I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (20 page)

“I should have given it a chance. Maybe it would have worked out.”

“No. No, you did the right thing. It was crazy.
I
was crazy.”

“Maybe it was crazy. You were certainly crazy, but I was crazy too. We were so young. But we're not crazy anymore . . .”

“Riley. Are you kidding me?”

“Mishka, I . . . I've never stopped loving you. The whole time, you were the one. I knew it, but was I was too afraid to see it through. I'm not afraid anymore.”

This whole thing, coming down here to meet her, had been a rotten idea. What was I going to do, pull out a yellow legal pad, give her the specific dates and times I'd cried on the bar or wept myself to sleep, and punish her for each one?

Riley was damaged. A loaded, unkind word, but there was no other. Not just her brain or her mind but the very core of who she was. She had been damaged by the men who had raped and abused her, as a child and as a teenager. Then she had damaged herself more, out of rage at them and out of rage at herself for being powerless to stop them. Then she had damaged me, out of pain and out of malice. And then I had damaged her, and myself in her name.

Inflicting more pain on her wasn't going to undo any of that. It wasn't going to make me feel better about the hell she'd put me through. It had been torture, absolute torture. And it was nothing compared to what she'd endured.

“Riley.”

She looked up at me, miserable. She was still so beautiful.

“It's okay. I forgive you.”

Her face opened up.

“I forgive you. And I wish you every happiness. I hope you have a great life. But I won't be in it in any way. I will never trust you again.”

I insisted on paying for the salads we didn't eat, a petty revenge I allowed myself. We said good-bye in the hotel parking lot outside her car. She stepped close for a hug. I shook her hand, then turned to head inside.

Light was flowing through me. It was over. It was done. Riley had been leaving me for nearly ten years. Now she was finally gone. For the first time in my life of weakness and idiocy, I had done the right thing. I was free.

“Mishka.”

I looked back.

“Can I use your bathroom? I'm sorry, I should have peed at the restaurant.”

I hesitated.

She rolled her eyes.

“Come on. I have a long drive home ahead of me.”

“Ah . . . yeah, that's fine. Sure.”

She followed me into the hotel. We walked up to the second floor in silence. I opened the door with my key card, walked in, and turned on the light in the bathroom. Riley pushed the door to the hotel room closed and, without a word, knelt at my feet and pulled my belt open.

Riley dropped me off the next morning at a little country store at the entrance to some military base where Tatyana was going to come pick me up. I felt completely out of my mind.

We had slept a couple of hours at most. My will had folded instantly with her on her knees in front of me, staring deep into my eyes, my cock in her mouth. Riley wanted to do everything, everything we had ever done, everything she had never let me do, everything either one of us had ever thought of. She had brought a Polaroid and wanted me to document every depravity.

And I wanted it all. I wanted to roughly fuck her mouth till her eyes watered and she gagged; I wanted to come in her mouth, come on her face. It sickened me, and it made me hate myself, but I goaded myself on: here is what you wanted; take it now, take all of it, all you can stomach.

I professed to love my mother above all others and to hate my father for the ill he'd done to her. I'd aced my women's studies course; I loved my Bikini Kill and Liz Phair records; I read women authors and went out of my way to support female musicians at the club. But in my personal life, all that shit went out the window. I'd taken Riley for granted when we'd been together and cheated on her repeatedly. When I'd finally driven her away, that's when I decided I couldn't live without her and dove headlong into hateful obsession. I professed to hate the men who'd abused her, who'd
dehumanized her, who'd treated her as a sexual possession . . . and then, in my mind, I'd done the same thing.

I had locked myself away from the rest of the world in Riley's name. Speck had been great—salty, tender, insightful. We could have been happy, had I let her in. Shannon had been jealous and paranoid and insecure . . . but maybe she wouldn't have been had I not been writing songs for Riley during every waking moment, even mumbling her name in my sleep. And Allison . . . God, I had a real woman, a real person, real love waiting for me patiently at home. She deserved better than me at my best. She certainly didn't deserve this.

I went into the bathroom of the country store. The stack of Polaroids felt heavy in my pocket, like a folded flick knife with blood on the blade. I sat on the toilet and took the pictures out.

