The Dwelling: A Novel (47 page)

He went upstairs to the attic, feeling suddenly like he was making a terrible compromise and feeling very, very comfortable with that. At the bottom of the stairs in the hall, he turned on the answering machine, hardly noticing that in his other hand, as he worked the controls on the little box, was the bottle of bourbon. Amber liquid sloshed in the bottle, cheerfully, all the way up the stairs.

Things went much better once the compromise had been reached. Richie sipped at a glass of bourbon and wrote the end of the bedroom scene with Porter. He got Porter and his grandfather out at the site where the old man had seen the spaceship and back into the car where they sat at the edge of the road in the shadow of the old man’s most haunted past. They talked about Porter’s parents. Porter cried.

It went well. It read fast and the road scene foreshadowed a scene that would come much later in the book. Richie wrote through the first glass of bourbon, hardly noticing when his hand poured the second. He sipped it, the friendly feeling flowing through him and covering up the mistakes of the day before like a blanket covering a corpse.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just go on home.
That reminded him uncomfortably about the girl, and he gave his head a shake. What the hell was the guy doing with
parts
of her? Souvenirs.

Somewhere between the second and third filling of the glass, his typing began to degenerate. He made lots of typos, which forced him to go back and fix them in order to make sense of what he was writing. The ideas were good, though. Good strong ideas. He had just needed to relax.

And relaxed he was. The effect of the bourbon, once the initial buzz had moved up a notch, made him sleepy enough to have a nap. He checked the time on the computer. It was just after four by then, and that gave him lots of time to have a nap and still get some more work done that night. Just after four he decided to do that, planning to sleep no more than an hour, then maybe a bite downtown and then back at it. And nothing more to drink.

He’d get serious. It was going well. The spell was broken.

He woke to the phone ringing, slowly opening his eyes in the dark room and remembering something, something that just touched the edges of memory, but something bad and like déjà vu all over again. The machine picked it up before he could even think about getting out of bed to grab it. For a second he thought it was morning again, and the phone was ringing, waking him up. His head was still sore.

Janis’s voice screamed up the stairwell on the machine.

“WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?”
He sat up in bed and in the dark saw his clock radio. It was six-thirty
P
.
M
. Had to be evening. “You call me back, you bastard. Fuck,
Richie
…” and it trailed off, a mixture of disappointment and disgust.

It was the dial tone that brought it to him. Janis must have hung up then, and the machine continued to record, the annoying high-pitched sound of the dial tone coming up the stairs and it, too, was—

RJ. He was supposed to pick up RJ.

He sprang out of bed and ran down the stairs. At the bottom he was paralyzed with indecision. Should he put on his coat and just drive down there and get him? Was he still waiting? What time was he supposed to pick him up? He fucked up something, because Janis was pissed off. Five. He was supposed to pick him up at five. Was he supposed to pick him up at five?
Shit.

Richie picked up the phone and dialed Janis, and tried to think of a lie.

In the end, he hadn’t been able to. He had been left with somewhat of the truth: he told her he’d worked really late the night before, then got at it early in the morning and had simply fallen asleep. Two lies and a truth. He hung up, dejected and mortified by his own behavior. Janis had wrung him out. RJ had waited a full hour outside in the cold, turned down a ride from Jason’s mother, then started to worry that something terrible had happened to his father. Finally he called Janis on her cell phone
during her meeting
and told her that Richie hadn’t shown up. Then Janis had worried. She
cut her meeting short,
and they had driven the route home that Richie would have taken—all the way to his house—and saw the lights out and his car outside on the street. She had contemplated going in and
killing
him, but RJ was upset and she just took him home. He’d missed his math tutor, and that was thirty-five dollars she’d have to pay anyway (
and no way am I paying it, buddy, that particular bill is yours,
she’d said). What the fuck was he thinking?

“Were you drinking?” she asked, in the tone of voice that was a curious mixture of concern and disgust.

He’d answered, quickly, with utter indignation. “Of course not!” horrified even as he answered her that she would have the nerve (the
nerve
) to ask and that she’d been right. He might have been drinking. He had
not
been drunk.

