Slut Lullabies (15 page)

“Aren't you coming with me?” I say.

She looks up. She is biting her lip, not really crying anymore but sniffing in a somewhat theatrical manner. She does not quite look at me, but says to the air, “It's all right. I think I'm going to stay awhile longer, until I sober up. You don't have to worry about me.”

Phillip keeps staring at me. “She'll be OK,” he says. “It's still early. Just go on home now before the crazies start coming out.”

I keep looking back at her until I reach the door, but she doesn't meet my eyes. Not once.

It is eleven when she comes in to work the next day. I am silent, trying to swallow the need to ask her what we are going to do with our letters of resignation, which are sitting in my top desk drawer. She smiles a weak smile at me as she goes to her desk. Her hair is messier than usual.

At lunch she comes to my desk and waits for me the way she always does. We are quiet in the elevator, but as soon as we get outside, she says, “I know I shouldn't have done that last night. Please don't lecture me. There's just such an attraction between Phillip and me that I couldn't resist it. It doesn't affect how I feel about Jeffrey.”

There is a long silence during which I am sure that she imagines me to be struggling with my moral stance against adultery. I cannot think of what to say. When I speak, I say, “That was him, wasn't it? The third important man in your life. The one besides Geoff and Jeffrey?”

“I have such a weakness for him,” she says. “No matter how long we spend apart, we're always drawn back together. God, you should see his apartment here. The painting he was thinking of buying last night wasn't even half as expensive as most of the art he owns. You should have come with us. Larry wasn't so bad once he sobered up.”

The sudden realization that I have no idea what is going on hits me. “Look,” I say, “maybe it's a bad day to resign.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” she says. “I don't know if I can afford to be unemployed just now. Jeffrey is trying hard to save, but his expenses are making it difficult. As soon as he's saved some more money, we'll do it. That will give you a chance to save, too.”

“So did you have a good time last night?” I do not say,
Besides your crying fit
. I do not say,
Did you actually sleep with that guy?
I do not say,
Don't you see what's going on?
I do not say,
Who are you
?

“Phillip puts me through an emotional wringer,” she says. “But he's just a very honest man; he says what he feels. He has the power to draw me out, to make me see things I don't want to see and act in ways I don't normally act.”

Geoff, a limp penis, and two women tumbling around on a bed to please him.

“Like a Svengali?” I venture.

“Exactly,” she says. “Do you see? We understand each other so well.”

Van tells me one of his students has written a story about a girl with a tracheotomy, whose English teacher breaks into her bedroom at night and makes love to the hole in her neck.

I bum one of his American Spirits because they give me a buzz. “So does this chick have—”

“No, but she has a prosthesis on one arm with a big-ass hook on the end of it,” he says.

“Not really the same thing.” I wave randomly so threads of smoke snake around us. “The metaphor is totally different. A hook is
dangerous
—being fucked through your tracheotomy is . . .” I ash Van's sleeve. “About as submissive as it gets.”

“The teacher dude says ‘y'all' every time he speaks in the story.”

I start laughing; I choke on my smoke. All these American laws against public smoking were, it appears, created for me.

“I wanted to give them artistic freedom,” Van says. “I said they could write anything they wanted. I don't want to buy into censorship.” He downs his Jameson shot and signals Conrad for another. “But I don't want to get in trouble. Think I should arrange a meeting with her and explain that I have to wait till the class is over before we can fuck?”

I met Van in the Critical Theory seminar that ultimately convinced me to drop out of my graduate program. Since I could no longer work, I was tinkering with pursuing a Ph.D. Van was only auditing the class. He's a composer by aspiration, a translator by trade, and an English instructor at UIC because, despite his utter inability to make even a dent in his own musical career, he has managed with less than minimal effort to publish two novels with a cutting-edge press in a small Illinois college town he would not set foot in for the book tours. His contributions in our seminar consisted of a drawled blur of Marxist posing and a tendency to break into occasional French that only our professor, a Derridean, understood. I used to mock Van with my best grad school friend, Tina. We drew pictures of his gigantic, fleshy mouth and got the giggles. By mid-semester, Tina was sleeping with him, and I was forced to give him rides back to Wicker Park in my car. We lived only a block away from one another. Somehow I started hanging out here, at the Artful Dodger, where he tends bar. My husband, Mark, never accompanies me.

