46.
“Your Body has Never Been Good for Much,
But Your Face, That is Another Story.”
Often when he thought about his mother, it was a way to reflect the image of his life back at himself as something archetypal, rather than a life to be lived. In this light, he could tell himself that all his shortcomings were predestined, that because he’d had such a flawed mother, his flaws were irrevocable. But then, the legend of her deficiencies would prove not expansive enough to explain his own failures to himself, and he would dread what the real excuse must be; plain laziness, plain goddamn uselessness.
The young men waited in the wrecked apartment for Christina’s arrival, and Christopher walked around the neighborhood with Pammy, blaming the way she wasn’t paying enough attention to him on some vague curse Shirley must have marked him with at birth.
At the treatment center, they made him feel like he would be supported indefinitely, a coverage almost magical enough to make any rejection of him whatsoever seem impossible. At the treatment center, there had been righteous frustrations and good intentions and unbridled vomit, and the future was a thing to bravely put off and to pretend to want. He’d had a therapist there, a dazzlingly intelligent woman, who genuinely and not just professionally liked him, and the fact of this validated him immensely. Her esteem for him impacted him so much it became a source of frustration, it made him antsy and fragile to be as precious as he felt, and so to remedy this, he vowed to become humble. Humility, hopefully, would silence the conversations with other people he constantly rehearsed in his head, and would instill him with patience in receiving the gradual opportunities he believed he was owed.
At the treatment center, one of his old girlfriends, Catie, wrote him letters from her current boyfriend’s parents’ condo in the hills when she was staying there for Thanksgiving weekend.
“Dear Christopher,” she’d written, “John’s dad is the quintessential yuppie. We went to the car wash with him the other day and he was like, helping the Mexican car washers there buff his BMW. Lame. Way to help the ‘little guy,’ pal. Anyway, I miss you. You sent a letter to your mom to me on accident. It said her name on the envelope but it was addressed to my apartment. I thought it was really sweet that you kept the scrap of paper I wrote my address on -- thank you! Well, if there’s any way I can help you, AT ALL, call me, ANY TIME DAY OR NIGHT.” And then in much smaller handwriting, “I love you very much. Love, Catie.” It was like she was telling him she would wait forever for his use. They were all that way.
He thought of Catie, of August, of me, of Pammy, and even of Bell, and Christina with her obvious ploys to bewitch him, and he was trying to consider them one at a time but when each girl became only a memory of an instance he felt securely cared for, he let these girls melt into the single theme of regret. He could have done something to lend one of these misfitted girls who came to him some real importance in his life, and then their attention would have been able to sustain him, and in that space of their sustenance, he could have lain back on a couch of theirs and made a plan for himself, so that now he wouldn’t just be working in a convenience store, the job a friend had set up for him for when he got back from rehab.
August and her stupid retro record player she took so much pride in as she sat beside it on the floor, her beer boxed in between her Indian-style legs, and put on single after old single, watching him sit on her single chair, eating the food she bought for him. The songs she put on were always things like Aretha Franklin’s “I Ain’t Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You” and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving you Too Long.” She would just sit there in an agony of trying to feel desirable, trying to think of charming, off-hand things to tell him or just hoping that the songs would speak for her.
Me and my way I could seem not cloying, by focusing on my books and movies I cared so personally about, and then the way I would decide to let myself falter and tell him I love him and ask if he loved me.
Christina and her breasts pushed against his arm, her way of standing by him when they were doing any chore together, the drug chores that established and sometimes threatened their camaraderie.
That black-haired girlfriend too lethargic to feed herself much of anything or to get up to answer the phone. That quiet, younger girlfriend who always used words like “translucent,” “iridescent” and “transcendent,” the kind of words that girls who wear lots of purple and tell people that they believe in fairies love to use. That loud, tall girlfriend with a disease, who he turned into a monster and who will use all the drugs he introduced her to until she dies from them.
Pammy and that other lover of hers which was independence.
How could he have decided which one would have made him whole? They were all so similar, he found himself saying and doing the same thing so many times, only the little pictures above their beds changing. The way both August and I like to collect old-fashioned objects and how we think that makes us artists. The way both Christina and Catie, and a couple of the other girls he’d known, thought that giving oral sex would infuse them with some sort of power over him. The languages they all made up to use with only him, all the words they used for making love and for their body parts and for his, and for him.
Love had let him down, by being too plentiful. It had cheapened itself with its multiplicity, distracting him with its multiple similar promises.
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