(1981)
Emily—fresh-faced, braless—after a year with the gangsters I feel a hundred years old beside her. My first creative writing class I make a point to find a seat near her. Emily’s story, about a man who sells cocaine and gets lost in it and ends up dying a very Jack London death in a snowstorm, is better than anything I’m writing, the best thing in the class. We begin talking and decide to go to a party together on Halloween. I show up at her dorm room that night with Doug, the friend I went to Europe with who I eventually followed to Amherst. Sloppy makeup around my eyes, a choirboy robe, I’m the approximation of a ghoul. Doug wears a broken plastic street lamp as a helmet, his body wrapped in a shower curtain, a spontaneous mess. Emily’s still transforming herself into a wood sprite. I roll a joint, we pass it. We drink some beer, small talk. Once sufficiently spritelike and sparkly, she takes out a baggie with a large quantity of white powder in it, asks if we want “to sniff.” Doug and I look at each other—the bag holds ten or twenty grams of cocaine, easy, and we’ve never seen more than a gram at a time, ever. She’s eighteen, dating her boss, a twenty-nine-year-old coke dealer and the owner of a music shop in Provincetown. Generous with his drugs, as are most of the older straight men in Provincetown, especially with teenage girls. When I meet him a few months later he takes me aside, tells me to treat her well, and gives me a baggie full of quaaludes, as if they’re the keys to his car. Doug and I tend more toward crystal meth, which is cheaper and lasts longer, though teeth-shatteringly unpredictable. But we don’t say no. We help ourselves to an unhealthy line or two. I then offer Emily half of my hit of acid—
Love Saves the Day
. It’s my second or third time tripping, Emily’s first, and she’s understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she’ll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper,
No
.
We got the acid from Sam. Sam lives in an old camper, the type you pull behind a car—rounded corners, a tiny sink, a table that folds down. He pays a farmer a couple hundred bucks to park it in a field for the winter. It has no heat, no electricity—essentially a bed in a field, dead husks all around it. I never ask where he shits. That winter we all end up living together, through the cold months, in Doug’s dorm room. Doug’s the only one supposed to be in the room, except for a phantom roommate who never appeared. I’d forgotten to sign up for housing and after a week sleeping in my car Doug offers me the empty bed. Sam comes by for a shower, leaves his toothbrush, a change of clothes. The weather turns. Sam hooks up with a teenage girl who’s likely a runaway. One night it makes no sense to send them out into the snow to bicycle back to the camper. They curl up behind our desks, and that’s where they sleep for a few months, at least until the girl goes back home.
When Sam isn’t sleeping on our floor he’ll dress up in a skeleton suit and stand at the trashbarrels in the dining common, a sign taped to the wall behind him giving statistics on world hunger, on how many children have died that day. He’ll silently reach into the trashbarrels and pull out the food others toss, eat it with his hands, there in his skeleton suit.
Emily and I stay together for six months, until the school year ends and we drift back to our hometowns. That summer I live on the boat with Phil and work for the gangsters. Once, after having been “missing” for a few weeks, Tony lines all the local misfits who work for him up on his porch. Holding a wad of hundreds, he asks each of us what he owes. For the last couple months I’ve been wiring the lights around his new swimming pool. When he gets to me I say,
Eight hundred
, which I figure is about right. Tony laughs, shakes his head, looks at the carpenter, rolls his eyes—Eight
hundred
? He reaches out, pinches my cheek, slaps it lightly, still laughing—
Eight fuckin’ hundred dollars?
The carpenter shrugs.
The fuckin’ kid doesn’t think I’ll kill him
, Tony mutters, then peels off eight bills.
That November, back at school, Emily’s now with someone else, and one night we’re all at a party at his apartment. Emily’s telling a story about a friend of her family’s, an eccentric guy who comes to their house for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I’m half listening, eavesdropping from another conversation. Emily’s generally soft-spoken, but telling this story animates her. This guy approaches a woman in a bar and begins chatting her up. After a while the woman says,
You don’t even know who I am, do you?
And he, thinking she might be famous, says,
Should I?
She answers,
Well, you should, you bastard, you married me.
The story seems somehow packaged, unlikely, the punch line about being so out of it you try to pick up your ex-wife too wacky. Emily’s telling the story, in part, as a cautionary tale, of the fate that awaits us as would-be writers—this guy calls himself a poet. When Emily says the man’s name I listen harder. When she says he’s a failed writer I down more of my beer. This eccentric friend had related the story of encountering his ex-wife around her family’s dinner table. Her family had laughed, entertained by their friend’s outrageousness. One of his parlor tricks over the years had been to read aloud the love letters women had written him. They remembered the young wife, asked about her, but this was all he knew, this random encounter. I watch Emily’s face. She said he drank too much, that he’d spent time in federal prison, had fallen off a ladder onto his head, that his memory was gone. He claimed to have written a novel but no one had ever seen it. She says the name of the novel—
The Button Man.
