The Clarinet Polka (49 page)

She comes out in her bathrobe, her hair wet and her makeup all scrubbed off, and pours herself a gin and me a Jack Daniel's, and after a drink or two, I'm thinking, aw, what the hell, I guess I don't need to eat right away, because it's sure nice and cool in there and we're sailing out on that first rush, you know what I mean? Come on, folks, give us a break here, it's happy hour. Bunch of raw chops laying out in the kitchen, nobody paying any attention to them. Oh, no, that sweet first hour when you're getting loaded is too good to miss for anything as stupid as cooking dinner.

I've seen the show before, plenty, and I should know how it goes, so why does it always take me by surprise? We start off having something you could call a conversation—yeah, yucking it up and enjoying each other's company just like normal drunks, but eventually we shift into Phase Two. Then what's supposed to happen is Connie gets to talk and I get to listen. That's when I start hearing, “Shut up. You're interrupting my train of thought.”

So she's telling me that the only thing she ever learned about sex is that it's totally its own thing. “Sex is supposed to be related to all these other things. Love. Friendship. Respect. Well, that's hogwash. The only thing sex is related to is sex.”

Then for her next act she turns into Connie the Dictator of the Universe, and she's telling me how she'd fix things if she had a chance. You take marriage, for instance. It's one of the stupidest institutions in the world. You're supposed to get everything rolled into one person, but that's just ridiculous. If things were run right, you'd have one guy to hang out with, one guy to screw, trained professionals to raise your kids—and on and on she goes.

Just like always, I'm getting sick of listening to her, and I've heard it all before anyway, and I'm seriously shitfaced by then and thinking how it might not be such a bad idea to get started on the goddamn dinner. So I stumble out into the kitchen to see what I can do with the chops. It shouldn't be too hard. Piece of meat, right? You aim some heat at it for a while and then you get to eat it. She stumbles out behind me, and she's yelling at me because I just walked out on some brilliant point she was about to make.

“What do you do with these things?” I say. “Fry them?”

“Christ, all you think about is your goddamned stomach.”

You're goddamn right. I'd walked in there hungry, and I'd guzzled down a couple beers and a good whack of Jack Daniel's, and my requirements in the nutrient department were getting to be kind of urgent. All that raw meat I just couldn't contemplate, so I started going through her fridge.

“What the hell are you doing?” she's yelling at me.

“What the hell's it look like I'm doing?”

She goes crashing over to the sink, jerks open the door under it, hauls out the garbage can, and starts throwing the chops into it. One chop at a time. She misses with a couple and they go skidding across that clean shiny linoleum floor. “Great, Connie,” I say, “there goes ten bucks' worth of meat.”

She starts screaming at me. I mean full tilt. Like, okay, folks, let's just blow every circuit right out of the system. Some of those old guys that worked at the mill with my old man had pretty foul mouths, but they had nothing on Connie when she got cranked up.

“Hey, honey,” I say, “this is an apartment you're living in here. You do have neighbors, you know.”

There's one of those casserole things way in the back of the fridge, and I pull it out and open the lid and I've hit the jackpot. Leftovers from one of those terrific dinners she made for her husband. Scalloped potatoes and half of one of those little mini-hams. “Get out, get out, get out,” she's yelling at me.

“Sure, honey,” I say. “Right.” I'm banging through her drawers looking for a carving knife.

All of a sudden she turns the volume down on herself. She says in this quiet reasonable voice, “Jim, you're in my space.”

I couldn't argue with that. I was there all right. “Will you please leave now?” she says.

“Sure,” I say, “in a minute.” I've finally located a knife, so I start slicing up the ham. “You know, Connie, you should eat something. You're not looking too good.”

“Didn't you understand what I said? I want you to leave right now.”

“Well, maybe there's something you don't understand, honey. I'm kind of fucked up. Same as you are. And I've had a lot of practice driving drunk, but there's a thin edge you don't want to cross over. You understand what I'm telling you here?”

“Fuck you,” she yells at me. She's jumping up and down and banging her fists on the counter she's so mad. Then she runs at me and starts banging her fists on my chest. I grab her wrists and hold them. She's thrashing around trying to get free, and of course she can't. She looks real surprised. I've got my eye on her in case she decides to kick me, but that doesn't seem to occur to her.

