Death Will Help You Leave Him (6 page)

It looked like no
deus ex machina
would be needed. Luz hung back, hidden from the bereaved parents behind Vinnie’s bulk. Jimmy, taking the lead, held out his hand first to Massimo, then to Silvia.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” His voice held a tactful blend of sympathy and respect.

I followed suit. Then came Barbara, who impulsively laid her other hand over Silvia’s as she held it.

“I am so sorry about your son,” she said. “Losing a child— terrible for you.” Even when the child was a scumbag like Frankie.

“You were friends of my son?” Massimo asked. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for coming,” Silvia echoed. “Have you spoken to Netta yet? She is so sad.”

We nodded and murmured as we backed away. I didn’t have to feel ashamed, but I did. One more unwelcome but authentic feeling from the folks who brought you sobriety.

Jimmy heaved one of his ACOA sighs. Barbara’s eyes filled with tears. I hoped she wouldn’t break down. Barbara didn’t cry prettily like Luz. Puffy eyes, a red nose, and a lot of mucus would not improve the present situation. I hoped we could avoid the wife. But the crowd fell away around us, leaving a straight path to where she sat. Enthroned on a gold velvet wing chair, she was surrounded by women of all ages. Two leaned over the back of the chair. Two more crouched at her feet. One had pulled a folding chair close and held her hand. On the other side, a woman enough like her to be her sister rubbed her back. She looked up as we approached, dull misery in her eyes. With automatic politeness, she pushed up against the chair arms to rise in greeting. The women pushed and pulled her down again, conveying with little pats that she had the right to remain comfortable. But we had seen enough. Behind us, I heard Luz gasp.

Frankie’s wife was pregnant.

Frankie had lied about sleeping on the couch. Luz almost fainted. She hadn’t known.

“I want to go home,” she moaned as we propped her up.

“Let’s get her out of here,” Barbara said through gritted teeth. “Now!”

We forged through the crowd. Barbara kept the wilting Luz on her feet and moving. Jimmy’s bulk provided a privacy screen. I scurried around the edges like a pilot fish escorting a shark. Vinnie had disappeared. The rat.

Barbara kept murmuring without conviction that it was all right, it was going to be all right. Somewhere in there she had crossed the line. She’d taken on Luz’s catastrophic life and dragged us with her. When I got sober and she and Jimmy let me back into their lives, I had no idea I would do as much leaping before I looked following Barbara around as I’d ever done getting wasted.

We reached the foyer. The front door looked like the gates of paradise to me by this time. But Luz started tugging Barbara toward a discreet Rest Rooms sign.

“I can’t go outside like this,” she said. “I look like sheet.” Agitation increased her accent.

“Can’t we just go?” I whined.

I hoped Jimmy would talk them out of this detour. But he was whistling through his teeth and looking at his guardian angel, who had hovered above his left shoulder since we were kids. He didn’t always believe in it, but in moments of stress, he checked in.

“You’ll feel better when you’ve washed your face,” Barbara told Luz. “I’m going to pee, and you should too. It’s a long ride back to Manhattan.”

“Yes, dear,” Jimmy said. “She doesn’t have to face that grueling subway ride, though. I’ll call a car service.” He got his cell phone out of his pocket as Barbara drew Luz toward the Ladies.

“You should go too,” she told Jimmy and me, pushing open the textured glass door.

“Thank you for sharing,” I said as the door swung closed behind them. “Come on, Jim, let’s get some air.”

We emerged into the afternoon sunshine. A lot of people had fled the funereal atmosphere inside. Small groups loitered on the flagstone walk.

“Praise the Lord! Smokers!” I nodded toward a tight circle with heads together and the smoke from their cigarettes rising from the center. Collectively, they looked like a wigwam in winter. “Look like a bunch of oddballs, too.”

“Program people,” Jimmy said. “Let’s join the party. Ask them for a light.”

Sure enough, the password was, “Hi, I’m Jimmy, I’m a friend of Bill.” Code. Bill W. was the founder of AA. They eased back and made room for us in the circle.

“Friends of Frankie, too, I guess.”

“Yeah, we were all in rehab with him.” The speaker was a wiry little guy, maybe part Asian and part African American, with a shaved skull that made him look like a very scary baby and tattoos up and down his muscular arms.

“We liked him,” a woman said. “This is such a bummer. I can’t believe he’s dead.” She shook back blonde hair showing dark at the roots. “Hi, I’m Marla.”

We all chorused, “Hi, Marla.”

