Archibald Full Frontal, page 17
I flick on my light and sit up in bed. It is only 10 p.m. I have to get out of the apartment. I reach for the phone. Sam. He will calm me down. He will know what to do. I listen to the tone worrying its way through the phone for a few seconds and replace the receiver. I can’t call Sam. He has a life and a girlfriend. Besides, I want to talk to someone who knows nothing about me. Maybe someone who is even more screwed up than me. I reach into my nightstand drawer and rumble through its messy innards. I find a scrap of paper with a number scrawled across it in a tiny, feral hand. Jeff 731-3767. Call me. He’s from my drawing class. He seems about my age and nice enough, apart from the sucking noises he makes each time he laughs, probably due to his chain smoking. He offered his number one day in the cafeteria after a brief conversation about his problem with pigeons on the roof of his apartment. He is probably out, but what the heck, I think. He picks up on the second ring. After a slightly awkward conversation, he agrees to meet me in a local bar, a seedy artist’s hangout.
After my third drink, I loosen up. My voice loses its stiffness, and everything he says seems almost amusing. He wears his wild yellow hair beneath a fedora, and black ripped jeans and a thick plaid button-down shirt. Underneath the shirt, he will be wearing a tattered T-shirt. I know the drill. He is discussing our painting teacher’s affair with the department receptionist, a popular topic among students.
“I called you because I just broke up with someone,” I say suddenly.
“It happens,” he says. I wonder if he means breakups or women calling him in the wake of a breakup. I am wearing a short cord skirt and a thick black sweater. His eyes keep darting to the hem of my skirt. “I really think your hair is cool. It makes a statement.”
I don’t ask what statement that is. “He was older,” I offer.
“No kidding.” He gulps back the dregs of his beer and signals the waiter for two more. “A lot of girls go in for that. Older men. I’m not sure why.” His face is long and narrow, but not unattractive.
“He was really good in bed.”
“Well, there’s that,” he says, eyebrows pushed together.
“He is an actor turned real estate mogul,” I lie.
“Really? I was seeing someone too. Her name was Michelle.”
“Why did you break up with her?” I ask, not really interested.
“She broke up with me, for a musician.” He glances over at the band balefully. “What about you? Who ended things?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe me. Maybe him.”
“It was mutual?”
“I guess. He claimed I wanted too much. I wanted him to stop screwing other women.” I finish my beer and swallow a shot of tequila.
An hour and four shots later, I lie half-slumped in my chair. I have to tilt my head to keep the room straight. The waitress with bleached hair, wide hips, and a mean grin plunks a plate of what looks suspiciously like French fries on the table in front of me.
“Don’t eat the food here,” I tell the waitress. “There is a problem with maggots.”
“Time to hit the road.” She scowls. I look at her name tag.
“I didn’t order these, Bev,” I say defiantly.
“I ordered them for you,” Jeff says. “I think you could use a little food.”
“Oh, okay,” I say. Bev turns away to attend to a table of rowdy teenagers. I pick up a greasy fry and eat it, after a few attempts to find my mouth.
“It’s getting late,” Jeff says.
“The night is young,” I slur.
Outside, he helps me as I struggle to get into my coat. It is a long, grey sailor-style jacket. I waver on the sidewalk, trying to keep it still. “Where to now?”
“Let me give you a lift home.”
“I’m fine. I’m fine. On to the next place!”
“Maggie? You are totally wasted,” he says, not unkindly.
“In that case, how about your place?”
He drives a seventies Beetle repainted the colour of red wine. The door groans as I let myself in and settle into a hard, black seat. Inside it reeks of petrol and gym socks. After two attempts, the car engine groans and turns over. My stomach turns with it.
“How far do you live?” I ask, trying to suppress my queasiness.
“I live on the East Side,” he says. “I share a house with a couple of guys.” I notice an extra hand on my knee. I hold both of mine up in front of my face and look down at my knee again, bewildered. The hand moves back and forth, and I realize it’s Jeff’s. He looks slightly embarrassed and stares out the window.
