Losing Clementine (2 page)

“Samosa or momo?” she asked.

“Both.”

Dolma laughed her bell-chime laugh. “You'll get fat.”

“I don't have time to get fat.”

She laughed again and disappeared into the kitchen.

The samosas were pyramids of fried pastry filled with vegetables just spicy enough to bring color to my cheeks. I broke them open and let the mouth-scalding steam escape before dipping them in a cool mint sauce as thin as milk. The momos were steamed, pale dumplings that looked like the flat round pillows on my aunt's couch. They were filled with chicken and much milder until dipped in the pickled tomato called
achaar
. Like a tangy, savory chutney, it was unlike anything else.

My taste buds were coming back. The medications I'd been taking for most of my adult life were slowly leaving my system. Things I thought I had liked were so much better than I suspected. Dolma brought a new cup of tea to replace the empty one. I considered drinking nothing else for the next month.

“I'm treating myself tonight,” I told her. “All my favorites.”

“All?” She tried to call my bluff.

“All.” I made a big gesture with my arms.

The dining room had perhaps fifteen tables, half of them full. The bell over the door tinkled every few minutes as the dinner hour grew more respectable. Everyone came here, from broke clothing designers working out of their landlord's basements to marketing executives in statement eyeglasses. The food was cheap and delicious. Dolma had three nieces and a son taking orders and delivering water glasses and steaming dishes of curry.

Before my first main course arrived, my cell phone rang the
boom-chick-a-bow-bow
that signaled my ex-husband.

“Are you okay?” he asked when I picked up.

“Fantabulous,” I said. “How are you?”

He had his serious face on. I could hear it in his voice. “Because last week you weren't so good.”

“I'm better now.” I dipped a bite of samosa into the mint sauce and put it in my mouth. Divine.

“Are you sure?”

“Come see for yourself. I'm at Dolma's. I've already ordered enough for both of us.”

The food came long before Richard did.

Potatoes and cauliflower swimming in a thick orange curry sauce were first. One of the nieces set it down on the glass table topper that protected the postcards from Nepal underneath. The basmati rice and peas came next and covered a map of Everest.

I ordered green beans that were heavy on the anise, lamb vindaloo, and chicken korma. I had a noodle dish called chow-chow that tasted sweet and put off diners not expecting it. I ordered both naan and roti and then yak chili, which isn't much different from beef jerky except you can say you had yak for dinner. My table for two wasn't big enough, so Dolma's son scooted an extra chair close to my side and set the breads there.

When Richard showed up he was wearing a tie and crow's feet that didn't used to be there. He sat down and looked at the overburdened table. He didn't smile or laugh. He looked, if anything, resigned. Doubt, which lived behind my solar plexus, fluttered its wings, and I regretted asking him to come.

“You ordered all this?”

I was being scolded.

“Yes, have some.” I pushed the plate of lamb toward him. A peace offering, a child trying to avoid punishment. He liked lamb.

Dolma glided up and deposited a cup of tea in front of him without a word and just as silently disappeared.

He took a sip and winced when it burned his tongue.

The week before—before I'd fired Jenny and my shrink—he'd come over. I'd refused to let anyone come in for three days and had stopped answering the phone. He used the spare key I'd given him for emergencies. An emergency is a gas leak near an open flame. What I was having was more like a situation. I was on the bathroom floor and determined to stay there until gravity stopped being so unbearably heavy or until I rotted away and died, whichever came first. I didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other, but Richard—being Richard—thought it might be best if I got up. Gravity had yet to relent, and so I stayed down. He cajoled, and I ignored. He threatened me with hospitals. Been there, not going back. I ignored harder. I ignored in the way Chuckles had taught me.

He would, he said, drag me all the way out of my studio and out onto the street and into the car and all the way to Cedars if that's what it took. He held me under my arms and yanked me off the floor. I fought. He pulled. One of us should have let the other call the bluff. I should've gotten up even if I didn't want to. He should've left me there. I shouldn't have given him a key. He shouldn't have come over. I shouldn't have had toast for breakfast. He should've chosen another shirt. Whatever the case, someone should've done something differently, because when he got me up under the arms and dragged me by force out of the bathroom and into the studio, he dragged me right past a bookcase, and on the bookcase was a small metal fan. I snatched up that fan, and before the idea could pass from my impulse center through something that controlled logic and humanity, I swung it behind me and hit him in the head with it.

He dropped me, and I landed hard on the floor, bruising my tailbone. The fan crashed to the floor, never to work again, and Richard pressed his hand to his cheek. There was blood seeping between his fingers and a look of shock and betrayal on his face. It was the sort of look you'd expect from a child whose mother had suddenly and inexplicably turned on him.

The cut had bled and bled as facial wounds do, and we had argued about whether it needed stitches. Sitting here at Dolma's now, I could see that the swelling had gone away, but it was still a little yellow and the cut had not yet healed. What I had done was unforgivable. Richard disagreed, but we all know when we have done something from which there is no going back, when we reveal to ourselves what we are capable of, even when we want to believe that we can and will do better. That was when I'd decided to fire my shrink. Those sessions had clearly been a waste of money. Having me around is like keeping a chimpanzee for a pet. It's only a matter of time before the maulings begin and someone has to shoot it.

Now Richard and I were pretending between us that it hadn't happened, because it was too humiliating for me and too embarrassing for him to watch my humiliation. Instead, I let the feeling of it make a home inside my intestines like a tapeworm. That, and I offered him my lamb.

