Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (8 page)

 
          
 
"Nervous."

 
          
 
"That's all?"

 
          
 
"What am I supposed to feel?"

 
          
 
"There's no 'supposed to.' " She
paused. "Are you an alcoholic, Scott?"

 
          
 
"No. At least I don't . . . well, people
say I have a problem."

 
          
 
"But you're not an alcoholic."

 
          
 
"Define an alcoholic. I've stopped for
weeks at a time, months even."

 
          
 
"Let's not worry about definitions, not
yet. What I see so far is a lot of denial."

 
          
 
"So far? Fifteen seconds?" Jesus!
Everybody knows everything around here!

 
          
 
"Let me warn you about one thing you're
going to feel, because you won't recognize it at first: loneliness."

 
          
 
"I'll be all right. I'm pretty
self-reliant."

 
          
 
"Sure you are. You don't need people.
Family, friends. You've got it together, right? Who's your best friend?"

 
          
 
Preston looked away, as if searching for a
name. What was this woman driving at? Was she going to call all his friends,
involve them in this charade? Not bloody likely. *'I don't see what this is . .
. Forget it. You wouldn't know him."

 
          
 
''Oh, I'd know him, all right. He's so close
to you that you've turned to him every day. He's been with you in all the good
times and all the bad. He's so close he's gotten inside you and consumed you.
And now he's gone, Scott, and you're going to miss him. Your old buddy Jim Beam
or Jack Daniel's, or maybe you've hung out with the exotics, like Comrade Stolichnaya."

 
          
 
Preston
's
head jerked. He felt himself blushing.

 
          
 
Marcia laughed. "It's that Russian,
right? I knew it. Can't trust a Commie, Scott. Just when you're getting to be
buddies, he up and deserts you." She reached out in a friendly gesture and
touched his arm. He flinched. She left her hand there, forcing him to accept
her touch. "You'll make new friends in here, friends who want to help you.
'Cause Jim and Jack and the Commie, they were going to do only one thing for
you, Scott, and that's kill you." She removed her hand. "You've
already made one friend. Duke asked if he could bunk with you. But he's already
been assigned with Lewis."

 
          
 
"Frankly, I think this is best for
me."
Preston
gestured at the empty room. "I'm
comfortable by myself. I don't mind solitude."

 
          
 
"Uh-huh. If we do have to give you a
roommate, do you have any preferences?"

 
          
 
"Not really. Someone who reads, I
suppose. Maybe likes the Mets, listens to ... I don't know . . . James Taylor .
. . Beethoven."

 
          
 
“What you'd call a peer."

 
          
 
“I guess."
Preston
saw her nod and make a note on her
clipboard. Perhaps she did understand him, did realize that he, his type of
person, responded better to civility than brutality. They'd get along.
"What about you? Did you have a . . . problem?"

 
          
 
"Sure. We all did here."

 
          
 
"And who . . . what . . . was your best
friend?"

 
          
 
"I loved 'em all . . . separately,
together, one after the other, on top of each other. If it could be drunk,
swallowed, smoked or poked, it was my friend. What finally got me, though, was
elephant tranquilizers. We called them Dumbos."

 
          
 
Preston
felt his mouth tangle around a mess of "What?," "How?" and
"Why?"

 
          
 
"Because somebody had some. It was a new
sensation. I was on the Jersey Tlimpike between
Camden
and
New Brunswick
. I guess I was going a hundred and twenty,
a hundred and thirty. Everything was a blur-lights, other cars, the road. This
trooper stops me, and I say, 'I know I'm speeding, officer, but my mother's had
a stroke and I got to get to Helene Fuld Hospital before she . . . blah, blah,
blah . . .'He says, 'Speeding, huh? Why n't you get out of the car, lady?' So I
say, 'Sure thing,' only I can't. I try, but nothing works: arms, legs, nothing.
He looks at me and this big grin cuts his face and he says, 'Lady, I don't know
what you're on, but it's got some kick to it. You've been parked in the center
lane of this road for the last twenty minutes.' "

 
          
 
Marcia laughed and touched his arm again. This
time

 
          
 
he forced himself not to flinch. "That's
when they convinced me I could use some help."

 
          
 
"What did you do for a living?"

 
          
 
"Back then? I was a hooker." She saw
his eyes bug. The Mets, huh? Beethoven? How do you like them apples, Mr. Boola
Boola? "How else could I support all my little habits?" She looked at
her watch. "Group's in ten minutes. Don't be late."

 
          
 
THEY HAD FORMED a circle in the middle of Marcia's
office, the five of them sitting in steel-framed, folding chairs, heads down,
gazing at the floor, forearms on their knees, hands clasped loosely.

 
          
 
Marcia spoke first.

