I left responsibilities and routines behind with my wedding china and crystal, part of the scaffolding that had propped up my married life. It was a shelter I'd constructed from scraps of conventional wisdom, papered over with pretty magazine pictures, and glued together with sheer wishful thinking. When I met Patrick, it all came down in a jumbled heap. Suddenly, none of it made the slightest bit of sense to me. I didn't know why I was dressing for success, or saving for retirement, or drinking enough water, or not going to bed angry. I stopped working, planning, and counting. I slept too little, drank too much, took up smoking. Why not? My whole life was on fire.
I stayed in the smoldering ruins for a while, too sad and too scared to move on. Then I left, bringing my sadness with me because it was familiar by then, like the smell inside my husband's raincoat, which I kept, alsoâas if I needed it in the high desert of central Mexico where Patrick waited. A few months of sun and alcohol drew the dampness from my soul. By the time our money ran out, I was ready to resurface. We headed back across the border to the United States, where I began to enthusiastically embrace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was carefree, and altogether careless. Earlier that winter, I'd gone with some girlfriends on a weekend road trip to Dallas, hellbent for leather, with no thought for what might happen to me if we got pulled over on the interstate, somebody's joint in the ashtray, a temporary visitor stamp in my passport. In a tattoo parlor in the nightclub district known as Deep Ellum, I got my navel pierced.
“You're bleeding a lot,” the guy who skewered me remarked. “Been drinking much this weekend?”
I'm in a tattoo parlor in Deep Ellum on Sunday morning, getting a hole bored through my belly button, I thought. He needs to ask if I've been drinking?
When I arrived back at our apartmentâhours late, clutching a bloody gauze pad to my stomachâPatrick took one look and assumed I'd been mugged and stabbed. Even after I calmed him down, he was less than titillated by my antics. He had been glad to see me throw off the pall of guilt and grief, but he was beginning to consider the tiger and its tail. What spurred his proposal, several rocky weeks later, was the fear that he was losing me. In my experience, one of three suggestions almost always gets floated as a life preserver whenever a serious relationship starts to founder: get married, have a baby, or buy real estate together. Any one of those propositions is challenging enough under ideal circumstances, but that rarely stops people from thinking that the solution to an already complicated situation might be to make it more so. I was sure Patrick's sudden desire to get engaged sprang from the same last ditch as my estranged husband's insistence that we should start thinking about having children, just before we finally split up.
“You'd be a bad mother anyway,” he shot at me, when I couldn't agree that babies were a priority. It was in those last bitter days when he would throw any words that would cut me, and I let him, because I absolutely deserved it, even when he hurled his scotch glass across the room in blind frustration one night, aiming for the wall, and it broke across my forehead instead, to his grief and horror.
It was a very small cut, but the physical pain was a relief. Here, at last, was a feeling that was simple, direct, and honest. I didn't want it to go away. The throbbing spot on my temple was the nearest thing to lucidity I had felt in a long time. We stooped together to pick up the bits of broken glass, our heads bowed, as if in prayer, over what was shattered and couldn't be put back together; the awful mess I'd made. He was a gentle and kind man who adored me, and I was making him crazy, because I had fallen in love with someone else, and I could not let either man go. I was a bad wife. Of course I would be a bad mother.
Patrick, looking from the outside in, took my part when I wouldn't, gallant as only the interloper can afford to be. But now the triangle had turned, and he found himself in my husband's former corner, while a poet I'd met at the open mike occupied his. I told myself it wasn't cheating. Or if it was, it was covered by my preexisting state of adultery, and I could just slip it in under general faithlessness. I rationalized that my relationship with Patrick was elastic and expansive enough to handle me testing my wingspan. But even as I raced breathlessly from “meeting” to “meeting” with my poet friend, even as we kissed hungrily, backed up against a table strewn with the drafts of our poems we were ostensibly “meeting” over, I knew I was being stupid. I'd used up all my allowable karmic tax deductions where cheating was concerned. To keep repeating the lesson was to be willfully remedial. The piercing in Deep Ellum was my attempt to snap out of it. I needed to get lucid.
