The Body Farm, page 18
“Come inside and have a Bloody Mary,” Cade says, flashing me a mischievous grin.
“Oh, I don’t drink.”
“Just this once. Have two. Have ten.”
“You know—” I begin, but he interrupts me.
“Pretty please,” he says. “E-dog and I made a bet a while back. I’m still hoping to win. Fifty bucks if either one of us could get you wasted. Man, I’d give a lot more than fifty bucks to see that. Little Miss Priss on a tear!”
He throws back his head and guffaws. It is my husband’s laugh, note for note.
○
Even now, I am not sure exactly when Baylor became an alcoholic. It was hard to see the pattern unfolding in real time. At some point, he turned to drink as though he’d been dating around for too long and was ready to settle down. He’d tried those other girls—cocaine, marijuana, pills—but this was love. This was the real thing.
Ten years ago, newly married, we moved to a cozy apartment on the west side of Boston. Baylor found a job at a prestigious marketing firm. I began teaching at Boston University, working my way up the ladder toward tenure. We lazed in bed on Sunday mornings doing crossword puzzles. He made me laugh the way I used to in childhood—a full-bodied, uncontrolled, snorting laugh I thought I had outgrown along with my Hello Kitty wristwatch and training bra. I taught him about the solar system and the existence of quinoa. We made love often, linked by tidal locking like Pluto and Charon, always facing each other, spinning in a private orbit of two.
I did not notice the change as it was happening. It was slow. Gradual. Baylor would stop by sports bars on weekends to catch up on “the game.” (I never knew what game it was, or even what sport; I was content for him to share this interest with other people, like-minded people.) He would go out after work with “the boys”—his coworkers, always referred to that way, though many of them were female. He came home wasted and amorous, kissing my neck and expounding on my beauty, never an angry drunk, only affectionate and even more boisterous, the life of the party and a dynamo between the sheets. He took up wine as a hobby, buying excellent vintages to share with me over dinner, then drinking a few more glasses once I went to bed. A beer with lunch. A shot of whiskey to settle his nerves. His career did not suffer; he even got a promotion, due in part to his boozy socializing with the top brass.
There was no benchmark, no line in the sand, no moment when I could have pinpointed his descent in action. Maybe addiction is always like that—only discernible in hindsight, with the clarity offered by distance and retrospection.
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In the afternoon, we visit the local swimming hole—all five brothers, both parents, and three wives, including me. The day is steamy, hung with shimmering curtains of humidity. I set up a beach chair and apply sunscreen and bug spray. Baylor’s parents have aged significantly in the past year, shuffling cautiously across the grass to place their lawn chairs. The mother immediately falls asleep, but the father engages me in small talk, though his voice is so low and his southern drawl so thick that I cannot catch a word. I just smile brightly, nodding along, until he dozes off too.
The brothers take turns hurling themselves off a rope swing into the water. Jimmy Lee belly-flops, earning jeers and hollers. Farther down the beach, Cade crashes through the shallows, attempting to catch a minnow in his hands. They have a thousand inside jokes, almost their own language, like twin-speak expanded to include five. Whenever one of them salutes, the other four strike body builder poses. Jimmy Lee and Emil appear to communicate exclusively in quotes from Calvin and Hobbes. Baylor and Hank keep karate-chopping each other. At one point, Jimmy Lee screams, “Fire in the hole!” and at once, in unison, all five of them drop to the ground as though felled by bullets.
In truth, it is difficult for me to keep the brothers straight today, dazed as I am by the sunlight and the heat, overstimulated by voices and movement, hulking bodies, unkempt brown curls, jiggling beer guts, identical booming laughs, now tossing a Frisbee, now leaping off the rope swing again. The other two wives are no help. One of them has been texting since the moment we got here, thumbs flying, long plastic nails clacking against the screen. The other slathered herself with baby oil and stretched out on a towel. I can almost hear the sizzle of her skin broiling.
