Sliding Past Vertical

Sliding Past Vertical

By Laurie Boris

Sliding Past Vertical

Published by Laurie
Boris

Copyright 2013 Laurie
Boris

This is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental. Usage choices governed by
The
Chicago
Manual of Style
, 16th Edition. No actual animals were harmed in the writing
of this book.

PART 1: Boston, July-August 1987

Chapter 1

The breeze off the waterfront raised
goose bumps on Sarah’s arms. She rubbed them to keep warm, wishing she’d
brought a sweater to cover her slip of a dress. Couple after sparkling couple
disappeared inside the restaurant, some giving her an occasional backward
glance but then leaving her alone on the sidewalk, teetering on her heels.
Their laughter taunted her, as did the aroma of lobster and melted butter.

She squinted down the pier. Nothing
resembling Jay or his car was anywhere within visual range. Glancing at her
watch again only proved he was ten minutes later than the last time she’d
checked, when he’d only been twenty minutes late. The pay phone across the
street had already eaten two of her quarters, gifting her nothing in return but
two fruitless stabs at his answering machine.

Her stomach growled, poking at her
for trusting him to show up and for starving herself all day in anticipation of
the fancy dinner he’d promised.
I should
have known
, she thought, shaking her head. This was supposed to have been a
celebration. He’d been clean for six weeks and wanted to thank her for sticking
by him. Again. But getting a “something came up, meet me there” message had
never been the start of anything good. It was often the start of another binge
and another morning-after when she would be called in to do damage control,
armed with orange juice, aspirin, and a fifth of something from the package
store across the street. She gave him another ten minutes, made her flustered excuses
to the maître d’, who had already given away their table, and took off toward
South Station with just enough quarters in her purse for the trip home.

The T ride back to Sarah’s
apartment near Boston College felt like the longest of her life. Into the
hamper went the slinky new dress she had no business buying on her joke of a salary.
She tossed on an oversized T-shirt and jeans with a rip in the knee. While she
settled into her roommate’s sofa with a bowl of leftover spaghetti, she managed
to convince herself that lobster was overrated.

Then, she called Emerson.

“Why do I keep cleaning up other
people’s messes?”

His electric typewriter, the same
Smith Corona Super Sterling he’d been using since college, hummed in the
background. Sarah felt a twinge of guilt for disturbing his writing. He always
made time for her; she knew that and tried not to take advantage, but
sometimes—

“For the same reason I do,” he
said. “It makes you feel useful.”

She missed Emerson: the way he
spoke, how carefully he chose his words. Even when they were words she didn’t
want to hear. “I don’t feel useful. I just feel used. He stood me up tonight.
Again. It was totally humiliating.”

“So…stop seeing him.”

“I tried that,”
she bit at her lower lip, “a few times…”

Emerson let out his breath. It was
an old, wounded sound, clearly discernible over the purr of the typewriter. His
voice took on a serious tone, deeper than usual. “Sarah—”

“I know,” she sighed. “You’re tired
of this conversation. I’m tired of it, too. I’m sorry, Em. But…I think I need
to have it one more time.”

The humming stopped. She hadn’t
visited him for a couple of years—another thing to feel guilty about. How
easy it would be to pack a bag, take the bus to Syracuse, and let him adore her
until she got her confidence back. But she knew the cost of his adoration and
how much easier it was to bear from a distance.

She pictured Emerson leaning his
long, unmuscled body back against his chair. He’d push a lank curtain of
dishwater-blond hair off his forehead and his little, round glasses back onto
the bridge of his nose. The corners of his mouth would set into that
heartbreaking perpetual downward turn—to match his eyes, his brow, his
shoulders—as if his very genetics were trying to drag him into the earth,
piece by piece.

His voice then came out lighter.
“All right.”

“What were you working on?”

“You don’t want to talk about Jay
anymore?”

“No. It’s too depressing. Tell me
what you’re writing about.”

Pause. “You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

Another pause. “Spray cheese.”