I understood why Marla was rattled by Frankie’s death. You expect addicts to die. Hell, I had expected to die myself at any moment. But when somebody dies clean and sober, it’s a shock.

“I think I know you,” Jimmy told the wiry guy. “Marshall, right?”

“It’s Mars now, I call myself Mars— the god of war.”

“Mars knew me when I first got sober,” Jimmy told us.

“Before that, man. The TC?”

Therapeutic community. One of those places they locked you in and turned you into a straight arrow who would make a Mormon missionary look radical.

“Oh, right,” Jimmy said. “Of course. That was a hundred years ago.”

“We escaped together.” Mars grinned. “Remember?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “I was there. I did that too.”

Mars and I gave each other a closer look.

“That was you, man? Shit, I guess it is. You was one sarcastic dude, I remember that better than your face.”

“That was you?” I said. “I can kinda see the resemblance. You had hair back then. And skin.”

Mars raised his arms and contemplated his tattoos with pride.

“Now I gots Art, man. That be Art. So you stayed the course, Jimmy my man? From that time in AA, what, ten years ago?” He shook his head in admiration.

“Sixteen,” Jimmy said.

“Not me,” I admitted. “Waited to see how the big guy liked it first.”

They all laughed.

“Woke up last Christmas Day in detox on the Bowery,” I added. That got a bigger laugh. It always did. “Day at a time ever since.”

“Way to go, man,” Mars said.

The others muttered that stuff that sounds so asinine from the outside, like “Keep coming back” and “Easy does it.” Sometimes even I got the warm fuzzies when I heard it. Oh, well, everything’s a tradeoff. My liver for my sense of irony.

“And here I am just gettin’ outa rehab one more time,” Mars marveled. “Seems like I purely like the shit too much.”

“Jimmy! Bruce!”

Barbara and Luz stood framed in the dark doorway, blinking in the light.

Barbara beckoned to us.

“ ’Scuse us a second.” I ground out my cigarette with my shoe.

“You go, Bruce,” Jimmy said. “Bring them over. Tell Barbara I want her to meet an old friend.”

Delegated. Why not? Jimmy had them eating out of his hand. He loved program people. I guess that over the years, AA friends made up for the friend he’d lost. That would be me. Failed best friend and perennial fuckup Bruce Kohler. Not a cheery thought. The black cloud that still followed me around sometimes made its presence felt.

“Ladies. What’s happenin’?”

Luz gave me a wan smile.

“You should have seen this ladies’ room,” Barbara said. “I’ve seen some fancy bathrooms, but this one took the cake. Gold swans on everything— well, brass, I guess— swan faucets, swan soap dish, a swan boat tissue dispenser. But wait till you hear what happened. Poor Luz— it was awful, wasn’t it, Luz? I made her splash cold water on her face, then we went into the stalls.”

“I appreciate the blow by blow description,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t want me to miss anything.”

“Give me a chance,” she said. “It’s important what we did, because we were both still in there when the door banged open and we heard the clatter of stiletto heels.”

“I couldn’t stop crying,” Luz admitted. “I didn’t want to come out.”

“And I was too emotionally exhausted to pull my undies up,” Barbara declared. “So I sat there sort of spaced out, but I snapped out of it when I heard the Brooklyn voices. ‘Poor Netta, I feel sorry for huh,’ the first one said. ‘She was supposed to stop throwing up by the second trimester, but no such luck.’ Then the other one said, ‘Didja see how she was crying? All of a sudden, Frankie is a saint. D’ya think it’s true about him having a girlfriend?’ And the first one said, ‘Well, duh. They found him in somebody’s apartment, and I don’t think it was the cleaning lady’.”

“I was so embarrassed,” Luz said. “I thought I would die if they knew I heard them.”

“They were horrible,” Barbara said. “You could tell they enjoyed dishing the dirt, even though Netta must be their friend. And in between, they’re going, like, ‘Wanna Tic Tac?’ ‘Nah, I got gum,’ and chewing through all of it.”

“They thought I’d killed him,” Luz said. “One of them said, ‘She must have done it, don’t you think?’ ”

“ ‘Must of done. Doncha’,” Barbara corrected. “They were awful women with awful voices. One had a giggle and the other had a snicker, and I don’t know which was worse. The one said, ‘Netta tole me Frankie swore there wasn’t anybody. All those times, he just went uptown to get those drugs.’ And the second one goes, ‘Oh, that’s a great excuse. Don’t worry, honeybunch, I was at the crack house so it proves I love you.’ Listen to me— ‘she goes’— that’s how they talked.”

