Brightness Falls (49 page)

"Cruel food," said Delia.

Jeff reached over and held her hand steady as she lit a cigarette. All the campers' hands shook because of the medications they were on, or the ones they were coming off. Mickey then explained that he was going to patent a slingshot-shaped stick designed for use in institutions such as this one. Designed to support the unsteady wrist, the crotch of the Y-shaped stick would be upholstered with fabric in a psychologically neutral color.

"I'll make millions. And I'll fly my private helicopter over my father's terrace and piss on him while he's sunbathing."

Dr. Taylor appeared in the food line, a rare public appearance, reminding Jeff of his absurd session this afternoon.

"You think Caitlin left you because she didn't like your dog?" he'd said. "That seems a little simplistic."

"'Any man that loveth me must also loveth my hound.' Sir Francis Bacon.
Not
the painter."

"You're speaking metaphorically?"

"Woof woof."

Out in the sitting room amidst the other antiques, blue-haired Babs Osterlick and busty Evelyn Salmon sat at their usual stations observing the exodus from dinner.

"There's that nice tall boy."

"Jeffrey."

"Hello, Jeffrey."

Jeff waved.

"That one comes from a good family," Babs said. "His people have a place next to ours on Mount Desert Island."

"A lot of the drunks are from good people. Is he a drunk or a nut?"

"Drugs, I think."

"I like a tall man."

"Such a pretty girl," said Babs as Delia wandered out a moment later. "Lovely hair."

"But skinny," observed Evelyn. "The boys like more up top."

"Where's everybody going," Babs asked presently. "Is it time for the movie yet?"

"The drunks have to have their meeting first."

"What is the movie?"

"I hope it has that young actor... what's his name?"

"Warren Beatty."

"No, the other one. The naughty one."

"Jack something."

"That's it."

Delia joined Jeffon the porch, where he was smoking a solitary cigarette before the evening AA session.

"Do you hear voices," she asked.

"Now?"

"I've heard that writers hear voices."

"I try to," he said. "Lately I don't hear much of anything."

"I do."

"What do the voices say?"

"They tell me I'm a bad person. They tell me to do things."

"What things?"

"Sometimes they tell me to hurt myself."

"I have a voice like that. The junk monster.
Feed me, feed me."

"Is it a boy or a girl voice?"

"It's sort of a growl now, but it started out as this torchy feminine whisper that used to sing outside my window, lure me out into the night. Desire calling."

"I like you," she said, with the unabashed directness of insanity.

"I like you, too."

"I like your friends Russell and Corrine, too. I didn't used to think so but now I do. They have a bright green aura."

Jeff took a long drag from his cigarette, then looked into her eyes. "They're
nifty,"
he said after a while. "Ah, yes."

"There's somebody else inside my body," Delia said.

Jeff nodded, as if to say that this was often the case.

Then it was time for AA.

After supper the depressives received their second meds: particolored pills in a Dixie cup. Delia got lithium, Nardil and Thorazine, plus a multiple vitamin. Hers was one of the heavier meds. The people in substance abuse, who were denied medication, envied her. The doctors were still tinkering with the balance on her meds. The week before, she'd almost gone through the roof of Glover House when the Nardil finally kicked in after eight days. When she failed to respond the first week they kept upping the dosage until finally she woke up at five one morning declaring that she was the handmaiden of the Lord, and she had to be kept under restraint for two days.

The AA meetings were held in Carlyle House. Jeff, Delia and Mickey traditionally occupied the same chairs in the back right corner. It seemed important to observe a routine.

Halfway through the hour Mickey elbowed Jeff's ribs. "Did he actually say his name was Brit Hardy?"

The newcomer looked like a Brit, with his chinos, button-down pink oxford shirt, thick blond hair that looked as if it had been walked through by the athletic, unringed fingers of girls named Sloan and Kelsey.

"There was one night that sort of nutshelled the whole thing," he was saying.

"
Nut
shelled," Jeff queried.

