September 21, 2006
I ripped the phone from the wall today. I am starting to scare myself. It’s good that Jones won’t be home til Sunday. I think I’d love to choke her. I can picture her surprise as I wrap my hands around her little neck. I think I want another beer. Fuck. I know I should call her, leave a message at the hotel, let her know her one true god is ringing our phone off the hook like a cunt-struck teen. I wonder what she owes him this time. A manuscript she’d promised to proof? A call back to uncover the last piece of the collective unconscious, Jungian synchronicity? Or whatever other bullshit excuse he’s cooked up. I know he just can’t live without her voice. How empty his life is without her. I don’t know how she can fail to notice that he can’t seem to get through the week without talking to her about something. I don’t know why they keep jerking themselves off this way. It’s pathetic. It makes me sick. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of connection, that kind of smoldering energy. I can feel it collect around them like thick fog rubbing their skin until the tiny hairs stand on end. I don’t believe for a moment it’s platonic. Plato was a fag, she used to say. Til she met him. Now there is this higher love and it’s killing anything good that was in her. She is such a fucking saboteur.
What kind of terror would make her run this way, drawing that creepy need from anything male around her, then cutting them off at the knees. At the dick. Why won’t she just go back to Toronto, to him, to the life they keep denying they have together.
I am sick of having her here. It was a bad idea. She’s changed, gone sour. I wanted it to be like the old days. Laughing till our stomachs hurt so bad we thought we’d be sick. We didn’t need anything more than a walk in the snow to have fun, or a late night fire at the beach, or a drive on the country roads in the velvety night, watching her shift gears while mixing her trademark gin and tonic. Or like the night the cops pulled her over and searched the car, all her drama club costumes scattered in the back of the station wagon, the other cop smirking and shaking his head sorting through them. She’d argued with them endlessly, all the while having a stash of pot in her socks. But they never searched her, just sent her on her way. She was good at holding her liquor, good at conning a cop. We were almost on the ground laughing. Just the picture of her, stinking drunk, telling the police how they could better use their energy pursuing real criminals while they pulled tu tus and cloaks and swords and tiaras from the beat up old wagon. Now everything we do feels all empty and driven. Like there’s no there there, but we’re going through the motions.
I never thought I’d hate her like this. She was the one true mind that knew me. Knew just where to hurt me. First John, now Gary. Part of me knows she can’t help it. Men seem drawn to a woman in trouble. She acts as if nothing happened. But suddenly she’s never here. Won’t sit in the same room with us. He’s another story. Fucking transparent. I can tell he wonders if I heard them. Who on the block didn’t hear them? Does he think I’m a fucking idiot? Or that desperate? Sometimes I want to tell him, just to see the look on his face. But if I tell him, what suffering would there be then? He’d think the slate were clean. It will never be clean.
But I don’t blame him. He’s just a man, like any other man, as the song goes. He never stood a chance against her. The worst part is, I don’t know if she even knows why she did it. I know why, and it’s why I won’t tell her I know, as much as it’s killing me.
I can picture her working it out, how to tell me he’s not good enough. She underestimates me, thinks I don’t know that already. I know the preachy bitch is just waiting for the right moment to sit me down and drop the bomb. I can imagine her shock when she realizes that I know. That despite, or maybe because of his failings, I will not leave him. Maybe then she’ll understand that all her drunk slutting around doesn’t mean a damned thing to anyone. That she’s sick, not powerful. That she can’t touch us there. That she’s the leader of a straw army, the troops left the lineup long ago.
Sometimes I think I should give her that chance, let her drop the bomb. But he’s always here – it must drive her crazy – so she doesn’t dare. His own philandering has been to my enormous benefit. Contrite, doting now even. He’s grateful to have me still. Likely sees how different it could be. It makes me sad sometimes, to see through the anger to that small well that still hurts. I think of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, Jen’s favorite book in high school. “Freedom was my wilderness, and pride was the devil that led me there.” I guess that sums it up. Have I turned to stone? Or to salt? Did I look back at the smoldering wreck of friendship when I instead should have run, breathless, far, hard away? And what is that costing me, this stoic song, this floating vantage that has me not emotionally connected to the flux. That has me watching, waiting.