Sarah laughed for the first time
that day. “Not something for the
New
Yorker
?”

“Not exactly.”

To supplement his paycheck, Emerson
wrote “personal experience stories” for men’s magazines. His forte was using
food products in ways Shop-Rite never intended. He’d started back in college.
The money was easy, and it was all kind of a goof to begin with, but Sarah
preferred not to think about why, at twenty-nine, he still wrote for men who
read with one hand.

To further distract herself, she
asked, “What happened with the short story you were writing about your
brother?”

At first, he said nothing. She
imagined him pulling off his glasses, rubbing at his eyes. “It’s a melodramatic
pile of crap,” he finally said. “Every time I read it, I keep thinking how much
better it would be in the hands of a real writer.”

“You
are
a real writer, Em.”

His laugh sounded bitter around the
edges. “Don’t humor me. I’m a hack. I push a mop at an old age home and get
paid by the word to write fake letters so men with no imaginations can get
off.”

“But only until something else pans
out,” she added quickly, a running joke she’d added quickly many times.

“Right,” he said, drawing out the
word. “I’m just biding my time until the Nobel Committee finally notices my
literary accomplishments. Or my skill with a mop-wringer. Whichever comes
first.”

Chapter 2

Emerson lived off of Westcott
Street in Syracuse, about a mile from the university, in the same sagging,
two-story wood-frame house he’d been hunkered down in since the summer before
his sophomore year. The faces had changed as students—mostly foreign,
mostly male—had come and gone, leaving their strange cooking smells,
colognes, and Emerson behind. He felt like a fixture with kitchen privileges, a
monument to cheap rent and inertia. Mainly though, he felt like a student who
was supposed to have passed through as well but got stuck somewhere along the
way.

After speaking with Sarah, Emerson
felt more stuck than ever, marooned back in the days when even thinking about her
with another man was enough to twist his insides into knots.

This latest joker really fried his
bacon. Not because he was yet another name on Sarah’s dance card of abysmal
boyfriends, but because he was talented, handsome, and built like some kind of
Greek god, by Sarah’s description. Worse, she seemed to be in love with him.
Why else would she keep taking the stupid cokehead back?

He stared at the piece of paper in
his typewriter. Globs of aerosol cheese on naked female haunches had lost their
appeal. He should give it up for the night and go to bed with a good book. A
good book never disappointed him. Heroes triumphed in the end, and the bad guys
got what was coming to them. Unlike real life, when the bad guys won and the
good guys got royally fucked.

There was a tap on his bedroom
door, a sort of polite scratching sound. Only one of his housemates knocked
like that.

“Come on in, Rashid.” Emerson put
away what he’d been writing. “I’m done here.”

The younger man sidestepped in,
wearing striped pajamas that looked recently ironed. A graduate student from
India, he was one of the residents who hadn’t yet left Emerson behind. They
made an odd pair. Rashid was a good six inches shorter than Emerson—about
the same height as Sarah. And Emerson, though not as lean as he’d been in
college, looked underfed next to his friend and housemate, a recent and
enthusiastic convert to American culinary delights like all-you-can-eat buffets
and french fries with everything.

“You are not getting bad news from
Sarah, I hope?”

Emerson shrugged. “Just the usual.”

Rashid nodded and stroked his anemic
attempt at a mustache while gazing at the photo of Sarah that Emerson kept
taped to the wall behind his typewriter. “The boyfriend?”

“Yeah. The boyfriend.”

Emerson could choke on the word. He
was looking at her picture, too. She’d sent it to him. There had been a male
attached—not Jay but one of the many. Emerson had snipped him out. He
liked the photo of her too much to sacrifice it because the jerk of the moment
happened to have an arm around her shoulders. It was taken at some sort of
artists’ charity event. What he liked best about the photo was that despite the
sophisticated dress hugging her curves, despite the long, brown hair moussed
and sprayed into a careful imitation of postcoital disarray, it caught Sarah in
the act of being Sarah: spontaneous and unpretentious, unposed and unpoised.

