To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (5 page)

We were losing that night. We were in first place in the American League East, ahead of the Yankees by a game and a half, and losing to the middling Rays. It sucked, but it was only right. It gave us the chance to come back from behind, which was the only way I cared to win. But in the end we failed to come back. Nine to six we lost to the crap-ass Rays on the fifteenth of July 2011. I turned off the TV absolutely disgusted. I pressed
STOP
on the VCR, rewound the cassette, ejected it, labeled it, and filed it away with all the other tapes. Then I went to bed.

When I woke, it was a quarter to three in the morning. I couldn’t believe it. Almost four hours of continuous sleep. It was really only a little over three hours of continuous sleep, but I chose to think of it as four. That much continuous sleep hadn’t come my way in what, three or four weeks? and I lay in bed happy, almost rested. But then I had to decide: get up, or struggle to fall back asleep? Every three or four weeks I could struggle my way back to sleep for another hour or two, for a total of five or six hours. It was only ever a total of four or five, but that’s not how I chose to think of it, and on mornings like that, it was always, “Good morning, Abby. Good morning, Betsy. Good morning, Connie.” So I lay in bed struggling to fall back asleep, diverted from sleep by thinking, first, of how frustrating it was when we lost to a team like the crap-ass Rays, and then of how I alone had chosen to spend the previous night. I’d forfeited all other possibilities to another regular-season baseball game, and now, at quarter to three in the morning, it was too late for me and my onetime options. The night was now as dark as it could get, and from thinking of how dark the night was and of my forfeited options, I proceeded to think of how alike this one night might be to my last night on earth, when all options, and not just one night’s options, expired. Every night was a night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed
opportunity to expand, explore, risk, hope, and live. These were my thoughts as I tried falling back asleep. Inside my head, where I lived, wars were breaking out, valleys flooding, forests catching fire, oceans breaching the land, and storms dragging it all to the bottom of the sea, with only a few days or weeks remaining before the entire world and everything sweet and surprising we’d done with it went dark against the vast backdrop of the universe. The chances of me falling back asleep were nil once again. I got out of bed. I checked my email. There was still no answer from Seir Design. I made some coffee and eggs. I sat in my kitchen eating and drinking again, eating and drinking to sustain myself another few hours, always sustaining myself by eating and drinking, or eating and drinking in order to distract myself from how ultimately pointless it was to sustain anything. I was, if not the only person awake in the city, the only person awake at that hour who’d fallen asleep at the hour I’d fallen asleep, and who was now unable to get back to sleep. Perhaps, by a series of miracles, the night had worked out for the other insomniacs, and now it was only me awake among them, alone at my kitchen table, hours from daybreak, absent of options, and wondering what to do with myself. I considered calling Connie, but that would have required me to look at my me-machine and discover that Connie had not called me, or even so much as texted, and then I would have had to wonder what she was doing when she was not sending me a text or trying to call. I would have had to conclude that at the moment she might have been calling or sending me a text, not only was she doing neither, in all likelihood she wasn’t even thinking about me. It hardly mattered that she was probably just sleeping. And anyway, if I called her, what would I say? There was nothing more to say. Everything that could be said had been said. Calling Connie wasn’t an option. I called her anyway, but she didn’t pick up. It was
early. She was probably still sleeping. I hung up. Then I took down the game tape from the night before, popped it into the VCR, and watched the game again until the light of dawn, forwarding through all the bullshit and wondering all over again how we could lose so badly to the crap-ass Rays.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I
sat down next to Connie at the front desk. I almost never sat down next to Connie when she wasn’t just starting to rub lotion into her hands. I watched her rub her hands together. Her hands were like lubed animals doing a mating dance. And she was hardly alone: people everywhere kept bottles of lotion in and around their desks, people everywhere that morning were just starting to rub lotion into their hands. I missed the point. I hated missing the point, but I did, I missed it completely. If I could just become a lotioner, I thought, how many other small, pleasurable gestures made throughout the day might click into place for me, and all that exile, all that alienation and scorn, simply vanish? But I couldn’t do it. I despised the wet sensation that refused to subside even after all the lotion had been rubbed in and could be rubbed in no farther. I hit that terminal point and wanted nothing more to do with something either salutary or vain but never pleasant. I thought it was heinous. That little hardened dollop of lotion right at the lip of the squirter, that was really so heinous. But it was part of the point, the whole point. Why was I always on the outside looking in, always alien to the in? As I say, Connie was not alone. In medical offices, law firms, and advertising agencies, in
industrial parks, shipping facilities, and state capitols, in ranger stations and even in military barracks, people were moisturizing. They were in possession of the secret, I was sure of it. They slept soundly. They played softball. They took walks, sharing with one another in the soft fall of night the events of the day while the dog trotted alongside them. It was terrifying. Their leisure was a terror to me. So at ease it was, so natural. And yet you had to wonder: whence this mania, this scampering frenzy to lotion yourself throughout the workday? Connie’s hands were dancing and copulating, working the wet lotion down to an evenly distributed film across the surface of her hands. It was really almost a kind of grotesquerie that should have been done only in private. And unnecessary. Connie had good hands. Old-people hands are the only hands that seem to the naked eye in urgent need of a new coat of moisturizer. They are liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, tendony, and dying. I will be sitting across the patient from Abby, who is just waiting to pass off an instrument, and I will point at the patient’s hands, the hands of an old person distracted by trying to keep her mouth open under the light, and I will say, pointing at the old poxed and spotted hands, “Is that what Connie is trying to forestall?” Abby being Abby, she’d have no opinion on the matter. Oh, she had plenty of opinions, I’m sure, but none she cared to express through her pink paper mask. Though I think she would have happily expressed them had I not been present. At some point every day, I’m sure that Abby wanted me to be the victim of a disabling stroke. Then she would be free to unleash at last. My rolling eye, my sunken cheek, my mouth unable to call back spit, would only encourage her, and from the floor I would hear for the first time every last unedited truth. Still tending to the woman in the chair, I asked her, “Do you moisturize, Abby?” She looked at me like,
Do I moisturize?
“It’s very important to lubricate your
hands, apparently,” I said. “And other parts, too.” And other parts, too! My mouth was constantly pouring out the stupidest shit! The stupidest, always-innocent, all-too-easily-misinterpreted shit! She would never say it, but of course that’s what she was thinking, what the two of us were thinking, probably also what the old broad in the chair was thinking.