Baylor keeps shooting glances back at me, shading his eyes with a hand. Tennessee has always been a minefield for us. At home, we do well enough. We move seamlessly around each other. I go to bed at ten on the dot, while he sleeps whenever and wherever the mood strikes him. He works long hours; I set my own schedule. On weekends we hike through the nature preserve, and Baylor sweetly feigns interest as I classify the sedimentary strata of every rock that catches my eye. I return the favor by letting him show me incomprehensible memes on his phone every five minutes. In public, I can be standoffish, while Baylor charms everyone he meets. He has talked his way into free dessert, into a tour of the back rooms of my favorite museum; he “could sell sand to a camel,” in his own words. We still have explosive, spontaneous, no-holds-barred sex. We are living proof that opposites attract. We balance each other out.
In Tennessee, however, our system invariably begins to break down. During previous visits, Baylor and I have found ourselves fighting over everything under the sun. My use of five-dollar words. His dirty socks. The way I pick at my food. The way he flirts with waitresses. We have squabbled over our finances. We have quarreled over our decision—made long ago, and only revisited here in Dyersburg—never to have children. We have fought over his drinking. His drinking, his drinking, his drinking. More than once, Tennessee has nearly detonated our relationship.
Now Jimmy Lee hefts a cooler from the back of his pickup. The brothers swarm around it, and the air resounds with the crackle and hiss of beer cans opening. Baylor flops down on the grass beside me, pressing an ice-cold can against his neck.
“Tell me something about Jupiter,” he says.
“It’s big,” I say shortly.
“Oh yeah? How many moons does it have?”
“Seventy-nine.”
Baylor runs a hand through his damp curls. “Jupiter is near the asteroid belt, right?”
“Right.”
“And how did the asteroid belt form again? I know you’ve told me, but I forget.”
Against my will, I smile a little. This is Baylor’s usual peacemaking strategy—drawing me out on my favorite topic. The annoying thing is that it works.
“Gravity makes things circular,” I tell him. “Gas and dust swirl around until they settle into a ball. That’s how the planets formed. But not the asteroid belt. It’s too close to Jupiter, and Jupiter is almost big enough to be a star. Its gravity is so intense that a rocky planet couldn’t form near it. So instead, there are millions of asteroids orbiting the sun in a wide cloud.”
Baylor stares up at me. The sun has brought out his freckles, a dusting across his nose and forehead. “Millions?” he asks. “Really?”
“Some of them are the size of pebbles. Most are around a kilometer across.”
“What does the word asteroid mean?” Baylor asks, his voice soft.
“Starlike. They look like stars to us, especially when they fall out of the belt. When they hit our atmosphere. Shooting stars.”
“Starlike. I never knew that.” Baylor runs a finger down the length of my arm, leaving goosebumps in his wake.
“Bo!” Jimmy Lee yells. “We need you to be tiebreaker over here.”
My husband bounds to his feet and joins his brothers.
○
There was an afternoon in autumn, perhaps ten years ago, when I caught a glint of light where none should be. I was at my desk, working on a lesson plan, when I saw something shining in the soil of my fiddle-leaf fig tree. On closer inspection, the gleam was coming from the tiny gap in between the plastic pot and the pretty basket I’d bought to cover it. I fished out the offending object: a bottle of bourbon.
Baylor had taken to hiding stashes of liquor around our home. I knew he was drinking, and he knew that I knew, but he still hid the evidence from me. Addiction is furtive by nature. In that moment, I felt compelled to discover exactly where each bottle might be.
And so I set aside my papers and scoured the apartment. I got down on my hands and knees to examine the underside of the couch. I peered into the tank of the toilet, where Baylor had stashed a quart of vodka a few months back. In the kitchen, I disarranged the cans and spice jars. In the mud room, I groped inside each of the boots.
Our apartment was not infinite in scope. In less than an hour, I had located a bottle on top of the refrigerator and another under the bed, swathed in a bin of Baylor’s winter sweaters. Two more bottles were hidden in the bathroom, standing incognito among Baylor’s toiletries.