The poet had his own reasons to not be stupid. When I came back from Dallas, we agreed to end it before the furtive make-out sessions went any further and things got out of hand, a distinction I had yet to demonstrate any aptitude for making. I was barely through patting myself on the back when Patrick found out about it anyway.
It was one thing for me to decide it was over between me and the poet. Being told it was over was another. After all, Patrick was the one who had come along and busted open my pretty, safe life, insisting I deserved to be free. Who was he to shut the gate now? Maybe it was over, and maybe it wasn't. We fought about it for weeks. He wanted a promise of fidelity, and I didn't want one more thing in my life that could get broken. But then he smashed his three-thousand-dollar Martin guitar into a tinder pile of splinters and unlashed strings, to illustrate the point his words weren't driving home: something had gotten broken anyway. The guitar was the only object of value he'd kept through our cataclysmic affair, which had cost him his house, his job, and his savings. It was the last thing he had left to sacrifice, the final installment of my ransom, and he was ready to walk away.
It was a repeat performance of a one-act melodrama. New man, different props, same me. I was tired of driving nice guys crazy. I was a bull, and all the world a china shop.
I knew I had to assume some responsibility for my life and for my relationships. I decided to take another stab at monogamy. I was even willing to find a job, if it would keep me busy and out of trouble. The risk of idleness was worse than the threat of deportation, so I put the word out among our drinking associates that I was looking for work. Our drummer friend, Hollywood, a weathered and whiskered reprobate in the mold of Levon Helm, sent me to a blues shack down by the tracks, the venerable Whitewater Tavern.
As far as anyone knows, the Whitewater has been in Little Rock longer than Jesus, and its “corner crew,” the shift of hardcore regulars who cling to the corner of the bar with the tenacity and devotion of old-world Catholics at daily Mass, sprang out of the red dirt with it. Its hymnal is the blues. Hang around awhile and you will hear “Stormy Monday” in more variations than should be musically possible or musically desirable. The place cycles through phases of vogue. Every few years, a new generation of white college kids rediscovers it, and it becomes the fashionable place to demonstrate one's authenticity and hipster cred. New management comes in with new ideas. “Stormy Monday” goes out, replaced by punk, or pop, or rap, or whatever music the hot new band in town is playing. The corner crew hunkers down; smokes, drinks, waits. The band gets signed and goes on tour, the kids move on, the band breaks up, the place burns down. Somebody plays “Stormy Monday.” Repeat. The Whitewater Tavern
is
the blues.
The trough between “kids move on” and “place burns down” was where I came in.
“I may be from southeast Arkansas, and I may talk slow. But that don't make me no
dumbass
.”
Roy, the man who hired and trained me, had a point. Depending on who you asked, and how you defined it, he and his business partnerâalso named Royâmay or may not have been a couple of dumbasses, but no one could blame it on geography if they were. The term “good ole boys” may have originated in the South, but the South doesn't have a monopoly on the type. I was perfectly at home with the Roys. The mill town I grew up in was full of guys like them, country boys who swaggered into the city with grandiose plans and dodgy schemes. True, Roy did talk excruciatingly slow, but his drawl actually made him seem a little more refined. With a face as broken as a sailor's, and the body of a roughneck, he came across as brutish until he opened his mouth to speak in that deep Delta accent, the lazy beat of a cat's tail as its metronome. It was rumored that they had done all right for themselves in certain cottage industries, and were in the bar business to branch out. I made it my business not to know.
They hired me on as a cocktail waitress, essentially working for tips. My belly-button ring was investment attire. I worked in low-slung, bell-bottom jeans, with a halter top knotted at my bosom, and towering platform heels. My hair, formerly styled in a preppy bob, had grown long past my shoulders. There was no trace of the earnest young woman who had played dress-up in pencil skirts and blazers and toted a briefcase up and down the elevator to a job at the Board of Trade, just two years earlier. This work felt more real, and in a way, more respectable. The correlation between the effort I put out and the cash in my back pocket was direct and immediate. I had to hustle.