"I'd just done a huge deal where I brokered the sale of a bauxite mine and I realize I've made like a couple hundred in one day, and so of course I buy an eight ball to celebrate. So I'm sitting around my loft with my girlfriend, who happens to be Miss Brazil 1985..."

Confession as another form of self-assertion, Jeff thought, indistinguishable from bragging. Each time the alcoholics recounted their war stories the bottles multiplied and the mounds of cocaine grew until the entire process seemed an extension of the intemperance and excess that had brought them here in the first place. It was bullshit just like therapy was bullshit just like everything else. We're all drowning in it, Jeff thought, and choking on it.

That night, the day before he left for Frankfurt, Washington took the train up to visit, overcoming, he insisted, a profound fear of self-improvement and the philosophy of abstinence. "Do the visitors got to take a drug test," he asked on the phone. He and Jeff shot pool in the game room, talked about what a pain in the ass Russell had become. Jeff felt at ease for the first time in months. The mutual feeling was that he'd been busted.

* * *

Delia took a walk, her first unescorted stroll in weeks. Suspecting that her privileges would be revoked at any moment, she wanted to test her liberty more than savor it. She was not used to being alone, and she was not entirely sure she liked the idea.

Half an hour before curfew she walked from Glover House up to the main house, taking the long way around, past the tennis court and the chapel. The air was cold and sharp, and the moon was nearly full. Little needles of frostiness pricked the insides of her nostrils and her lungs; the black metal posts of the lanterns that marked the footpath were glazed with white. The lanterns were spaced at ten-foot intervals, and when she half closed her eyes they seemed to shoot off rays of light, like picture-book stars in a long curving constellation that marked the bridge into another galaxy. She opened her eyes and continued up the path, passing a lantern in which the glass was broken. She walked by the tennis court and had almost reached the chapel before she turned back, without understanding exactly
why,
drawn almost against her will, telling herself she wanted just another look and imagining a purely theoretical aspect to her interest—curious that in an institution where such care was taken to banish sharp edges, here in plain sight was a potentially deadly weapon—thinking that she would take a look and make sure of what she had seen and of course if you tell someone they can't have something they will become fascinated by the proscribed object, even obsessed. She could feel a tingle of illicit anticipation as she approached the broken torchère, checking behind herself to make sure she was unobserved, feeling the rhythm of her steps to be inexorable now, as if she no longer had anything to do with her motion or direction. Something was guiding her. She could hear a voice calling her back. It was the sweet, seductive voice. The one that was nice to her.

Still there: framed in black metal, two whiskery slivers of glass flanking a long, flamelike shard. Her breath became labored as she stared ... a hot flush rising to her face. For a moment she was paralyzed, as the attraction to this object was counterbalanced by everything else she could feel.
Take it.
She stepped forward and pulled the piece of glass out of the metal frame, bending back the wire crosspiece and wiggling it back and forth till it came loose. She held it up to the light of the moon. A beautiful object, the shape organic like a teardrop or a flame. Go
ahead.
She tested the tip of the flame on her fingertip, drawing a tiny red blossom to the surface. She heard a chorus of voices whispering in her ear, swelling toward a weird crescendo of morbid affirmation. She'd heard them before, the last time. She was supposed to tell Dr. Taylor the next time.

Slipping the glass into the pocket of her parka, she looked into the whispering shadows that surrounded her.

Back in her room, Delia buried the shard deep in the soft soil of the jade plant on her windowsill. While she slept that night, the crystal she had planted in the soil grew into a perfect red rose. The rose shed a tear, which turned to glass and tinkled as it hit the floor. The blossom began to speak to her in a smoky, throaty voice. The rose wanted to be picked. Delia knew it was against the rules, and she shivered with excitement as her hand moved through space toward the trembling petals, but the fat nurse woke her up and it was morning, again.

"We used to have this expression."

"Who?"

"Me, Crash, Wash."

"Crash is your friend Russell?"

"Right, we'd say we had to feed the dog, which meant getting high, getting drunk, getting laid—all the lower appetites. When we first came to the city we used to think we could do anything, we used to stay up all night feeding the dog."

