Slut Lullabies (16 page)

We used to be so happy my jaw ached from smiling. But that never lasts, even in the absence of tragedy or error. Even the luckiest people, in time, begin to forget.

Van says to me at the Dodger, “I'd love to hog-tie you and belt you till you lose that cool. You have a very spankable ass.”

“You're such a dork,” I sigh. “
Hog
-tie!” I start chortling; I am drinking Jameson, and my alcohol tolerance, even after years of alternating Vicodin and Norco, is still for shit. “Likening a woman to a hog—does that get you lots of action?”

“Conrad hog-tied this woman the other night at the apartment,” Van whispers. “And then he just fucking
left
her there. It was trippy. I came in—I'd snorted some H after my shift—and there she was, naked on the couch. Bartók was sleeping right on the curve of her hip—she couldn't move, so she was just lying there. I was all,
Hey baby what's goin' on
, and she was just like,
I'm waiting for Conrad, do you know where he is
?” Van's nose is runny. I wonder if he's done more H tonight.

He grabs my arm for emphasis. “But I'd seen Conrad
here
! He was here getting high with the other bartenders. So I go back and find him, right, and he's all,
Man I panicked—I didn't know what to do with her so I just came back here
. It was fucked up.” He shrugs. “So I went back and fucked her and untied her and sent her home. She was really pissed.”

I stare at him, aware that maybe I'm getting his message wrong.

“At you?”

“At
Conrad
.” He looks at me as if I'm not following the story. “At Conrad, who left her hog-tied in the apartment like an
idiot
? Shit, I had a hard time getting it up—I was pretty high—but the situation was so extreme, I managed.”

“Oh.”

His brows narrow further. “Girl, you're not driving tonight, are you?”

I shrug.

“Why don't you eat something? You don't look so good. You wanna go for some barbecue?”

I'm laughing again; I can't stop.

“You know,” he says, “I've been thinking. Like how much I love Bartók—like, would I love him as much if he were a fish? 'Cause, you know, you can't touch a fish. Do you think you love things according to a scale—I don't mean a
fish
scale, I mean a
scale
scale, like a weighing, balancing . . .”

“I know what you mean.”

“Like, love measured on a scale of how much you can touch something? 'Cause I don't think twice about eating a fish, but I'd never eat a cat—why is that?”

“You can touch a cow,” I say. “You eat cows. They eat dogs in China.”

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe I'm wrong.”

“Touch is a luxury,” I say. “So is love. If you were hungry enough, you'd eat Bartók.” I want to say,
Or high enough
, but I don't, because it's more petty than true, and I'm not even sure why I'd bother being petty anyway.

“You look hungry enough to eat me,” he says, and he snickers.

I have never slept with Van. His immature blatancy notwithstanding, I'm not sure why. Maybe because if he can barely be civil to Mark now, I'm afraid of what he'd do if I actually went to bed with him. Maybe because his affairs tend to go horribly awry in messy, embarrassing ways. He's been stalked by two women since I've known him. One busted up his car.

“Did you know that Faulkner wrote dozens of letters to this married woman he was in love with, but they never consummated their attraction?” He is pouring me another Jameson I didn't ask for. “You wanna do H with me later? Conrad's sticking around.”

I have never done heroin either, although as an opiate it can't be that different than the other opiate derivatives constantly in my system. When Van was in high school, he used to make tapes of the music he'd composed and pipe them into headphones to guide his friends through their first acid trips. Nobody ever had a bad trip under his tutelage, he swears. But I don't know if I can do it: snort H and then kneel in front of a toilet and let him hold my hair. I don't know if I can go home to Mark and act normal afterward, even though I want to know if some drug can numb me out enough to let me feel.

“Conrad gives me the creeps.”

He doesn't say that we can blow Conrad off; he knows what I'm telling him. He has three lovers right now: a wine broker, a married forty-year-old flutist, and still Tina occasionally, though she and I haven't spoken in over a year.

