Authors: Matthew Quick
“What do you mean?”
“You’re happy. I’m happy. Let’s not push our luck. Just be happy with Portia independent of us. I’m fine. You’ve already done enough for me, big brother.”
The truth is that while I love my sister, and I really do, carrying her financially and emotionally has been draining. The break Johnny Rotten provides is somewhat of a relief.
And so when Portia gets her own place in Collingswood, a little two-bedroom apartment above a flower shop on Haddon Avenue, I gradually move most of my stuff over there. She sets up a small sofa bed in her office for Tommy, so that he can sleep over whenever Danielle asks us to babysit, which is often. Even though I am still paying the rent on the Oaklyn place, Tommy tells me that Johnny Rotten’s been staying there more and more.
Tommy doesn’t like jumping back and forth between the two apartments, but he’ll get used to it, and to Danielle’s new boyfriend, who seems okay, from what I’ve observed. If he makes my sister happy, well, then I’m all for that. And so I tell Tommy, “Look for the good in this guy. He may just surprise you.”
Portia’s writing a novel now. That’s what she does all day long.
I’ve never met anyone before who was writing a novel, and now my girlfriend is a full-time fiction writer, which makes me proud, I have to admit. It seems so glamorous, even though no one is paying her to write this book, it’s just something she does alone in a room. She says she can get an agent when she finishes and then that agent can sell the book to a publishing house in New York City—“a real one,” she’s always saying. She reads books about how to do it and chats with all of these other writers on the Internet, which makes her hopeful.
Portia works with her door closed and always covers the laptop screen with her hands whenever I knock and stick my head in. She says she can’t talk about her book because the talking will rob her of the creative energy she needs to write, which sounds a little like bullshit to me, but what do I know. She even wears this lucky hat when she’s working—it’s a pink Phillies baseball hat that they gave her for free on ladies’ night at the ballpark when one of my customers slipped us tickets as a tip. The writing makes her so joyous—
she seems determined and driven—that it probably doesn’t really matter what she’s wearing or doing in that room. It’s all good, as far as I’m concerned.
Late at night, after she’s had a few drinks, she’ll talk about how she first decided she wanted to write a novel back in Mr. Vernon’s class, and how the world knocked the belief that she could do it out of her.
“How does that happen?” she says. “You can’t look back and pinpoint an exact moment when you give up on your dreams. It’s like someone stealing all of the salt from your kitchen, one tiny crystal at a time. You don’t realize it for months, and then when you see that you are low, you still think you have thousands of little crystals left—and then bam, no salt.”
Sometimes when she talks like that I feel stupid, because I don’t think about the world the way she does, and yet I love Portia, so I nod and agree. I feel completely lost when she asks, “What do you think about that?” and I can’t think of anything to say.
But she never seems to mind. Portia says I listen to her and “don’t piss on her dreams.” She never really talks about her husband directly—it’s sort of a taboo subject—but I’ve been able to infer that he made her feel stupid and small and weak.
Apparently, when they were in New York City, Portia told Mr. Vernon that she would publish a novel and dedicate it to him, and now she thinks that if she can keep her promise, Mr. Vernon might discover her book, read the dedication, and maybe it will save him after all.
That’s her new great hope.
Portia Kane’s latest master plan to save our old teacher.
We asked the Oaklyn Police Department for information on Mr. Vernon, but by law they weren’t permitted to share any developments or details, or so they said.
Late one slow night, when it was just Jon and me at the bar, he finally admitted after four or five pints that he had driven Mr. Vernon to the Amtrak train station in Philadelphia, and that was the last they heard of him. Because our former teacher had committed no crime, they didn’t even ask him for any of his information.
“It’s damn hard to see a grown man crying the way he was that night, Chuck,” Jon said, staring down into his golden pint of Budweiser. “Shit. Especially after all that had happened to him. So I gave him a ride across the bridge in the cruiser. It’s what any decent person would have done. You would have done the same thing.”
