My Education (31 page)

That winter, I misplaced myself.

I was not even lost, a condition which still retains something intended. There can be vigor in “lost.” I only slid down, in near silence, from whatever had carried me forward. I slid down like a scrap from some pile on a cart. I slid down, into dusty unregarded margins, and was left behind and forgotten by the flesh part of me, which went on. But the flesh part did little apart from go on. Waking in the morning I was conscious I had woken, a pain so intense that it solved its own problem. It gouged like the edge of a spoon scraping flesh from a pelt, and destroyed what could feel it. Misplacement and void. I must have urinated and sometimes changed clothes. I no more recall these quotidian things than the arias I sometimes mustered, when drunk, such as putting a chair through my downstairs neighbor Donald's front window one night when I came home and found a neat box of my clothes sitting out on the porch. Or, again fenestrating, one night dancing with such fierce abandon at an unknown host's party as to hurl myself into a window and decorate it with a sunburst of cracks. Perhaps the darkness in my soul thus sought light. At the time it more seemed that glass always stepped into my path. I drank, however and whatever I could, and the more I succeeded the more panes of glass boxed me in.

The distinction between sociable and suicidally alcoholic had always been fine in our town, and to cross it was not to attract any fresh attention. That winter comprised a long train of dimly lit, underheated, overcrowded, and overloud rooms in which opposing teams pressed themselves toward or away from a flooded countertop bristling with bottles of booze. Handle jugs of cheap vodka and bourbon and gin, those guests who'd brought their own liters of Jack Daniel's or Gordon's without embarrassment hoarding them under an arm. Casper remained, more than I, in the know about parties, and like one ragged tramp leaving signs for another where a dry bed or a meal could be found he made it his business to keep me informed. One night we'd ascended dark sidewalks in silence, our feet keeping time, and scuffed over some region of gravel and through oversize, institution-like doors and were homing toward noise down a lint-colored hallway before I grew thickly aware I had been there before.

“This is Brodeur's building,” I told Casper.

He turned back to me, where I'd stopped short. “I don't think it's his party.”

“Still.” But like a swollen hand, groping, my mind could not quite make the shape of its worry, although it could feel it.

“Do you want to leave?” Casper said, his voice rising slightly with ill-concealed pique, for he was by now as alcoholic as I, with less money. We still drank in bars every night, but if part of his night was supplied by a party he'd accomplished a savings.

“No,” I demurred, though anxiety dogged me the rest of the way—never quite making contact, because as I've mentioned my self had gone dead in my gut, but bothering me all the same.

The party was not at Brodeur's but directly next door, if I wasn't mistaken—although the old factory building, with its vast, windowless, cryptlike halls, duplicated itself every way that I looked. Still I felt sure I was looking at his door, 1F. An annex to the party, a slumped group of comp lit and art history mingled, had unrolled like a tongue outside the door to 1G. “Greetings!” cried Casper in his expansive and fraudulently jovial way.

“It's unbelievably hot in there,” one of them said as they lifted their legs up to let us pass by. “Apparently the windows in this place don't open.”

“Good news for you,” Casper said to me as we went in.

I could no longer enter a crowd without seeing Martha. Her pale cheek's semaphore flashing at me from an opposite wall. The indigo well of her eye as it vanished behind an obtruding shoulder. Now her husband's ghost joined hers to tease me as well, luring me from one hot, crowded room to the next. There was his dirty-blond rooster's tail cresting above better-groomed, blander heads. There the patrician nose swift as the bow of a schooner. The more elusive he was the more doggedly I pursued him through the high-ceilinged tomb-dark apartment as if along the bottom of a canyon already poured full of a refugee column. I couldn't move a step without someone else shouldering into my path. I had come separated from Casper just inside the front door. Reaching the foot of a stairs I went up. Here was a sleeping loft, with a mattress and box spring afloat at the center of an oatmeal wall-to-wall carpet. Hunching, I crept to the parapet and looked over while keeping pressed close to the wall, although without a light on in the loft no one could have seen me. Below writhed the restless congregation of shoulders and heads, but though I'd gained the God's-eye perspective the crowd had grown dim and generic and I could not make out Casper. As oversubscribed as the party was, I was alone. No illicit pair groaned on the bed. No one was locked in the master bathroom. All this upstairs region had been overlooked. Beside the door to the bath was one other, closed door. Opening it I felt for the light switch and locked myself in.