“Maggie, look. You’re drunk, and I have to tell you it’s obvious you are on the rebound.”
“I’m good to go,” I say, although everything is moving back and forth, back and forth, under the sway of an enormous windshield wiper.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “I think you need to…”
I lean forward and kiss him. His mouth is narrow and tastes like tequila. I realize I can taste nothing beyond the overpowering stench of my alcohol-drowned breath. I fall back into my seat.
“Wow.” He blinks a few times. “My eyes are watering.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Hey, can you turn the windshield wipers off?”
“They’re not on,” he says. “It isn’t raining.”
“Oh,” I say as I dive forward, mouth open, into his lap. Vomit pours from my mouth in a violent surge. My head snaps forward as if my neck were an elastic band. I rest my head across his bony knees as I watch it, fouler than death, the colour and consistency of mildewed candy floss dripping down his legs.
“Michael,” I say. I try to open my eyes. They resist. I try again. The room is a dark grey smear. A few rays of sun penetrate the curtains and mingle on the wall. I turn on my side in the bed, which is large and soft. It feels comfortable, like it has been well-used over the years. It is then that I notice I’m not in my bed. The night comes back to me in horrendous, pounding waves. I must have passed out. Jeff must have taken me to his place. I push myself up and recall how I had vomited all over his car. I am still dressed except for my sweater, which is hanging over the back of a chair. I go to pull it over my T-shirt when I notice the smell, rank and pungent, curdled stomach juices. I tuck it under my arm and peer through the front door. Hopefully I can make a clean getaway.
I take a step and nearly collide head-on with Sam.
“Sam!” I say, not quite coherently. “What are you — did he call you to come get me?” I attempt to push past him, not wanting to be seen.
“Maggie, hold on. Hold on. Okay?”
In the hallway, I stop. It looks familiar. I take a few steps into the living room. It is familiar. It’s Sam’s apartment.
“How did I get here?”
Sam takes me by the elbow and steers me to the couch where I gratefully collapse. “You had a rough night. Jeff said you gave him this address. When he got here, he didn’t know which apartment, so he buzzed me. He said he had a drunk short-haired girl by the name of Maggie, and I said, ‘Bring her on in.’”
“Oh, God. This is so humiliating,” I moan. “Did I puke once I got here?” I hold my breath silently praying. Not on Sam. Not on Sam.
“Once or twice,” he says with a grin. “I managed to get you to the bathroom, but not before you passed out and hit your head on the bathtub.”
I rub the lump at the back of my head.
“Sam, I am so sorry. I just…”
“It all turned out okay. You got all the booze up. I wiped your face and put you in bed. Not the end of the world.”
I lean forward and put my head in my hands. “And Jeff, I guess he was glad to get rid of me.”
“Let’s just say, he might be moving on for the short-term.”
I lean against the shower wall, hot water pouring down my back, until Sam knocks on the door.
“Everything okay in there?”
“I’m fine.” I shut off the water and towel off my aching limbs. I slip into the clothes Sam has lent me: a shirt that smells like him — it’s roomy and falls below my hips — and a pair of jogging pants that belong to Carolina. I towel my hair and slick it back. Dark circles hang beneath my eyes. Aside from that I look very pale but more or less human. I collect my clothes and open the door.
I approach Sam, who is in the kitchen frying eggs.
“Should I burn these?” I ask.
Sam glances over his shoulder. “Put them in the basket. I’ll throw them in the wash.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s no problem. I thought you might want to avoid being seen.”
“Good point.”
He puts the eggs down on the table in front of me.
“Come on, let’s eat,” he says.
“I don’t think I can,” I say, sinking down at the table.
“You’re feeling shaky because your blood sugar is so low. It’ll help.”
I take a hesitant mouthful. They are good. They are better than good.
“Not bad,” I say as I polish them off. He hands me two Aspirin as we head into the living room. “So do you want to talk about what happened?”
