My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (25 page)

As dusk fell, thirteen of my mom’s longtime meditation students showed up at our door, one by one—the kind, centered, understatedly spiritual folks who, since my childhood, had played the part of my extended family, since we had no blood relatives within a ten-hour drive. Every year, after the potluck feast is over and everyone’s stuffed, we all sit around the living room, playing our family’s 1983 edition of a game called Scruples, where you read ethical questions off of a card and try to guess how each person will respond. “Okay, this one’s for Davy,” said my mom’s good friend Karen Shill in her musical Cape Town accent. “‘You suspect a neighbor’s son of vandalizing cars. When confronted, he admits his guilt, but begs you not to tell, for fear of corporal punishment. Do you inform the neighbor?’”

I chewed on that for a second. “Yes,” I said evenly. “Let the son of a bitch fry.”

The house phone was ringing. Since it was already past eleven I figured it was probably for me, and scrambled out of the room to answer it in the garage, which had been converted years before into the meditation hall where my mom taught her classes. Kori was on the line. She sounded shaken. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Is everything all right? What happened when the police came?”

“I’ll tell you about it in person,” she said. “What are you up to tomorrow?”

“I’m going to Toronto to see my girlfriend.”

“Oh. Okay.” She paused. “What time are you leaving?”

“Like three. I gotta drive to Windsor, and I’m taking the train from there.”

“Shit. Okay. Well,” she said, “I’m working lunch, but how ’bout when I get off I give you a ride to Windsor?”

“Yeah, if you want to. That’s cool.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

“Wait, hold on,” I said. “Is everything cool? Are we in trouble or anything?”

“Jesus.” She took a deep breath. “A guy is dead.”

“Shit. I know. Look, I know, okay? I’m sorry.” I could see how, from her point of view, my fear of the cops seemed petty, but the dead guy had been dead long before I found him, I was pretty sure, whereas I still had plenty of years ahead of me and didn’t want to spend any of them in prison just for being shady and stupid at her behest. At the same time, a part of me felt shrouded in darkness, like I’d killed the guy myself. Cheating on Tasha was one thing—one fucked-up thing, yes, but just one medium-sized fucked-up thing, and, no surprise, this wasn’t the first time it had happened. But the other thing—pushing the guy back into the pool, no matter how dead he was—I was having a hard time spinning that one to myself.

Kori sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait, can you bring my hat?” I asked her. “It’s my favorite hat.”

“I’ll bring your fucking hat,” she said.

*

The next day, a cold front moved in, and the featureless gray sky promised snow. Around quarter after three I watched through the front window of my parents’ house as Kori’s truck pulled into the driveway. I walked outside with my gym bag full of clothes, slid into the cab beside her, and gave her a hug. “Want me to ride in the back, under the tarp?” I asked.

“Very funny,” she said.

We headed west on 94, past Rawsonville’s abandoned auto plants and salvage yards. Peering over at Kori as she fiddled with the radio and hit the blinker, shifting back and forth between lanes, it was hard to make sense of the fact that all of the crazy shit we’d done in her cousin’s bedroom was real, and not some demented dream. Kori told me the police had been at her aunt and uncle’s house all Thanksgiving morning and half of the afternoon. The dead man’s name was Clint Wilkerson III. He was a veteran, forty-three years old, had had some problems with drugs and alcohol, and had twice served time for burglarizing homes. He lived with his mom and sister in a trailer park through the woods behind Kori’s aunt and uncle’s house—this, I knew, was on land that had once been a drive-in movie theater called That’s Entertainment, where as a kid I’d seen
Jaws
and
Gremlins
. The mom and sister had been called, Kori said, and they’d come by the house, spoken to the detectives in the front yard for a while, then came inside, sat in the living room, and wept. They’d asked Kori about what had happened, and she’d repeated the story she told the police—that she’d come outside for a late-night beer and had spotted him in the water. The police assumed he’d been watching the house, knew that Kori’s aunt and uncle and their kids were out of town, and had planned to break in but had fallen into the pool instead, too drunk or high or panicked to pull himself free. But Clint’s mom and sister told Kori, privately, that they felt it was suicide. Clint’s ex had just moved to Mobile, Alabama, with their two sons. “He was acting so strange,” the mom told Kori. “He kept telling me and his sister how much he loved us. He kept saying, ‘If anything happens to me, take care of my boys.’ Like he was back in the service, headed overseas.” They hadn’t seen him in a few days, and thought he was staying at a friend’s place over in Jackson.