At some point in Connie’s moisturizing, her hands downshifted. All that manic whipping around turned into something gentler, more deliberate. She had reached that point when the lotion, absorbed into the skin, ceased being a sloppy slick and now retarded as much as lubricated motion. She was no longer just applying the lotion. She was working it in with more attentive strokes, concentrating on one finger at a time and on the little blond webbing between fingers. She conjoined her hands as if in sensuous prayer and then unconjoined them to make a pass across the spur of a thumb, all of this as patiently as a player working oil into a new ball glove. She concluded (her attention half turned now to something new) with a series of ritualized, perfectly silent hand embraces, one hand clasping the other, the other hand clasping the first, the first on top again, and so on, conveying to anyone watching an indescribable sense of satisfaction at another satisfying job complete. I tell you without exaggeration that I was brought to tears. I admit, it could not have been just anyone. I would not have been brought to tears watching Big Jim the Ranger hydrate his hands. It was Connie who brought me to tears and always made me sorry that I did not understand in a more intuitive and personal way the multitude of minor banes people everywhere around me were trying to soothe in what were so easy to dismiss as vain and empty rituals of comfort.

“You’re doing it again,” she said, without looking over.

“What?”

“Staring at me. Objectifying me.”

“I’m not objectifying you.”

“You’re always objectifying me,” she said. “You idealize me, and then you’re disappointed when it turns out I’m not perfect. You blame me for not being godlike. It’s tiresome.”

“Trust me,” I said. “If somebody knows you’re not perfect, it’s me.”

“Then why do you do it? Why do you scrutinize me? Aren’t you sick of it by now? Especially when you’ve made it painfully clear just how far I fall short?”

“I used to think you were perfect, but those days are long past.”

“So please, stop looking.”

“I wish I had let you teach me about lotion,” I said.

“Teach you about lotion?”

“Yeah, the reasons for it.”

“The reasons for lotion are self-evident,” she said. “You put it on, you feel better.”

“I never feel better. I always feel icky.”

“Not after you rub it in. After you rub it in, you feel good. Your hands feel good. They feel moisturized.”