“Go on,” I urged her. “So she goes, like— ?”

Barbara grinned.

“The snickery one says, ‘Men! When the cat’s pregnant and big as a balloon, the mouse goes and finds somebody else’s mouse hole’.”

“She didn’t.”

“I swear she did. And the giggler says, ‘Pu-lease! I almost swallowed my gum.’ I thought, I hope you choke on it. I suppose there is a silver lining— they obviously didn’t suspect that Luz had come to the viewing.”

“Hardly enough silver to line a toilet seat,” I commented, “but I guess it’s better than nothing. What happened next?”

Barbara hesitated and looked at Luz.

“It’s okay, Barbara,” she said. “I know you think the same. The woman said, ‘She’s better off without him’.”

“There wasn’t much more after that,” Barbara said. “They must have been cousins, because one said, ‘Don’t tell that to Uncle Massimo and Aunt Silvia’ and what a shame when they thought he’d finally gone straight, and the other one said Aunt Silvia might think so but Uncle Massimo was smarter than that and he knew Frankie.”

“They said no more,” Luz added, “but I thought they would never leave.”

“I could hear them messing with the little cut-glass bottles of lotion and spraying their hair,” Barbara said. “Finally, I realized they must both be waiting for their turn to go. There were only two stalls. So I came out. If I hadn’t, they’d probably still be in there yakking and squirting themselves with free products. They were such slobs. They dropped their hand towels on the floor, and they didn’t put the tops back on the lotion bottles either.”

“Then at last we leave,” Luz said. At least she had recovered enough to talk normally. Back inside there, she could barely drag the air up from her lungs. I guess she was in her own kind of withdrawal. She’d been as hooked on Frankie as a junkie is on smack.

“Barbara, c’mere,” Jimmy called out. “I want you to meet somebody.”

“We can leave now, if you want, Luz,” I said. She had had enough for one day. “Jimmy called a car. It should be here soon.”

“Luz?”

“It’s okay, Barbara, I’m fine. I’ll wait for you right there.” She flicked her chin toward the street.

“Leave her alone,” I said. “It’s all right, Luz. If you need us, we’re here.”

Barbara and I went over to the recovery crowd. Jimmy made the introductions.

“My partner Barbara.” Partner, not girlfriend. Nice. Correct. And he omitted the fact that she wasn’t an alcoholic, so they wouldn’t all freeze up.

“You were all in rehab with Frankie?” Barbara nodded toward the building where the body lay. “Poor guy. What could have happened? How did he do in rehab? Do you think he meant to stay clean? Or am I breaking anonymity?”

“No anonymity no more,” Mars said solemnly. “He dead.” The others nodded.

“He didn’t take it seriously at the beginning,” said a chunky Hispanic guy with slicked-back hair. “I roomed with him. He’d been dealing, right?”

The others nodded.

“He played it close to the chest, but I thought maybe he was hiding out.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Mars said, and they all nodded again, the way people do in a meeting when they identify with someone’s story.

“I can’t get over it. I just saw him,” Marla said. “We held hands during the Serenity Prayer. I’m a chronic relapser. I can’t seem to get beyond five months.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mars said. “We heard it before.”

“Fuck you, ballhead,” Marla said without heat. “Ya mother.”

She and Mars grinned at each other.

“We were all in group with him,” Marla said. “He was pretty mokus at the beginning. Like he didn’t know where the hell he was or how the hell he got there.”

“He was angry,” the Hispanic guy said.

“Yeah, but after a while, he started listening,” Marla said. “It was like he wasn’t sure whether or not recovery was bullshit, and he couldn’t decide which scared him more.”

“Frankie was scared?” Barbara asked. It didn’t jibe with what we’d heard about Frankie.

“Not to hear him talk,” Mars assured her. “Big Frankie wasn’t scared a nothin.”

“Right,” said Marla. “Not dealers, not the drugs, not the counselors. Just maybe everything, underneath, like the rest of us. And now— poof! I still can’t get over it.”

“Scared of himself,” a tall black woman put in. If heroin chic turned you on, she was stunning. She pushed up the sleeves of her heavy sweater, uncovering stick-thin arms striped with track marks.

“How about women?” Barbara asked.

“He talked in group about his wife and girlfriend,” she said. “That’s her, right?” She nodded toward Luz, eyeing her with tolerant contempt. “And the other one in there knocked up.” She was sharp. A survivor, like any addict who’s not dead.