by TJ Price
I
For years after an abrupt departure from college, I floated around, aimless and pathless. It was only a matter of time before I lost any buoyancy and began to drown, most likely in one or any of the bars I had begun to frequent. Seasons slid by without any notice, as if each month were just a mask slipping off by the coy legerdemain of a stage magician. Winter led to another winter; summer led to another summer. How we got from one to the another was the topic of much surly amazement from the drunks with whom I kept company; often I would bear witness to their surprise—and their gall—upon realizing how much time had passed.
There was always a reason to drink, but there was never a reason to stop, other than a vague intimation of estimated excess. Maybe a pang in the liver, or a tightening below the sternum. A nose turned slightly bulbous, blushing with broken capillaries. Maybe a heart so full of booze that it sloshed around each chamber, flooding it like rooms in a house.
I spent most of my time with this girl I knew, this girl who spent more time in the bar than she did in her expensive condominium. We’d hit it off almost immediately, bonding over our shared love of reading. Not that we had a lot of books in common—our tastes were wildly divergent—but it was more that we both just liked to read that drew us together. The first night we met, during a late-night excursion from our barstools, she took me to her place and I discovered that her fridge was stuffed full of pizza boxes and takeout containers. The stove didn’t work, she explained, but I knew she was bluffing—it would have been simple to get it fixed, even if it were actually broken.
That night, after a few lines of cocaine, we talked excitedly about poetry: she recited a line or two of Plath—you do not do, you do not do, black shoe, in which I have lived for years like a foot, barely daring to breathe or ha-choo—I returned my own salvo, with Eliot—and through the spaces of the dark, midnight shakes the memory, as a madman shakes a dead geranium. She pressed a finger alongside one nostril, sniffed loudly, and then stared at me with her big round moon eyes, impatience growing on her like a fungus. I was meant to do something, I think, but in that moment of booze and drug-fueled confusion, I couldn’t parse what was expected of me.
Finally, she sighed, then gestured to the half-full bottle of tequila on the counter next to me. I hadn’t noticed it, grouped as it was in a similar colloquy with others just like, all empty. “Tequila time,” she said, and my stomach grew queasy. Tequila on top of vodka on top of cheap whiskey on top of whatever else I couldn’t remember I’d had—certainly not food, that’s for sure. I suddenly needed to get out of her condo, with its bare walls and sad furniture.
If she saw my sudden agitation, she didn’t comment on it. Sweat prickled on my skin, and I fidgeted uncomfortably. The air was still, and too quiet, garnished with the aura of something either long-dead or just starting to rot. This all-too-organic scent clashed with the staid, upmarket vibe of the furniture, even though the couch was smudged and ashy in places where errant, clumsily-handled cigarettes had singed the upholstery. It was a melange of hedonism and squalor I’d never really ever seen before.
We both did a shot. I gagged—it was awful tequila, rancid and cheap, bottom-shelf, plastic-bottle stuff. She grinned wolfishly at me—her teeth were big and slightly grayish, like headstones, and her fingernails were mauled even beyond the quick, the nailbeds exposed and raw. There wasn’t a single fiber of keratin left to chew, yet still her fingers crowded at her lips, pressing in against the others, hungry for her mouth (and teeth) to attend to their ragged, bloody edges.
When we finally left the apartment, stumbling and giddy with intoxication, we went right back to the bar. She hadn’t even closed out her tab—the bartender knew her, after all, even saw her coming back down the street with me, and had drinks prepared for us before we could even request them. For her: a glass of pinot grigio; for me, whiskey and ginger with bitters, to soothe my ravaged stomach.
II
I’d like to say it didn’t take me long to hit rock bottom and turn it all around, but it did. The coke-fueled nights made us ghastly, but I still craved it—and her. Her company was like possessing a letter of passage from the regent: everywhere I went with her, I was known as her companion, and then how the drinks—and drugs—would flow. Sometimes, on the bad nights, her “guy” would flake out on her, or we’d have to wait an hour til he could make it by, and as the air between us began to fray and our packs of cigarettes emptied alarmingly fast, suddenly the “guy” would ooze into the room and simper something at her, and I would be relegated to a blur in the corner of their eyes.
I didn’t want to know the “guy,” anyway, and I didn’t want him to know me. We never exchanged names, only terse nods of acknowledgement, if that. She played the coquette with everyone—especially the slimeballs, for some reason—yet never with me, and though she kept me close, I knew that tether could have been severed at absolutely any moment—an act of cruel mercy that would both free me from her clutching orbit, but also damn me to float in isolated darkness, cast out from her drug-hazed light.