I think of Margaret, pounding away on the piano at Comfy’s, toothless wonder belting out torch songs. Her age folds down her face like a soft, stretched blanket, her green eyes glitter, contrasting her dye-bottle-red hair. She hollers and wails like a grandmother Siren. How I do love Margaret, her spent life quivering in the air. It’s Tuesday, she’ll be playing tonight. The jocks will snigger and throw their darts; the couples will chat softly, waiting for the excitement that will never come, has gone for good; the preening cougars will flirt with the businessmen, slick nails blood red. I will sit in my corner, beneath the butterfly tiffany lamp, pound back my beer and write my heart out. I feel like a smoke. If I am not careful, I will become her. Vanish in the ashes.
Jen sets down the leather diary and stares out the window. She can chart a course, dotted with Saint’s raving entries, that led her to the place where everything collapsed. She is sitting on the back porch, braving the spring breeze that’s ruffling papers on her desk. Every window is open; she can’t seem to get enough of the turbulence. She can smell the damp, warming earth in the night’s air. The stars glitter in the indigo sky, casting a glowing sheen across the river. The willow tree shudders and bows, sweeping limbs. She is waiting for the storm but sees no clouds scuttling. Just the wind’s handprints, moving across the yard. Her light has an unnatural amber warmth to it amidst the dark majesty of spring.
She is exhausted, but does not care to go to bed. Chris is sound asleep, as is Jace. Rosemary is tucked away up at 3 East despite a less than stellar start to her stay. At dinner, Jace was conciliatory, kind even. Saint’s journal has put her in mind of it, made her suspicious. He must feel guilty about whatever his role is in Rosemary’s story. He would only tell her that he is not assigned. She feels there’s more to the story, but is too emotionally exhausted to probe. He kept his promise, or so it appears.
She closes her eyes for a moment and lets the warm wind flow across her face. She feels the tears well up until they spill down her cheeks. She is no closer to understanding why she was with Gary than before. She is no closer to understanding Saint. She feels only a burning shame. She hasn’t a clue what they were playing at, really. She only remembers the sickening, sinking feeling she awoke with every day. The panicky urge to climb under the covers and never rise. The days moved like glue.
It wasn’t so much Saint and Gary breaking her heart back then. They were the icing on the cake. It was feeling so alone, so hopelessly irrelevant. She supposes if she were honest with herself, she’d been suffering a life-altering case of unrequited love in her close but platonic relationship with Marty. He was her best friend. Her godly pan. But never to be hers.
It made her sad that Saint saw that so clearly but left her out there on her own to wrestle it. And mad, that Saint saw her more clearly the futility of her relationship with Marty than Jen herself could see at the time. She knows in every bone that Saint’s cold assessment was correct. All those things were true. How could she hate Saint for the truth? Saint was the one person who really knew her, and pulled no punches. Until that autumn, until the post-Gary fallout and Jen’s rapid spiral to a near-fatal level of self-disgust.
“Jen, what are you doing,” Jace asks.
Jen startles, open her eyes. Where’d he come from, she wonders. He is standing in the doorway, looking rumpled, barely awake. Jen realizes she is holding Saint’s journal. She doesn’t want to explain.
“Just going through old stuff,” she says. “I was having trouble sleeping.”
“What’s the matter,” he asks, ambling over to sit beside her.
Fuck fuck fuck, she thinks.
He slides his hand over her free hand and leans forward to kiss her temple.
“What’s that,” he asks, nodding toward the journal that Jen’s clutching to her chest.
“It’s a different point of view,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I got it in the mail today. It’s one of Saint’s journals from way back, before the hospital. I think Gary sent it to me.”
Suddenly Jace looks flustered, angry. He snatches it out of Jen’s hand.
“What the fuck are you doing with this,” he nearly shouts.
“No, really, it’s okay, Jace. It’s good in a way. To see things as she saw them.”
“Why the hell would he send this to you,” he blusters.
“I saw him the night of the accident,” Jen says, calmly, bemused by his temper. “She kicked him out. He was moving out east. He’s just likely looking for someone to share his, well, his angst with.”
“You are not fucking reading this,” says Jace, standing up, journal still in hand.
Jen springs up to grab it. She neither wants him reading it nor taking it. It’s hers now, she earned it.
“Give it back, Jace. I need to clean this all up for myself.” She reaches forward and grabs it. Eventually he lets go, shaking his head.
“Jen, no good will come of this. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He storms off, clops up the stairs.
Jen is baffled. He’s acting as if she’s a junky taking a fix, as if their whole life will crumble around their ankles because of some dusty words on a page.
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