 
          
 
"I'm Marcia. I'm an alcoholic and an
addict. I feel pretty good today, because I think Lewis had a real breakthrough
yesterday telling us about his feelings for Kevin. I think Hector learned
something from that, too, but it may be up to us to help him see what it was.
And I feel good about Cheryl. She's been letting that bastard guilt ride her
pretty hard, but maybe now she's ready to throw him in the dirt. I feel good
that Scott's with us. . . ."

 
          
 
Gimme a break!
Preston
grimaced and clenched his fists. Don't talk
about me. Make believe I don't exist. He let his eyes wander around the circle,
expecting to see someone nudge someone else, expecting to hear a derisive
snigger. But all heads were bowed.

 
          
 
"These twenty-eight days will be just the
beginning for Scott. He's got a long, long road ahead, and it's up to us to be
his guides."

 
          
 
Marcia stopped and nodded to Hector, who sat
to her right.

 
          
 
Smoking wasn't permitted in therapy, but
Hector, in whom nicotine withdrawal provoked panic that had once led to threats
of violence against the clinic's Methodist chaplain, had been granted
dispensation to pack his gums with snuff. He sucked his cud and thought of
something to say.

 
          
 
"I'm Hector. I'm a junkie. I guess I feel
okay today, no problems. . . . But I got to say, I don't know what Lewis and
what's-his-name . . . Kevin . . . got to do with me. Like, the last thing in
the world I want to do—I mean, it comes after cutting my tongue out and maybe
kissing goats—is—"

 
          
 
Lewis sat up straight and opened his mouth,
but Marcia pointed a finger, silencing him, and said to Hector, "It's not
about mechanics. Hector, it's about relationships. We'll go into it
later." She nodded at the fragile little bird who sat to Hector's right.
Cheryl.

 
          
 
"I'm Cheryl. ..." She sounded like a
frightened kitten, as if worried that any sound above a whisper would give
offense. Though
Preston
kept his head down, his eyes refused to
look away from her. She was tiny and so thin that her head looked oversized and
her bones seemed to be held together by her clothes. A cap of ebony hair
surrounded a face made up only of lips and cheekbones, for the eyes lived in
dark caves deep in her skuU.

 
          
 
"I'm still sad that Karen graduated
yesterday. I mean, I'm glad she made it through, but I'm really going to miss
her. I see her starting out on a new life, and it scares me, 'cause I don't
know how much of a life I can have and . . . well, I guess you could say I've
got mixed feelings about it all."

 
          
 
When, after a beat, Cheryl said nothing more,
Lewis smiled at
Preston
and declared, "My name is Lewis, and I
have the gift of alcoholism."

 
          
 
''What?"
Preston
realized he had spoken out of turn, and he
added quickly, "Excuse me."

 
          
 
Marcia said, "Lewis, that's not fair to
Scott."

 
          
 
"Oh, all right." Lewis shrugged.
"I'm Lewis and I'm an alcoholic. I'm a bit upset today because I have a
new roommate whom I do not like. He treats me like I've got leprosy. Not that
I'm not used to dealing with homophobes, but this one is particularly conceited
in imagining that I'd ever want to put a move on him, and . . . well, it's just
so tiresome having to justify yourself to every new bigot that comes along.
Anyway ..." Lewis dismissed the thought with an imperious wave.

 
          
 
Silence.
Preston
's time had come. He had nothing to say.
What could he say that would mean anything to these people—a hooker, a junkie,
a fruit and an anorexic? He had nothing in common with them. Their problems
were theirs. If they wanted to blab about them, that was their business. His
problems were his, and he'd deal with them. They couldn't understand.

 
          
 
A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose.

 
          
 
"Scott . . . ?" Marcia said softly.

 
          
 
No way out. "I'm Scott, and ... ah ... I
guess I wouldn't be here if I didn't have a problem, but ... I don't know . .
.I'm nervous as hell."

 
          
 
“Nervous isn't a feeling; it's a condition.
How do you feel?"

 
          
 
"Scared, then."

 
          
 
"What are you scared of?"

 
          
 
"I'm not sure, really. It's kind of like
..." Blessedly, the quotation came to him. "... that 'undiscovered
country from whose bourn no traveler returns.' "

 
          
 
Preston
saw
Hector and Cheryl exchange a mystified glance. They thought he was speaking
Chinese. Good. Now maybe they'd believe him when he said he didn't belong here.
His whole frame of reference was different from theirs. He was different.

 
          
 
He did not see Lewis look at Marcia and then
turn away with a barely contained grin of delicious anticipation.

 
          
 
Marcia didn't raise her voice. It was as flat
and matter-of-fact as a razor cutting through an artery.

 
          
 
"Listen to me, you arrogant prick: I
don't want to hear you quote anybody—living or dead, famous or not—in this
group ever again. You got that?"