Puppyish eagerness seeped through
cracks in Rashid’s reserve. “She will be coming to visit?”

“Seen any flying pigs lately?”

His housemate looked confused. A
diplomat’s son, Rashid had learned English from a variety of British teachers
in a variety of countries. American idioms still troubled him.

“No,” Emerson sighed. “I don’t
think she’ll be coming to visit. At least not any time soon.”

“I should like to meet her one day,
after all you have told me.”

“And I should like to meet your
fiancée one day,” Emerson said.

Rashid’s smile faded. “Yes. Someday
I should like to meet my fiancée as well.”

Chapter 3

Jay wasn’t answering the phone or the
door buzzer, although she knew he was home and alive: his car sat in front of
his apartment building and changed parking spots every day or so, which she
couldn’t imagine had happened of its own accord. So the only avenue Sarah had
to elicit any kind of reaction to his no-show on the waterfront was his
answering machine. She left what she considered angry messages. They were
ineffective. She then opted for a softer approach—by that time, she
really was worried about him. When this didn’t work, she tried silence. Perhaps
a few days of guilt stew would provoke some contrition.

It was nearly a week before she saw
or heard from him again.

Her birthday fell during that week.
Everyone else remembered. Emerson sent red roses with his usual mushy card—a
tradition he kept up since she’d graduated from the university and moved to
Boston, eight years ago. For the first five years, Sarah had a
counter-tradition of her own. She’d have a short panic attack in the back room
of the Copy King, followed by a serious case of the creeps for the rest of the
afternoon, interspersed with calls to her roommate to debate the symbolism of
red roses. Later, over a beer or two and a lot of convoluted rationalization,
she’d convince herself that perhaps she’d read too much into a bunch of stupid
flowers and a heartfelt birthday greeting from her old-lover-now-platonic friend.

Then she’d call to scold him for
having spent too much on her.

“I had a good month,” he’d say.

Somehow, July always happened to be
a good month.

That year, she was secretly glad
he’d spent the money. She felt vindicated to have a trophy, proof that some man
besides her father or her boss cared enough to remember.

So she’d skipped the panic
attack—although she had called Emerson later to scold him; after all, it
was tradition—and arranged her flowers in an old plastic wash bottle the
pressman had found in the back room. She’d set it to the left of her
workstation, the side closest to the counter, in case Jay came in.

But that had been days ago. The
wash bottle had been replaced by a crystal vase, donated out of pity by her
boss’s wife and already chipped by Sarah’s T-square. The blossoms drooped. An
occasional petal floated down onto her drafting table, but she’d be damned if
she’d throw the roses away before Jay had an eyeful of what another man thought
she was worth. Even if they crumbled to dust and potpourri, she’d keep the
stems.

Luckily, it didn’t have to go that
far.

Jay made his entrance the following
Friday around noon, a tall drink of rock star in a T-shirt and tight black
jeans. Sarah was on the floor of the Copy King’s small lobby, up to her elbows
in the guts of the Jurassic self-service copier. She was clearing yet another
paper jam for a sweet older lady who had been attempting to copy her receipts
by inserting them
en masse
into the
hand-feed tray, even though Sarah had explained to her several times that this
was not in the best interest of the copier.

She recognized Jay first by his red
canvas high-tops, his long, slim legs, and the swagger in his walk. Despite a
stern talking-to, a tiny part of her brain danced, inebriated on lady hormones upon
his very presence.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she
told him, forcing a deliberate frostiness into her voice. She shredded a piece
of paper out of the roller and slapped the front cover closed.

“I’m not paying for those.” The
woman clucked at the ragged bits in Sarah’s hands and on the floor surrounding
the copier.

“Of course not, ma’am, but you did
make ten copies before that, and the sign says—”

Jay whipped a twenty out of his
wallet and flashed Sarah’s customer a set of enviable caps. He’d paid the
dentist in cash. “I’ll take care of that for you, gorgeous.”

