Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (7 page)

BOOK: Snowstorms in a Hot Climate
4.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

It didn’t penetrate. “This won’t help us, Elly. I told you right from the beginning. I said it as clearly as I knew how because you were important and I wanted you to understand. It was your choice. You had everything you wanted, and you screwed it up. If you can’t play the game you shouldn’t join in. You make my life dangerous when you’re like this—”

“And you can’t have that, can you, Lenny?” I smashed back. “Because it’s as cold and clear-cut as that, isn’t it? My God, for a man who’s so smart you are so dumb. What do you think this is all about, eh? Me having a good time? Christ, didn’t it ever occur to you that the coke was just a substitute? That the reason I took it was because it gave me something you couldn’t?”

That pricked him. Despite himself, he was interested. “A substitute for what?”

“Attention.” The word shot like a missile across the room. “Yeah, attention. For the short amount of time when we got on
together, the coke gave me its full attention. It made me feel important. Wanted. Needed. And it gave me something else. Something that no lover of yours should ever be without. It gave me self-containment. It made me as impenetrable as you. And that’s what made your absence bearable. Of course,
you
can do without it. You don’t need help to grow cold. You are already. That’s why your precious white mistress doesn’t dominate you. I took coke to be like you. To make living with you less painful. But unfortunately I couldn’t mold myself in your image. However many ounces I shoved up my nose, I still needed. And I still loved. More fool me.”

I hadn’t meant to say so much. The effort exhausted me. Too many tears and too little sleep. And no drug to numb the pain. I remember that I turned over in the bed, away from him, and lay with my eyes closed, waiting for him to leave. I heard the floor creak, then felt the weight of his body as he sat down beside me on the bed. I kept my eyes tightly shut. He put a hand on my shoulder. Not a sustained touch, but a real one. More real than for a long time. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, to give him the pleasure of my weakness. Not again.

When he spoke I could almost have believed I was hearing the man I had once loved on an island. There was something close to tenderness in his voice. “Elly, you’re not telling either of us anything we didn’t already know. You always knew there would be limitations, priorities. No, I don’t need people in the same way. I never have. That’s just how I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for you. I’ve stayed with you longer than I’ve stayed with any other woman because you seemed to understand that instinctively. But I can’t change for you. Yeah, I know I’ve given you a rough time. But you pushed me and you knew the score. I’m not the one who has changed.”

I wondered if that were true, if I had once found easy something that I could now no longer bear. It didn’t matter anymore.
The air was full of splintered glass, and there seemed nowhere to tread where we wouldn’t draw blood. I didn’t trust myself to speak. After a while I felt him stand up and walk away.

Then I heard him say: “It’s your decision, Elly. All of it. I met a woman in Bogotá ten months ago. She was bright and clean and independent. If you come across her again, tell her I would like her back. I’ll be gone for a while. Maybe she’ll be here when I return.”

And so he left. And I didn’t see him again for two months. I called you that day, February 15. But you were out, and somehow I didn’t have the courage to pick up the phone again. That evening I hired a car and drove to Vermont. It was a hard winter. Everything was ice and snow. I booked myself into this beautiful old hotel, all open fires and brass bedsteads with mounds of quilted covers. That night I flushed ten grams of cocaine down the washbasin, dosed myself with Valium, and stuck it out. At the end of the week I called my fancy gynecologist and set up an abortion. I paid a share of Lenny’s profits for a high-class vacuuming of my womb and then squandered a little more on a plane ticket to Hawaii. I spent six weeks lying out in tropical sunshine doing nothing but trying to work out why the fuck I still loved him. I wrote to you a couple of times, but the letters never got posted. I guess I didn’t want to hear what you would have to say. I slept with a few men and instantly forgot them. He did bestride my narrow world like a Colossus, and I could find no place where his shadow didn’t touch me. I thought about it until I knew the thoughts by heart. And then I made one final attempt to sort it out. I flew back to America. I went to the only person who I knew had been closer to Lenny than I had. To J.T., Lenny’s ex-partner, the guy whose house we had stayed in the summer before. It was a long shot. He’s not exactly the world’s most outgoing person—you’ll see when you meet him—but he’d known Lenny for years—lived with him, scammed with him,
traveled with him, seen him, presumably, with other women. He was the nearest, in fact, that Lenny had ever got to a friend. And although we hadn’t exactly become close that summer, he’d been OK with me—even Lenny had been impressed. It was J.T. or no one. And I needed advice.