 
          
 
Cheryl gasped. Hector and Lewis smiled.

 
          
 
Preston
stuttered. "I b-beg your p-pardon. ..."

 
          
 
"Quotes are a cheap way out, a way to
avoid your own feelings. You've been shutting off your feelings for years,
drowning them in booze, anesthetizing yourself from life. Remember I told you
you'd feel lonely but wouldn't recognize it? Your best friend isn't there
anymore to give you distance from your feelings, so instinctively you go to the
next best thing: You use somebody else's words about feelings.
Understand?"

 
          
 
It took
Preston
a second to say, ''I never thought of
that."

 
          
 
“No, you sure didn't." Marcia smiled at
him. "Besides, the parallel isn't right. Hamlet's 'undiscovered country'
was death. Yours is life."

 
          
 
Preston
gaped at her. This woman is dangerous.

 
          
 
"Now," Marcia said, resuming her
hands-on-knees position, looking once again at the floor, "I want us to
help Cheryl deal with her feelings about losing Karen. But I want Scott to help
too, and he can't help till he knows us a little better. So let's everybody
remember one thing we didn't want to deal with or we didn't know about
ourselves before we got here. I told him about my trip with the Dumbos."
She laughed. "I'm not sure he believed me, but it's the truth. . . .
Hector?"

 
          
 
“No sweat, man," said Hector. "The
thing I'd blocked most was that when I stabbed myself it wasn't no
accident." He looked at
Preston
.
"I tell you, man, when you take a handful of reds in the morning and a
handful of yellows at night, and in between you're sniffin' and snortin'
whatever the dude's got, there comes a time when you're out of fuckin' balance.
I stared at that knife for musta been five minutes before I stuck it in my
guts, and I still swore up and down it was an accident." He laughed.
"You believe that?"

 
          
 
''No."
Preston
shook his head. "I can't. I really
can't."

 
          
 
"Sure you can, Scott," Marcia said
with a crooked smile. "You can relate to that. All he was trying to do was
make his quietus with a bare bodkin." She turned to Hector. "Which is
how some douchebags say 'off yourself.' " She pointed at Cheryl.

 
          
 
"It's all about blindness," Cheryl
began. "That's what the disease does, it blinds you. I never drank liquor,
so I couldn't be in trouble, right? I never once missed work. 'Course, that
might have been because I didn't have a job. I never drank in the morning. Why
should I? I slept all morning so I could drink all the rest of the day. You're
supposed to eat a balanced diet, so I found something with malt and hops and
grain in it. A hundred and eighty calories a can, twenty-four cans a day, I had
to be eating enough." She shook her head. "Christ, what a jerk!"

 
          
 
Immediately, Hector leaned over and wrapped
her in one of his huge tattooed arms. "C'mon, tell guilt to take a
hike."

 
          
 
Lewis patted her knee. "It's all in the
past, hon. What's done is done." He looked up at Marcia and said,
"This isn't helpful."

 
          
 
"Yes, it is, Lewis. Your turn."

 
          
 
Lewis sighed. "Well, if we're talking
about blindness, how about convincing yourself that a vodka enema is a
perfectly normal way to have a social drink?" Lewis paused dramatically,
pleased to see all eyes locked on him.

 
          
 
He hasn't told this one before, Preston
thought. He must've been saving it for some special moment.

 
          
 
"I'd just had an ulcer," Lewis
continued, "and I couldn't drink. But that just meant that I shouldn't
take alcohol into my poor abused stomach, right? So one night when Kevin was
sitting there getting sweetly smashed on one of our thirty-dollar bottles of
Margaux, I got angrier and angrier till it occurred to me that my

 
          
 
House of Heavenly Highs had a front door and a
back door.”

 
          
 
"Mutha ..." Hector said.

 
          
 
"Don't knock it till you've tried it.
Fastest high I ever had in my life. Up the gee-gee, in the bloodstream . . .
liftoff!-

 
          
 
Lewis laughed, which must have given tacit
permission to the others to laugh too, for Hector suddenly guffawed and Cheryl
tittered and Marcia chuckled. Preston put his hand over his mouth and tried to
swallow his laughter—he did not feel entitled to assume membership in this
fraternity—but a staccato "unh-unh-unh" escaped between his fingers.

 
          
 
Marcia let the laughter subside and then said,
'*How does this make you feel, Scott?"

 
          
 
"Like an alien. This isn't me. I've never
done these things. I can't conceive of doing them."

 
          
 
"Well, what have you done? There must be
some reason you're here."

 
          
 
"Actually done! Nothing. That's my point.
If this . . . these stories, these experiences ... if this is alcoholism, or
addiction, or whatever you want to call it, that's not me."