2.
Open-mouthed sobs in the car. Wide-open self-pity. Eyes-to-the-sky “please god”s. Hands to the forehead, hands to the wheel. Her mother used to put her carrier in the car and drive her around the block to put her to sleep. Sleep: don’t be a fool. Oh, sleep, it comes, that’s not the problem. It’s the waking up. It’s the parsing out of dreams and reality, the remembering that’s heavy as a blunt butcher’s knife, the confusion like Vaseline coating the eyes. She pulls into her driveway and breaks anew because she doesn’t have any groceries & her roommates are assholes & her dog is in the yard howling across the boundaries of the electric fence. Surely there’s a can of tuna or a package of ramen noodles in her cabinet. She’ll eat the ramen straight from the pot, she knows, while watching Bravo. Even tuna requires the effort of seasoning and stirring. She gets out.
At least she has a separate entrance to her room. Originally conceived as a “den” (the house was remodeled in the ‘70s. The add-ons each include 3x as many outlets as necessary because the television and the den were meant to be hip ideas for bringing the family back together), her bedroom sits off of the living room (the difference between this and the “den”, other than the shuttered closet-door style divider, still elude her), and features fake wood-panelling on the walls. These appalled her, at first, but came to represent a life of simple wants and creature comforts that she imagined people who live in wood cabins or double-wides lead.
Grace’s neighbor growing up was a grandmotherly Italian woman who had married a mechanic named Larry and moved to his native Georgia to build the plantation home she dreamed all Southerners maintained. She had revelled in Joan’s garden, sewing room, and many curio cabinets, but what truly intrigued her was the RV permanently parked in the driveway. Mischievous in the conventional ways sociable young children often are, she would ask Joan why why why and the answer, woven always in a different way, consistently came down to “just in case”. Just in case! Of what? Grace didn’t know, and Joan didn’t really know either, but the possibility occupied each of their imaginations: the kind of life that could be led if you ran away.
The fantasy of doing so, and investing in the fantasy insofar as buying the RV that, in reality, became a storage unit for the excess trappings of her plantation life, was enough to keep Joan from a actually doing it--skipping town and tasking her husband and four boys with tending the herbs, sewing the quilts, composting the vegetables, bathing the dogs, mending the hems, baking the bread. All of which she did. And happily so. Because she’d step into the carport each morning to check the dryer, see that RV, and think “not today”.
1.
She throws her glass of white wine at the floor. Immediately she regrets 1. not taking the last swig and 2. aiming for the carpet, at the last second, instead of the concrete landing outside of the open door. The door is cracked so that Spencer can stand inside while smoking a cigarette “outside”, because Grace has often complained that she leaves his apartment with a migraine from the smell.
But because she opted not to throw the glass against the concrete, where it would have shattered nicely, she is forced to watch it land limply on the floor and turn a few revolutions, leaving a wet spot like it pissed itself, and mount frustration upon her fury. Not the cathartic gesture she expected it to be. What would she know about all that. She came from a family of WASPy passive aggression mixed with British coldness and Southern charm where anger was strained into either a witty quip or a meandering black-humored joke. The throwing of the glass is an experiment in anger, in how it travels. Outward and down, down, down once it has smacked up against its unreceptive subject: the carpet; her junkie boyfriend. Flat, lifeless, their only comforting qualities being the 1/2” of softness on their surface and the warmth they reflect back to you from your own body heat if you lie there long enough.
It isn’t finding his needles again that gets her. It’s his dark eyes that don’t see her, and how relieved he is to have something to look at other than her face which lately has confused him. She is transformed by a thinned, pinched mouth and heavy brows, she appears sharp-featured as a crow. When he’s high he takes pleasure in losing himself in the gentle Renoir smudge of her flush cheeks and expressive Irish eyes. This face she wears now, he does not recognize, and he fears she’ll peck him dead. He feels her descend upon him, and the weight of her austerity which hovers above him. He prostrate, she carnivorous, holding him in place by talons in the soft of his belly.
They lift their eyes from the glass to look nowhere.
“I can’t keep trusting you.”
His eyes assent.
“I have to go.”
She flies.
3.
“You’re not married. You don’t have to do this.”