The woman was predictably
flummoxed. “Now, isn’t that nice. See dear, some people know how to be polite.”

The door chime tinkled, and she
minced down Beacon Street, an unmistakable wiggle in her hips.

“I
was
being polite,” Sarah told her retreating form.

“You could be nicer to people.” Jay
shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled as she crossed to the cash register.
The teeth were an improvement on his parents’ DNA and a lifetime of bad habits,
but in some areas, he had been naturally blessed, most notably with thick black
hair and dark blue eyes to commit a felony for. Regardless of what parts of him
were natural and which had been a public works project, the fact that he looked
so damned good and knew it did little to improve Sarah’s mood.

She plucked the bill out of Jay’s
fingers and rang in the ten copies, plus the five that had jammed, the three
that had come out too light, a couple more because she was mad, another because
the air conditioner barely worked, and another because he hadn’t as much as
looked at her roses.

Jay blinked at his empty hand. “I
didn’t think you’d actually take it.”

With a huff, she handed him his
change. He counted it before stuffing it into his wallet. Emerson wouldn’t have
counted.

Jay rocked on his heels, shoved his
hands deep into his pockets, and lifted his eyebrows. “So…wanna come over for
lunch?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. He
had to be kidding. It would take a lot more than a surf across his waterbed to
make things right this time. “You’d better be talking about food.”

He blinked back puppy eyes that
seemed to reach over the counter and touch every inch of her, all at once. She
had to look away. “Baby, I fucked up.”

No
kidding.
She glared at the floor, remembering the stiff ocean breeze on her
bare arms, the indignity of having been stood up, the anger and fear that
pulsed through her as she’d pumped quarters into the pay phone. Then almost a
week of silence! “You could have called.”

“I know.” He sighed. “I should
have. Look, baby, I’m trying. Really. I want to stop. I do. But it’s so hard. I
need you to help me.”

She was caught by his
verisimilitude of sincerity. He did it when he was on stage too. Sometimes he’d
look her way, and it felt like they were the only ones in the room.

“How,” she found herself saying.

“There’s a place near Springfield,
they have a program.” He leaned in close, elbows on the counter. She smelled the
tobacco on his breath—tobacco and peppermint Life Savers. “I got a gig
near there tonight. Come with me. We can stay over somewhere, and tomorrow
morning you can check me in.”

She stared, her mouth going slack.
This was the first time he’d brought it up on his own. She didn’t think about
the promise she’d made to Jimmy to work late that night and over the weekend.
She didn’t think.

“It’ll take three weeks.” He
stroked her cheek with an index finger. He kept his nails long because of the
way he played his guitar and he scratched her, ever so slightly. “But, baby,
I’m doing it for us.”

* * * * *

It was quarter to one in a bar
outside Springfield. Jay’s band futzed around with cables and sound checks, lobbing
private jokes at each other while they prepped for their last set. The crowd
had thinned but the smoke hadn’t. Feeling the effects of the free beers her
seemingly contrite boyfriend kept sending to her table, she went to the ladies’
room—a misnomer because there was no evidence of a lady in recent occupancy.
How do women miss the seat?
Sarah chose
the least hideous of the three stalls. She leaned her head against the
graffiti-hatched partition and fought sleep. It was late, she’d had too much to
drink, and she was already fried from working twelve hours straight.

“Don’t be too late now,” her boss
had said, when, at seven thirty, he finally dragged his butt home to his wife
and four kids. Sarah had stayed until eight to finish pasting up a church flyer
and designing a menu for the deli down the block before racing home to pack and
meet Jay. How she loved watching him on stage, the slow, sexy way he fingered
his guitar. Never in her life had she been jealous of a block of wood. She
couldn’t wait to get to the hotel, take a hot shower, sink into a clean bed and
maybe, if she was lucky, have Jay to herself for a little while. After leaving
him at rehab the next morning, she wouldn’t see him for three weeks.