"You used cocaine?"

"Of course. The fun was never going to stop. Even Corrine had her own feisty little dog, sort of a schnauzer. I think it died. Russell had a big one, we had the big old hounds that used to run and hunt together. Russell's has gotten fat and happy, I guess, sprawled on the rug in front of the fireplace whacking its tail on the floor once in a while when Corrine calls its name or rubs its head."

"So the cocaine led to the heroin."

"I don't know, what the fuck does that mean? You try to fill the big empty. You find a name for your yearning—call it God or money or Corrine. You call it literature. Call it heroin—or junk, smack, downtown, scag. Heroin most of all, because it swallows all the others. You don't hurt, you don't even feel. It simplifies and incarnates your need, and it becomes everything. You fall into the arms of Venus de Milo."

"You'd compare God to drugs?"

"I don't think I can explain this to a man who flower-arranges the medical magazines on the cofFee table."

The doctor gazed benignly into Jeff's face. "Why did you say Corrine?"

Jeff shrugged.

"How are you coming on Step Eight," Tony asked one night at dinner, playing the AA sponsor. "You made your list of the people you hurt?"

"Who needs a list? I have perfect recall."

"No addict's got perfect recall."

"I hurt everybody. "

"Make a list. You're going to feel a lot better when you ask their forgiveness."

"I doubt it." Lord, Jeff thought, let this cup pass from me.

"I guarantee there will come a moment when you feel nearly overwhelmed with shame and grief for what you've done to yourself and the folks around you. And when it does, you're about to feel better. Count on it. But first you got to ask for understanding and forgiveness. Check with me, though, before you do anything drastic. Your head is going to be twisted for a while longer."

"Will you read me a story tonight," Delia asked after dinner.

"I'd like to," Jeff said, "but I'm afraid I can't."

"Please."

The childish simplicity of the request touched him, but he hadn't been able to concentrate on a page of print since detox.

"I keep hearing the voices."

"Okay, I'll try. No promises, though."

That night after meds and evening AA, he carried several books to Delia's room. While most of the inmates tried to personalize their cells, hers was bare except for several plants, obviously gifts, and a spray of red roses wilting in a plastic vase on the floor near the bathroom.

She sat on the bed, rigidly vertical, poised as only a model with ballet training could be, her feet tucked up under her thighs. Jeff pulled a chair near the bed, feeling self-conscious about the whole thing. He would have preferred to close the door to passersby in the hallway, but this was against the rules.

" To begin with the beginning,' " he read, forcing himself to concentrate on the dense lines of print, unsure if he would be able to keep sorting out the letters, forming the words, following the sense. It was the story of a man named Francis Weed, whose airborne brush with death precipitated a loss of faith in the diurnal verities of his life. From time to time Jeff looked up as much to rest his eyes as to check on Delia, who was staring straight ahead, toward the windows. Would she identify, he wondered, with Julia, the wife, "whose love of parties sprang from a most natural dread of chaos and loneliness." He read on through a Westchester cocktail party in which Francis recognized the maid as a prisoner, an accused collaborator, he'd seen after the war; later he embraced the babysitter and fell in love with her. Jeff lifted his eyes up to Delia, but she seemed impassive, enthralled by something far away outside the window.

Then Francis Weed struck Julia, and Jeff worried that he was reminding Delia of her own suffering at the hands of men. But she was either completely absorbed or completely oblivious. He read on through as Francis insulted his neighbors, yearning for the girl and through her for some other life: " 'The feeling of bleakness was intolerable, and he saw clearly that he had reached the point where he would have to make a choice.' " Sickened with love, Francis Weed went to the psychiatrist, took up woodworking and tried to make peace with himself and with the single, hedged green acre of life he had been given in which to live.

"Do you think we could ever be married," Delia asked, several minutes after he had closed the book. "I don't mean to each other, necessarily. I just wonder if we're excluded from all that, people like us. It's like you want to believe in that and you can't. You want to have this nice life, but you just see right through it even if you wish you didn't."

"I'd like to go back and try."