“I know. I want to,” Grace looks away from Denise. The way she wrings the tissue in her hands reminds Grace of where they are, “I don’t know what else to do.”
Spencer is somewhere peeing in a cup, leaving them to wait in Dr. Pasternack’s office without the distraction of attending to Spencer's cramping muscles and joint pain. The nurse had ushered them in with assurances that the doctor would be “right in”, motioning to the leather sofa. Grace wonders how many people had sat on it, waiting to see him. A quick read of the room tells her: a lot. It’s decorated with Kleenex boxes and medical degrees in gaudy frames. These items are intended to be reassuring. It's about as comforting as make-up on a corpse.
Denise shows Grace her teeth. She is trying to smile.
“This is supposed to be a good place.”
Grace nods. She isn’t sure if she’s lying to Denise. She wants to be here, that’s perfectly true. But she suspects that it is because she wants to make sure that Denise doesn’t fuck up. Denise is a microwave Mom. She gets botox “for her migraines”. She thinks juice is only commercially available in single serve containers. These superficialities disturb Grace’s understanding of adult behavior. She denies her contempt and pats Denise’s thigh.
“Anything for Spencer.”
Dr. Pasternack’s door opens to a swollen bellied man in a pink Polo shirt which the rosacea on his face smolders against. A practiced assessment of the women’s bare legs transitions into a glance at his chart to find the patient's name.
“Spencer!”
Spencer skirts around from behind the doctor and sits, clasping his thumbs together.
“We’re very glad you’re here, Spencer. This is a safe place for you. Did you talk to Scott?”
“Yes,” Denise answers.
“Now, Spencer, Scott is a lot like you. He was into some heavy stuff for a while there. Scott came in two or three times before he got serious about getting better. Until he became willing. We could see that difference in him this time when he walked through the front door. Are you willing, Spencer?”
“I want to get better,” He pinches the bridge of his nose, “I want to be better.”
“Good. That’s good Spencer. You know, the reason I’m here today is that I was once where you are right now. When I was a young doctor, I got really stressed. I felt overwhelmed and out of control. I started getting into pills. I raided the supply closets, abused my scripts. It wasn’t hard. First Vicodin and Xanax, then Percocets, Valium, eventually synthetic morphine. I started this hospital because of that experience. I’ve got 19 years now.” The doctor met each of their eyes in turn, nodding yes as though they were in disbelief.
“Now, Spencer , I need to know a few things. When was the last time you used?”
“Saturday.”
“And how much would you use?”
“Half gram. A gram if I had it.”
Pasternack looks at his chart.
“And this was IV? Did you ever snort it?
Spencer shakes his head, “Just shot up.”
“Did you use daily, Spencer?”
Spencer nods.
“We just need to know if you can help him,” Denise interjects.
“You see, Mrs. Coyle. Or is it Ms.?”
“Ms.”
“Spencer is considered ‘high risk’. Because of this, your insurance won’t cover the costs of his treatment at our rehabilitative facilities. We’re required to check him into our hospital facility for detox treatment for a week, maybe two, before we could reassess his case and negotiate with the insurance company.”
“So you might not take him? After detox?”
“We will gladly admit him to the detox unit. As well as rehabilitation after that. The issue is with your insurance’s ability to finance the treatments, unfortunately. It will most assuredly cover detox, though.”
“We could sit on him for a week at my apartment. That’s not going to help him stay clean.”
“The withdrawals--”
“You can’t die from heroin withdrawal.”
“That’s true.”
“I need him in therapy.”
“Therapy is included in detox.”
“It’s a fucking week.”
5.
And since when did logic ever win out over love anyway?
She asks herself this in the hostel shower while thinking over all the things she should and shouldn't have done while she was with Spencer, and lathers the thought into her hair. Up until last week that Burt Bacharach song had been stuck in her head:
“What do you get when you fall in love?
Only tears, lies...something...sorrows
...?...
I-i-i-i’ll never fall in love agai-i-i-i-i-i-n”
This started up shortly after her Barcelonian lover left her wordlessly in the morning, which sounds tragic, but--can you justify calling someone your lover if he never quite made you cum? Granted, their affair was quarantined to his bottom bunk. The range of motion required to properly get a lady off is pretty limited in that situation. Though he barely tried. He put his tongue to her clit with the same length of time and intensity as when he used it to moisten the sticky edge of his rolling papers.
