considers this. “I don’t think Rick is creative enough to think of something like this,” she says. “I mean, Rick’s a jerk. But a harmless jerk.”
I’m not so sure. So all day long, I keep an eye on him. I watch him for signs of guilt. We pass in the hallways, and I make eye contact. He makes eye contact back and smiles. But he doesn’t look away, which to me would implicate him. I’m tempted to confront him, but if he didn’t do it, I really would seem like a crazy alcoholic faggot.
I also make sure to walk past the new account guy’s office at least twice, just to see if he looks up. I walk casually, as if out for a stroll. Just to see if by some far-flung chance, Greer is right, that the note is for real and the guy really does have some sort of crush on me. But the third time I walk by, he looks up from his desk. “Can I help you with something? Do you need me for some reason?”
I step into his office. “Um, I was just wondering if you have the competitive beer reel,” I say.
He smiles. “Nope, not with me. But I could get a copy for you. I’ll make sure somebody drops it by your office.”
I notice a framed picture of a beautiful woman on his desk. She is on the beach, laughing into the sun, the straw hat on her head about to blow off. “Never mind,” I say.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
Later, when I tell Greer that the note wasn’t from the account guy, she says, “That picture doesn’t mean anything. It could be his sister.”
“Greer, even if his sister were Christy Turlington, he wouldn’t have a shot of her like that on his desk. Trust me. It’s his wife or his girlfriend.”
“Maybe,” Greer suggests, “he’s confused. Maybe he’s engaged but doesn’t really know if he can go through with it. Maybe it’s like some sort of sexual-orientation cry for help.”
“Well, it’s possible. I mean, maybe he’s got all this family pressure, and all this pressure from the girl, and maybe he just really needs somebody to talk to.”
“Greer,” I say, “you are in the right business. I have never met anybody so skilled at creating mountains out of molehills.”
Greer looks pleased with herself. “You’re not the only one with a bookcase full of advertising awards.”
“My name is Augusten, and I’m alcoholic,” I announce to the room. “And today I have ninety days.”
The alcoholics at the Perry Street meeting applaud. I’m sitting at the podium because today I have ninety days of sobriety and in order to “work my program” I need to “qualify.” I glance over at Hayden, who smiles at me.
I’m amazed by how nervous I am, how dry my throat suddenly is. Even though I make a living talking in front of people, presenting advertising campaigns to CEOs, I’m terrified and speechless. My hands are almost dripping with sweat. I can’t think of how to begin, what to say. My mind is filled with twoply facial tissues. Yet, my mouth somehow switches to autopilot and words come out of me, like involuntary farts. I talk about how it was when I was drunk. I begin with the Fabergé egg exhibit, then being forced into rehab by my boss. I talk about rehab, and then coming back into my life, sober.
And I’m obsessed with a handsome, hairy-armed crack addict from my group therapy, I don’t say. I say I feel grateful for the people in my life, grateful for my sobriety, one day at a time, etcetera.
“You were spectacular,” Hayden tells me afterwards.
“How so?”
“You were so honest and substantive. Just no bullshit,” he says, slapping me on the back.
“Really? I seemed normal?” I ask.
“What a relief. I had no idea what I was saying. I was actually thinking about how my chest hair is growing back after having shaved it all off.”
Hayden turns sharply, “What?”
“Well, I thought maybe of bleaching it for the summer. But then I thought how awful it would be to have roots. Chest hair roots. That would be really humiliating. The blond chest hair might look good and natural like I go to the Hamptons on the weekends. But as soon as the roots started to appear, it would be like, ‘Oh, that’s very sad, he’s obviously looking for something and just not finding it.’ ”
Hayden stares at me with mock horror. Or maybe it’s real horror. “You absolutely terrify me. The depth of your shallowness is staggering.”
“Let’s go get Indian,” I say.
At the restaurant on First Avenue and Seventh, I tell Hayden that I think asshole Rick from work is fucking with me.