Portia and I have both googled our former teacher’s name many times, hoping to see “Mr. Nathan Vernon” listed on some high school faculty roster somewhere, or at least find some evidence that he’s still alive and didn’t actually go through with the suicide pact that he apparently made with his dog, according to Portia, which seems bizarre. Portia claims Mr. Vernon’s dog actually held up his end of the bargain by jumping out a second-story window, if you can believe that.
In the public records we find that he sold his house in Vermont, so we can’t even go looking for him there.
But no other new mentions of Mr. Vernon’s name ever appear on the Internet, just references to his teaching at HTHS and his being attacked by Edmond Atherton years ago.
It’s a consolation that we never find any evidence of his death either. Portia says that there would be some sort of official record, an obituary or a listing.
She’s always so optimistic when she says this, so I never bring up the fact that many people die every day in this country without the media printing their names—just ask any former junkie who has spent time on the streets, where last names don’t matter and people vanish into thin air on an hourly basis. According to what Portia
found out from his since-deceased nun mother, Mr. Vernon had no known family left to even pay for an obituary to run in a paper. He could also have killed himself in some remote desolate place where his body would never be found, or even in some back alley in a bad city neighborhood.
But as I hear Portia clicking away on her laptop, often until late at night, I know exactly what hope is fueling the writing of her novel, so I keep my darker thoughts to myself.
I want to preserve whatever harmony we have for as long as I can. My life has never been better.
Besides bartending at the Manor and taking Tommy places with Portia, I spend the summer applying and interviewing for jobs as an elementary school teacher. What I have going for me is that I’m a man applying for positions that are almost always filled by women, so I’m a bit of a novelty. What I have working against me is that I’m forty-two and have relatively little teaching experience.
My CV is mostly a huge blank.
Here’s what I have to show: strong recommendation letters from my college professors and the cooperating teachers and principal of the school where I did my student teaching, a portfolio of work from my students that includes happy child drawings of me looking like a super educator, and several samples of six-year-old writing that often proclaims me “the number one teacher in the world.” That’s a direct quote from Owen Hammond’s penmanship sample that I proudly include because it took us two months of encouragement and hand-over-hand coaching to get the little guy to stop writing his
S
’s backward—one of the finest accomplishments in my entire life, if I do say so myself.
All of this goes over well enough, but the interview will inevitably arrive at the uncomfortable part where they ask what I did in my twenties and early thirties. I have no suitable answer for that, because when choosing role models for small children, you don’t often hire men who used to shoot heroin as a full-time
profession. I can’t exactly discuss the many nights I passed out behind Dumpsters with a needle sticking out of my arm or the times when the cravings were so intense that I robbed homes for cash and jewelry. There are dozens of nights I don’t even remember. How I was never arrested, I can’t tell you. So when we reach that part of the interview, I usually just say something vague like I was still trying to find myself or I got a late start with my calling, and then I shrug and laugh in a friendly way. The interviewers never laugh back, and I’ve failed to get the job six times already this summer.
I’ve been extending my potential commute to ninety-plus minutes each way to increase my chances as I scour the Internet for job postings, so no one can accuse me of a lack of effort. Portia keeps saying, “Something will turn up. I’m absolutely sure of it,” which is both encouraging, because she’s so understanding, and infuriating, because her husband’s money affords her the ability to be so nonchalant about the fact that I have no real job, no health insurance, and no equity at all. Why he hasn’t cut her off yet is the biggest mystery of my life these days.
From time to time I ask Portia if it’s not weird that we are living together so happily—making love now on a regular, healthy, and exciting basis—when she is technically still married to another man.
She always laughs and says, “Don’t worry about him, because he’s a complete asshole.”
And when I try to push it, asking when she might actually file for a divorce, she always says, “Are you not having fun?” which makes me feel like I’m rushing her and also that she is just playing at love with me, which is my worst fear. But I keep telling myself to let things develop organically, although I worry about Tommy should Portia ever leave us. I’m not sure he could handle it.