The party moves to other stories, its white noise washes over me. I sit back in my armchair, look at each face, try to piece it together. Emily and I had gotten together over a year before, had stayed together for a while, were still close. And now my father, who I don’t think about much at all, aside from the infrequent letter, turns out to be a close friend of Emily’s family. Her parents, I will later learn, are Ray and Clare, whose names I’ve never heard before, though they remember me. After a few minutes I tap Emily’s shoulder.
That guy you were talking about,
I say,
that’s my father
. I’m known to not always speak the truth, but still she stares at me in horror.
I’m serious
, I say.
No one would notice Jonathan wandering upstairs as Ray and Clare’s annual New Year’s party rages below. Maybe he’s looking for a free bathroom, maybe a little air, a place to clear his head. All night he’d tried to down a glass of water between drinks, pace himself. He stands before the sink and checks his eyes in the mirror. How long can he hold his own gaze? Does he look as loaded as he feels? Tonight the mirror is unkind, makes his face so haggard. But his cheeks have the flush that always comes, makes him look rugged, his hair slightly mussed.
A party, for chrissakes, let’s get to it
. He can hear the girls singing below, angels calling him. He wakes up with his cheek pressed to the tile floor.
Must’ve dozed off
. The party below is winding down. He moves through the house, he knows the girls’ rooms. He will just stop by to tuck them in, to say how much he enjoyed their song, but his heart’s beating so loudly.
Jonathan had lived with Ray and Clare, off and on, for years. Even if not invited he would appear, drive his cab from Boston to Ipswich, forty-five minutes away. Ray would always welcome him, got a kick out of his hijinks. If Jonathan had money he was generous, especially as far as liquor was concerned. He’d arrive with a couple bottles, put them on the table with a flourish, drinks all around. I learn all this from Emily. More often than not, as the years passed, he’d arrive penniless. More and more of his things were kept in their basement, or in boxes left with other friends. In this way he could travel light, have a change of clothes waiting, a razor, a toothbrush, a book to replace the one he’d finished. In Ipswich he kept a suit at the dry cleaner’s, used it as his storage. He’d drop off the one he was wearing, change into the clean one right there. They knew him at the dry cleaner’s, he left Ray and Clare’s phone number, they would call Clare sometimes—
I’m not sure where he is or when he’s coming back
, she’d say. But he always came back, eventually, to pick up his suit, to clean himself up, to stay a few days—always optimistic, the work on his novel always going well. At one point Ray even set up a room for him, with a desk and a typewriter, so he’d have a place to write. Emily remembers him coming by for Christmas one year, he called that morning, had nowhere else to go. Emily, the youngest, barely ten, but she could see that Jonathan was trying very, very hard to be appropriate. As the girls got older it seemed less and less of a good idea to leave them alone with him. If they got close he growled. If you left him alone in the house too long he’d get into the liquor and drain it. The girls would come home from school to find him passed out on the floor. Or worse. One Fourth of July Clare baked an elaborate cake, something for after the fireworks. In the middle of the afternoon Emily came in from the barbecue to find Jonathan passed out on the couch, a hole gouged in the center of the cake, chocolate smeared on his face, his hands, the couch itself.
Is this man ever going to leave?
Emily wondered.
The night I found out that Emily knew my father, knew him better than I ever would, we went back to her room. I don’t know what she said to her boyfriend, or if we told our friends, but she wanted to show me her record collection, the albums she’d pilfered from her basement, some that had my father’s name on the cover. I recognized his handwriting from his letters, his unmistakable scrawl. We’d danced to his Zorba the Greek album at parties, I’d even put it on, but had never noticed my father’s name on Zorba’s face, his arms raised, a kick-step.
(1982)
Thanksgiving. Back home for the long weekend for the holiday and for a friend’s wedding, I accidentally leave my notebook in the bathroom. In it I had begun a story about a woman who works two jobs and tries to fit in a couple hours between each to be with her kids. This woman wants her kids in the kitchen with her while she cooks, wants them to tell her about their days. The kids sit on the counter while she chops carrots. I didn’t get to the part where it becomes clear that those moments they had together between her jobs were precious. I hadn’t gotten that far. My mother must have read it while I was at the reception, and while I’m downing shots my mother begins her suicide note. She begins by writing how she has just finished reading my notebook, about how perceptive I am. Two weeks later she finishes the note, when I’m back up at school, getting ready for exams. After swallowing a fistful of painkillers she goes for a walk along Peggotty Beach. An hour later she comes back home, groggy. “I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,” she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms. On the last page of her four-page note she writes how she loves me and my brother and her father, before a voice comes into her head—
Why don’t you use the gun?