“I thought your boss’s name was Elenor,” he says, biting into a vegetable samosa.
“Rick is her partner. They work together. Good cop, bad cop.”
“You said work was going well. I don’t understand.”
I tell him about how last week, I got into work and somebody had crammed beer ads from magazines in my desk drawer. I tell him about the sticky note.
Hayden is aghast. “That seems hostile,” he says.
“Rick’s a fuck. He’s a homophobic closet case and he hasn’t got an ounce of talent. He just hitched his wagon to Elenor years ago and she’s too busy to notice he’s as dumb as a box of hair.”
Hayden takes a long sip of water. “You have to keep an eye on this Rick person.”
I intend to.
• • •
“Come over to my apartment at six and we’ll walk to Group together,” Foster tells me on the phone.
I hurl my body into a cab and head uptown. Each block has tripled in size since the last time I was in a cab. I can’t get there fast enough.
He opens the door wearing a towel around his waist and half a beard of white shaving cream on his face. “C’mon in, I just have to finish shaving, then we can go.”
I stand in the doorway of his bathroom as he shaves; steam from the sink fogs the mirror. The towel is short enough that I can see the muscles in his legs flex each time he shifts the weight from one leg to the other. Thick muscles, covered with tan skin and black hair. He’s a hairy guy, circa 1970 when guys didn’t bother with electrolysis or waxing. Foster is physically retro. He watches me as he shaves, glancing from sink to skin to me, smiling. “Are we going to be okay, or are we late?” he asks, scraping the blade across his face; the sound of a butter knife against sandpaper.
“We’re okay,” I say without bothering to look at my watch.
Foster pulls the towel off from around his waist, revealing a pair of white boxers.
I think: Is it okay for one member of group therapy to see another member of group therapy in his underwear? Am I crossing a boundary?
He rinses his face over the sink, then stands up and takes a towel, presses it against his face. “All done,” he announces. He brushes against me as he walks by. “Oh, sorry,” he says, grinning. “Clumsy ol’ me.”
I follow him to the bedroom. “Should I wear these . . .” he asks, holding out a pair of black jeans, “. . . or these?”—holding out a pair of khakis.
“Neither,” I say.
He raises just one eyebrow. Something that I know (from Greer, of course) takes hours of practice in front of a mirror.
“Okay,” he says flatly, letting both pairs of pants fall to the floor. Then he saunters over toward me, smiling. I pretend to back away.
“I meant you should wear sweatpants,” I say, laughing.
“Is that what you meant?” He raises his arm up, brushes his forearm against my cheek. “Fur,” he says.
I move my hands around his waist, press him against me. He wraps his arm around me and somehow manages to move us over to the bed where we collapse.
“How’d you get this?” I say, pointing to a small scar under his chin.
He rubs it lightly with the tip of his finger. “I cracked up my pickup truck when I was in college, smacked my face on the steering wheel.”
His earlobe fits perfectly between my lips. I’d forgotten how it feels to kiss somebody. Back when I was in love with Pighead, I always felt like he didn’t want me to kiss him, but that he let me anyway. This is different. Mutual makes all the difference. And then I realize I’m kissing somebody from my outpatient group therapy.
“Foster, this is crazy. What are we doing?”
“You said you liked crazy guys.”
“I know, but not, you know, crazy guys I’m in group therapy with.”
I make an effort to rise; Foster pushes me back down. “Stay,” he says.
I stay, lie back flat. I close my eyes. He rolls over on his side, puts his arm over my chest.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
Wendy’s face is in my head, along with the consent paper I signed at HealingHorizons, stating that I will not become romantically involved with any of the members of the group. “Nothing,” I lie.
Foster kisses my neck. “Know what I’m thinking?” he asks.
“I don’t know if I want to know.”
“Yes you do, I guarantee. So ask me.” He gives me a shake.
“Okay. Foster, what are you thinking?”