“I can't stay,” he said. “I'm meeting Sheila for dinner. I just wanted to check on you.”

I held up the basket of naan and waved it under his nose. “Garlic. Your favorite.”

He gave one of those fake smiles where the corners of his mouth couldn't decide whether to turn up or down and instead twitched somewhere in the middle, which was always a sign he was going to pacify me. He tore off a piece of bread and put it in his mouth, washing it down with hot tea.

The tapeworm stayed where it was, but my doubt calmed itself a little. Plus bonus points that his breath would stink for his date with Sheila.

“Are you really okay now?” he asked.

“Perfect,” I assured him and scooped a spoonful of korma onto my plate, using a bit of my own bread to sop up the sauce.

“Are you working?”

“Like a beaver.”

“I'd ask if you were eating,” he said, “but under the circumstances—”

“Don't worry. This is food for the week.”

He looked at me, then at his watch, and stood up. “I have to go. I'm late.” He leaned over the table, holding his tie against his stomach so it wouldn't drag through the
achaar
. “Moderation, okay?”

“In all things,” I said.

After he left, I pushed my plate away, all the serving dishes still more than half full. Dolma came by, said nothing about his departure, and asked, “Dessert?”

“Yes,
kheer,
” I said. “And some boxes.”

I put the sack of leftovers in the fridge and took off my shirt and pants. There was some paint near the hem that would never come off. I stood in my underwear and pushed a finger into my bloated belly. Funny how overfull started to look like distended starvation.

I took an extra-large T-shirt out of a drawer and shuffled blindly to the bathroom as I pulled it over my head. I opened the medicine cabinet, watching my reflection swing toward me and then away with the door. The bottom shelf was full of white-capped, brown-bodied prescription bottles. There were almost more than I could hold in both hands at once, but I managed, carrying them the three steps to the side of the tub. I sat down and set the bottles next to me, lined up like soldiers.

I opened the first bottle, performing the complicated adults-only press-down-and-turn maneuver that would prevent any clinically depressed toddlers from getting their mitts on my stash. I upended it into the toilet. The white and baby blue capsules plinked into the water and sent up a fine splash. A few drops landed on my knees.

“Good night, Depakote.”

In went pink tablets.
Plink-plink-plinkplink
. Those had caused exhaustion.

“Adios, Seroquel.”

I upended the bottle. Those were fun—dizziness, constipation, and weight gain.

“Ah, Thorazine.” I poured the orange pills into my palm and spilled them into the crapper. They had made it impossible to fuck, plus I had been nervous all the time. “It was absolutely not a pleasure.”

More tablets. More bottles. Finally in went the last of it: the pink capsules that had made everything taste like I was sucking on nails. I lost fifteen pounds on those, which was a change from some of the other meds.

For twenty years, my body had been one pharmaceutical experiment after the other. I walked around feeling as if the air around me were dense and thick. My movements and thoughts and sensations were slowed and dampened. I had taken things that drained my personality and, worse, my desire to work, to bathe, and to breathe. But when I stopped taking them, I was at the mercy of the fanged black monster that settled on my chest for days only to leap off and leave me thinking and moving in fast-forward. Two years before, I had locked myself in the bathroom for three days only to come out and repaint my kitchen cabinets in the middle of the night.

And that was nothing—nothing—compared to the horrors that could happen. I had seen them up close and personal and a repeat was unthinkable.

I couldn't live with the pills. That I knew for certain. And life without them was dangerous, not only for me but for those who got too close to me. That I knew for certain, too. So this was it. The only possible choice.

“Good-bye, Lithium,” I said and flushed away the swirling pharmacy.

Somewhere in the bay, fish were overdosing on antipsychotics. Under no circumstances should they be operating heavy machinery.

“State your business,” I said into the receiver.

“Where are you?”

Carla ran the Taylor Gallery, which mostly made her in charge of corralling artists, who, as a general rule, are prone to things like getting arrested in Panama with a shipment of illegal parrots. She has a master's degree in art history from NYU and the self-flagellation tendencies of an Opus Dei follower. She deserves better. She wasn't getting it from me.

I dropped three strips of bacon into the hot cast-iron skillet and hopped back to avoid the spitting grease.

“I answered the phone. That's your first clue.”

“You're supposed to be here. Your work is supposed to be here. We should be discussing placement this very minute.”

“I've decided to devote myself to bacon.”

In honor of that, I peeled another strip from the pack and tossed it into the skillet. The smell was a heady, intoxicating thing. There is nothing like the sweet, smoky smell of dead pig.

I heard Carla pull the receiver away from her mouth and mumble to someone else.

“I don't know what that means,” she said when she came back to me.

“I'm not coming into the gallery.”

I tucked the phone between my jaw and shoulder and opened the fridge. Carton of eggs. Pickled jalapeños. Shredded cheddar. Onion.

“You're not coming in today?”

“Ever. I'm having a transformative month.”

“Is that some sort of artsy new age crap?”

“Probably not. There's booze involved.”

“I'm going to have blank walls, Clementine. Big, blank white walls. I've printed a catalog. People are coming to the opening. Buyers are coming to the opening. Critics. They are going to expect the art in the catalog to actually be on the wall. That's how this works. That's how we make money. That's how you make money.”

“Fifty percent of the selling price.”

“You're negotiating now?”

“Nope.” I pulled the bacon out of the skillet with a fork and cracked two eggs into the bubbling pork fat. “I'm not negotiating at all anymore. Not at all.”