“Call your husband and tell him to walk over here and drive your ass home,” he says. “What the hell kind of guy is he anyway, letting his wife wander around fucked up with the likes of me?”

I want to say:
a saint
. What I say is, “One looking for an excuse to leave.”

While I was in the emergency room in Windsor, Vermont, Mark showed up, though he was working a forty-five minute drive away and I had our rental car. I never did find out how he got there, only that the moment he appeared beside me, I was looking the other way and making a joke to one of the interns, and when I turned the other direction there was Mark, standing with an expression of disbelief while out of my mouth escaped the residue of a treasonous laugh. I expected him to say something like
Bitch
, and to stalk out of the hospital, where no doubt his ride would have left, so he'd begin the walk home in those white Nikes he'd had since college, plowing blindly—how long would it take?—through the snow.

Instead he said, “I'm glad you're OK.” He touched my cheek. I remembered then that the baby had not seemed real exactly to Mark—that he was no good at speculation or loving things he could not see. I wasn't showing yet. Maybe he didn't mind much, even. His own mother told him in high school that if abortion had been legal in 1967, she'd have had one—“nothing personal,” she'd added. She did experiments on rats. Rats were her passion. He'd never particularly wanted kids.

Ironically, after the accident, he seemed to take for granted that we would “try again.” My pregnancy had been accidental; we'd been married for only two years. We wanted to travel. Mark was in the final year of his Ph.D. and already he'd had the chance to do research and present papers around the globe. I had not craved a baby. The accident that had totaled my car and killed my unborn child had left
me
with only a mild concussion and a profound case of relief.

It occurred to me only briefly then that perhaps the accident was some kind of retribution for what I'd done—that maybe I was meant to have died, too. I contemplated this the way one makes sure to worry sufficiently about a plane crash before flying, to hedge my bets, because if you worry about something, the worry carries its own negating effect.

Six days later, I got into Accident Number Two.

Mark is in his last year of funding at U of C. He has a NASA grant, like he did during his Ph.D. years, to do research on the earth's magnetosphere. Specifically, he researches the impact that a spacecraft has on the magnetosphere—on the plasma waves the spacecraft generates. Mark takes the data from this disturbance and turns it into pictures that can be read at a glance. When people find out that Mark is a rocket scientist (usually this happens when they say, “Wow, you're practically a rocket scientist,” and Mark says, “Uh, I
am
a rocket scientist”), the next question is usually whether he ever wanted to be an astronaut. I asked this question when we met. But the answer is no. Mark may want to jump out of the occasional plane, or fly one himself, or climb to a really high peak and look down, but he wouldn't want to build a life around it, so to speak. He is both too low-key and too high-maintenance for that. He has, for starters, never gone more than three months without owning an excitable mutt he allows to make out with him and practically hump him even in public. He loves crème brûlée and expensive cognacs. He masturbates nearly every morning, regardless of how often he is getting laid, and cannot stand to sleep in anything more confining than white briefs. He is positively addicted to The History Channel. If he is forced to be in a crowd for more than a few hours at a stretch, he is known to have fits of spontaneous narcolepsy—I have seen him fall asleep in the middle of a rave while the cops were breaking the place up. Space life would not suit him.

And so getting Diego to take us for a spin in the plane is as close as he is going to get. He and Diego have known each other since Mark's grad school days, but Diego is usually at the Max Planck Institute, Mark is usually at U of C, and most of their correspondence takes place over e-mail. But now Diego is in New Jersey for the holidays, and so Mark and I have flown East for the express purpose of taking a ride in his rinky-dink plane. Afterward we will have to go somewhere and drink German beers, and I will listen to them talk about the magnetosphere and their mutual and boring colleagues until my eyes glaze. Diego has just been in Indonesia. Once he gets drunk enough to forget that he is not supposed to speak to me (as though that isn't conspicuous), he may tell us about the trip. He may make eye contact across the table; he may feel tingly, like the newcomer in a ménage à trois. He may think to himself,
They both want to be me; they both want to fuck me
, and although I am fairly certain Mark has never thought of his Diego-infatuation in those terms, it is close enough to truth to make the prospect of the evening ahead already embarrassing.