The study. Like the rest of the mezzanine level, low ceilinged, and lacking windows. I sat down in the desk chair and substituted a hunched gooseneck lamp on the desktop for the overhead light. Entering the party I'd taken two bottled beers off the trashed countertop in the kitchen, and then in the crush had not even been able to drink them. Now I did, rapidly and without relish, one after the other. My purse flask was empty and I hadn't seen bourbon to fill it. Books lined the walls corner to corner, and impressed themselves on my attention despite my noninterest. Many repetitions of the words
citizen
and
Bastille
. The apartment must belong to Walter Debrango, the French historian. The noise of the party reached me in the form of an urgent vibration, as if just a few yards away from my underground tomb an enormous drill bit were implacably chewing through bedrock. My tears, always there at the ready, had started to fall. Obeying a strong intuition I yanked open Walter Debrango's bottom-right drawer and in answer a heavy weight rolled away from me with the same noise a bowling ball makes, struck the rear of the drawer, and rolled back. It was a two-thirds-full bottle of Islay. No less weeping I hiccuped with laughter. Sometimes, when I drank, I seemed to dance a quadrille with the world, as if Martha had not in fact killed me but released me to some higher order of grace. I plucked the bottle out of the drawer by its neck. It might sink out of sight if I didn't act quickly. There was a lowball glass pushed to the back of the desk, near the base of the bulletin board, with a rich amber skin of dried scotch painted onto its bottom. I squeaked the snug cork out and drank straight from the bottle. Above the glass, push-pinned onto the bulletin board, a typed index card read
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
and then listed several suggestions, the first
NICK BRODEUR (NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR).

The phone was there. I pulled it toward me and dialed while tipping the scotch bottle into my mouth. “This is Nicholas,” came his remote, courtly voice, though he too seemed muzzed over, as if I had woken him up and he lay with his face half submerged in a pillow.

“It's Regina,” I whispered. Saliva had flooded my mouth in response to the scotch, and tears streamed down my face.

In the same somnolent, unsurprised voice he murmured, “Where are you?”

“Next door. At the party.”

“I hear it better through my walls than through the phone.”

“I'm upstairs. In his study.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Better come over.” With a muffling and rustling he seemed to sit up. “I'll unlock the door.”

Going downstairs again the noise and darkness of the party closed over my head as if I'd passed belowdecks into the engine room of some enormous ship plowing black waters to no one knew where. I pressed for the door and was suddenly out, and faced a different, more numerous gauntlet blocking both of the doors, to 1F and 1G.

“And the bar comes to us!” someone said.

“Regina Gottlieb. Long time,” someone else had begun, as head down, as if this might conceal me, I picked and dodged my swift way from one door to the other and reached for the knob, which anticipatorily opened on Nicholas, dressed in a half-buttoned white Oxford shirt and near-whitened blue jeans with large holes at the knees, his hair looking as though he had filled it with glue, a pale stubble like beach sand contouring his face. His feet were bare, his face calm and exhausted. He looked so like her, my erstwhile lover—in no simple, features-and-coloring way, but in that far more essential, intangible, soul-matter way—that I stood gazing wordlessly at him, scoured by revelation, as if we had not met before.

In perfect silence he stepped back and I followed him in, and the door swung behind me. Just as the latch clicked, the spell broke, and outside the comments erupted like mushrooms.

“Do you think it's a work-study job?”

“I never saw that one listed.”

“That's a job I would pay for. For fifty percent more tuition, you can sleep with them both—”

Then we had passed down his alternate-universe corridor, the mirror of the other, but empty. Here all was still if not silent. The party beat through his walls like a massive irregular heart, and his darkened, austere living room seemed to amplify it. From the sleeping loft above a frail light sifted down, but downstairs his lamps were all off. I still had the neck of the bottle of Islay gripped tight in one fist. I hadn't intended to bring it. Nicholas appeared beside me from the cave of his kitchen with two glasses of ice, and filled them from the bottle.