At some point, the excesses swiftly became deficits, as so often happens in a relationship built on foundations of addiction. The demands of bearing one another’s company grew stricter, and yet, perversely, the need of it grew ever more strident. Her impatience for my peccadilloes faltered—what she used to find awkwardly charming about my anxiety began to irritate rather than amuse. Conversations turned recursive, bending back toward memory more often than they dared, replacing wistful hope or pipe dream. The future, it seemed, had been locked out, like the Red Death from Prince Prospero’s palace.
And yet, just like that castellated abbey, the future was already in the room with us. Indeed, it had never left, despite all our promises to live only in the present, in the now. That the future was for the boring. She smoked cigarettes, she said disdainfully, because it would “cut off the diaper years.” Her continual refrain—even to the point of my imitating it—was that she wanted to “die happy.” Whenever she said this, her gaze would skate away from whomever was around, toward some distant, unseen place, and her mouth would twist grimly.
I knew this came because she had been a witness to her own dad’s death: drunken, spitting and insensate, the old, once-venerable attorney had stumbled out of a chain restaurant in a suburb of the city, where he had been having dinner with her. They had a fight, he stormed out—without paying, so she was still inside hastily settling the bill when he tripped over the curb, and sprawled out in the street, knocked unconscious.
There was no time to save him. It was a busy road, and the cars often went much faster than they ought. When she exited the restaurant, still furious and muddled by too many glasses of bad chardonnay, all she heard was the frantic blasting of a horn, and then the shriek of brakes applied far too late.
“That thud,” she said, taking another long drag from her Parliament light. I imagined how her tongue flicked at the recessed filter, needily, hungrily, like a kid goat at the nipple of a bottle. “I hear it every night in my dreams. I’ll never get it out of my head. That sound. Thud. Thud. Thud.” She would drunkenly attempt to mimic the sound with her mouth, but could never be satisfied with her own approximations.
In her worst states, at her drunkest and most fucked up, she would narrate the entire scene, replete with sound effects: honnnnnk, screeeeeeeech, THUD! (splat, squish, squelch.) Hopefully, no one would try to assist her in recalling the exact sound, to perform it for her—only once had that ever happened, and she had turned her back on the offender, dismissing them from our lives forever with one of her arctic glares—indeed, I never saw that hapless individual, ever again, after that night. (In some of my darker moments, I fantasized she had had him killed. She could do that, probably. She’d just call her “guy,” her bucket of boiling turpentine; her “guy” would wipe the offender right off the page.)
III
It wasn’t until after she found the poem I wrote about her that she grew cold; every eave of her clustered with sharp, glittering points of ice. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that she’d read it. I never even told her about it, and it was only one poem in a whole flimsy notebook full of them, but one night, when I was in the bathroom—and had left it unattended on the bar by my drink—she had casually leaned over, opened it, and begun to leaf through the pages.
When I came back, however, we went on drinking and following our patterns like good little addicts, pretending as hard as we could that we weren’t illimitably bored with not only each other, but the larger world. It was ultimately unsuccessful, though, and I left earlier than normal. I’d recently started chatting online with an older man who had reawakened a fierce desire in me to succeed, stoked the slumbering fire of my ambition, but had warned me that in order for any fire to blaze, it must begin with kindling. Thus, I’d been trying new things, quietly: a drink or two less each night, eating an actual meal every now and again. Of course, every evening I’d still go with her to the bar, and sit there beside her as she held court. I felt like a dowager king, muted even before death had a chance to widow the queen, and the imposed silence had begun to rankle.
Instead of continuing to core out my brain with coke, I started making excuses. Once or twice, here and there. Begging off, saying that I was too tired, maybe I needed to try to slow down, reconfigure some things. I wasn’t getting any younger, I said, and it was true—in fact, we were only ever ageing one another more rapidly, like two decaying particles stuck in a synchronous orbit around one another, superradiant and sick. I have always gravitated toward inertia, as if I have been living on the event horizon my entire life, hesitating to take a step beyond for fear of the enormous forces of nature that would rip me apart if I tried. I felt like she numbered among those forces.
