Jessica Chiarella - And Again

Linda smiles a little. “I think you underestimate his feelings for you,” she replies, and I wonder how much she knows, how much she has suspected.

“It’s harder, isn’t it? Doing this on our own? I never would have expected it could get harder.”

“It won’t always be like this,” she says. “Give it time.”

I’m not sure if she’s even aware that she’s handing my same useless platitude back to me. But I can see something in her now, a patience, something that makes her seem older than I remember. It’s motherly, that way about her.

There’s not much else to say, but we both linger a little longer. It feels good, running into Linda in the long drudgery of my daily life, like finding money in the street. Something unexpected and a little bit thrilling, a change of luck. Linda must feel the same way because neither of us seems to want to leave.

“Maybe you and I can meet and talk, once in a while,” I say, desperate to keep some connection to the three people who know me better than anyone, even when they don’t particularly know much about me at all. “Watch some Stratford Pines ?”

“I don’t know, Hannah,” Linda says, drawing a hand across her stomach. “I’ve haven’t had as much time to keep up with it as before. You know, with the kids.”

“Of course,” I say. “Of course, I understand.” She gives me a squeeze on my arm and wheels her cart away from me. I blink hard, waving again at her kids as I pass them. They eye me with unguarded suspicion.

I glance back at Linda just in time to see her slip a package of trail mix into her purse. She tucks it under her arm and goes back to consulting her shopping list like any other mother on a grocery run. But she’s not. She’s not like everyone else. She’s a woman who lived in a white-walled room, unmoving, for eight years. I think that Sam was right, that it has to have an impact, everything the members of our groups have had to endure. So, while I myself don’t steal anything from the store, I can understand the impulse.

I work my way back up to Scotch. It takes time and a lot of dedication because my taste buds have reverted back to the days when I’d drink sugary sodas and dump a long succession of creamers into my coffee. But as the months pass I move from faux wine to Jack-and-gingers to Old Fashioneds and then there I am, finally, sipping Scotch and hating it in some hipster bar on Lincoln Avenue. The lady bartender has an intricate tattoo of a mermaid running from her shoulder to her elbow. It makes me think of that painting of Hannah and, though the bartender is nowhere near as pretty as Hannah, I find myself chatting with her for a little too long. She has a silver ring in her nose and bleached-blonde hair, and she laughs heartily at my jokes, which are subpar at best. I wonder if she’ll go home with me if I ask. And then I do ask, more to quell my own curiosity than anything else. She smiles.

I buy another drink, running down the clock until this tattooed little college dropout is off work, and I catch my reflection in the mirror above the bar. I’ve been avoiding mirrors since the transfer, since the self that I imagine when I close my eyes and the self I see in the mornings are two very different men. But now it looks like all the working out has paid off, because I can see muscle definition through the sleeves of my shirt. I’ve let my beard grow back. It’s easier, now that my new face has been splashed all over blogs and newspapers and magazines, because people don’t recognize me as easily with facial hair. It’s too unexpected. They don’t make the connection; politicians never have facial hair. I don’t look like me, not really, but I don’t look that bad either. It’s no wonder this little bartender is interested.

There are three missed calls from Jackson on my phone. He is in such a constant, furious state of damage control that I’ve begun ignoring him so I can get drunk in peace. The people of my district are furious with me for taking part in a treatment that involves human cloning. The rest of the country is furious that I bought my way into a clinical trial from which I should have been disqualified. The guys in my caucus and the Republican leadership are incensed that I’d get caught trying to tamper with an FDA study. People are talking about recall elections. People are talking about hearings in front of the disciplinary committee. I’ve been accused of everything from corruption to blasphemy to murder, ostensibly of the person whose life should have been saved in place of mine during the pilot program. I’ve done my best to ignore most of it. Beth is holding up like any good political wife would, keeping a stiff upper lip and shaking off the media attention with her trademark WASP-y coolness. It’s Jackson who can’t seem to let our presidential dreams go.

Jackson has been insisting lately that we sue Hannah for breach of confidentiality. She’s from a wealthy family, it seems, and my impending political fights look like they might be costly. But thinking of attacking Hannah brings with it an exhaustion I can’t understand, much less handle. How can I explain it to Jackson, how badly I want to hurt this girl and how sick it makes me when I think of it — simultaneously. I justify it to myself by considering the fallout that could happen if she reveals our affair to the public on top of everything else. I could lose my family, all that I have left, if she takes that sort of revenge. Going after Hannah would be breaking the cease-fire. Mutually assured destruction. So I ignore Jackson’s calls. And I get drunk in peace.

It bothers me, a little, that I’m attracted to the bartender because she looks like Hannah. It’s not unexpected, by any means. I’ve been hate-fucking girls who look like Hannah from one end of Chicago to the other for months now, since the article came out. What bothers me is that the hate has begun to soften, while the attraction remains. I find myself scrolling through the handful of text messages we exchanged while we were together, mostly arrangements of times and places where we would meet, but still, it feels good to see something she’s written. I’ve gone back twice to the Museum of Contemporary Art to look at that painting of her, naked and lying in some lousy painter’s sheets, and the hate and want and jealousy I feel is like getting hit by a linebacker. It makes me feel weak, to still want her despite everything.

I take the bartender home and fuck her from behind on the living room sofa, watching the birds tattooed on her back dart about as she moves. She and I share a cigarette when we’re finished, and that makes me want a drink. It’s a disappointment, like everything is a disappointment, every moment another signpost of my failing, my squandered chance for redemption. But it also feels good, like slipping back into my favorite leather jacket for the first time each winter, its fit perfect even after all those months of waiting for me. I’ve missed this part of myself, I find, the part of me that revels in surrendering to my vices. The boy who yelled into the wind at ninety miles an hour in a borrowed car. The part that Hannah dug up from where I’d buried it. The part of me that was never meant to stay dormant for very long.

When I can no longer stand the sight of my couch, surrounded as it is by empty glasses and takeout containers, its quilt permanently wrinkled in the shape of a nest for my little body, I decide I need a project. I clear out my studio on a Friday morning, the kind of day where the city seems painfully bright, all sun-bleached asphalt and piping-hot glass. I box up my supplies, unplugging the fridge and throwing away the abandoned water bottles and the single beer that I had left there. I wrap the canvases in heavy paper and twine. Everything else goes into boxes that I tape shut and label, trying not to focus too much on one object or another because it will be too hard that way. If I allow memories to start slipping in, I’m sure I’ll be lost.