The anticipation of sex dragged her
up. She fixed her hair and makeup in the cracked, smoke-fogged mirror. She swiped
on some extra lipstick and went out to watch Jay do what he did best.

* * * * *

The house lights came up. Although
it was after last call, Jay plopped two Bass Ales on Sarah’s table, swung a
chair around and sat in it backward, imprisoning her between his long legs. He
shot a murderous glare over her shoulder—cobalt lasers. She turned. A
young guy at the bar studiously ignored them.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t like the way that
asshole’s been staring at you.”

They had so little time together and
she didn’t want trouble. “I’m sure he’s harmless.”

His eyes remained locked on the bar
as he started to untangle himself. “Right. Uh-huh. Stay here, baby.”

“Jay, no.” She grabbed both his
thighs.

For the moment, she had his
attention.

The truth was that she’d barely
noticed the guy at the bar, even when he’d offered to buy her a drink. She’d
been too entranced with Jay, channeling Jagger in the band’s cover of “Ain’t
Too Proud To Beg,” which made her want to tear his clothes off.

She leaned in and brushed her mouth
against his, the tip of her tongue tracing a slow path along the top of his
lower lip. A moan rose from his throat, and he palmed the back of her head,
drawing her toward him for a long, beery, tobacco and peppermint kiss. By the
time they stopped, her hands had slid a few inches north, and two androgynous
strangers were sitting at their table. She whipped her hands off him and
straightened her clothing. They seemed to know Jay, and they looked like
zombies, but that could have been the light, or the hour, or the fact that they
were in black from head to toe, complete with matching eyeliner and lipstick.
And they just…sat there, creeping her out.

“Are we going to the hotel soon?”
she asked Jay.

He hesitated. Another bad sign.
“See, here’s the thing. We’re crashing with some friends of mine tonight.” He
introduced Mr. and Mrs. Night of the Living Dead. They grunted in unison. “They
got a foldout in their living room.”

“I thought we were staying at a
hotel,” Sarah said under her breath.

“I owed somebody.” He shrugged. “I
had to give them everything on me. Tomorrow, I want to…you know, go in clean.
No debts, no baggage.”

A tentative smile oozed across his
face and he ran a finger up her arm. The nail scratched lightly. She shivered,
wishing she had enough money for a room. But she’d need every cent in her purse
for her bus ticket home; she didn’t have a license and couldn’t take his car
back to town. With fading hopes of ever sleeping with him again, she thought
about her paycheck, forgotten in the top drawer of the utility cart beside her
drafting table, along with the fifty bucks her boss had given her as a birthday
bonus. She’d planned on giving it back to him. It was too much money and Jimmy
had a family to feed, but at the moment, she would have spent it all—plus
her bus money—for five minutes alone with Jay.

He threw back the rest of his beer,
winked at the female bartender, and asked for another, with a shot of whiskey.

“You mind giving up on the hotel
thing?” he asked Sarah. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

His eyes were beginning to glaze.

“I guess.” Sarah let out a long
breath. She knew that glaze. Five minutes was probably all she would have
gotten.

They followed the pair back to a
ratty apartment and didn’t unfold the foldout until three thirty. Jay snored
beside her. At 4:23, Sarah still couldn’t sleep. She rolled onto her stomach,
her back, her side. The metal bar in the thing tortured her in every position.
It was hot in the decrepit place, and the sheets reeked of stale pot and unwashed
bodies. Plus, there was a giant bloodstain on one of the removed sofa cushions,
which disturbed her so much that she had to get up and turn the stained side
toward the wall.

Then her mind opened a door she
thought she’d locked tight.
What if the
rehab doesn’t work?

Emerson hadn’t been too optimistic.

“People don’t change that easily,”
he’d said. “Especially if they don’t want to. From what you’ve told me, it
doesn’t sound like Jay wants to.”

She’d quarreled with Emerson, then.
Accused him of hating all of her boyfriends on general principle. Accused him
of being sanctimonious and smug, that he’d been projecting his own experience
with his alcoholic mother on her.

But what if he’d been right?