“Connie,” I say, “you be a good girl now.” I let go of her and she jumps back. “Honey,” I say, “we're down to basics, okay? Food. Sleep. Rest and recuperation. Like that. Just calm down. Eat something. Watch the telly or something. I'm getting out of here just as fast as I can. So don't worry about that. And then you'll have your space back all to yourself. So you just cool out now, okay?”

She stands there staring at me a minute. Like maybe I'd just materialized from some alien planet. Then she walks out.

Well, I ate all the scalloped potatoes and most of the ham and a couple slices of bread. I had a big glass of milk. And then it's like somebody hit me over the head with a shovel. I go lurching back into the living room, and I don't make it any farther than the couch.

I wake up and it's pushing one in the morning, and I've got just about the sweetest little hangover you ever saw. What I want is a gallon of water, and I can't even force myself up to get it. Then I remember that Connie has a few cans of pop in the fridge, and when you've got one of those terminal hangovers, wow, those bubbles sure taste good.

So I stumble out into the kitchen and chug down a can, and I'm eyeing these two pathetic chops laying on the floor, and I'm thinking, hmmm, I wonder what happened to Connie. Boy, is she ever going to be one sorry girl when she wakes up in the morning.

To this day I don't know why I decided to check on her. Where I expected her to be was in bed, and that's where she was, but she hadn't got into it. The light on her table was still on, and she was laying on top of the covers. She didn't look real comfortable. Like she'd just fallen over—plunk—and the way she'd landed, that's the way she'd stayed. One of her legs was sticking off the bed—like if she rolled over even a little bit she was going to end up on the floor—so I picked up her feet and swung her over so she was in the center of the bed, and there was something weird about the way her body felt. Like so much dead weight. And then I took a good look at her, and I swear to God I thought she was dead.

What got to me was I couldn't see her breathing. And then I see the pill bottle laying on its side with a few pills spilling out of it, and I'm going, oh, Christ, no, this can't be happening. And there's her glass. Nothing left in it but some mostly melted ice cubes. I'm slapping her face, yelling, “Connie, Connie, Connie,” and nothing. As gentle as I can, I pull back one of her eyelids, and there's nothing but white. I kneel down and put my ear right in her face, and what I hear is nothing.

So I try to find her pulse. It looks so easy when some doctor does it to you—you ever tried to find somebody's pulse? That's when I really thought she was dead. I'm pawing up and down her wrists and I can't feel a damn thing. I pull that bathrobe about half off her and just glue my ear to her chest—right over where I thought her heart ought to be. And there it is. I've got to work to hear it, and it sounds kind of slow, but what do I know about heartbeats? At least she's got one.

She makes this cough noise—no, it's more like a snort—and if I put my hand right under her neck, I can feel the breath going in and out. Very slowly. It's funny what your mind will do at moments like that. My mind's going,
“Zdrowaś Maryjo, łaskiś pełna, Pan z Tobą—”
you know, the Hail Mary.

Then I come back to myself and I'm panting like a dog. I'm telling myself the same thing I used to tell myself in the air force—don't panic, asshole, take it one step at a time. I grab the pill bottle. If you've never contemplated the side of a pill bottle, you'd be amazed at how much is written there. It says, “BRADSHAW, CONSTANCE.” It says, “SECONAL” and however many milligrams it was. It says, “Take one at bedtime. Do not exceed recommended dosage. Do not use with alcohol.” There's her doctor's name, “Dr. Andrew R. Hamilton,” and the date. It says there's thirty capsules in there.

The date's just four days ago. I count eight pills left. That means there could be eighteen or nineteen pills in her. She was drunk when I got there, and she'd been hitting it pretty hard ever since, so there's a fuck of a lot of gin in her too. I'm thinking, Christ, what do I do? Call her husband? Call her doctor? Hell, no, asshole. She could be dying right in front of your eyes. Call Emergency.

They asked me a bunch of questions, and then they said, “Don't try to move her. Don't touch her. We'll be right there.”