“Gee, Auggie, how sweet of you to ask. I was thinking that I can’t wait to see people’s reactions in Group when we walk in this afternoon, together, late.”
“Shit. C’mon, let’s go.”
Foster is laughing and I’m pulling him up from the bed by his arm, shoving the khakis at him.
“I’ll walk in after you,” I plot.
He slides his pants on, buttons them. “Aww. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
We take a cab downtown, Foster clutching my index finger in his hand the whole way. It’s a sweet gesture because he does it without thinking, while he looks out the window. Before we walk into Group, I check my watch, see that we’re fifteen minutes late.
We open the door, the talking pauses and all heads turn. Foster walks in first, whispering, “Sorry, sorry, go ahead.”
I take a seat on the opposite side of the room from him, despite the fact that the chair next to his is empty. Peter, one of the alcoholics in group, continues where he left off before we came in. I look at Peter, giving him my complete attention. Then, I briefly sneak a look at Foster. And Foster, the idiot, is smiling widely, staring not at Peter but directly at me.
This evening Hayden and I were walking on Perry Street heading home from dinner and I was wondering out loud which apartment Linda Hunt lived in because I read she lived on Perry Street; used to see her walk her dog. In fact, the first time I saw her I was squatting down scooping up Virgil’s shit into a Zip-Loc baggie and she was standing there, almost face-to-face to me, and she asked how old my dog was. The one time a celebrity, an Oscar winner no less, speaks to me, I am hunched over, collecting feces off the street.
As we were walking, a man in a wheelchair, parked on the sidewalk in front of his brownstone building, said something to us. I ignored him, assumed he wanted money. I walked on, then noticed Hayden had turned around, stopped. They were talking. I didn’t hear what they were saying because I was further ahead, frowning back at him. I was annoyed that he was talking to an older man in a wheelchair. Hayden waved me over and said, “This gentleman needs our help. He’s been waiting for somebody strong to come along.”
I’m strong, so Hayden volunteered me. The man focused his attention on me. I looked between them, impatient and annoyed.
Finally, the man in the wheelchair said, “Thank you for offering your help. If you could just get me up the stairs and unlock my apartment door.”
He produced his keys, fumbling with them with his semiparalyzed hands, looking for the correct key among the many. I was thinking, You don’t need to show me the key now; you can show it to me at the door if I can’t immediately figure it out. Since I was now going to help him, I wanted to do it as quickly as possible. I wanted it to be over. “Just wait one minute while I park my wheelchair over there by the stairs,” he said.
After his wheelchair was in position he hit a switch and turned the motor off. Then he asked me to pull the chain out of the pack on the back and fasten it to the railing of the stairs.
I forced a smile, although I felt conned. I reached into the bag and found the chain, then I secured the chair. All the while he sat, watching me. “Careful,” he said. And “Be gentle, please.” I wanted to say Shut the fuck up.
When I was done he asked me to carry him. “Just pick me up under my knees while I . . .”
I couldn’t hear another word he said because suddenly I knew I would be holding this man, carrying him up the stairs to his apartment. I heard “Like a baby. Just like a baby,” and I felt ill. I felt like I was visiting my mother.
My mother had a stroke ten years ago that left the right side of her body paralyzed, left her in a wheelchair. I thought about how I can never bring myself to visit her. And when I did, last time must have been over a year and a half ago, I could never bring myself to stay long. From the moment I walked in the door to her apartment, the need hit me in the face, thick like an odor. Would I change a lightbulb? Then roll her across the bridge. Then buy canned tuna. Then unscrew something, affix something or bring something to her and set it in her lap. Always turning something on or off, moving something from one side to another. As if she needed me to do these things, me specifically. As if she had been saving them up for me to do. Like they were gifts. Love. Dead birds she had caught and killed with claws, saved while I was away and dropped, all together in a mound on my doorstep for me to appreciate. Of course, they were such small things to do, but they each felt so impossibly large and uncomfortable to me.