Mark and Van have met only once—when Van went up to Mark, pulled at the back of his shirt collar, and said, “I know this shirt is from J. Crew.” The shirt was in fact from a London shop called Next, and its label indicated as much, but nothing Mark said could dissuade Van from believing Mark “owned a J. Crew card.” Needless to say, Mark, despite not being entirely sure what J. Crew was, knew he was being insulted and will no longer agree to be in Van's presence. Thus far, however, he has said nothing to the effect that my being in Van's presence in any way interferes with his integrity.

I don't like to fly. In the past four years, I have been on twenty-two airplanes, two of which have made emergency landings. I maintain three separate physicians, none of whom know about the others, to assure always having a prescription for Valium.

Mark's closest friend, Diego, has a pilot's license. He owns a plane, but it resides in New Jersey, where Diego's mother lives. Diego lives in a German town called Garching that boasts the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in an apartment with an ornately carved metal ceiling and numerous chunks of moldy cheese on cracked plates that rest on every flat surface. The last time I was at Diego's, while Mark chatted in passable German to Diego's twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, I did tequila shots with Diego on the kitchen floor beside one such plate; I kept expecting a rodent to race from under the cabinets to claim the cheese. An hour later, I fell asleep with my face on the toilet, and sometime after that, I vomited calmly into one of Diego's T-shirts, carefully refolded it, and left it at the bottom of his bed. Nobody had seen me puke, so if I'd had the presence of mind to tuck the T-shirt into my tote, I could have left without anyone being the wiser.

As it was, I woke at 5:00 AM next to Mark in our hotel bed, head and heart pounding, staggered to the phone, and slurred an apology to a half-asleep Diego, who said only, “These things happen.” Mark later explained to him that I can't hold my liquor because I'm on too many painkillers for my back. Diego took me aside privately and asked if he could snag a few of my painkillers, and I gave him ten—unlike Valium, there are always more where they come from.

Mark is a little in love with Diego. Diego's apartment is full of photos of his adventures: safaris, skydiving, waterfalls, mountains. Mark fancies himself the kind of man who would lead a similar lifestyle of moldy disarray and life-risking excitement, if he hadn't ended up married. Diego is more handsome than Mark, despite being more than ten years his senior, but Mark is handsome enough. They are both blond and chiseled, and Mark is actually taller than Diego, although Mark is losing his hair. They both come from educated families; Mark's parents are scientists, whereas Diego's mother is a professional sculptor who named her towheaded infant Diego as a sign of solidarity with third world class struggles that had never touched her. My mother is a secretary, and my father was a bartender. They each dabbled in jazz, my father playing sax and my mother singing, but that ended long before I was born.

It is probably true that without my back problems, including the expense of alternative medical treatments and my inability to hold a proper job, Mark would have his pilot's license by now. It's something he's always talked about doing. But it comforts me that even if he were to climb to the Everest base camp or jump out of a plane, he'd still see the world like a scientist. He would clinically pursue activities that give human beings adrenaline rushes; he would chart them in his repertoire of experiences and, though not visually-oriented, might even hang some shots on the wall. But he would still be
Mark
.

Sometimes, a man doesn't need to shop at J. Crew—or shop at all, since the truth is that I bought Mark that shirt from Next, just as I buy all his clothes—in order to be the type of man who
would
shop at J. Crew. It's not so much that Mark is bourgeois (he is, but who isn't?) as that he lacks imagination. In the corner of his bedroom, Diego has a sculpture of a female nude, made by his mother, wearing his girlfriend's kimono. His shower curtain consists of laminated postcards of places he's been pinned together at the corners. When I met Mark, he had a framed Nagel hung above his bed, which was adorned with a Crate and Barrel blue bedspread so bright it made my teeth ache. There are things we tell ourselves, but the truth is, it was clear even then where he was headed.

