I called Sarah as soon as I got home. I was surprised not to get her machine. I started talking right away, trying to tell her everything.
“Honey, I’m sorry, I can’t stay on right now,” she said. “I’ve got to run. Listen,” she said when I didn’t answer, “I’ll be around later. Call me later, okay?”
I knew I should say something about being fine, but I couldn’t. What could be so urgent that she couldn’t spend five minutes on the phone? Elly. I’m sure it’s Elly.
“Terry,” she said, “there’s a seven o’clock meeting at the All Crafts Center on the East Side. You need a meeting. Go,” she said, “talk about it. Or just listen. It’ll be good for you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up. I’ve never done that to her before. The phone rang immediately, but I lowered the volume so I wouldn’t hear who it was.
That’s what I hate about Al-Anon people. Go to a meeting, they say. Keep it simple. Right. Simple for them. They don’t have to bother talking to you. They hand you over to the group. The fucking committee. I was tired of needing people.
I poured a glass of wine, filled Mark’s Mont Blanc with red ink and wrote Brian’s name on a piece of paper. I wrote mine on the opposite side, then I wrote Mark’s name under Brian’s. I added Eric, Glenda, Yvonne, Sarah, and Elly. Just before I tore it up, separating my name from the others, I scribbled Father Dugan’s name at the bottom. I put the half with my name under a candle I lit for myself. The other half I tore into strips and dropped them, one by one, out the window onto Spring Street.
“Keep it simple,” I said, and tossed Mark’s name.
“I will not become attached to persons, places, or things,” I said, and dropped Brian.
“Easy does it,” I said, and watched Eric float out over the pocketbocks and sweaters in the Spring Street Market.
“You can’t buy oranges in a hardware store,” I shouted and dumped the rest of the papers. Only Yvonne’s I kept. Yvonne’s name I burned over the candle I’d lit for myself.
“What are you saying?”
Mark was dangling a bottle of wine, leaning against the brick wall beside one of the few pictures in the loft I actually like. A painting of a puddle done by this Australian woman. “This is how my mind feels sometimes,” she’d said to me when Mark bought it. And I know what she meant. I love the way the lines and swirls, the blues and grays and yellows, take you further and further in. You’re pulled into the background, and the painting makes you feel like you could just keep being pulled. It reminds me of the ultrasound. Those gray shapes hanging in space. And nothing there.
“Nothing,” I said.
Seeing Mark there, leaning against the wall in his leather jacket, made me want to go back to the old days. Before Yvonne and Brian. When things were simple. When I knew Mark loved me. When I knew he’d be there for dinner, or I’d be there for dinner. Before I began going through his datebooks and copying keys, before I began stealing clothes and sneaking into apartments.
Outside a sax player blew a moody version of “Silent Night.” I thought of our first Christmas. The framed picture of Curly. My first bottle of Opium. I always want to smell you on me, he said. Always and everywhere.
I’ll always love you, he said. There would be temptations, attractions, but staying together is a decision. He said all that. Now I wonder whether he meant there would be times one of us would succumb. And whether he considered I might be the one.
I’ll always love you, I’d said to him. And I meant it. I couldn’t have imagined anyone else.
I thought of a night years ago, around the time Mark and I were sliding from like into love. We were at the Time Cafe, having dinner. I was going on about a show we’d just seen. From Our Lips it was called. I’ve never seen such awful stuff. A woman who smeared peanut butter all over herself and recited passages of Virginia Woolf. Enormous vaginas made out of putty with objects stuck inside—toy sports cars and eggbeaters, photos of George Bush and Eydie Gorme. I’d just stuck my fork into Mark’s arugula salad, telling him about how Virginia Woolf would have hated the show. When I looked up, Mark was leaning forward, his chin in his hand, smiling at me.
“Do you know what I love about you?” he asked. Just like that, smiling at me, really looking, taking me in, not the way some people do, flitting over you and noticing the whole restaurant at the same time, every potted cactus or snooty waiter.
“What?” I’d asked. It made me feel funny—the way he was looking at me—but loved, really loved.
“You don’t remind me of anyone,” he said.
It was such a simple thing, I don’t know why it thrilled me, but it did.
“You’re an original,” he said.
Maybe that’s when I fell in love with him.
I looked at Mark leaning against the wall and I thought about that night, the crazy clock over the bar, its hands spinning around in the wrong direction, and I understood what people mean when they talk about wanting to turn back the clock.
Red and green flashed on the floor, reflected from some Christmas lights across the street. Tony jumped from his post by the heater, curled into the light, a red glow on his blond fur.