“Well, you seem to be pretty up to date. I went out, I drank, I puked, and apparently I came here and puked some more.”
“Before that, I mean. You don’t strike me as the type to go straight for the tequila.”
“Well, if you’re so smart, you tell me.”
“I think it had something to do with Michael.”
I look down at my hands, suddenly very tired. The words ache in my throat. “We broke up.” A tear settles in my eye. I wipe at it, irritated.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, what can you do?”
“Did you … were you expecting it?”
“Yes and no. I humiliated myself. I told him I didn’t want him to see other people.”
“So he ended it?”
“In a manner of speaking. I mean, he said he liked me fine, as long as he could date every attractive woman under thirty on the side. But I told him … I told him I wanted more. Is that ridiculous or what?”
“Far from it.”
“You warned me. You knew it wouldn’t work.”
He puts his arms around me, and I rest my head in the crook of his shoulder, my face partly covered in the downy blanket of his hair. I could sleep for a thousand years like that.
“We can never tell how things will end up. And anyone who tells you differently is full of shit. At best we can try to know ourselves, but even then, we are changing all the time.”
I lift my head slightly, staring at the fine stubble that covers his jaw. He releases me. “Sometimes you just have to let the day crinkle out, see where you end up.”
“Thanks for before, for telling me you hadn’t seen him with anyone in particular.” I hadn’t wanted to see that he had been lying. Lying for me.
“I thought if ever a lie was in order, it was then.”
“I guess,” I say. “I must seem like a complete basket case.”
“No, you just seem hungover and disappointed. And you can’t live without experiencing one or the other at some point.”
I sigh and scan the wall of photographs, revisiting all the familiar faces. Dan on his mountain bike, a cop sleeping in his car, a woman rifling through a garbage can, a little boy playing with a toy plane.
“Have you ever thought of having a show, you know, for the public?”
“No, not really,” he says. “They’re personal.”
I turn my attention to two or three pictures in the corner partly hidden by a floor lamp. “Hey, wait. There are a few new ones.”
“Yeah, I added them, from the past year.”
There’s a girl sitting grumpily in a skating rink, staring down at a broken skate. “That’s Carolina’s niece,” he says. I peer at the next one. “That’s Carolina.” The ever-absent Carolina, alive in celluloid. I look at her with great interest. She stands in a large snowy field, tiny, in the foreground, bundled up in a coat, glossy black hair visible beneath a fuzzy cap. Petite, pretty, and faraway.
And then I freeze as I come face to face with myself. I am in colour, lying on a bench, asleep in a field of cosmos I recognize from the garden outside. I lie on my back, hair wild, coils of copper wire. It looks like I am being lifted by the flowers’ purple-pink heads. I am wearing shorts and a tank top. My hands are outstretched and covered in dirt. One hangs off the side down into the flowers. My shoulders and cheeks are slightly red from the sun. My mouth curved in a slight smile. It is evident that I was deeply asleep. What was I dreaming about? I wonder, trying to place the day. And then I remember. It was the day after my first and last date with Sam and my first night with Michael. The memory is vivid. It jars me, to see myself laid out at such an intersection in my life. It was the beginning of something that had, in its own way, consumed me, I saw now. I turn to Sam, and he looks away, self-consciously.
“I never noticed this before,” I say.
“I was waiting for you to notice. What do you think? I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, no. I … it’s just … I wasn’t expecting,” to be caught in such a candid moment, I finish to myself. “I have never seen myself sleeping. It’s strange. It’s a great picture, though.”
“I forgot I had taken it and then found it on a roll a few months ago.”
“It’s the only one in colour.” All the rest were black and whites.
“I know. I don’t usually shoot colour, but it works. The flowers, your face, hair.”
“I look like a garden fairy ruling over my flower subjects.”
“I have often wondered what you were dreaming of.”