These are the last words she will write.
The day after she shot herself I’m shown this note at my grandfather’s kitchen table. Two friends had driven me home from Amherst the night before. My step-grandmother tries to console me, says the note shows my mother had been deranged in some way, not in her right head, but I know it was the drugs taking over her mind, the overdose that made her hand tremble, the letter almost unreadable by the end. My brother and I find fifty thousand dollars in her safe-deposit box the next day and this same grandmother points out that my mother had always been frugal, that she must have saved it over the years. I explain that it’s drug money, money she’d skimmed off her laundering favors—her cut, so to speak, blindingly clear. The money itself is troubling. The story I’d told myself was that she’d been tired of working so hard, tired of being poor, yet here was fifty thousand dollars, squirreled away, doing nothing.
Two weeks later Emily and I drag a Christmas tree into my grandmother’s living room. It’s a year since we found out who we were, and we’ve been together ever since. My grandmother reaches up to embrace me, whispers loud enough for Emily to hear,
Did you swipe it, Nicky?
After Travis left I’d continued to pick up our tree at midnight from St. Mary’s, but until this moment I didn’t know my grandmother knew, all those years. My mother’s barely ash. I’m twenty-two.
I swiped the tree after reading a self-help book that said not to make any life changes after a major trauma, to keep doing what you’d always done. I would have gone back to work for the gangsters, but the gangsters had all been arrested. Everything had fallen apart over the past year, after they’d begun flying cocaine in, and started using it, and got sloppy. Even my mother began using, leaving cut straws in her glove compartment, I’d find them when I was home from school, split them open to lick out the bitter residue. And now this car is mine, the first new car she’d ever owned, a Subaru wagon. I park it and never drive it again.
I reappear at school at the end of January, hollowed out by it all, but I don’t know where else to be. I return to my room off-campus, in a house with four “radical” women, my friends, who taught me, finally, how to be a vegetarian. I enroll for classes, show up on time, but I can’t seem to focus on the second half of Shakespeare, the comedies. Or on eating. And I can’t stop crying. At one point a few weeks into the semester I find myself slumming in the Frost Library at Amherst College, reading Faulkner in one of those comfortable Ivy League chairs, and after a while I realize I haven’t turned the page in over an hour. I focus on a sentence, a word, and get hung up—each seems to have its own set of problems, its own code, until at some point I understand that I’m holding the book upside down. I right it, but even then my mind gets entangled, a sentence comes at me like a truck without a driver, bearing down—
It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she don’t even call trouble
—I try to get out of its way, I turn it over and over, but it’s more an echo than a piece of something larger. My eyes go to the period and back to the first word, it means something more than I can unlock.
Wasn’t any woman…got her into what…she don’t even call
…I know then it will be impossible for me to finish school.
In an overlit room, standing before one of several windows, like in a bank, a registrar informs me that in order to withdraw without flunking I need to have an extenuating circumstance. I whisper that my mother just killed herself, but maybe this woman’s hard of hearing, she squints and shakes her head as if she doesn’t understand, so I repeat it, but still she doesn’t understand, so I say it again, and again, each time a little louder, until I nearly scream it.
Only a shrink can get me out of school without failing this late in the semester. The health plan allows ten visits, one per week. The doctor’s about my age, perhaps slightly older, his face untroubled, eager. A resident, working off his required hours at the university clinic. At our first meeting we look across his desk at each other for a long time, until he asks me how I’m doing. My chart, which I’d filled out a few minutes earlier in the waiting room, lies in front of him. I know he can read that my mother has recently taken her life. How am I
doing
? He nods. I smile and turn the question over in my mind. I begin to point out that it isn’t really the right question, but start to laugh before I can finish, and keep on laughing, a laughter that builds on itself. How
am
I doing? He might as well ask,
Would you like more pebbles in your shoes?
or
Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?
I’m laughing like a goddamn hyena at this point, and each time I look at his face, now clearly riddled with concern, now aware that he’s perhaps in over his head, confronted by a truly deranged person, a madman, it makes me laugh harder, falling-off-my-chair laughter, painful, side-splitting laughter, gasping for mercy, tears streaming down my cheeks, only fueled more with each glance he makes toward the doorknob. Afraid of
me
? I can barely put one foot in front of the other, I read books upside down without knowing it, for chrissakes. At the end of our session he says I can come as often as I like, every day if I want. I imagine I must have finished at least the ten sessions, for eventually I leave school without failing, though I remember not another moment with him.