I have no evidence Mark’s been having an affair. No hard evidence. I’m having an affair. Maybe this is all my own doing. My obsessions and jealousies. My imagination. Maybe I’ve blown it all out of proportion. You see what you want to see. Like Othello. Some part of him wants to believe Desdemona is guilty. He’s obsessive and bullheaded and completely lacking in perspective. Why would Mark be having an affair with Yvonne? Maybe it was a flirtation, maybe he was even tempted. Mark loves to flirt. I mean Yvonne’s not even his type.
And she said she had a date.
Mark uncorked the bottle of wine and held the cork between his fingers. I love his hands. His long fingers. They’re familiar. I can’t even picture Brian’s hands.
He poured a glass, held it to the light to check the color. His fingers took on some of the red glow.
“It’s freezing out there,” he said. I hadn’t even noticed. I’d been so revved up after seeing Yvonne.
I wanted to go over and put his hands under my armpits, hold him, forget the past few months and just spend the rest of the night making love. Lying on the floor in the red lights. Watching the light play across his ass, his long back. I was about to confess everything: How Sarah had led me to believe he was having an affair. How I’d blown it out of proportion. I was going to ask him if we could go away for a while. To Italy or Mexico.
“So you decided to come home,” he said. “What an honor.”
Mark is so rarely sarcastic I didn’t catch the tone.
“Or are you planning to spend the night out? Just home to pick up a change of clothes.”
He held out the wineglass as if to ask if I wanted any, then just poured me a glass and handed it over.
“Right,” he said. “It’s Friday. Maybe you’re thinking of taking off for the entire weekend.”
I wanted to say stop. Let’s just stop. I stood there.
“Why not the whole holiday? Why not just take off for the whole fucking two weeks? Wherever the hell it is you go.”
Chico walked into the room, blinking and stretching as though he’d just woken up. I picked him up and held him to me. I didn’t know what Mark knew and I couldn’t think fast enough. Couldn’t think how to turn this. And I’d just downed two glasses of wine.
“Mark, stop,” I said. Chico jumped out of my arms.
“I am so sick,” he said, “of this shit. Of your moods. Of these fucking acts of aggression.” He poured another glass of wine, looked at me and laughed. “What? I’m not supposed to notice my shirts ripped up and used as rags?”
Yesterday morning I’d torn up the Sorbonne T-shirt he used to wear all the time. Used it to polish my boots. I’d been looking for the shirt with the Nietzsche quote and Moe’s picture. I was glad now I hadn’t been able to find it.
The phone rang. I wondered if Mark thought Yvonne when I thought Brian. Nothing. Then I remembered I’d lowered the volume and leaned over to adjust it.
“I just wanted to see about Christmas. To make sure you’re coming,” she said. “Everyone’s going to make it.” My mother.
We stared at the machine as if it were some kind of oracle.
“Are you there?” she continued. There was a pause. She always waits for us to pick up, as if she can’t imagine no one being there to take her call. “Well, okay. Call us back.”
I remembered what Mark had said about her keeping my father tied to the bathtub. Shackled, he said. I should have thrown her name out the window, too.
The phone rang again.
“It’s me again.”
“Shut up,” I screamed, and picked up a brick that was holding a row of books along the windowsill. The books slid to the floor. I think I would have smashed that machine. Mark grabbed my arm.
“I forgot to tell you,” she went on, “someone called last week from Mount Loyola. I gave them your number.”
I must have given them my parents’ number by mistake.
My mother hung up after asking again whether we were there. It was as if she could see us. Mark looked at me.
“Terry, I don’t know what’s going on with you anymore. I don’t know when all this started, but I can’t live like this.”
He took off his jacket. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, looking the way he looked years ago, when we first met. I wanted him to call me Treas, to push me on the floor and fuck me, to whisper Tree, Tree. I thought I could jolt him into it.
“Maybe you need some time away,” I said. “I mean do you want to be alone for a while?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I do.”
Just like that. Like I’d asked him if he wanted spinach for dinner. Yeah, I do.
It struck me then that that’s exactly what he’d said the day we got married. When the priest asked Do you take this woman . . .
Yeah, he’d said, I do.
I couldn’t talk. I know I said something, but I can’t remember what. I should have begged him, promised I’d be different, gotten him down on the couch, opened his jeans, sucked his cock. But I didn’t. I don’t know what I did. It’s funny that when you look back on some of the most crucial moments of your life you can’t remember at all what you said or did.
I remember he came over and put his arms around me. Held me.
“I was thinking of staying with a friend for a while. Just for a while. Give us both time to cool out. Maybe I could stay with David and Glenda.”
Right. Or maybe Yvonne.
“It’s Christmas,” I said.
He just held me. I held him. Maybe we kissed.
I don’t know how things have gotten to this point. One day you’re making love after breakfast, the next you’re old and alone and wheeling around in some nursing home.