He didn’t deserve the blow job she gave him in return, but in this case she pushed for it. Her last “lover” had been a woman--her first--and the petite frailty of Simone’s clit shocked Grace from acting upon her instinctual aggression in bed. She thought, mid-pussy-eating, that this must be how a first-time father feels holding his infant: monstrous, clumsy, far too capable of destruction. It was a relief, then, to feel V’s dick in her hands, her mouth. Sturdy, reliable, needing only more, faster, stronger. Plus, making him cum was an ironic bit of “fuck you” to him for being so full of shit. He had a girlfriend. Said girlfriend was V’s sole reason for staying, long-term, in the bottom bunk of a hostel in America, in this mediocre California town, close enough that he could visit her on weekends. Though he didn’t. Instead he invited Grace into his bed to watch a movie. And held her hand. Excuse me? Yes. Held her hand. Grace was fine with this. She certainly wasn’t going to care about his girlfriend more than he seemed to. Movie ended, this motherfucker spoons her. As if that’s it, end of story, I’ve got this girlfriend but I’m gonna SPOON you all night.
She thought not, and when he draped his hand across her hips she clasped it, slid it down her shorts.
“I shouldn’t. I have--”
“Yeah. I’ve heard.”
He continued to hold her. It was pleasant, painfully so, to a person as lonely as she. Like a feral cat in heat she lashed out at him the next morning, peering into her oatmeal and granting him only furtive stone-faced responses. Her insolence ended up attracting him all the more, and the extra attention this warranted soothed her back into his arms.
Yet as they came back from the bar that second night--after V had prodded her & plopped her down on his lap & pulled her groin to groin against him & lit his cigarette butt up to hers even though he had a lighter & teased her about how drunk she had gotten & pretended not to hear her when she protested
“I had a--”
“What?”
“But I had...”
“I cannot understand”
“I had a whole ‘nother one than you!”
“You are wasted”, he grinned, “I don’t know what you say,”and leaned in so her lips skim his ear and she finally decided to shut him up by mashing her mouth to his (the inevitable conclusion that each, especially he, tried to pretend hadn’t been the goal all along)--after all that, as she reenacted that scene from The Sound of Music for him in the gazebo, you know the one:
“I am 16, going on 17
I know that I’m naive”
and enthusiastically elaborated, “It’s so fucked up because he’s like, a Nazi. Like a Hitler youth. Don’t you see!? So fucked up,” unclear of which character she was referring to but very clear that whoever it was is a Nazi, she knew, even in her drunken exuberance, that this whole performance was for Spencer. And that the giggling and hiding they did when people approached the gazebo while she was straddling V would have been a lasting, if incredibly silly, memory had it happened with Spencer, rather than the smirky anecdote she would text to her friends that it turned out to be. And that the salsa dancing V taught her, which amounted to a few stumbles in a box step motion and more giggling and mashing of mouths, only reminded her of how awful of a dancer Spencer is, and how much she admired that he loved to do it anyway.
She turns the shower off and grins at herself in the mirror, still amazed at the sight of it. Every chance she gets she slips into an unoccupied restroom to see how far back toward her ears she can get the corners of her mouth.
4.
The night of her going away party Spencer hands her an armful of books.
“I thought you could use these, for the plane.”
Grace sifts through the stack: Nin, Rimbaud, Rachoff, Delillo.
“Jesus, Spencer. Thanks.”
At least the moral impunity he grants himself works in her favor occasionally. He stole for her those loves of her life that cannot leave her.
“I can’t take them all, you know. I’m only bringing a carry-on,” she gestures to the half packed rucksack set on the floor by her bed. She softens, “I’ll save them for when I get back.” He is thin and unfinished as an Egon Schiele drawing. She wonders how someone as frail as he could push her so far away.
“I know. I just thought...you’ll be gone for so long. You might need them.” Grace delicately hugs him, kisses the place where his ear meets his cheek. A New Order song he likes starts up on the iHome and he pulls her in to dance. For that second their story, to her, seems ancient; they have performed this ritual at Jesus’ birth and Robespierre’s beheading and Picasso’s putting the final stroke on Les Demoiselles.