I set all five in a row on the mantel—biggest to smallest, like children in a class photo. The bottles gleamed in the light. I weighed my options. I could leave them in pride of place where they were, a silent accusation for Baylor when he came home. I could tuck each one back where I had found it and say nothing. I could pour the bottles down the drain, rinsing each one carefully, patting it dry, and carrying it out to the recycling bin, as I did with my yogurt cups and milk jugs. I could smash the five bottles on the floor, leaving a glorious mess of congealed liquor and glittering shards to greet Baylor on his arrival.
All at once, a great weariness fell across my shoulders. The situation was as well choreographed as the orbit of planets around the sun. I had done all these things before, every single one. I had pitched a fit, screaming and sobbing. I had begged Baylor to think of his health. Once I printed out photographs of diseased livers and taped them up all around the apartment. Once I got hold of a list of surgical patients waiting for liver donations and handwrote my husband’s name on top, pinning it to the fridge. (The fight that followed was epic. Baylor accused me of being a drama queen, which may have been accurate.) Once or twice, I drank myself blind along with him, getting sloppy on purpose to make a point. I’d dragged him to AA meetings (“too much God talk”). I’d made appointments for him with a therapist (“too much jawing about feelings”). I’d coddled him, cooking his favorite meals and behaving as though the latest relapse was nothing more serious than a bout of flu.
But nothing I did could shift Baylor from his path. I could see that now. He was caught in the gravity well of alcohol. I pictured the void of space like a blanket, strewn with orbs of different shapes and sizes. As each planet settles into the cloth, nearby objects roll toward the ensuing depression, pulled by gravity. The largest objects—like Jupiter, like the sun—create a hollow as deep and unforgiving as a mineshaft dug straight down through solid rock.
Sometimes the Earth carves a perfect circle through space as it spins around the sun, circumscribing the rim of our star’s gravity well. Sometimes Jupiter or Saturn reaches out grasping fingers and warps our orbit slightly, pulling our world a few degrees outward, changing our path from circle to oval. But the modification is minor, and the primacy of the sun’s gravity remains, keeping us close.
If I made enough of a fuss, Baylor might pretend to change his ways for a short while. He might promise to cut back or stick to wine, but eventually, inexorably, he would return to the status quo. Every option before me—to pour the liquor out, to drink the stuff myself—was, at its core, a minute variation in the orbital rotation, like a faint tug from distant Jupiter, scarcely strong enough to register. A gravity well is an irresistible thing, bending even the fabric of space-time to its will.
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My last morning in Tennessee is cool and sweet. The air smells as though it has been scrubbed clean. I reach for Baylor and find his side of the bed empty. Then I remember. The brothers dropped me, their parents, and the other wives off after the swimming hole and went out together to “raise a little hell,” in Cade’s words. I did not ask what this meant; I did not want to know. I spent the evening reading in silence. Very late, Baylor called to stay that he’d be sleeping over at Jimmy Lee’s place. He did not add that he was too drunk to drive back to me; I gathered that much from the slurring of his speech. He told me he loved me. He told me again and again.
Dragging my suitcase onto the bed, I begin folding my clothes. Jeans, headbands, and lacy underwear—soon these things, like me, will be back in Boston where they belong. In ten hours, I will board a plane and leave this place in my dust. Like a loving wife, I pack for Baylor too. In filling his suitcase, I exercise far less care—wrinkling his slacks, incorrectly matching his socks into pairs, and shoving his toothbrush among the T-shirts without sleeving it in a plastic bag. I doubt he will even notice, but these gestures relieve my spirit anyway, petty revenges for my bruised heart.
As the sun climbs the sky, I get out my laptop and work on a lesson plan about asteroids. My conversation with Baylor sparked an idea. Next semester, I will give a lecture on asteroid families. I have done research on the subject: a whirling cluster of rocks that all share common orbits and spectra. Their coloration is identical: black for carbon or red for nickel-iron. Asteroids in the same family were once a single organism, but something broke them apart—an impact with another body in space or the tempestuous gravitational pull of nearby Jupiter, cratering a larger asteroid into many smaller ones. There are more than 120 such families in the belt, and they even have their own surnames: Nysa, Flora, Hungaria. Excellent fodder for a lecture.