If he was surprised he didn’t show it. Just picked me up at the airport and drove me back to the guesthouse, no questions asked. For two days I sat watching the ocean, remembering the times Lenny and I had spent there until it hurt too much to think about. Then I plucked up the courage to talk. I told J.T. something of what had been going on; the rest I think he guessed. I waited for his comments. He said very little. And, of course, what he did say I already knew. That there had been other women, and that the affairs had never outlasted the marriage. That Lenny loved me in his fashion, but that his fashion would not—could not—change, and that if I couldn’t live with that, then I should leave. It was my decision. But if I decided to stay, then he would advise me to say nothing of this visit. Lenny, he implied, would see it as a betrayal. Their friendship, it seemed, did not include emotional confidences.

There was nothing more to say. He took me to the airport, and I bought a ticket for London but at the last minute took a plane to New York instead. When we left the ground I was sure I was going to leave him, but somewhere over the continent I became haunted by memories and a kind of Dory Previn stubbornness that finally I alone could “cater to his passion and his pride.” Romantic shit, I know, but still powerful. By the time we touched down, I had decided to give it one more try. I took a taxi into town and walked back into the apartment, brown, clean, and bright, but not, I know now, independent. I was asking him to take me back.

He had been home a couple of weeks and was still riding high from a scam well done. He looked gorgeous, so defined, so
sure of who he was. And I knew it was stupid, but I wanted him. And more important, I wanted him to want me. Enough to make it happen. We talked for a while, prowled around each other, and then went to bed. In the morning I made my pitch. I told him that I would stay and play by the rules, but that I couldn’t live that way forever. That if there was to be a future, he would have to think about his loyalties and finally decide between us. Her and me. And he listened and nodded and said he understood. Said that he too had done some thinking and that yes, for a while at least, he would give her up and see how it affected us. I was amazed, entranced, suspicious. I both believed and did not believe him. And so we began again.

And since that day I have not done a line of coke. You probably find it hard to believe from looking at me, but I am fatter than I was. My body is healthy again. I have a purpose to life. I work a couple of days at the store. I am employed. I even employ others under me. I hold a green card, which gives me an identity separate from Lenny. I am legal, justified. And on the days when I am not working I draw, take Spanish lessons, learn the flute, and wander the city. I fill my time. I am busy. As busy as Lenny.

And Lenny? Well, he has both changed and remained the same. He is still the amateur academic, but only for some of the time. For the rest he is away. On trips. Business. The shops. Or so he says. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. If I asked, he might tell me the truth, and then I would have to face facts. I don’t mean to be unfair. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. He has. He still does. Gives me what he can. Sometimes I think he has almost forgiven me my weakness. But deep down I don’t trust him. And, when I’m feeling really paranoid, I think he doesn’t trust me either.

It’s crazy, because in some ways we get on even better than before. In bed, for instance. The sex is great. My desire for him increases. As if I take from sex what I can’t get elsewhere. And
take
is the right word. I’m grabby and selfish. We both are. It’s good. I like it. It touches something in me, makes me powerful. But it never lasts past the orgasm. And he never says he loves me, because, of course, he doesn’t. And the lack of it sometimes drives me distraught with pain.

Hard to believe, isn’t it, Marla? Me, Elly Cameron, life and soul of the party, old before my time. I mean it. It’s as if he’s taken away my youth. When things were really bad, do you know what I used to do? Go and sit for hours in coffee shops watching other women, wondering how they did it. I was fascinated by the ones younger than me. I don’t think I’d ever noticed them before. Suddenly they were everywhere. I used to marvel at their skin, the softness of their flesh, the confidence of it. And I would so envy them their possibilities. I knew I was being absurd. That it’s as easy to be fucked over at twenty as it is at thirty. Only it didn’t feel like that. Not anymore. I had been young in the world for so long that I had grown to assume that was how it would always be. But, of course, it isn’t. I know that now. There’s less room for mistakes now. That’s what being with Lenny has taught me.