I feel dirty when I visit my mother. I feel that her intimacy is exposed. Her nightgowns are so thin that her flesh shows through them. Her need is like a vagina. And I do not like to see it.
Her apartment isn’t as clean as our home was growing up. When I was a child, our house was immaculate; one dust mote on the teak dining table would be cause for a complete spring cleaning.
Like holding this man tonight, I’ve had to hold my mother, not carry her but hold her. I guess it’s called hug her. Or help her into a restaurant, hot-faced in shame. Looking around at the other people in the restaurant. Ashamed that my mother alone required two people to do the activities of one.
Furious, underneath of course, for giving me away to her lunatic psychiatrist when I was a little boy. And now paralyzed, needy, she has the nerve to crave?
I don’t go to see her because I don’t know her body. My mother in someone else’s body. A paralyzed woman’s body. Like she traded her own former lifeguard body in for one that was limp and frail and hungry. I resent her because I feel like she did this on purpose, made an impulse decision and now regrets it. Like it was a way of drawing attention, once again, back to her.
Of course this isn’t true. Hers simply broke, like a car, and she can never get a new one. A capillary burst in her brain one night while she was sleeping and when she woke up her life as she knew it was gone, like a dream. My mother lives inside a paralyzed woman’s body. When I hugged her, visited her, I was doing it to a stranger. I visited a body, like a medium that is a cripple and can fluently channel my dead mother. I feel particularly uncomfortable when I have to use her bathroom because it smells of something other than bleach or Soft Scrub. So does the kitchen. These rooms smell of paralysis. They smell of the handicapped.
My mother, who seemed to feel it was entirely okay to let a pedophile fuck me up the ass for three years when I was a teenager, this woman may not expect anything from me. She has not earned the right to expect me to change one lightbulb in her apartment. She gave me away when I was twelve, and she does not get to have me back.
But I did help the wheelchair man. I carried him all the way up to his apartment, four flights. He was light and silent like a bag of laundry. I delivered him right to the door. I had to reach into his pocket for the keys. It felt obscene, an invasion, my fingers against the heat of his dead leg. Yet he didn’t seem uncomfortable in the least. As if he were accustomed to invasions. Welcomed them maybe, or at least tolerated them. As I deftly slid each key through my fingers, hunting for what looked like an apartment key, he directed, “Not that one, not that one, the brass one, the round one,” until I had found the correct key. As I slid the key into the lock, I braced myself for what his apartment must be like. I expected a horrid, putrid, paralyzed smell to escape from the room like a big, bounding dog.
I opened the door and the apartment was stunning. It was large, artful and spotless. A Frank Gehry chair, beside a le Corbusier sofa. Bookshelves floor to ceiling, packed. Photographs on the wall, black frames and white mats. Photographs of him, before. Handsome, with friends, beachside. A computer and a fax and a glorious fireplace filled not with logs but with lilacs.
He asked me to take the change out of his pockets and put it on the counter. “No, not that counter, the other one, with the rest.” I set the change down, next to some other money. I thought, I could take his money. I could steal the small Picasso sketch that was framed and autographed. I could take his life. I could kick him and he would be defenseless. He lives on faith. Good faith. He thanked me and I smiled, told him it was nothing.
I was uncomfortable in my clothes all the way home, as if something of him wore off on me. I was afraid to touch my face, afraid of the transfer of molecules. I was thinking of a little girl I knew growing up, Annie, how she was playing in the yard and got dog shit in her left eye when she was four and caught a parasite that blinded her in that eye. I felt like some of his vulnerability, some of his need, some of his dependence, had attached itself to me.
He and my mother are like clams without shells. Clams and snails and lobsters without their shells. Vulnerable and exposed.