Instead of daring to cross that boundary, I shrank in on myself. I dodged texts, and then calls, to my phone. A phone call would trigger my screen to fill with the photo of her that I used as her profile picture, one I took myself, at a beach around four in the morning. In the photo, she’s wearing a big black jacket and a black winter hat and her blonde hair is flying loose around her white, chapped face. She has crossed one arm over her chest, and has tilted her head up. She stands at an oblique angle to the camera, with her back slightly to the lens—she might even be oblivious to its eye, but it’s hard to tell. She is looking at the stars in the swiftly-lightening sky, watching them appear to wink out with the slow, determined coming of the dawn. She is smoking a cigarette with such fervor that it appears she is trying to reignite those far-flung embers, high above.
Whenever I saw that photograph, I remembered how I felt, taking that picture—I saw what I thought was her beauty. Not immediate beauty, but a striking light of potential—of hope—stabbing out like a beacon from within the thick cloud of her misery. I remember I wanted to capture that moment, like a prize or a trophy, or evidence in case I needed to prove it again later—as if a photograph can truly contain such a thing.
I answered the phone. I had good intentions! I didn’t let her speak; instead I rushed into my own apologies and excuses, and eventually trailed off. I had, in that brief span of moments, resolved to say goodbye to her, to be decisive and final about ending our … association. Our friendship? I didn’t know what words to use, or how I would use them, but I was committed. I told her again how sorry I was I’d been so distant. Did she want to go get a drink? My treat!
There was long silence on the line. I think I rolled my eyes: this was the gesture of the the lioness, examining her claws before leaping onto the soon-to-be carcass of her injured prey. I knew enough not to say a word. There was a decorum there which I had to observe. If we had been in person, in an earlier time, she would have expected me to sketch a couple of lavish bows and take a few steps back before her majesty’s deliberation—as if her thoughts outsized her when she engaged them, ballooning out of her—and I would have, by God.
Then, rather coolly, she surprised me by accepting my invitation, which made me cautious. The last time we’d tried this had ended poorly. I’d said something or done something to spark her ire; though the switch in the conversation had happened after I’d stepped out to the bathroom, when I hadn’t been present. I’d often endured episodes of this prickly demeanor, though, and they usually resolved with enough time and space, as well as enough performative deference, so even if it had been my fault, I could fix it—or so I thought.
IV
When I arrived to the bar that night, she was already there, sitting in the same seat she had been when I met her—the one in the corner, next to the wall, at the end of the bar; closest to the cooler behind where they kept not one, but three chilled bottles of pinot grigio for her, restocked frequently. Usually my place was beside her, in the only other chair at that end of the bar, with a vantage of the entire rest of the place and the door behind our backs. This time, however, my seat already had an occupant: an oversized, floppy purse—a new one, colored a strange shiny scarlet, and dappled to look like lizardskin. Maybe it was.
She was wearing lipstick that night, too, which she almost never did except for when she went on a rare date. It was bright, savage red, and stood out in sharp relief against her face. She smiled at me, and I marshaled my courage. I’d have to be firm.
We exchanged stiff pleasantries; she ordered a(nother) glass of wine, I ordered a cup of coffee. Her lips thinned when she heard my order. “So,” she said, limply, levelly. I waited. This was the moment when the tide rushed out, far, far beyond where it should be dragged, the big inhale before the plunge. I felt strong! I could take her on. “I read that poem you wrote about me.” She took a sip of her wine, flicked her eyes over to me, casually.
I think it was the anger I felt next. How it rushed up inside of me, like a swarm. “How?” I said, managing the word through my confusion. “When? Where?” None of my poetry had ever been published anywhere; lord knows it wasn’t good enough for anything like that. I was working on a chapbook, but I’d never shared it with anyone. Especially not her. My notebook? But when..?
She tapped on the bar with one deformed nail, her face drawn into a tight rictus of hate. Thud. Thud. Thud. “Here. Last time. You were in the bathroom, so I looked. What’s the big deal? It’s just some shitty poetry that doesn’t have a chance of ever being published. You even dedicated it to me: for Virginia, who grieves and goes on grieving.” She laughed, her nasty, crackling mirth like hot oil in my ears.
I got up quickly—too quickly—and tripped over the stool. Its wooden legs scraped against the tiles with an equally horrible noise, a cry like something being subjected to an enormous pressure. “You’re such a bitch,” I said, attempting to make my voice as cold as hers. “You don’t care about anything else but yourself.” The clichés thickened and congealed in my throat, and she smiled coldly. Nothing I could say would hurt her. I was too emotional, and the most grievous wound needs a steady hand, even in verbal skirmish.