“Hold it HIGH,” Roy bellowed at me, a cigar held askew between his teeth, my first night on the floor.
He gestured to the tray of drinks I clutched at waist level, and mimed the proper technique with one huge paw fully extended over his head, palm open to the ceiling and fingers spread. It seemed counterintuitive, but he was right. The tray was much easier to balance that way. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, along with other tricks of my new trade. Some were taught to me, like how to mix a perfect dry martini by chilling the glass with a shot of vermouth on ice, then dumping it out and pouring the gin or vodka over the trace that remained. Other skills I figured out on my own, like at what intervals a shot of whiskey would give me my second, third, and fourth wind without slowing me down. I was a good waitress, though I had a hard time counting American money in the dark, since it's all the same color. Customers must have wondered if my impairment was mental or visual, as I held each bill up to my eyes to read what value was printed on it before giving them their change.
Patrick took up a regular position at the bar, becoming a kind of staff stringer, helping out at the door and with closing before we took off for the after-hours clubs. Sometimes inventory had to be bought out of cash receipts. The Roys handed a wad of bills to him one night and sent him down to the nearest liquor store with a list. It was a rough neighborhood, so they gave him a pistol.
“Better take this,” they told him.
“For what?” I asked, furious when I found out, “for someone to shoot you with?”
I had sidled up to the wild side, but in my mind, there was a line, and illegally carrying a gun crossed it. Partaking in the endless buffet of meth and cocaine crossed it. Too much booze crossed it. I didn't want my wings clipped, but neither did I want to crash and burn from flying too high. The Whitewater was full of addicts and fugitives with one demon or another at their backs. That wasn't free living, any more than a life of rigid convention was. The corner crew was looking less colorful and more tragic to me with each shift. It had been fun, but I couldn't avoid real commitments and responsibilities indefinitely. Except that I saw that I might, and that scared me more than all the guns, drugs, and booze put together. It was closing time.
Patrick had been content to let his knee-jerk marriage proposal drop, once I decided to consolidate my attentions. We were very happy together, and I didn't see how a piece of paper could add anything to our relationship, but I was in danger of wearing out my welcome with the U.S. government. I may have been an adulterous whore, but I was still too much of a nice Canadian girl at heart to stomach the life of an illegal.
I held out hope that my estranged husband would file for divorce from Canada, where it would be automatically granted after we'd lived apart for a year, but it was no surprise when the anniversary of our separation agreement came and went with no decree. We spoke once by telephone when I was in Mexico, long enough to know he wasn't inclined to do me any favors. It was time for me to go home and dispose of the remains. I flew back by myself to handle it.
In a courtroom I testified that yes, those were our names on the petition. Yes, we were married. Yes, we still lived separate and apart. It was our wedding ceremony in negative, the bride attended by absences. No dearly beloved, no rings, no troth, no thee. Just me. Divorce granted. I wondered if I should call my ex-husband to let him know we had been unmarried that day, if that would be courteous or cruel. I got his voice mail, and left a message, telling him one more time how sorry I was.
I flew back to Little Rock, and we made plans to get married, quickly, quietly, and without fanfare. I thought we might do something a little offbeat, elope to Las Vegas, or a country wedding chapel. It would be a second marriage for both of us, Patrick having divorced the year before we met. It was only four years since my big white first wedding. I lost a year of my life to obsessing over stationery, orchids, and stemware patterns; sashayed down a red carpet on my father's arm, all my doubts bound and gagged with a white satin bow. I suppose I thought if it looked like a fairy tale, it would end like one. I spared scant consideration for what came
after
happily ever after.
This time was different. I loved Patrick, he loved me, and that was enough. We didn't need to decorate it. But since he had proposed once to me already, I thought it would be nice to return the compliment, so I surprised him with a ring. He accepted it, but popped his own question again anyway before giving me my engagement ring, a deep green tourmaline for a stone instead of a diamond. Suddenly, we were engaged twice. Ironic, for a couple who'd insisted all along that we didn't need a ring.