“From Walter's desk drawer, isn't it. I'll repay him in kind.”

He had a sofa now, floating like a life raft in the middle of the floor. He guided me to it and I sank down at one end and he, carefully, at the other. It faced the enormous and uncurtained windows which framed the black night. I looked there, afraid to look at him, and felt his gaze resting alongside mine, seeking the same void, as if he feared equally looking at me. “I woke you,” I said.

“Not at all.”

“All your lights are turned off.”

“Because I was sitting in darkness. I was enjoying the party that way. With the lights on it was too obvious I was here all alone.” His words, and mine, came at long intervals, between long silences that were not tense so much as replete, with the urgent drumbeat of the party, and our shared distance from and yet nearness to it. And whatever we said seemed like so many reeds we were linking together, to probe the dark air and confirm that the other was there.

“I thought you would be there,” I said.

“I'm not much for parties. I tend to stand in a corner with a fixed smile on, as if I was mildly retarded.”

“I don't believe that,” I said, though I did.

“It's very true.” He paused, and I understood that he would have said, “You should ask Martha,” if I had been anyone else. Instead he said, “I might have gone over if Walter had been there.”

“I thought Walter was there.”

“He's on leave. He's sublet to a visiting Hum Center fellow.”

“Not Gareth.”

“Not Gareth. Another one equally Dionysian.”

“Gareth was last year.”

“That's right. And that dinner was meant in his honor.” But now, and by such small degrees, having each equally led the other, we'd arrived where we hadn't intended—but of course we had meant to arrive there.

Standing before me, he refilled my glass. I was crying again, but without violence now, and with barely a consciousness of my own tears, as if they were streaming because of cold wind. Leaning over, he palmed my face dry and retained my cheek cupped in his hand, analyzing it closely. His palm as always was chapped, sharp with stiff bits of skin, like the deceptively smooth-looking bark of a birch, and I thought of him glovelessly paddling the unsettled North like a Jesuit.

“My beautiful girl, you are starving yourself,” he said quietly.

He made me a strange meal, all out of boxes and cans on a single stove burner, as if we were camping: spaghetti boiled, and then a can of tomatoes, and then an odoriferous can of mackerel, all stirred and mashed together with a fork. “I'm not the cook,” he said, factually, as he set it before me, but something in the unapologetic, utilitarian crudeness of the meal unlocked something in me. Sitting hunched at his unadorned table, at a single place setting, and under his watch, I devoured it. It was possible I'd eaten nothing in two or three days. He had poured us both glasses of wine while I ate and when that bottle was finished he opened another. In the course of it something was shifting between us. The food entered my bloodstream, and my brain and my chest throbbed with power; I felt sobered and even strengthened at the same time as I thirstily swallowed the wine. While Nicholas swiftly grew drunk. So it was that on balance I rose toward him while he sank toward me, until we locked gazes at last, recklessly energized. He was smiling in quiet recognition, as if he'd reached into my mind and were riffling its pages as he did those of books he'd long since memorized. “What?” I objected.

“I wasn't thinking anything at all. Only that the blood has come back in your cheeks.”

“I was thinking the same thing, almost.”

“I'm unusually gratified. I'm rarely of help when a guest arrives hungry.”

“I didn't realize I was hungry.” And then: “You're thinking again of the party. For Gareth.”

“For Gareth among other things. That poor party was meant to serve so many ends. It's no wonder that it collapsed.”

He might have had a fingertip in the soft of my stomach, and I in his, both of us gently yet steadily pushing: who would mention her first? And then, who would feel anger? Who shame? Who the groan of release?

“. . . such as.”

“Such as.” We were back on the couch, with the bottle of Islay and empty wineglasses. Now clean glasses, ice cubes, were forgotten. He poured the scotch into the wine-damp wineglasses, splashingly, for us both. A sort of ruminative growl embristled his words. “Such as, demonstrating our marital ease with each other.” He had as much as named her. I stiffened with mournful outrage—that his claim to her was eternal while mine was so slight he could sit here beside me and feel no outrage in return.