I am waiting for my cell phone to chime. Whenever he wakes up, Baylor will text me. I pick up the phone, making sure it isn’t silenced. Surely he will reach out soon. It’s almost noon, and even the most hungover of the brothers must be awake by now.
Baylor and I always check in regularly. When he’s at work, when I’m on campus, scarcely an hour goes by without one of us making contact. He might photograph the pile of paperwork on his desk and send it to me with a sad emoticon. I might send him a passive-aggressive text about the laundry. These moments matter—me sharing a snapshot of my newly pedicured toes, him informing me that he has just discovered his hair is thinning. The sensation of my phone vibrating in my pocket, containing a note from my husband, a note that tells me nothing important, nothing romantic, can be as intimate as a caress.
Today, however, there has been no word. One of us is giving the other the silent treatment, but I am not sure who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.
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Fourteen months ago, Baylor got sober. He did it himself, without the benefit of AA or rehab. He did it the “dude way”—which, to my untrained eye, looked excruciating.
First he went on a tear, drinking all the liquor in our apartment and vomiting it back up over the course of a gruesome twenty-four hours. Then he sank into a kind of hibernation. He crawled into bed, emerging only to get himself aspirin while glowering at the sunshine. During that phase, he seemed to be not so much recovering as devolving. His beard grew thick and wild. The smell of him pervaded the apartment. I brought him water and tried to make him eat. I would tap nervously at the mound of quilts he had piled over his huddled frame, and he would gradually emerge, a sweaty, bleary-eyed wreck of a man.
There followed a few difficult months. Baylor was not drinking. When I asked him how he was, he would say, “I’m not drinking.” When I asked him what he was thinking about, he would say, “I’m not drinking.” Everything in front of him—the TV, his dinner, his wife—was clearly being compared to the attractions of a good bottle of bourbon and found wanting.
I kept track of his sobriety in my calendar. A circle marked each dry day—the image, in my mind, of an empty glass. He passed four months, the longest stretch he’d ever done. Five. Six. Seven. I was not sure what was motivating him. He had been wanting to quit for years—forever, really. Every addict always wants to quit. Maybe something had shifted in him physically, his liver crying foul. Maybe it was simply time, as though he had been saving up his willpower in some internal vault for years, and now, at last, there was enough accumulated to see him through.
He stopped going to bars. He avoided his weekly poker game. He let “the boys” go out after work without him. In the past, he had stayed up late to drink after I went to bed. Now his secret behaviors included watching infomercials, reading spy novels, and eating all the Popsicles in the freezer.
I was different too. In a word, I was happy. After ten months passed—a nice round number—I stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. I no longer sniffed Baylor’s breath every morning as a reflex. I stopped wincing in restaurants when the waiter set down the wine list. I stopped reaching convulsively for my husband’s arm as we strolled past a liquor store, a metaphorical leash, keeping him from bolting.
There is nothing worse than hope. It is an illusion, ephemeral, like the light emitted by a faraway star that has since reached the end of its life cycle, exploding or contracting into nothingness, even as it appears to twinkle on in our night sky.
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Hours later, I wake for a second time, covered in sweat. The quality of light pouring through the window suggests midafternoon. I am prone on the couch, my neck bent at an uncomfortable angle, a sour taste in my mouth. I push myself upright, brushing sweat-dampened hair from my brow. I am not usually a napper, but the Tennessee heat is as powerful a soporific as ether.
There is another person in the room, planted in the armchair, staring at me. I jump halfway out of my skin. Brown curls. A barrel chest. Clasped hands.
“Baylor!” I cry.
The man rises to his feet. “No, sorry. It’s Hank,” he says.
I blink, clearing my head. “Where’s Baylor?”
“You know, that’s a funny thing,” he says.
“Funny how?”
“Here.” Hank smacks his hands on his thighs. “I’m going to get you some water. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“I don’t need . . .” I begin, but he is already on his feet, clattering in the kitchen. As he hands me a glass, I notice that he is avoiding my gaze.