“But what does that matter when they’re just going to become all liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, and tendony?”

“Because it’s what you do with them in the meantime,” she said, turning at last and slapping my forehead with her palm. She turned back and, peering up at God, made a vigorous full-armed gesture of supplication that might have been comedic if it didn’t go on so long. “Now take a squirt and rub it in and see if your hands don’t feel better.”

“I don’t think I will,” I said.

“No,” she said, “because if you did that, you might like it. And heaven forbid you should like something, knowing what’s coming,
knowing they just turn liver spotted and die. Better never do it at all than do it, enjoy it, and lose it in the end.”

I stood up and walked away. Then I came back.

“You didn’t return my call,” I said.

“You have to stop calling, Paul.”

“It’s the time of night. I’m not in my right mind.”

“The time of night is half the problem.”

“I try just to text.”

“I’ve never once received a single text from you.”

“Texting is for children, I hate texting, it hurts my fingers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.”

“A call or a text, Paul. At that hour, they’re pretty much signaling the same thing.”

“I wasn’t calling to get back together,” I said. “We said we could be friends. Friends call friends.”

“We can’t get back together,” she said. “We will never get back together.”

“And that wasn’t why I was calling.”

“Why, then?”

“Night.”

She looked over at me for the second time.

“It’s not my problem anymore,” she said.

The phrase “pussy whipped” gets the job done, I guess. It evokes. You picture a milquetoast, a little pansy boy. He takes his balls off, like a pair of dentures, and places them on the nightstand before snuggling up to Queen Nefertiti to watch
Sleepless in Seattle
. If that’s your thing, God bless. Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever, and the potential for incarceration. I don’t get pussy whipped. I get cunt gripped. I get cunt gripped and just hope to get out alive. What doesn’t kill you makes
you stronger, as the saying goes—so that you can look forward to that one irrecuperable battering ram of a ballbreaker that will finally do you in.

To be cunt gripped means to show up at the door unannounced. It means calling at all hours. It means saying “I love you” far too soon, on or around the second date, and saying it all too frequently thereafter. When they caution that I might be moving too fast, I double down and send them flowers and fruit. To be cunt gripped is to believe that I have found everything heretofore lacking in my life. They fill an enormous void, the women I fall in love with, and I will revert to nothing—to less than nothing, now that I know consummation—unless they remain filling it forever. Fear of losing them provokes me to act desperate in a whole host of ways that inevitably sends them scrambling for the door. I’ve only been properly cunt gripped four times, not counting a dozen or so partial or short-lived cunt grippings: once when I was five, once when I was twelve, a third time at nineteen, and finally with Connie, who came to work for me when I was thirty-six and she was twenty-seven. Each time—with the possible exception of that first time, when I was still so new to the world that it’s hard to remember much beyond her name (Alison), our hand-holding, and a long cry under trash-strewn bleachers—I have never been able, once cunt gripped, to hold on to my essential self. I mean by that whatever makes me me: a success at school, a dedication to the Red Sox, a determined belief in the nonexistence of God. It all vanishes, leaving… what? Was there a person there? All I could ever find was untethered want. The girl, or woman—first Alison, then Heather Belisle, then Sam Santacroce, and finally Connie—consumed me to the extent that I could say of myself only that I was Paul-who-loves-Alison or Paul-who-loves-Connie. It was flattering to them at first, of course, that someone should take such a
dire interest, but the flattery was soon smothered under a shit-storm of need, jealousy, irrepressible and indiscriminate praise, and an obsession that scared parents and friends. Everything I held in high regard before falling in love dropped away, and I appeared to myself, and no doubt to the objects of my desire, as a tiresome refrain offering them nothing to love in return. Needless to say, it never lasted long. Of Alison I’ve already recounted everything I remember. I fell in love with Heather not long after my father died, and as I look back on it now, that love affair was as much about Roy Belisle, Heather’s dad, who coached our coed baseball team and drove a pickup truck and had really cool arm veins, as it was about the wet new thrill of Heather’s tongue. (I couldn’t picture Mr. Belisle in a dry bathtub with his clothes on, staring for hours at the browning grout, and then rushing me off to the mall to buy ten pairs of running shoes, which he’d hide from Mrs. Belisle by digging a large hole in the back of the apartment complex.) I spent a long Presidents’ Day weekend making out with Heather in her garage and, during meals, admiring Mr. Belisle’s arm veins while watching him turn the dials of his police scanner. It all came to a swift end when school resumed on Tuesday and Heather dropped me for a boy with a bad haircut. I was stunned, hurt, and embarrassed, in withdrawal from Heather’s tongue—the first tongue I’d tasted and the reason, at least in part, that I became a dentist, awakened to the mouth and all its marvels—and angry that first my dad and now Mr. Belisle had been taken from me by a fickle and irreconcilable force. I did what anyone would do: I walked twelve miles to the mall, got into the backseat of an unlocked car, drove with my unsuspecting chaperone another dozen or so miles, waited in the garage a long time before entering his house, found a closet, masturbated, fell asleep, and in the morning came full upon all the family at breakfast.

