Bad Things. Michael Marshall
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I arrived. Lone drinkers held each corner of the room, like tent pegs. There was no one at the counter, generally the first roosting place of the professional drinker – for ease of access to further alcohol, and the faux-conviviality of shooting it back and forth with the bartender. I guessed I was between shifts, that the place never did that much hardcore business, or that Black Ridge was slowly sinking into the swamp and the drinkers had worked it out first. The Marilyn Manson playing on the jukebox probably wasn't helping either. Not everyone enjoys the company of music that sounds like it means them harm.
I stood waiting for a couple of minutes before I heard someone coming out of the rear area. When I turned I was surprised to see the woman I'd spotted while sitting on the bench opposite, earlier in the afternoon.
She looked at me a moment, raised an eyebrow. ‘Am I in trouble?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘I just want a beer.’
The eyebrow went back down and she slapped each of the pumps in turn and told me what was in them.
‘What's popular?’ I asked.
‘Money and happiness,’ she said, quick as a flash. ‘We don't have either on draught.’
I nodded at the one in the middle. ‘Can I smoke in here?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘We are not afraid.’
I watched her as she leaned over to the other side to get me an ashtray. I guessed she was probably in her late twenties. Tall and skinny, with a high forehead and strong features, hair that had been dyed jet black and cut in an artfully scruffy bob. Her skin was pale, her movements quick and assured.
‘You want to pay, or run it?’ she said.
‘For a while,’ I said. ‘I'm meeting someone.’
‘Oh yeah – who?’
I hesitated, and she winked. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen a woman wink before.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I get it.’
‘You don't,’ I said. ‘It's just an old friend.’
‘Whatever you say.’
One of the tent pegs came up to buy another beer, and I took the opportunity to walk away. I climbed on a stool at the counter which ran along the bar's street window, got out my cigarettes. It was a long time since I'd smoked or even taken a drink inside, and my associations with the practice were not good. Have you ever set fire to the hair hanging lankly over your face, when very drunk and trying to light yet another cigarette – despite the fact you've already got one burning in the overflowing ashtray? It's not a good look. Nobody's impressed.
But that was then.
The drunk period lasted about a year. It began in the way one chooses, without being aware of a conscious decision, to take one route around the supermarket rather than another. The first time, it's happenstance; the second, it's the way you did it before; and then it's just what you do.
I had been someone who didn't drink at home, or alone, or to frequent excess. And then I was. Small differences. Big difference.
Just because.
The advantage of being drunk is not that it helps you forget, though it will keep reality at arm's length. Mainly it conveys a rowdy vainglory to the things you do think about, which may seem preferable to their being blunt, hard facts. It wasn't the drinking that was the problem – it didn't make me aggressive or abusive (merely drunk, and maudlin) – as much as the hangovers. I never got to the point of turning pro, where you plane out of the morning-after by starting again bright and early, and so I found myself mired four or five times a week in dehydrated despair, consumed with self-loathing, all too aware I was letting down Scott's memory by failing to be the straight-backed and self-reliant adult I'd hoped he would grow up to be.
When I'm hungover I can only get by if I retreat inside, which basically means I can't listen to other people. Carol needed me to listen. Her way of dealing with the thing we couldn't talk about – it was not subject to interpretation, once we'd established the medical profession didn't have a clue as to what might have caused Scott's brain to blow a fuse, and Carol's hours on the Internet had produced no further clues – was to talk about everything else. As if she felt that by containing life's trivial chaos in words, in obsessive detail, it would become contained, made incapable of doing us further harm. Not only did I disbelieve this, I found it hard to withstand hours of meaningless utterance from someone who had once been so concise and sparing of observation.
As a result I drank even more, to get through the listening periods, and the hangovers got worse and more frequent, and my willingness to listen decreased yet further. It came to the point where she would be talking all the time we were together, knowing I wasn't listening but unwilling to stop, unable to understand that I was coming to hate her for filling the world with noise that made it impossible for me to start healing in silence. Consequently we began to spend less and less time together, and I started missing more and more of her narrative – until I realized I had lost track of whatever story she was trying to tell; and then finally came to understand that I was no longer even a part of it.
I got this, in the end, when she left. Of all the things she tried to say, that was the one that got through. It was four months after Scott had died. I woke one weekend morning, late, in a house that felt empty and too quiet. I lurched around in my robe until it became clear that significant things were missing: principally, my wife and remaining child. Eventually I found a letter propped up on the desk in my study. It boiled down to: The world is broken, you're fucked up, and I'm out of here.
In the next six weeks I did what we should have done long before – something Carol had tried to make me do many times. I sold the house. I sent her three-quarters of the proceeds, once the loan and other expenses had been paid. Half for her, a quarter for Tyler. An odd name for a child, I'd always felt, but it was not my choice. He had been a while in arriving, and was Carol's son from before birth, somehow announcing this to us from the womb. I would have loved him nonetheless, but it was Scott who had been my son. I did not feel like a father any more, and had failed at pretending otherwise.
The last time Carol and I met was on the six-month anniversary of what happened. We met in a restaurant equidistant between Renton, where she was living (close to her brother, over on the Seattle side of the Cascades) and Black Ridge, in which I currently had that motel room. Carol looked tired and drawn. Tyler seemed to have no strong reaction to my having been absent, nor to me being there again. I learned that he was sleeping through the night now, however – having started almost immediately after he and his mother left the house. Carol and I had been married for a little under seven years, and apart for only a month. Yet on that afternoon the proportions seemed reversed, and it was clear neither of us was looking for a reconciliation.
‘Are you still drinking?’ she asked. Her hands were, possibly without her being aware of it, organizing the table's silverware into neat lines.
‘No,’ I lied. I was actually drinking less concertedly by then, as if the demon knew it had done its job and was ready to go spread hell in someone else's life. But the position felt precarious, and I did not want to endanger my progress by getting into it with Carol. By leaving she had made it my problem, not hers, and it would be another six months before I felt the boss of it again.
She raised her chin, and I knew she understood both what the truth was and what it signified. That was okay. It was even nice, for a moment, to feel married and known. It was about the only thing that made me feel that way. In the old days there would have been a smile in her eyes. Now they looked dark and sad and old.
Twenty minutes later we stood and kissed each other drily on the cheek. I haven't seen her or Tyler since. Maybe there was more she could have done, or said. I fell short in those and other ways too. Though we had been a good couple when times were fair, we had no idea how to deal with each other when they were not. We'd tried therapy. The problem is that marriage is a language – an oral one, with no tradition of writing. Once you begin to codify it, it starts to die. There's a lot of sleight-of-hand in relationships, too, and talking excavates