The plane is falling. It happens out of nowhere—a drop, a stomach-rising pitch like riding the American Eagle at Great America when I was a child. I scream, “Holy shit!”

No one responds: the panic wall has already gone up between us so that we cannot even hear each other.

“Don't worry.” Diego, finally. I can barely hear anymore over my own screams. “Just an air pocket!”

Mark is gripping my arm; later it will bruise. My stomach is in place again. It has all been too quick, a snap in reality, a sudden fissure through which we entered another dimension—I am not back yet. Diego is flying, he's howling, “Whoo-eee!” like some asinine cowboy even though he is a blond from New Jersey with a pretentious Mexican name.

Mark murmurs, “I know that feels awful—it freaked me out, too—but it happens all the time. It's no big deal. We're fine.”

We are? I stare at him. Already my back hurts again.
Third time's a charm
. This death could have been so clean, so quiet, nothingness. For four years, I have been waiting for something to finish me off, every day its own silly agony. I have thought more than once,
I cannot get through a lifetime of these days
; I panic if I think of myself having to go through this every day until I'm eighty. Won't the pills themselves kill me before then? Won't they stop working—and if they do, what will become of me? It is not at all outside the realm of possibility that I will take my own life. Here was fate's chance to finish me off. My temples are thumping louder than the plane's engine, because the only thing worse than having to face another day in this body on this earth is
today
being the day I get off.

Then we land. All around us is empty space, winter-dead farmland surrounding the concrete landing strip meant for just this defiance of nature's laws. Diego is exhilarated, talking faster than I've ever heard him, hot for his beer. Mark's steps are cautious. He does not let go of my arm. We stand blinking in the sunlight, three foreign islands, two joined precariously by the peninsula of Mark's clutching fingers. He is an expert at the way the velocity of one object impacts the larger field around it. Can he sense the plasma under my skin, the waves of Diego's lust piqued by our trespass into a space we didn't intend? Does he know that right now I want to smack the grin off Diego's face and bury my head in my staid husband's coat and hold on for dear life? Does he know that I am losing it already—the raw ability to feel that gripped me as the plane plummeted—that I am looking to him, desperately, to show me how to hang on?

“I think I want to go back to the hotel.” My voice sounds weak.
My voice sounds like I feel
. If he will just come with me, I could collapse into his arms, I could cry and confess my fears. “I don't . . . really feel like partying right now.”

He nods. His eyes are on mine, and I feel something rising in me, Diego all but invisible now. Something is close to the surface—one stroke and it would all come pouring out.

“No problem,” Diego says. “We understand. I'll get you a cab.”

I start to cry then, right there. The tears come, and I think,
Last time I puke all over the man's house and now I'm blubbering over his airplane
. That is when I know the fissure has closed. Everything is clicking back into focus: Diego, this man who will be nothing in my life now, who could have been something else entirely, watching me, no doubt tired already of my foibles and departures. And Mark. Mark, whose nonjudgmental love is contingent on his being able to maintain a clinical distance, on not interfering with my data. He will never leave me for being sick, I realize abruptly. He will not leave me for refusing sex, for doing everything possible to keep myself from conceiving again, for the artificial tone of my voice or the oscillating concealment and outbursts of my pain. He observes me like his numbers, like his mother observed the rats—a bad run of luck cannot make him give up his project. I remember the earnest efforts of his tongue after the accident, his patience, his hope—love's experiment—and my inability to produce the waves that would prove he'd been there. Were he to come with me now, I would pour into him everything that felt so close to spilling. Then we would wake tomorrow with his expectation that life would go back to normal. He would have woken with the breakthrough behind him, and I would have woken with one good night behind me, and every other day stretched out like a war.