“Hey Grace, can I have this?”, Lily shouts from the porch. She indicates a collage where the Venus de Milo has been given angel wings and a tetrahedronic shape for a head.
“Yes. Everything must go!” she yells back. She had dropped Spencer’s hand and he, still dancing, stumbles on her rug. He skims her bed in his attempt to catch himself and lands on the floor. Grace almost pities him for this, but instead opts to pity herself for the loss of her invented history and the remembrance of her real one.
Toward 2 AM her friends file out and wish her well on the way out.
“Be careful.”
“Don’t take drinks from anyone.”
“Remember, French guys will say anything to sleep with you. Not that you shouldn’t do it! Just saying.”
Grace waves at the tail lights of the last car. She turns to go back down the driveway and sees Spencer lying down in the carport.
“Why am I surprised?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I just wanted one more day with you. I don’t even know why.” She has stared at him in this same way for four months, even through the phone, when he was away failing at rehab, even while she was asleep, throttling him in her dreams.
“I didn’t ask you if you’d been using since you got back, because, you know what, Spencer, it’s fucking obvious. I didn’t want to to talk about it or think about it or know about it. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to think about this whole fucking time and now I’m leaving and you’re finally here and I didn’t want to fucking acknowledge it, okay? And then you come to my house and get fucking wasted on your last chance to see me.”
He tries to get up. She pushes him back down. He hardly talks when he’s dopesick. He just looks. Looks at the leaves he’s landed on, still slick from the time he changed the oil in her car.
“Do you realize that at this point I’ve known you for longer as a junkie than not?” This sentence wrings in her throat like a dirty mop getting squeezed dry because it is only as she says it that she recognizes it as true. Spencer braces himself to stand up. She walks past him into the house. He follows.
“I’m--”
“What?” she bites, not giving him the chance to answer because if he uttered the empty words “I’m sorry” one more time she’d shove them right back down his esophagus. Grace kneels at her bag, gaped open, and stuffs clothes deep into it.
“I wanted to pretend too,” he says.
“It’s me who gets to be the one to leave,” she whispers into her task of packing.
Open-mouthed sobs in the car. Wide-open self-pity. Eyes-to-the-sky “please god”s. Hands to the forehead, hands to the wheel. Her mother used to put her carrier in the car and drive her around the block to put her to sleep. Sleep: don’t be a fool. Oh, sleep, it comes, that’s not the problem. It’s the waking up. It’s the parsing out of dreams and reality, the remembering that’s heavy as a blunt butcher’s knife, the confusion like Vaseline coating the eyes. She pulls into her driveway and breaks anew because she doesn’t have any groceries & her roommates are assholes & her dog is in the yard howling across the boundaries of the electric fence. Surely there’s a can of tuna or a package of ramen noodles in her cabinet. She’ll eat the ramen straight from the pot, she knows, while watching Bravo. Even tuna requires the effort of seasoning and stirring. She gets out.
At least she has a separate entrance to her room. Originally conceived as a “den” (the house was remodeled in the ‘70s. The add-ons each include 3x as many outlets as necessary because the television and the den were meant to be hip ideas for bringing the family back together), her bedroom sits off of the living room (the difference between this and the “den”, other than the shuttered closet-door style divider, still elude her), and features fake wood-panelling on the walls. These appalled her, at first, but came to represent a life of simple wants and creature comforts that she imagined people who live in wood cabins or double-wides lead.
Grace’s neighbor growing up was a grandmotherly Italian woman who had married a mechanic named Larry and moved to his native Georgia to build the plantation home she dreamed all Southerners maintained. She had revelled in Joan’s garden, sewing room, and many curio cabinets, but what truly intrigued her was the RV permanently parked in the driveway. Mischievous in the conventional ways sociable young children often are, she would ask Joan why why why and the answer, woven always in a different way, consistently came down to “just in case”. Just in case! Of what? Grace didn’t know, and Joan didn’t really know either, but the possibility occupied each of their imaginations: the kind of life that could be led if you ran away.