I also worry that the seemingly endless supply of money Portia has access to will dry up and leave us unable to pay the bills, but I know it’s not my business to ask about her situation, especially when she’s not charging me any rent, which allows me to keep paying for Danielle and Tommy’s place.
If I get a real teaching job, that’s when I’ll have a serious talk with Portia about money and our future together. How can I bring up the subject of cash when I am contributing so little?
My Narcotics Anonymous sponsor lives in South Carolina now, but we still talk on the phone regularly. His name is Kirk Avery, and he’s about twenty years older than me. When he first agreed to be my sponsor, I thought he would give me all sorts of advice, like a life coach. I think I was secretly hoping for a Mr. Miyagi who would share ancient secrets and teach me how to solve all of my problems, give me a cool antique car, kick the asses of all my enemies, and even get me hooked up with the hottest woman around. But Kirk turned out to be just a regular American guy who likes to go deep-sea fishing and paint little portraits of random things found in anyone’s house—a toaster or a bottle of Windex or a shoehorn or a roll of toilet paper—which he posts on his website and actually sells. It’s like he’s Andy Warhol or something, except he’s the most normal guy in the world otherwise. He was an accountant by trade, but he just retired recently. And he’s never really given me any advice at all. He just picks up the phone when I call, like he promised he would back when we were first paired up.
“That’s my job,” he said. “Just to pick up whenever you dial my number. And it’s the most important job a sponsor can take on.”
I thought he was insane when he said it, because it sounded so ridiculous. How could simply picking up the phone matter? I learned quickly just how much it mattered when I started calling him at all hours of the night because I wanted a fix and my life was falling
apart. He’d stay up with me, just listening to me babble on and on about all of the stupid shit I was angry and worried about. And the monologues I delivered were so long that sometimes I’d stop and say, “Are you even still there?” and he’d always reply, “Eternally,” which I didn’t really understand at first, but now, in retrospect, I’ve come to see that Kirk Avery is the rare sort of man who keeps his promises, and I needed that type in my life more than I realized.
Every Christmas he sends me a four-inch-square painting, and I have them hanging in Portia’s and my apartment now, over my dresser. These are all random things too—a fly swatter, a corkscrew, an electrical socket, hardly the type of art most women would agree to hang in their homes. But when I explained that these were from my NA sponsor, and that simply looking at the little squares of art helped to keep me on the straight and narrow path, so to speak, Portia told me to hang them up right away, wherever I’d draw the most strength from seeing them. I chose the bedroom, because the nights can be bad sometimes. These little paintings are a bit like Tommy’s Quiet Riot mask for me. It’s not what’s actually painted that matters, but that the little artworks have arrived and continue to arrive with a regularity that I didn’t think possible for most of my life. I like to count them in the middle of the night, like the tree rings on a stump, knowing that I’ve been sober one year for every little picture, and that Kirk Avery has been a witness to each hard-fought drug-free trip around the sun.
There are eleven paintings on my wall.
I’ve been asked to be a sponsor myself, but I haven’t taken on that responsibility yet. I didn’t think I could handle it when I was recently clean, and then Tommy arrived, and I immediately wanted to give him all I had—the best of me.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m kind of like Tommy’s sponsor, even though he’s not an addict, and I hope he never will be.
One day in mid-August it’s too hot to be outside, and Portia’s in her office typing away as usual, so I decide to call Kirk Avery because I haven’t spoken to him in months.
“Mr. Chuck Bass,” he answers now without saying hello, because my name comes up on his cell phone, and I remember when I used to call him mostly from pay phones, my front right jeans pocket bulging with silver coins that each bought me a few minutes, back before either of us had a cell. “Tell me that you’re still clean and sober.”
“I am,” I say. “One hundred percent.”
“Congratulations, friend. It’s a clearheaded life for us.”
“How are you?”