I don’t answer. As I watch the sleeping me, I contain her thoughts, as she held mine. And I know, Michael was there as I slept, weaving in and out, creating new patterns in the borders of my consciousness. I could repress those patterns during my waking state. But they would emerge as I slept, as I twisted in and out of memory, ran down familiar corridors, reopened newly sealed doors, and tasted the fresh pain of my longing.
Exorcism
“Can I help you?” She peers at me from the doorway, more officious than friendly.
I stare at her for a moment. I step back and check the apartment number — 102 — to make sure it’s Sam’s. “No. I mean — yes. I just came by to drop these off.” The clothes Sam had lent me the night I vomited were tucked under my arm. I had worn them home and forgotten about them. And now more than six months later, I discovered them as I was cleaning. And then I recognize her: the petite woman in the snowy picture.
But she is quicker. “You must be Maggie.”
“Carolina. I recognize you from your picture,” I say dumbly.
“You, too,” she says. “You’re the one lying in all the flowers. Sam talks about you all the time.”
We smile at each other for a moment. She is prettier in person, with shiny black hair, olive skin, and wide, voluptuous red lips almost too big for her tapered face. “Sam’s on an errand. Come in.” She holds the door open and glances at the bundle in my arms.
“Sam lent them to me a few months ago, and I kept forgetting to return them,” I mumble, feeling awkward about entering the apartment I had been in hundreds of times.
She glances down at the jogging pants serenely, as though it were perfectly normal for me to be returning clothes that had once belonged to her, a perfect stranger.
I place them on the table.
“When did you arrive?” I ask cheerfully.
“Yesterday. I have a couple of weeks off, so I thought I’d surprise Sam. It’s our anniversary.”
“Wow.” He hadn’t mentioned it. “He must have been happy to see you. I can’t believe we haven’t met in all this time.”
“Yes. I know. But it’s my fault really, trying to cram everything in, two degrees back to back. Would you like a coffee?” she asks. She’s a coffee drinker too, of course. “Or tea?”
The apartment gives off the wonderful aroma of jasmine rice, and something unusual, maybe eggplant. She’s cooking dinner. “No. I mean. I have plans, so…”
“Well, I’m sure we will meet again.”
“Definitely,” I say, trying not to rush out the door.
It’s Halloween, and the Rose and Horn is packed with creatures, most of them human. We had waited outside for half an hour until we were finally admitted by a bulky doorman dressed as a wizard. It’s an old-style tavern, with medieval wooden tables and faux rock walls. We push past warm bodies, following one another down the entrance corridor, past the hub, a large bar where at least a dozen bartenders pour shots and sling beer.
We form a human chain, Carolina following Sam; Dan following Carolina; and I bring up the rear. We finally manage to squeeze into a high table in a back room. I sit at a chair, legs dangling above the ground. I wait for my ears to adjust to the rumble of people yelling over the noise of the grunge cover band. We order a round of drinks from a Playboy Bunny.
The room is sweltering. I take off my hat, which is your standard witch variety, tall, black, and menacingly pointed. I fluff the black wig that hangs down to the collar of my predictably black gown. I’ve even painted my nails black. The only bit of colour is a chunk of jade on a string tied around my throat. The effect is very ghoulish and severe. It suits my mood of late. It is thanks to Sam’s persistence that I am out at all. I had been giving him his space — Carolina’s visit has been extended from two weeks to four — but he sought me out at Archibald’s and insisted that we go out for my birthday. Tonight, he is dressed in a grey suit and necktie. He has come as his nemesis, the everyday businessman, although he claims he is specifically a stockbroker. Carolina is managing to look lovely as a pirate complete with an eye patch. Her one black eye sparkles in her pale oval face. Even the fake beard doesn’t make her look bad. Dan, on the other hand, is dressed as a female flight attendant. With a pleated skirt and blouse stretched over his enormous frame and a blonde wig, he is giving a whole new definition to drag. He has even smeared on hot pink lipstick, which makes it look like he has been smacked in the mouth and is bleeding electric pink blood. I had laughed so hard when I saw him outside the bar that I almost peed myself. He had grinned uneasily, looking pleased with himself.