The cunt gripping I underwent at the hands of Samantha Santacroce was a much more involved ordeal, ending with my transfer out of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, with certain restrictions on my freedom to reenter campus grounds. Sam and I spent eleven weeks together, during which we both understood our souls to have awakened at last and our hearts to have been filled for the first time. We were instantly inseparable, arranging our walking patterns to and from class to minimize the time we had to spend apart. We ate together, studied together, and slept together, whispering late into the night so as not to disturb her roommates. We shared the same coffee cup, the same straw, the same toothbrush. We fed each other watermelon from our mouths. We watched movies and football games under the same blanket and sat together doing our homework in the student union, looking up at regular intervals to moon at each other with shameless abandon. Sammy was always sucking on a lollipop. I loved nothing more than to hear that sugary globe knock against her sturdy white teeth while the stick grew moist and pulpy at her lips, until at last she took the nub of candy between her molars and cracked it to smithereens. She swished the clattering shards around, melting them down to oblivion. When she was finished, and the stick had been deposited with others inside an empty bottle of Diet Coke (which also contained wrappers and wads of gum), she ran her tongue over her upper lip in search of some minuscule overlooked crystal and, if she found one, drew it in and pinned it between the cairn of her canines. Then she sucked her lips clean of their sugary coats—first the upper lip, plump and double peaked, followed by the lower one, seated upon a more perfect plumb line. Of the character and true nature of Samantha Santacroce, I knew essentially nothing, but that I wanted to live forever on the edge of her glossy red lower lip, that crimson promontory, warmed in the winter by
her syrupy breath and bathed with the same summer heat that brought out her freckles, I had no doubt.

What I did know about Samantha Santacroce, because she impressed it upon me at every turn, was the fierce and unconditional love she felt for her parents. This stood in stark contrast to my impulse to hide my parents away in a closet of shame. Sammy talked about hers as if they were the people with whom she willingly planned to spend the rest of eternity, college being less a time of rebellion and self-discovery than a temporary parting in a lifelong affair. I was almost jealous of them. Bob Santacroce was a big man with fair hair who had done well in the furniture business and now spent many of his mornings on the back nine. Barbara had raised Sam (and her little brother, Nick) and now remained busy with tennis and charities. I heard so much about them before we met that they grew incomparable within a few short days and mythical within the week, so that by the time Sam and I showed up at their house for Thanksgiving, when I planned to announce my intentions of marrying their daughter (“Wait, wait,” Sam had said, “you plan to do
what?
”), I was intimidated, nervous, and as in love with them as I was with Sam herself. The Santacroces were a picture-perfect family of Catholics whose tidy garage, sturdy oak trees, and family portraits through the ages would absolve all the sins and correct all the shortcomings of my childhood. Like my infatuation with Heather Belisle, my infatuation with Sam Santacroce had this extraneous element that had nothing to do with our shared love of dogs and Led Zeppelin, her blond pageboy, or the taste of her red mouth. There were no poorly attended funerals in the Santacroce family, no scrounging for quarters under the car seats, no runs to the recycling center for macaroni money, no state-appointed psychologists, no suicides. I loved Sammy and wanted to marry her, but I also loved Mr. and Mrs. Santacroce and wanted
to be adopted by them and live under the spell of their blessed good fortune forever and ever. I would affirm God and convert to Catholicism and condemn abortion and drink martinis and glory the dollar and assist the poor and crawl upon the face of the earth with righteousness and do everything that made the Santacroces so self-evidently not the O’Rourkes.