The fantasy of doing so, and investing in the fantasy insofar as buying the RV that, in reality, became a storage unit for the excess trappings of her plantation life, was enough to keep Joan from a actually doing it--skipping town and tasking her husband and four boys with tending the herbs, sewing the quilts, composting the vegetables, bathing the dogs, mending the hems, baking the bread. All of which she did. And happily so. Because she’d step into the carport each morning to check the dryer, see that RV, and think “not today”.
1.
She throws her glass of white wine at the floor. Immediately she regrets 1. not taking the last swig and 2. aiming for the carpet, at the last second, instead of the concrete landing outside of the open door. The door is cracked so that Spencer can stand inside while smoking a cigarette “outside”, because Grace has often complained that she leaves his apartment with a migraine from the smell.
But because she opted not to throw the glass against the concrete, where it would have shattered nicely, she is forced to watch it land limply on the floor and turn a few revolutions, leaving a wet spot like it pissed itself, and mount frustration upon her fury. Not the cathartic gesture she expected it to be. What would she know about all that. She came from a family of WASPy passive aggression mixed with British coldness and Southern charm where anger was strained into either a witty quip or a meandering black-humored joke. The throwing of the glass is an experiment in anger, in how it travels. Outward and down, down, down once it has smacked up against its unreceptive subject: the carpet; her junkie boyfriend. Flat, lifeless, their only comforting qualities being the 1/2” of softness on their surface and the warmth they reflect back to you from your own body heat if you lie there long enough.
It isn’t finding his needles again that gets her. It’s his dark eyes that don’t see her, and how relieved he is to have something to look at other than her face which lately has confused him. She is transformed by a thinned, pinched mouth and heavy brows, she appears sharp-featured as a crow. When he’s high he takes pleasure in losing himself in the gentle Renoir smudge of her flush cheeks and expressive Irish eyes. This face she wears now, he does not recognize, and he fears she’ll peck him dead. He feels her descend upon him, and the weight of her austerity which hovers above him. He prostrate, she carnivorous, holding him in place by talons in the soft of his belly.
They lift their eyes from the glass to look nowhere.
“I can’t keep trusting you.”
His eyes assent.
“I have to go.”
She flies.
3.
“You’re not married. You don’t have to do this.”
“I know. I want to,” Grace looks away from Denise. The way she wrings the tissue in her hands reminds Grace of where they are, “I don’t know what else to do.”
Spencer is somewhere peeing in a cup, leaving them to wait in Dr. Pasternack’s office without the distraction of attending to Spencer's cramping muscles and joint pain. The nurse had ushered them in with assurances that the doctor would be “right in”, motioning to the leather sofa. Grace wonders how many people had sat on it, waiting to see him. A quick read of the room tells her: a lot. It’s decorated with Kleenex boxes and medical degrees in gaudy frames. These items are intended to be reassuring. It's about as comforting as make-up on a corpse.
Denise shows Grace her teeth. She is trying to smile.
“This is supposed to be a good place.”
Grace nods. She isn’t sure if she’s lying to Denise. She wants to be here, that’s perfectly true. But she suspects that it is because she wants to make sure that Denise doesn’t fuck up. Denise is a microwave Mom. She gets botox “for her migraines”. She thinks juice is only commercially available in single serve containers. These superficialities disturb Grace’s understanding of adult behavior. She denies her contempt and pats Denise’s thigh.
“Anything for Spencer.”
Dr. Pasternack’s door opens to a swollen bellied man in a pink Polo shirt which the rosacea on his face smolders against. A practiced assessment of the women’s bare legs transitions into a glance at his chart to find the patient's name.
“Spencer!”
Spencer skirts around from behind the doctor and sits, clasping his thumbs together.
“We’re very glad you’re here, Spencer. This is a safe place for you. Did you talk to Scott?”
“Yes,” Denise answers.
“Now, Spencer, Scott is a lot like you. He was into some heavy stuff for a while there. Scott came in two or three times before he got serious about getting better. Until he became willing. We could see that difference in him this time when he walked through the front door. Are you willing, Spencer?”
“I want to get better,” He pinches the bridge of his nose, “I want to be better.”
“Good. That’s good Spencer. You know, the reason I’m here today is that I was once where you are right now. When I was a young doctor, I got really stressed. I felt overwhelmed and out of control. I started getting into pills. I raided the supply closets, abused my scripts. It wasn’t hard. First Vicodin and Xanax, then Percocets, Valium, eventually synthetic morphine. I started this hospital because of that experience. I’ve got 19 years now.” The doctor met each of their eyes in turn, nodding yes as though they were in disbelief.