I e-mail my mother every day. She feels cut off if we don’t email. Tonight, when there is no message, I feel oddly uncomfortable, disconnected. I wonder why she didn’t write. But I don’t wonder too deeply. I don’t consider that she might have fallen. Or had a seizure. Or another stroke like the one that took away her left side. I don’t think of her being hungry. Or depressed. I think of her as illuminated words on my computer screen, sometimes misspelled, but always there. Able to file away in her own little folder. And it’s sequential, our relationship. It’s never one on one. It’s one after the other. Time and date stamped. I’m removed from her not just by miles and cities, not just by computer, but also by time. I call fairly often, but I don’t send her any money even though a little of mine would be huge for her.
Is this punishment?
It just feels too difficult to find the stamp, make out the check and mail it off. Like when you have a dream where you’re trying to run underwater. I’m not committed to my mother. I treat her with the same regularity I feel she treated me.
Sometimes I fantasize about having a mother who wears a pleated navy skirt, crisp white shirt and a pale blue sweater draped casually across her shoulders. Her tan leather bag doesn’t rattle with prescription bottles when she tosses it on the seat of the car. And this version of my mother can be made happy with something from the Macy’s catalogue instead of the Physician’s Desk Reference. She would have a shoulder-length bob.
“Would you mind helping me with these bottles?” she would ask. My mother would have been to a farmer’s market in Hadley. She would take long baths in goat milk. “I just love what it does for my skin.”
When I hand her my report card, all A-’s, she would say, “You know, it might not seem like much, but that extra effort, that extra ten percent, could mean the difference between Princeton and Bennington.” Then she would smile at me in a way that suggested a private in-joke. “Bennington, darling. Think about it. Lesbians.”
Even in my fantasy, I would hate my mother sometimes. I would think she was petty and materialistic. I would complain. “You’ve already had your eyes done once.”
And she would reply, “No. That’s not accurate. They weren’t done correctly, so this counts as the first time.”
My mother would date men who own franchises.
“But you’ve always loved a Blimpie,” she would say, trying to convince me.
“He’s a pig, mom. He scratches his butt and then smells his fingers. I’ve seen him do it. Plus, his fingers are hairy.”
She would go on monthly pilgrimages to New York City where she would return loaded with bags from all the shops on Fifth Avenue. I would, from a distance, come to view Manhattan as a mall without a roof. I would not romanticize it. I would make a mental note to avoid it forever.
So when I turned eighteen, I would apply to USC. My mother would be aghast. “Good God, you can’t be serious. The University of Southern California? Have you been smoking pot? What can you be thinking? What are you going to major in, fast food preparation technologies? Surfing?”
I would say, “No, mother. Entomology.”
She would hate that I used this word because she wouldn’t know what it meant and would feel I was only using it to be showy (I would be a bookworm). “Well, if you want to be a doctor, I don’t know why you wouldn’t stay out East.”
“Entomology is bugs, mom. It’s the study of insects.”
She would freeze, nail polish brush midair. “What?”
I would look at her. Then I would shrug. “What?”
“Bugs?”
“Yeah. Entomology. Bugs.”
She would replace the brush into the bottle and screw it tightly. She would blow on her nails and her eyes would meet mine. “How can I phrase this so I don’t hurt your feelings, damage your youthful enthusiasm? Hmmm. Okay, I’ve got it. NO.”
I would tell her it wasn’t her choice, it was mine.
She would remind me it was her money.
I would say I’d get my own money.
She would ask how.
I’d say from getting a job and saving.
She’d say that I must be out of my mind and that she was going to take me to a therapist. She’d say, “If you don’t agree to see a therapist, I’ll cut you off without a dime.”
I would not agree. I would storm out of the house, furious.
We wouldn’t speak for a week.
And in the end, I would go to Princeton. Because in so many ways, my mother would have been right. And it would make her so much happier, could make life so much better if I just agreed. So I would agree. And because the future of bugs isn’t exactly promising, I would agree to at least try prelegal studies.
She would buy me a Rolex.
I would be wearing it on the first day of school.
Of course, I probably would have turned out to be an alcoholic lawyer who hated my mother for overprotecting me, so I guess it all averages out in the end.