I knew at that moment, sick with shame and rage, I had nothing to lose, and that opened up my field. I could, in fact, say anything—I’d never see her again. I could say anything, the most hurtful thing I could think of.
I could even bring up her dad. That terrible thud.
As I stood there, face thrumming with heat, preparing to speak, I stopped. There was something in the way she held herself, sitting on her throne, that I’d never noticed before. Had she always sat like that—as if she might at any point be hurled off of the axis of reality into a strange new world, unnavigable and hostile? She was afraid of this, I realized slowly, because it had already happened to her once, and she was even now still stumbling through the ruins. In her eyes I saw a wild, frantic despair—a barely sublimated madness, beneath the enamel-hard glaze of wine and god knows what else. She’d given up on ever getting out, of ever returning home.
And I didn’t have to say … anything. There was no point in reminding her of that thud—there hadn’t been a moment since she first heard it when she didn’t hear it, on repeat inside of her skull, perhaps forever.
I shook my head, my anger suddenly cooling into a dim, opalescent pity. I didn’t hate her. What I hated was who I was when I was around her—who I let myself become—and that was not her fault, not at all.
“You know—” I started to say something. I don’t remember what. I might’ve even been about to apologize. Then I shook my head. “Forget it.”
The last memory I have of her is that image of her sitting there as I walked past, out of the bar—her in profile, all white and blasted and cold, like the face of a mountain stripped bare by a gale-force wind.
V
It wasn’t really about the poem. We had just become different, somehow, the two of us. I didn’t need her anymore, and she knew it, and resented it.
I couldn’t go back to the bar, either. Because of how much time she spent there, she had grown in, somehow, with the other habitués and barflies. The staff all knew her by name. She was invited to their Christmas parties. She’d even had a series of relations with the owner of the bar, an abrasive and thoroughly unstable individual with multiple addictions and a wicked mean streak. I knew I wouldn’t be welcome back, not if she had decreed my exile, and frankly, I didn’t want to go back anyway.
It was surprising how quickly my life changed, after that. I joke about her “dieu et mon droit” fashion of holding court, but it really did feel like a kind of banishment. Those who interacted with me on social media stopped doing so; a few even posted snarky, sarcastic replies to anything I did, which would receive more attention than did my actual post. Thankfully, I had other things to occupy my time. If I had not, I would have maybe gone a little insane.
For a long time, I felt bad about it: here was a yearslong friendship, with genuine moments of connection—or at least, so it had seemed, here and there, even with the influence of drugs. Night after night, I would scroll to her entry in my phone’s address book. Drunk and a little regretful, I’d compose different forms of text message, then delete the entire thing before sending. Sometimes I’d look at her picture—the one of her on the beach at night, smoking, looking up at the stars—and I’d get that pang in my chest, a seize of desire mixed with loathing. I could call her. Apologize, or something. But what would I apologize for? The more I thought about the whole thing, the more absurd it became, like a farce.
And then I remember the moment after I took the picture, that night on the cold beach, a whirl of cigarette smoke around her head as she descended from the dune.
“It’s not pretty,” she had said, dismissively. “I don’t know why anyone thinks it is.”
I hadn’t known what she meant. The ocean? The stars? The sky? The world? Life? Herself?
I didn’t ask her then, and I can’t ask her now, but when I think about that night, it stands out to me as the Moment, the catalyst, that drew us to our inevitable parting. And I still sometimes wonder: was it more about what she said … or was it more about the fact that I didn’t ask her?
Even now, years down the line, having long since deleted her entry in my phone, I can see her in my mind’s eye—imperious, haunted, cruel and sad. I wonder often if she’s still alive.
If I concentrate, I can sort of zoom in, right down outside that same bar, where she is probably still standing. If I squint, I see her, trying to get her lighter to spark despite the mischievous, boggarty wind. Finally, after much frustration, she is successful, and she lifts her head, cigarette ember flaring. Her expression is cast in a peculiar mold of startlement—a friend is speaking to her now, someone with a muffled voice, a laugh. You look like you just saw a ghost! They talk for a moment, and then she stubs her cigarette out, waves her friend away—but she doesn’t go right back inside, either. She lingers there on the sidewalk, a distant, unfocused look in her eyes.
I need to get a little closer, to see what she is staring at. If I could just get a little closer, I might be able to see more clearly that blurry place where memory and this moment converge—indeed, are still converging—but then, she is gone, back inside the bar, taking the moment with her and leaving me with only memory.
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