“Well,” he says, like always, and I have spent many a night awake and thinking about how Kirk Avery rarely leaks any details regarding his life. He’ll tell me about some fish he “fought,” spending hours reeling in, or how many paintings he has recently sold on the Internet, but nothing else. Maybe that’s all part of the sponsor gig, making it about me and not him, but it’s weird how much I care about Kirk, when I know so little about the man. “What’s up?” he asks.
That’s my cue to tell him what’s on my mind—to get to the point of the call. It used to bother me, how direct he always is with me, but I’ve learned to appreciate the efficiency.
So I tell him all about Portia’s lax attitude toward her husband and how I can’t find a teaching gig, even though I technically graduated last December and now have six months of subbing experience under my belt, during which I kissed the ass of every administrator within eyesight, but the interviews always ask about the past. “I mean—they make you submit your goddamn life history on a piece of paper.”
“Use it to your advantage,” Kirk says.
“How?”
“You beat heroin. You can do anything if you can do that.”
“So you want me to tell them I was an addict?”
“Have you not been going to NA meetings for more than a decade now?”
“Yeah, but it’s different when you’re being hired to work with kids. It’ll scare them away.”
“I’d rather my son or daughter be taught by an openly reformed and honest addict than a liar with a shady past he’s afraid to talk about.”
I see his point, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to sit in those boardrooms at the end of a long table, being grilled by suits.
“How’s Tommy?” he says, uncharacteristically changing the subject before I’m through.
I tell him how Tommy doesn’t like Danielle’s new boyfriend, who I really don’t know all that well. “He seems like an okay guy, but he has these sleeve tattoos that make it hard to tell if there are any needle marks. And yet Danielle seems normal enough lately, so I don’t know. Tommy’s fine.”
“Remember,” he says, “you need to keep yourself healthy first and foremost. You can’t be your sister’s keeper for her entire life.”
“You know, sometimes I feel guilty,” I say, “because this new life with Portia—it’s like heaven.”
“Don’t overthink it. Just let it be heaven,” he says, almost Mr. Miyagi–like.
And I wonder if it can be that easy—just enjoying Portia without worrying too much about Danielle and Tommy and Portia’s marital status and how the rest of the world views my bank account.
“Hey,” Kirk says, “you’ve
earned
your sobriety, fought hard for it, fair and square, and that’s more than most people can say. Don’t
be embarrassed of your accomplishments. You think Tommy cares that you were once an addict?”
I wonder what the little man will think once he’s old enough to understand what that means—how low I once sunk—and I worry about it sometimes too. But I’ve already taken up too much of Kirk’s time, so I don’t say anything.
“You ever hear from that teacher of yours again, the one who left the party?” he asks.
“No,” I say, embarrassed yet again.
“Maybe you will yet.”
“I don’t know.”
“Life’s funny, Chuck. People surprise you sometimes. And don’t let anyone convince you different.”
“Thanks,” I say, though his bringing up Mr. Vernon makes me feel even worse about everything. Then I add, “Hope you catch some big fish and sell tons of paintings this month.”
He laughs. “Roger that. You good?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though I’m not really all that great, and then we exchange good-byes and hang up.
Like always, I think of a million things I could have asked the mysterious Kirk Avery if only I had more courage, but maybe it’s like I don’t want to mess with a good thing. I don’t want to back him into any bad corners that would make him think twice about picking up my next call.
He’s been my one constant since I quit heroin, and a constant is a powerful thing.
I spend the rest of the day listening to the clicking of Portia’s fingers on her laptop and the steady buzz of her headphones playing the classical music she likes. She’s become obsessed with some cellist named Yo-Yo Ma.
I wonder if all her typing will really help Mr. Vernon in the
future. I definitely hope that it will, but I also worry that Portia is actually going to be able to help Mr. Vernon in a way I never could, and while I realize it’s petty and low to be competitive like that with the woman I love, it is also hard to imagine her successes while I continue to fail.
Her determination and belief in her abilities are a little daunting, to say the least.