Second Best Fantasy (16 page)

So I needed to write and I took a week off to do so. So far all I had accomplished was watching the entire
Godfather
trilogy on VHS and being able to attend Janine’s gigs for the past two nights. It was already Wednesday and I hadn’t written a word.

Right. So, inspiration, inspiration, that’s what I needed. I opened a bottle of wine and poured half a glass, picked it up and wandered over to our bookshelves. How I loved our shelves, so many years of history in the making, first as individuals and now as a couple. When we first moved in together we went through 109

everything and pulled out all the duplicates, books we both owned. By the time we were finished we had enough for a small garage sale. The same thing happened with our CD collection.

They were all housed in our living room, quite the display of who and what we were, it was my favorite part of the whole house.

I browsed the writers I envied, the ones I thought were better than me: Augusten Burroughs, David Foster Wallace, TC

Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, gently running my hand along the well-worn spines. I got to the autobiography I had of Carson McCullers and noticed it was sticking out past the shelf. So was the Aldous Huxley next to it. I pulled them out to reveal a small wooden box.

I didn’t need to open it to know what was inside.
God dammit, Janine,
I thought. This was a “works” box. Inside there would be a tie band, a needle, a spoon. There was no way for me to know how long it had been there and I really, really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she’d hidden it there eons ago and forgotten all about it. But inside I knew; Janine wouldn’t forget where that box was anymore than I would misplace a bottle of single malt scotch.

* * * *

I did write that afternoon, I had nothing else to do with my feelings, nowhere to put them. So I set to work crafting two rough drafts for stories I would need for a total collection of twelve. One was a refurbishing of something I’d written a long time ago and never did anything with, the other was inspired by a little boy I had seen on the street the other day, holding hands with what I naturally assumed were his two dads. At least it was a start, and it kept me and my mind occupied while I waited for Janine to come home, walking blissfully unaware into her own crucifixion.

I was back in the kitchen again making a sandwich when she arrived. She walked up behind me and sang high and sweet into my ear,

“Sleep, little darlin’…things always come around…it’s day by day… that keeps me from…my safe and sound…”

110

She had to choose that one. I loved that song. I closed my eyes and felt the enormity of her presence. Just being alone in a room with her still felt like a transcendental experience in and of itself. People talk of their loved ones and say things like, “When he/she touches me, it’s like the earth moves.” I think with Janine
everyone
felt it, whether you were in love with her or not was irrelevant. Of course, I still was, very much so.

She kept singing to me and came up behind me, put her arms around my waist, her chin on my shoulder, and clasped her hands around my belt buckle. She still had an overwhelming affect on me, I felt myself get wet and my knees went weak. For just a moment, I forgot about my anger, about the box, about the drain of this relationship I’d begun to feel after a year or two, I couldn’t quite remember when it started feeling that way. I turned around into her embrace and looked into her eyes, hoping my anger was still visible in my own.

“Sit down baby. I want to show you something.”

I left her in the kitchen and went to retrieve the box from the living room. When I returned she was smoking my cigarette and drinking my glass of wine. So easily she would do this, I found it to be one of the most sweetly endearing things about her.

When I got up to pee in the middle of the night, I’d return to find her on my side of the bed. In any social setting, if I left the room she’d take my seat. If I attempted to bring her her own drink, light a cigarette for her, anything at all, I’d somehow wind up with the new one and she’d finish the old. I asked her about it once and she’d said she felt like she always wanted to be nearer to me then she was so it just became a habit. I was so enraptured with her and everything about her, how much closer could she get?

When I put the box on the counter she opened it, examined the contents, and avoided my glare. A long silence passed between us and resentment bubbled up within me because all I could think about was how much I wanted her. Still.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say…oh, fuck, I don’t know what I want you to say. Did you use it? I mean, have you done it? When was the 111

last time? Today? Yesterday? Say, baby I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again? Oh, no, wait, wait, I’ve already heard that fucking lie! Wanna try a new one?”

“I’m trying,” she said.

“Try harder.”

I’m trying? That’s what I was expected to accept? She wasn’t my troubled teenager failing a class, and I wasn’t her fucking mother. I’m trying. I could not believe that was all she had to say.

She looked scared though. She was afraid I would walk.

This both pleased and troubled me. I was glad she at least showed some concern about losing me, who wouldn’t be? It fed my ego. I thought about how hard it was to be with her, to be with anyone. But deep in my soul, in those darkest corners I had tried to drown with the blood in my own veins, she lived, tethered to me, a part of me. This is what troubled me so and often ripped me from peaceful sleep in the middle of the night. I was terrified of my desire to spend the rest of my life with Janine. At the end of each day it all came down to this one thing. Regardless of drugs, drink, her status as a famous or not famous singer, her annoying attachment to define herself as bisexual; my last vision of each night overcame all of that. I ritually looked at her face each night before I drifted off to sleep, and when I did, it was impossible to imagine my life without her in it.

If Janine were to vanish into thin air at that very moment, I would remember every single attribute of her face, every curve of her body, every tone of her beautiful voice, and every single word she had ever so much as whispered to me. There are no words to describe the terror that accompanies that kind of love.

Still, if I was going to be effective at all I had to act.

“Janine, I’m not sure if I can do this anymore. I’m going to stay somewhere for a few days and get it together. I suggest you do the same.”

Like any lover reluctant to leave, I hesitated by the door, hoping she would protest. But before she could say anything, there was a knock at the door.

112

* * * *

Kerry Washington didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the door and walked into my house as if he belonged there. He didn’t. I knew who this prick was, a dealer who scored for nearly everyone we knew, and I suspected had been Janine’s supplier both for the times I’d caught her and for the times I hadn’t.

