40.
“The Bar”
“I remember you,” the girl he’d gone home with said, as he approached the bar.
“Yeah, me too. Mandy, right?” and then, recalling a habit she’d had the night he slept with her of hinting that she had an eating disorder, “you’re the girl who doesn’t eat or take vitamins or nothing, right?”
Flattered, she replied, “I’m trying to slowly kill myself. Life’s too sad,” and she laughed. The way she said it came off warm and humorous instead of needy, and made her seem for a little while afterwards a remarkable person, both to her room mate and to Christopher, a triumph that meant a great deal to the girl. The room mate, who turned from the middle-aged man she was speaking with, was a short lesbian with olive skin and dark brown eyes and hair. Acting carefree the way she was, instead of serious, she looked attractive to Christopher. Both the girls were thin and tall, with large breasts, and he didn’t mind wasting some time hanging out with them, he decided. “Let me buy us some drinks,” the room mate said.
But after his third Jack and Coke, Christopher felt resentful of the two girls for what he saw as their coercion of him to ruin his tally of sobriety, which rehab had made him so proud of. His sobriety had been like a single, perfectly typed page, that now had a smudge of White-Out right in the center of its text and had to be completely crumpled up and thrown away. Somewhat bitterly, he asked the room mate, “Are you going to get me drunk, or what?” and she answered, “Yes, I am. Order yourself another, it’s on me. I don’t have any money anyway.”
She was a girl with a lot of friends from the Gay and Lesbian club at school, who thought of her seldom when not actually in her company, and as someone reliable. Since she was fifteen she’d been stealing Valium from her mother and carrying the little pills around in a vintage matchbox stuffed with a bit of Kleenex in her pocket, and she took the pills often and for no reason, telling herself it was the dull taste of the pill dissolving in her mouth and not its drowsy power that she craved. But nobody knew this about her, so there was no one to think that she needed help. However, Christopher was meeting her during a period in her life where she was behaving differently from all the other eighteen years that came before. It was the year she had her breakdown. “How can good and evil co-exist?” she’d assert to her philosophy professor, and he would not know how to answer, because he was flunking her out of his class, for truancy. How can good and evil coexist? How could she find a way to go down to the underworld, but be true to her own kind soul while she was down there? Would that cause the world to explode? At night in the mental health facility her mother and stepdad placed her in, later on, she’d dream she was trapped in an orphanage like the one in the musical “Annie,” with singing girls dressed in flower-printed aprons dancing on their beds and singing rhyming songs about the orderlies and psychiatrists. The suicide note she left, a few months after this night I’m telling you about, read, “If I should die, I want you all to know that I love you all very much and never meant to hurt any of you.” Her parents spoke consolingly, repetitively of this note to each other, and never mentioned the poem they found in her journal called “Nobody Liked Me,” a thing written down so angrily hard the words tore the paper in places.
On the night I’m telling you about, though, everyone just thought she was drunk. “God, Christopher, I’m really sorry,” Mandy said, “Laura’s been pulling shit like this all the time lately. The other day she was walking around outside without any socks or shoes on, it was that day it hailed. I’m really sorry she offered to buy us all these drinks without having the money to pay for them. But like, I don’t have any money either, Christopher, do you?”
That was how Christopher spent all the money he had in his wallet on this night. A few times during his stroll through this night, he’d think of Shirley waiting for him at their apartment, and would know that he should call her to tell her he wouldn’t be home until very late. But because he’d spent even his last nickel, he told himself there was no way to get in touch with her. Having these obstacles of economics, time, space between him and her made the idea of her protection so potent that at one point during the night, when Pammy was in the bathroom and he was waiting for her, Christopher heard himself muttering, “Oh God, mom, I’m coming home to you.”
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