I hadn't wanted pictures. I didn't want a single one. I wanted Riley as she had been, not as she was now. Too late, I realized I had loved her absence, not her presence. But the Polaroids were repellent to me not because I wanted to continue my worship of Riley's ghost but because they were concrete proof of my weakness. In my infidelity, it had finally become clear: I loved Allison, Allison in my head and Allison in the flesh, her and only her. I was free of Riley forever. And all I had to do to win my freedom was betray the one woman I loved, the woman who truly loved me.

I forced myself to take in each and every picture. Grainy, out of focus, Riley's speckled flesh harsh white in the flash, our genitals red and inflamed, all else in dark shadow like child pornography or a snuff film. Still, I felt sick desire growing in me. I threw the pictures on the floor. I put my head between my legs and cried.

I could never tell Allison about this. I could never tell anyone. I would just have to hold in my heart the knowledge that I had done a horrible, horrible thing. God, to do something like this sober . . . it proved that you had evil in your heart.

I collected the Polaroids from the floor, tore them up, and dumped them in the trash. Then I walked out to wait for my sister.

Walking home after work at Luxx one night, I thought again of my father and the neglected acoustic guitar in its case under his bed: the strings slowly tarnishing, then rusting, as he didn't learn to play and didn't learn to play and didn't learn to play. One day, the rust would eat all the way through. Those strings would finally break.

When I was a small child, I told my mother I wanted to be “a wandering minstrel,” just traveling town to town, playing my songs. Other dreams had moved me temporarily over the years, but that dream had never left. I had moved to New York to naively chase my dreams of being a musician and a writer and putting some kind of mark on the world. I had wanted a big, rambling, rambunctious life, but my life here in New York had been more circumscribed than anywhere else.

I decided to buy a van, put all my shit in storage, abandon my loving girlfriend, and hit the road, touring the country nonstop for a year. I felt sure the road would transform me. My fearlessness and devotion would win me a deal with a small label and a small (okay, medium-sized) advance. Of course I would drink—it would be impossible to do without drinking—but that was incidental. With the advance from the record label, I could buy an RV, and Allison would join me, singing backup, playing Wurlitzer and harmonica. I could almost see her, curled up in a sunlit corner of the tiny breakfast nook, playing one of the harmonicas I'd bought her, working her way through another song.

A year later, I came back to New York, broke, unemployed, and exhausted, with nothing to show for my efforts. I'd gotten discouraged trying to book shows, then fallen behind schedule, then found myself just begging my way onto bills on the night of a show, lucky to sell one CD or cadge a few free drinks for my troubles. Sure, I had padded my press kit, but there was still no one at the shows.
Yes, In Music We Trust, a record label in Portland had expressed interest in hearing a full-length album, but “record label interest” and two bucks will only get you a slice of pizza. I moved in with Allison and only made my first month's rent because my van got hit by a drunk driver, a young princess in a colossal, gleaming white boat of an SUV, who gaily wrote me a big check and asked for a signed copy of my CD.

Eben, my old boss from Luxx, got me a job as a night manager at the legendary music venue The Knitting Factory. I saved every penny I could, borrowed money from my uncle, and diligently set about making the record I was sure would rescue me from obscurity.

But the man I'd become on the road—depressed, resentful, self-obsessed, leering at women, convinced both that he was utterly worthless and that the dimwitted world had ungraciously failed to recognize his genius, eager to do any depraved thing to escape the eternal present of the drunk—well, he was unwilling to retreat back into the darkness from whence he'd come. I thought up a name for this asshole: Narsissyphus, from Narcissus, the legendary hunter so enamored of his own image that he starved to death staring at his reflection in a pool, and Sisyphus, the hubristic king damned to roll a huge boulder to the top of a steep hill in Hades, only to have the stone tumble back just before he reached the summit, forcing him to begin anew, over and over again for all eternity. Narsissyphus incorporated the worst of both characters: he was a man erotically transfixed by his own repeated, myopic failures. Probably not someone you want as a roommate, let alone boyfriend.

I went out on a ten-day tour and drunkenly cheated on Allison. That first night back, I felt physically sick with guilt. Allison knew something was up. I have always been horrible at concealing the truth.

It was late, and I was exhausted, so we just ate and called it a night. We got into bed and turned out the light, trying to ignore the
silence hulking between us. We lay there for a moment in the dark. I could almost see my infidelity, writhing obscenely above us in the night. It was okay, though. We were just going to fall asleep. When we woke up, it would be gone. I would never do it again, and we could go on with our life together.