“Did the cops say how long he’d been in the water?” I asked Kori.

“No,” she told me. “They said the medical examiner would be the one to know.”

We passed the Detroit airport, planes lifting off and disappearing into the gloom. “I’m going to the funeral,” Kori said. “It’s Sunday.” She was starting to cry a little.

“I’m sorry I can’t be there with you,” I said, touching her arm.

She pulled her arm away. “No, it’s okay. How would I explain that? Tony will be there.”

“Right.”

Detroit’s elegant, sage downtown skyline came into view, beaten up but still standing strong. Kori asked if she should cross the Detroit River to Windsor over the bridge or through the tunnel.

“Tunnel’s faster,” I told her. In the dark of the tunnel, fluorescent lights strobing over Kori’s face, she began to really cry. I took her hand in mine on the center console. “It’s okay,” I said. “I promise, it’ll be okay.”

On the far side, from the comfort of his immigration booth, a Canadian officer in dark glasses asked for our IDs. It occurred to me that if by some chance the cops
were
on my trail, fleeing to another country would look really, really bad. But of course, more likely, Clint Wilkerson’s death had already been filed away as an accidental drowning and the detectives assigned to the case were at home with their families, eating leftover stuffing and downing scotch.

“How long will you be in Canada?” the customs official asked, elongating his vowels like any good Ontario native.

“Just the weekend,” I said.

“I’m just dropping him off at the train station,” Kori added. “I’m not going with him.”

“Reason for your visit?” he asked me.

“Visiting my girlfriend in Toronto. She writes for the
Toronto Star
.” Even when I’m guilty of nothing, I reflexively invoke specific details when talking to authorities out of some faith that it will deepen my story’s aura of integrity.

“Your girlfriend, eh?” The officer stared through Kori’s window, between the two of us, where our hands were joined, down by the gearshift.

I pulled my hand away. “Yeah.”

The officer smirked and waved us through.

At the VIA Rail station, Kori pulled to the curb and said, “Well, have a good trip.” Her eyes were still wet, and in that moment, as we said our goodbyes, she was more beautiful than she’d ever been. I leaned in and put my hand on the back of her neck and we shared a long, intense kiss.

“You know we can never do it again,” she said. “You know, the other night.”

“Of course not,” I said. And we didn’t, not for two years, and when it did happen again, it was just once—I was dating another girl, and Kori had moved on from Tony and was living with another guy.

We traded another little hug and I bailed out of the truck and slung my gym bag over my shoulder. “You know how to get back to the U.S. side?” I asked.

“I’ll figure it out,” she said. “Say hi to Toronto for me.” She flapped her hand at me.

“Will do. Peace out.” I walloped the door shut and headed for the train.

*

There’s a certain kind of hangover that lasts two days. The second day is actually worse than the first, because on the first day you’re still slightly drunk, and you can kind of coast through, but on the second day you feel the way I felt now—dizzy, sad, and profoundly exhausted, dead to the world. I found a window seat and the train chugged out of the station, eastbound through empty factory yards and dried marshes, as night fell.

Slumped to the glass, my own bald, red-eyed reflection stared back at me from inches away. I closed my eyes, feeling small but persistent waves of guilt, remorse, and nausea lapping at me. How could I have done what I’d done? Tasha was an angel and deserved none of my careless, reckless damage. There was nothing cool or playa-listic about my ability to deceive her, it was purely sociopathic. I wondered how something that had seemed so thrilling, adventurous, and deeply enticing at the time—on the ride to Kori’s aunt and uncle’s house in the back of her truck—could later feel so absolutely sickening, once the liquor had finally worn off. I liked that my life was at times unpredictable and mad, and that I’d learned how to craftily feed my addiction to new experience, but I hated that I was a liar and a cheat and a fucking fraud. I hated Kori, too, for being as awful and deceitful as me, and dragging me into the mire. I thought of Clint Wilkerson III, drifting facedown in the pool, while inside, ten yards away, I fucked Kori from behind with my finger in her ass. Acid, rueful tears welled from deep within me and burned the corners of my eyes and I pawed them quickly away.