Now comes one of the biggest chickenshit moments of my life, and I'm not real proud of it. I got her wallet out of her purse and opened it up to her driver's license and put it right in front of her so they'd know who she was, and then I made my break. I left the door wide open. I went shooting across the back alley—her apartment faced the back—and I found myself a big black shadow and I stood in it. I was already hearing the sirens. St. Stevens is a nice little Ohio town, and those boys were quick. If it'd been South Raysburg, it might have taken them a week or two.

I watched them go running into the apartment, and I watched them come running back out with Connie on one of those stretcher things. I waited till they went roaring away with their sirens going, and then I hit it on down the road for the great state of West Virginia.

*   *   *

By the time I got back to South Raysburg, I was calmed down, so I went in the PAC to use the phone. I called the St. Stevens Medical Center, and yes, she'd been admitted. And she was in stable condition, but unless I was a member of the family, they couldn't tell me anything more than that. The next day I called again, and it turned out that she'd come up a notch and was in good condition. And she had a telephone in her room. She sounded—well, I was going to say flat, but it was flatter than that. She sounded like she'd been
squashed
flat. “I owe you one,” she said.

She didn't know when they were going to let her out. Maybe not for a while. “They think it was a suicide attempt.” Well, gee, Connie, how could anybody ever come up with a totally insane idea like that?

“Don't come here,” she said. “It's not a good idea.” Right. I'd never wanted to meet her husband, and the way things were at the moment, I
really
didn't want to meet him.

The next day when I talked to her, she sounded a little bit perkier. “It's hard to kill yourself with pills and booze,” she said. “Did you know that? I didn't know that. They tell me it's a very popular way to try it, but it hardly ever works. Oh, God, Jim, imagine the worst hangover you ever had in your life and then multiply it by a thousand. Death would have been preferable, believe me.” And she tells me again that it wasn't a suicide attempt, just a stupid mistake. But how you could take eighteen or nineteen sleeping pills by mistake was something I could never figure out. “I've been seeing the shrink,” she says.

I called the fourth day, and she'd been discharged. I called her apartment and she was there. I was a little surprised. I'd thought her husband would have brought her home with him—at least that's what I would've done if my wife had just tried to knock herself off, no matter how estranged I was from her. “I thought you'd be at home,” I said.

“I am at home,” she said.

When I got off work, I drove out there. She opened the door for me and gave me a little kiss on the cheek and said, “Thanks.” She was wearing pajamas—I mean the baggy flannel kind. I never would've figured Connie for a baggy-pajamas girl.

The shrink thought she needed extensive long-term psychotherapy—his exact words if I remember them right. She'd signed up to see him three times a week. The shrink had told her to lay off the sauce, and she was doing okay with that. She hadn't had a single drink. Instead, she was taking these little beige pills he'd prescribed for her. “They make me
feel
beige,” she said.

She kept telling me how it wasn't a suicide attempt. “Christ, everybody must think I'm a moron. If I'd been trying to kill myself, I would have taken the whole bottle, wouldn't I?”

She told me I could have a drink if I wanted, it didn't bother her. She said she was sorry she didn't want to make love, but she just didn't feel up to it. In her beige state, she probably wouldn't be a lot of fun to make love to anyway. I had a drink and said I was cool with not making love and with her being in a beige state. Then these big fat tears started rolling down her face. In her baggy pajamas, she looked absolutely pathetic. “Oh, Jim,” she said, “I know you're going to leave me someday, but please, don't leave me yet.”

*   *   *

For a while I was shooting out to St. Stevens like once a day to check up on her. It was a hell of a time. I was bouncing back and forth between Raysburg and St. Stevens like a Ping-Pong ball, and there was no way I could fit everything in. When you've got to sacrifice something out of your life, it says something about you—what you decide can get sacrificed and what can't. I could miss some work—even though that meant money—and I could miss hitting the weights with Mondrowski, but I wasn't going to miss seeing Janice. If I left the shop in the middle of the afternoon, and if everything went okay with Connie, I could be back in time to catch up with Janice in the evening, and— Hey, this is funny. You know what? I was spending so much time driving back and forth, most nights I didn't even have enough time to get good and loaded.