“Now, Spencer , I need to know a few things. When was the last time you used?”
“Saturday.”
“And how much would you use?”
“Half gram. A gram if I had it.”
Pasternack looks at his chart.
“And this was IV? Did you ever snort it?
Spencer shakes his head, “Just shot up.”
“Did you use daily, Spencer?”
Spencer nods.
“We just need to know if you can help him,” Denise interjects.
“You see, Mrs. Coyle. Or is it Ms.?”
“Ms.”
“Spencer is considered ‘high risk’. Because of this, your insurance won’t cover the costs of his treatment at our rehabilitative facilities. We’re required to check him into our hospital facility for detox treatment for a week, maybe two, before we could reassess his case and negotiate with the insurance company.”
“So you might not take him? After detox?”
“We will gladly admit him to the detox unit. As well as rehabilitation after that. The issue is with your insurance’s ability to finance the treatments, unfortunately. It will most assuredly cover detox, though.”
“We could sit on him for a week at my apartment. That’s not going to help him stay clean.”
“The withdrawals--”
“You can’t die from heroin withdrawal.”
“That’s true.”
“I need him in therapy.”
“Therapy is included in detox.”
“It’s a fucking week.”
5.
And since when did logic ever win out over love anyway?
She asks herself this in the hostel shower while thinking over all the things she should and shouldn't have done while she was with Spencer, and lathers the thought into her hair. Up until last week that Burt Bacharach song had been stuck in her head:
“What do you get when you fall in love?
Only tears, lies...something...sorrows
...?...
I-i-i-i’ll never fall in love agai-i-i-i-i-i-n”
This started up shortly after her Barcelonian lover left her wordlessly in the morning, which sounds tragic, but--can you justify calling someone your lover if he never quite made you cum? Granted, their affair was quarantined to his bottom bunk. The range of motion required to properly get a lady off is pretty limited in that situation. Though he barely tried. He put his tongue to her clit with the same length of time and intensity as when he used it to moisten the sticky edge of his rolling papers.
He didn’t deserve the blow job she gave him in return, but in this case she pushed for it. Her last “lover” had been a woman--her first--and the petite frailty of Simone’s clit shocked Grace from acting upon her instinctual aggression in bed. She thought, mid-pussy-eating, that this must be how a first-time father feels holding his infant: monstrous, clumsy, far too capable of destruction. It was a relief, then, to feel V’s dick in her hands, her mouth. Sturdy, reliable, needing only more, faster, stronger. Plus, making him cum was an ironic bit of “fuck you” to him for being so full of shit. He had a girlfriend. Said girlfriend was V’s sole reason for staying, long-term, in the bottom bunk of a hostel in America, in this mediocre California town, close enough that he could visit her on weekends. Though he didn’t. Instead he invited Grace into his bed to watch a movie. And held her hand. Excuse me? Yes. Held her hand. Grace was fine with this. She certainly wasn’t going to care about his girlfriend more than he seemed to. Movie ended, this motherfucker spoons her. As if that’s it, end of story, I’ve got this girlfriend but I’m gonna SPOON you all night.
She thought not, and when he draped his hand across her hips she clasped it, slid it down her shorts.
“I shouldn’t. I have--”
“Yeah. I’ve heard.”
He continued to hold her. It was pleasant, painfully so, to a person as lonely as she. Like a feral cat in heat she lashed out at him the next morning, peering into her oatmeal and granting him only furtive stone-faced responses. Her insolence ended up attracting him all the more, and the extra attention this warranted soothed her back into his arms.
Yet as they came back from the bar that second night--after V had prodded her & plopped her down on his lap & pulled her groin to groin against him & lit his cigarette butt up to hers even though he had a lighter & teased her about how drunk she had gotten & pretended not to hear her when she protested
“I had a--”
“What?”
“But I had...”
“I cannot understand”
“I had a whole ‘nother one than you!”