I made a series of promises and compacts with myself—I would never do this shit again; I would respect the woman I was with; I would drink less, because drinking, I knew, was too often what threw open the gates and welcomed the storm. All in all, I knew how lucky I really was: I’d fucked up—many, many times over the years—but still I had a beautiful, smart girlfriend waiting for me once my train reached Toronto, and as long as I could get my mind right, I could dig in fresh when I arrived, slate clean. I’d turn over a new leaf, like my friends that had kicked eating disorders, gambling, and heroin, but without all the pesky meetings and rah-rah Jesus bullshit.

Past London, Ontario, I dozed off for about forty minutes, and when I woke up, my hangover had magically lifted. I still felt faded, but no more than after a night closing down any bar, though I also had a spiky kink in my neck tossed in from sleeping with my head at an odd angle. The darkest parts of the last thirty-six hours—Kori’s howls as I fucked her, her vagina’s vinegar smell, the dead man’s waterlogged body and vacant face, gummy to the touch—had all been expunged from me, or if not expunged, just heated to a thousand degrees and melted down into one strange, vivid, and unshakable image—that fat-bodied, wiry-legged, blacker-than-black tarantula in its black-lit purple tank, staring out at me. The train screeched and squealed along the tracks and blasted its deafening whistle as we hurtled through Toronto’s western suburbs, while I sat rubbing my neck, looking out the window, lost in the vision of that gigantic, terrifying goddamn spider.

Tasha was there waiting when I stepped off the train, and we kissed and whisked off in a cab to an art opening on Queen Street, where a friend of hers from work was showing off canvas-sized drawings of robots fighting samurai warriors. The gallery was mobbed with friendly hipsters and young professionals who cried each other’s names out and traded funny hugs, careful not to spill each other’s wine or plates of crackers and cheese. A guy in horn-rimmed glasses and an argyle sweater chased his friend down and shoved a handful of pretzels and Pepperidge Farm goldfish down the back of his collared shirt.

“I’ll kill you,” shouted the victim merrily, whirling into a karate pose and continuing to silently move his mouth, as though he were an actor in a Japanese movie that had been dubbed into English.

“Not if I kill you first!” shouted the guy in the sweater, facing off against him, while the crowd circled around them to watch their mock combat.

I made my way to the far end of the gallery and stood inches from a painting, my back to the room, my eyes even with the gleaming tip of a samurai’s sword, savoring the prickly sensation on my tongue and in my throat as I took down a full glass of white wine. Alcohol is the nectar of the gods—every cut, rip, puncture, and abrasion of the soul is mended once the first drop hits.

“There you are!” said Tasha, coming up beside me, grabbing my arm above the elbow. “I thought I lost you for a minute.” She gave me a look. “I am so sorry. We don’t see each other for weeks, and the first thing I do is drag you to a place with, like, nine hundred of my friends. We should really just find a place to be alone, huh?”

“Yeah. That would be nice.”

Her brow furrowed. “What’s wrong? Did you get hurt? Why are you rubbing your neck like that?”

I dropped my hand; I hadn’t realized I’d still been rubbing it. “It’s nothing,” I told her. “It just hurts. I think—I think I got bit. I think I got bit by a giant spider.”

“Aww,” she said, her eyes going soft. “You poor thing. Give it a few days. It’ll go away.”

I smiled down at her, brimming with feeling. “You know, Tasha, I really love you.”

“What do you mean ‘really’?” She pretended to be mad. “Like ‘actually’—like you didn’t really mean it all the times you’ve told me that before?”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I told her. “I just mean that I love you a lot. I
really
love you.”

“Oh.” She smiled, looking deep into my eyes. “Well, guess what? I really love you, too.”

Some folks fall in love gradually; for me it always happens in an instant. I was at the airport in Albuquerque, headed for California, when I saw a beautiful and sweet girl dressed in white, maybe twenty-three years old. I watched her at the check-in counter—she was sad but radiant, and she moved and spoke delicately, like an arctic bird on a fragile bit of ice. With her was a gumpy guy in a hot-pink
NO FEAR
T-shirt. He was pestering the lady behind the counter with questions about the plane: Was it a 747 or a 767? The lady had no idea, but he was determined to pry an answer from her. I prayed that this guy was not the boyfriend of my sweet girl. It seemed inconceivable, and yet I knew the world was filled with strangenesses, so it was hard to say. The pair finished their business at the counter and, to my delight, said goodbyes and headed off separately. I noticed for the first time that the girl was wearing a cumbersome plastic boot on her right foot, as though she’d broken a bone or torn a ligament, causing her to lurch and sway with each step. This effortful gait, combined with her sad glow, twisted something in me, and my heart hurt, and I was in love.