And if I’m being truthful, I think that I’m in too far ever to get free, that when they sucked out my womb, they took half of my will as well. He’s like a disease inside me, Marla. But one that I don’t want to recover from. Of course I say nothing. I keep to my side of the bargain, demand no more than he feels able to give. And meanwhile his other affair he conducts in greater and greater secrecy. And some nights, after we’ve screwed and he’s fallen asleep, or more likely gone out on the balcony to read a tome or two, some nights I wonder if it means that I am becoming just like him. Or if I have simply become accustomed to being a victim.

I should know the signs. Women who are victims always throw themselves in the path of the oncoming truck and then
complain when it runs over them. Remember those people? We used to know a lot at one time. And we were so scathing about them. Well, sometimes I think I’m one of them now.

And the terrible thing is, Marla, you’ll see nothing of this. When you meet him he’ll be charming. He’ll smile and shine and talk and listen, and you’ll believe it’s all there for the taking. But it won’t really be him—any more than the person he has made me is really me. Or at least not the me you once knew.

Which is where this all began … and which is why I asked you to come. You’re my last hope, Marla. I can’t do it alone. I want to leave him, but I don’t know how. It feels as if it’s not allowed, like a rule which can’t be broken. I want you to help me break it. Please.

five

S
o ended Elly’s tale. Outside, even the city seemed stilled for a moment. She sat huddled in her chair, her body awkward and taut, as if a kind of rigor mortis had set in.

I went over and put my arms around her. She did not respond. I held her tight, willing her to relax. “Listen, look on the bright side. It’s fortunate I didn’t bother to unpack. This way we can be on the first flight home.”

But she missed or decided to ignore the irony in my voice and pulled away from me, brittle again. “It’s not that simple,” she said angrily. “Don’t you understand, I can’t leave. That’s just the point.”

I watched her carefully, as one might watch a child whose tantrums might lead her to inflict some damage on herself. It was a long time since Elly Cameron had so lost her sense of humor.

“Come on, Elly. This is me, Marla, remember? We’re the ones who used to hit each other’s shins with hockey sticks to avoid having to play games in winter. Comrades in adversity. Nothing’s changed. It’s all right. I understood what you said.”

Now, at last, her body loosened, and she let out a noisy sigh, caught midway between tears and laughter. “Oh, Marla, what a mess, eh? How the hell did I get into this? Does it really make any sense?”

“Of course.” I was only half lying. It could never have been my story because I would have lacked the original courage to get that involved. Because Elly had always taken life in such huge gulps, it was inevitable that sooner or later she would ingest something that would disagree with her. But people seldom die of food poisoning, and Lenny, potent though he may have been, did not strike me as a lethal dose. At least not for the Elly I once knew.

“Listen, you know the legend as well as I do. All you have to do is slay the Minotaur, then start winding back the thread until you reach the entrance, which will also be the exit.”

This time she grinned. “Trust in the gods, eh? Oh, Marla, I’m so glad you’re here. Don’t you wish you’d taken a package to Majorca instead?”

“Perish the thought. Haven’t you heard? They’re blowing up English tourists out there. Anyway, you know me. Why lead my own life when I can live through someone else’s? Why do you think I’ve been so disturbed by your silence? I always knew there had to be a good story behind it.”

Talk of our separation brought us back to time present. She
looked at her watch in a kind of disbelief. “Christ, Marla, we’ve been sitting here for hours. You must be shattered. It’s already morning in England.”

And did I miss it? Not a jot. I could have stayed up till lunchtime. But she was in more need of sleep than I. Now it was told, the energy had seeped away and she looked gray with a tiredness worse than jet lag. I stood up.

“One question. How long before he gets back?”

She made a face. “Your guess is as good as mine. He left last Thursday. Said he’d be away for ten days. But he’s always unpredictable. In my more paranoid moments, I think he does it deliberately, just to check up on me. Let’s just say he could walk in at any time.”

BOOK: Snowstorms in a Hot Climate
4.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Drop City by T. C. Boyle
Shadow Heart by J. L. Lyon
Duke by Candace Blevins
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano
Divine Justice by Cheryl Kaye Tardif
Las correcciones by Jonathan Franzen