Without warning, a rage gripped me that I probably hadn’t felt since the last woman I’d caught red-handed in another woman’s bed. Not really knowing what I was doing, I snatched the needle off the counter from Janine’s box and charged at him.

With the element of surprise on my side, I threw him up against the living room wall. With one arm I held him under his chin, and with the other I gripped the needle in a fist ready to plunge it into his throat. Never in my life had I done such a thing, like a fucking action hero in a movie, and my subconscious was frantically watching wondering if this was really me.

The punk, and he was just a punk, was terrified. He thought I was out of my mind and just crazy enough to stab him in the jugular. I stood poised and spoke clearly and slowly, “If I ever, ever catch you here or anywhere near her, I will fucking kill you.”

I let go.

“Fucking bitch! You think you’re some goddamn super dyke or something? Why, ‘cause you’re getting a piece of that?”

He jerked his head in Janine’s direction.

“Let me tell you something, baby, everybody’s had a piece of that! And as far as who’s taking who out, I’m the one who could get away with it, you don’t know who you’re fucking with!”

And that was it, he turned and left. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes. I wasn’t afraid of Kerry Washington, he was exactly what I said he was, a punk.

He knew a few people who introduced him to a few other people and band members of all different ranks called him by name only because he had something they wanted.

I couldn’t recall the last, if any, Arnold Schwarzenegger film I’d seen, so my action hero self wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Stupidly I stood there with the front door hanging open and 113

watched Kerry peel out of our driveway in a Trans-Am. Not only were we in an Arnold movie, but one that apparently took place in a heavily Italian populated area of the Jersey shore. Clearly my love for Janine had, in fact, driven me out of my mind. Why else would someone like me, a thirty-six year old lesbian author, with a nice house and cool job in Manhattan, think it was an everyday occurrence to go around threatening the lives of drug dealers? Insanity was the only plausible explanation.

“Maggie, look…”

There was Janine, bringing me back into the blinding light of reality. The sound of her saying my name weighed on me like lead. Then she was near me, the soft hand of obsession and passion gently on my back. Words were always followed by touch, it was how she operated. In all this time, I couldn’t recall even one conversation with her at one end of a room, or even a couch, and me at the other.

“I don’t blame you for being angry with me. I’m angry with myself. The last time was about a week ago, I won’t lie to you.

Frank was here (a colleague from Sam’s recording studio) and he was really depressed. He asked if I’d get high with him and I did. It’s hard to say no, Maggie. You don’t understand because you’ve never done it.”

Apparently this was a great flaw of mine. Because I’d never indulged in a drug that scared the hell out of me, I was unable to commiserate with her as I could with other drugs. I knew how hard it was to become a functional person who was still a heavy drinker but wouldn’t cross the line anymore into the behavior of a raging, maniacal alcoholic. And I knew how it felt and what it meant to continue with a woman I inherently understood would destroy me, but that didn’t seem to count either.

“That was the first time since Florida. I swear. Please look at me.”

I was still standing at the front door. I’d closed it, but stood staring at it, wondering what miracle of strength would allow me to walk through it and never return.

“Baby, Maggie, please…”

She slipped between me and the door. There were tears 114

on her face, little wet spots on her shirt. I noticed because it was a light gray color, then I thought it was strange to notice such a thing at such a time. Never would I
need
heroin, or any drug, even liquor, because life with Janine was mesmerizing and intoxicating enough.

It was so strange, even after four years together, to be face to face with her like this. To know I was the only person in the world to touch her the way I did. Gently she buried her face in my shoulder and wept. I brushed her hair back from her shoulders and took her face in my hands. She told me she loved me and I believed her.

Sometimes I hadn’t been so convinced, but in that moment I was, which seemed strange since she had just betrayed me. But something in her I had been waiting for to change finally had. It was almost a noticeable change in the air, or weather, some little piece of her that had been un-surrendered to me gave way.

“I love you. So much,” she repeated.

She kissed me as she often did after a fight, testing to see what I would do, if I were still angry, if I’d resist her or hold something back. I didn’t. We made love in front of the living room door, an irony that had not escaped me. It was a door to the outside world, which after all meant so little to me in comparison to this woman, this hold on my being who had stepped off a merry-go-round and into my life. As we laid there not speaking, not having any desire to get dressed, or even get off the floor, I had a crushing feeling of something inside me, screaming, that turned to a soft whimper, defeated again. Janine lay with her head on my shoulder, an arm strewn carelessly across my waist.

I stared at the faint scar of a pinprick and the moment lasted a long time, an eternity, and I finally knew and understood. I would never leave her, and she would never stop using.

115

Jesus, she’s not even trying to hide it anymore.

I had awakened in an empty bed. When I went to go find Janine the house was empty and there was a small, mostly empty bag of dope and all its accoutrements on the coffee table in plain view. The night before we had argued, and it seemed to me we argued every day now, and had been for two months, maybe three, maybe six, I couldn’t even say. We argued about money, about drugs and alcohol, about appliances and grocery shopping and sex and the pets. The list of things we did
not
argue about was much shorter.

I told Cindy as much when I arrived at the coffee shop to find her already there with a double shot espresso waiting patiently for me. Gracious Cindy, the epitome of a best friend.

She had never abandoned me, or judged me for anything I had ever done. I knew her patience had grown thin with the Janine and Maggie story though.

I sat down saying, “I don’t know what I can ask or what you can tell me that haven’t already been said.”

“Actually, I do have something new, something I haven’t had the courage to say to you before.”

It was difficult for me to imagine Cindy not having the courage to do anything, let alone say something to me.

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Maggie, I love you, you are my dearest friend and have been for many years. But in the past three months, you have turned into someone I barely know. And whenever we get together, all I ever hear about is negative talk about Janine, what she does and doesn’t do, what she will and won’t do, I’m astonished at how self-centered you have become.”