The accidents happened exactly six days apart. The first time, I was daydreaming behind the wheel and drove into a guard rail. The second time, I was on high alert, but in the icy conditions, a van full of out-of-town grunge musicians spun out of control and barreled into my Tercel, knocking me off the road. That was four years ago, when Mark and I had only been married two years.

There are no visible scars. No hook, no tracheotomy, not even a demure back brace to signal my pain, which is nonstop and which, without the drugs, is blinding, ceaseless, maddening until I pace and scream and cannot sit down at all, cannot sleep. I throw things, refuse to eat, and Mark covers his ears and shouts “I can't take this anymore!” but never leaves, so out of pity I drug and drug, until I feel very little but can keep down some food, use words smoothly, curve the corners of my lips into a smile.

I am not a good lover anymore. The pain in my low back inflames my entire pelvic region, so sex is excruciating. Mark doesn't like to hurt me, so he scarcely tries. At first, I gave a lot of head—we had sixty-nine down to an art. But with all the drugs, I'm so numb I can barely feel his mouth; it's been over two years since I've come. Mark solves problems for a living. He can stay between my legs long enough to build a space shuttle. It's just that I don't give a shit anymore. His touch, tentative, carries nuances I do not welcome, and so I shrink away. “My body is not my friend,” I tell him. “I need to feel something in my mind. I need the arousal to originate in my
brain
.” But he just stares, uncomprehending, my juices warm on his lips. He just says, “Don't you love me?”

There are things we tell ourselves. That without the burden of a wife, a man would be larger than life. That a car, derailed, can change one's ability to love. The truth is I cheated on Mark before we even married. Our happiness couldn't hold me in place—I was proud of that, in a way. I didn't see what it had to do with Mark. My lovers were separate from our life together. I felt no craving to confess.

Often when I run into old college friends, they seem shocked to find me married. “You were always such a free spirit,” they exclaim. I used to be mildly amused. What sort of woman
didn't
marry? All the single people I knew seemed floundering and anxious: lonely souls pitied by married friends at worst, or living some kind of self-indulgent, Peter Pan limbo of meaningless promiscuity at best. Who wanted that kind of scrutiny? Marriage was infinitely more tasteful, more discreet.

Pain should not be discreet. But when it becomes your lover—more intimate than the husband whose body curls beside you in the bed because
it
, its insidiousness, intertwines with your very breath and blood—
it
becomes like breathing itself. You do not take vacations from it, do not lie on a beach and decompress and laugh about it like you would a tyrant boss,
I'm so glad to have that asshole off my back
. Instead, it accompanies you: to the Max Planck Institute, to Los Alamos, on a “second honeymoon” in the Canary Islands. It becomes the only thing you can trust not to abandon you—the possessive boyfriend none of your old friends can stand and whom they use as an excuse to extricate themselves from you. You cannot hate it, exactly; it is too familiar, too loyal, too integral. When you rage against it, there is nothing to do but cut your own skin with the tiny razor pried from inside your eyeliner sharpener, nothing left to do but ingest so many pills the lines soften between friend and foe. Your husband says, “How are you feeling today?” and you say, “I feel like crap” or “Fine,” but either way your voice is not frantic anymore but always, thank God for the drugs, calm.

I am like one of those church women with the artificial smiles. Everything I say has become a lie, because affect is more important than words, and my
affect
has been off since I became a Norco junkie, or maybe before that, when I was so blindsided by pain people seemed like noisy props solely intended to plague me. Mark knows I'm lying, but he has to believe me if he's going to stay here out of anything more than pity. Being a scientist, he cannot be held by pity alone. He buries himself in his work. We exchange pleasantries. Many of his geeky colleagues maintain a similar congenial estrangement with their wives, always in separate rooms, on separate computers, keeping separate bedtimes. As long as we're here in Chicago, far away from Diego and his safari photos and his nubile, long-legged girl sitting cross-legged on rumpled sheets scowling at us for dragging him from their bed—as long as he stays away from Van and pretends I am out with Tina, that I am just a social butterfly . . .