In all, Richie had managed to say two other things. He’d asked to speak to RJ, and Janis told him RJ was too mad at him to talk. And then he’d said, stupidly, “He has a math tutor?” in a vain attempt to distract her from the conversation.

To that Janis had said, “What kind of a father are you hoping to be, Richie? What kind?” And then she hung up.

He sat on the couch. His kid. Jen. The book that wouldn’t be. He thought horrible thoughts of himself, the sort of thoughts that ended with no realization outside killing himself for the sake of society and the people he loved. They threatened to drown him. Thoughts went round and round in his head.

So he would have a drink. Just one. He needed one. No one would deny that.

He had brought the bottle of bourbon down to the dining room. With the two empty wine bottles and the dust and crumbs from the night before, it was not a pretty picture. The bottle did not have much more than a drink or two left in it, maybe three shots. When the hell had that happened?

The drinking fairies are at it again, obviously. Terrible hosebags, those fairies. Drink all your beer, drink all your wine, drink all your brown pop and then make you sleep right through picking your kid up after school.
Expensive little buggers, too. Represented on the table at that very moment was nearly thirty dollars in liquor—even if, technically, it hadn’t all been his money. But there was thirty bucks, pissed away. Not to mention (technically) a hundred-dollar promise ring and the possible earnings from the last two days, add that to the fact that his kid might never again cut his lawn for free, you were looking at a few dollars.

Terrible prospect for a guy with so few to spare (ironically, previously due to the drinking fairies; insidious little bastards, when you gave it any thought at all).

One drink never hurt anyone. Sometimes you
need
a drink. That’s what it was there for. Medicinal purposes. You could even say a guy
earned
a drink, because what was that warm and fuzzy feeling if not some sort of reward for the piss-poor fucked-over world that you have to wake up to every morning of your life?

He’d make it all right with RJ. Like no other father in the history of the world ever forgot to pick up a kid after some kind of school thing.

He’d make it all right with Jennifer. Give up. Get a nice wedding present. Bygones and all that.

He’d make it all right with Janis.

He’d make it all right with his agent. Write a fucking book already.

He’d make it all right with…

Well, the list could just go on and on.

He understood, perfectly and clearly, deeply and profoundly, that he could not have a drink. Not one, he could never, ever have just one, and he could not have a drink then. It would be wrong, in the grand scheme of things, cosmically and karmically, it would be wrong. He also understood that the reason it was cosmically and karmically wrong was because it was (gentlemen of the jury) absolutely the one thing that could be traced back to every fucked-up moment of his life. The drinking fairies did it, absolutely, if not directly then certainly through a chain (such as today) of events that led right back to their little lairs, buried deep in the chasms of Richie Bramley himself, host of hosts.

I am not an alcoholic,
he thought, frightened, the word so dark and large in his head that it bore no looking at, no indulgence. A scream in uniform.
Of course not. I might
(might)
have a drinking
problem.
Not an alcoholic.
On the heels of that thought came an equally disturbing, petulant one:
If I’m not an alcoholic then I can have one lousy drink. Just one.

He stepped forward, legs weak, and grasped the throat of the bottle. His hand shook. He carried it into the kitchen.

Glasses dried upturned on the draining board by the sink. Glasses in the cupboards. Richie realized that he had a lot of glasses. Mugs, he had a half-dozen. He had a six-piece setting from his mother. The cutlery was a jumble of cast-offs from god knew where, but he had two sets of highball glasses and any number of short, fat Rob Roys. He had wineglasses, beer mugs, shot glasses, shooter glasses, and even a set of martini glasses that had come with a shaker one Christmas from Steve or Dubs or Brad or someone. When in doubt, get Bramley a bottle. And ice-cube trays. He had to have four in the freezer at all times, at all times full. He was meticulous about filling ice-cube trays. He might forget to pick the kid up from school, but you never had to go for ice at Bramley’s.