“You are wasted”, he grinned, “I don’t know what you say,”and leaned in so her lips skim his ear and she finally decided to shut him up by mashing her mouth to his (the inevitable conclusion that each, especially he, tried to pretend hadn’t been the goal all along)--after all that, as she reenacted that scene from The Sound of Music for him in the gazebo, you know the one:
“I am 16, going on 17
I know that I’m naive”
and enthusiastically elaborated, “It’s so fucked up because he’s like, a Nazi. Like a Hitler youth. Don’t you see!? So fucked up,” unclear of which character she was referring to but very clear that whoever it was is a Nazi, she knew, even in her drunken exuberance, that this whole performance was for Spencer. And that the giggling and hiding they did when people approached the gazebo while she was straddling V would have been a lasting, if incredibly silly, memory had it happened with Spencer, rather than the smirky anecdote she would text to her friends that it turned out to be. And that the salsa dancing V taught her, which amounted to a few stumbles in a box step motion and more giggling and mashing of mouths, only reminded her of how awful of a dancer Spencer is, and how much she admired that he loved to do it anyway.
She turns the shower off and grins at herself in the mirror, still amazed at the sight of it. Every chance she gets she slips into an unoccupied restroom to see how far back toward her ears she can get the corners of her mouth.
4.
The night of her going away party Spencer hands her an armful of books.
“I thought you could use these, for the plane.”
Grace sifts through the stack: Nin, Rimbaud, Rachoff, Delillo.
“Jesus, Spencer. Thanks.”
At least the moral impunity he grants himself works in her favor occasionally. He stole for her those loves of her life that cannot leave her.
“I can’t take them all, you know. I’m only bringing a carry-on,” she gestures to the half packed rucksack set on the floor by her bed. She softens, “I’ll save them for when I get back.” He is thin and unfinished as an Egon Schiele drawing. She wonders how someone as frail as he could push her so far away.
“I know. I just thought...you’ll be gone for so long. You might need them.” Grace delicately hugs him, kisses the place where his ear meets his cheek. A New Order song he likes starts up on the iHome and he pulls her in to dance. For that second their story, to her, seems ancient; they have performed this ritual at Jesus’ birth and Robespierre’s beheading and Picasso’s putting the final stroke on Les Demoiselles.
“Hey Grace, can I have this?”, Lily shouts from the porch. She indicates a collage where the Venus de Milo has been given angel wings and a tetrahedronic shape for a head.
“Yes. Everything must go!” she yells back. She had dropped Spencer’s hand and he, still dancing, stumbles on her rug. He skims her bed in his attempt to catch himself and lands on the floor. Grace almost pities him for this, but instead opts to pity herself for the loss of her invented history and the remembrance of her real one.
Toward 2 AM her friends file out and wish her well on the way out.
“Be careful.”
“Don’t take drinks from anyone.”
“Remember, French guys will say anything to sleep with you. Not that you shouldn’t do it! Just saying.”
Grace waves at the tail lights of the last car. She turns to go back down the driveway and sees Spencer lying down in the carport.
“Why am I surprised?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I just wanted one more day with you. I don’t even know why.” She has stared at him in this same way for four months, even through the phone, when he was away failing at rehab, even while she was asleep, throttling him in her dreams.
“I didn’t ask you if you’d been using since you got back, because, you know what, Spencer, it’s fucking obvious. I didn’t want to to talk about it or think about it or know about it. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to think about this whole fucking time and now I’m leaving and you’re finally here and I didn’t want to fucking acknowledge it, okay? And then you come to my house and get fucking wasted on your last chance to see me.”
He tries to get up. She pushes him back down. He hardly talks when he’s dopesick. He just looks. Looks at the leaves he’s landed on, still slick from the time he changed the oil in her car.
“Do you realize that at this point I’ve known you for longer as a junkie than not?” This sentence wrings in her throat like a dirty mop getting squeezed dry because it is only as she says it that she recognizes it as true. Spencer braces himself to stand up. She walks past him into the house. He follows.
“I’m--”
“What?” she bites, not giving him the chance to answer because if he uttered the empty words “I’m sorry” one more time she’d shove them right back down his esophagus. Grace kneels at her bag, gaped open, and stuffs clothes deep into it.
“I wanted to pretend too,” he says.
“It’s me who gets to be the one to leave,” she whispers into her task of packing.