His hand still gripped the throat of the Wild Turkey bottle. He stared at it, taking in the label, as familiar as most of the faces of his friends.

Hand shaking, he dumped the rest of it down the drain, the heady, metallic smell of it flooding over him, turning his stomach at the same time that it made him yearn to taste it. He rinsed the sink. The bottle was left beside the draining board.

His hands still shook, and the act had not made him feel strong or even better, as an action sometimes can. Instead it made him feel vulnerable and exposed to whatever evils the rest of the night could or would lay on him. For them, he would be sober. Edges would be sharp and dangerous.

Thinking about RJ did not help. Deeply, so deeply inside that he didn’t feel any need to acknowledge it was a small seed of petulant anger toward the child, his child.
See what you made me do.

Richie went upstairs to the attic, hoping to salvage whatever he could from the rest of the day.

Glenn Darnley wiped her mouth with a piece of tissue paper from her place in front of the toilet in her house. She knelt on the cold tiled floor thinking how dirty it probably was, even as she heaved a third time, fruitlessly, and spat the foul bile out of her mouth into the bowl where it joined the remnants of half a toasted bagel and some weak tea. The other half of the bagel waited in the kitchen for her and she didn’t think they’d be seeing each other for the rest of the evening. Maybe she would sip some tea but she felt perfectly awful and it was time to admit that.

She stood up on weak legs, dropped the tissue and flushed. The smell of her vomit, stirred up by the action of the water, swirled up around her nose and threatened her stomach in a whole other way, but she managed not to gag. Not that anything more could possibly come up: everything she had consumed that day was gone. She leaned over the sink and ran water over a cloth. She rinsed her mouth.

It was the flu, or some other bug that was always circling the globe at that time of the year, the change in weather: the dropping of the barometer, or some such nonsense, had lowered her usually stoic resistance to bugs and now she was paying for it. Likely she should have been in bed a week before, when this had all begun in earnest.

There were lots of bugs around.

Of course, something else bothered her. Things she hardly wanted to think about. Like the weight loss. A dress that had fitted nicely two months earlier was now hanging loosely. Her stomach had been, for almost a year, weak and uneasy. The pharmacist at her local drugstore had teased her about putting Tums on a tab. And she had no fever, no aches, no other flu symptoms. Nothing common.

But there were lots of bugs going around. At any given moment you could find a variation on a flu bug. She’d simply been fighting the good fight and was finally conceding. A prescription of antibiotics and this would be a memory.

Glenn changed into warm pajamas and turned the heat up in the house a notch. Without bothering to clear up the few things in the kitchen, she brought her cool, weak tea into the bedroom with her and thought to read for a moment, but instead fell quickly into exhaustion and put out the light. The flu didn’t last long; she would indulge herself with a very early night and be up and about in time for her doctor’s appointment in the morning. That was very important to her.

She would not wander sick and vulnerable into the doctor’s office. She would go in straight-shouldered, straight up. And whatever it was he would have to say, that’s how she would hear it.

Richie called it an early night, too. He had sat up in the attic, staring blankly at his computer for what seemed like a very long time, typing the odd sentence here and there when he could focus his mind on it, but for the most part, he ran over interminably in his head the disarray of his life.

Everything had been there, ready for him to seize and control. And he had done that, in the beginning. He had started off with some pretty major disadvantages—although not necessarily bad within his chosen profession: sometimes a nasty childhood can be a writer’s best friend and most constant muse—but he had moved aside the obstacles of a falsely middle-class existence and risen above it. For a while. He had taken the meager tools of youth and built them into something grander than he had thought himself capable of, in the dark, lonely nights of childhood, lying in bed listening to the fighting from the kitchen, the old man drunk in his chair, his mother screaming well-earned obscenities at him, the old man mostly silent through her tirades, his only contribution to it all a sort of background noise, a shuffle to the refrigerator for another beer, a shuffle to the bedroom for another pack of smokes, the occasional, heartfelt
“You’re absolutely right.”
His mother’s tears. The clunk of bottle or glass on table. The squeal of the sofa springs with his father’s weight.