David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

I’d shied away from it ever since my first husband and I had shared a slender joint one of his basketball buddies gave us for a wedding present; he’d had to reason me out of going to the emergency room. But one night when the pianist and the drummer had come to the house to work out some new songs, my new husband brought them upstairs afterward, got out whiskey and glasses and put on a record by somebody named Bill Evans. (Yes, I understand now that everyone’s supposed to know who Bill Evans was.) “Oh fine,” the pianist said, “make me feel like shit. Anybody want some of this?” My husband put up his hand and said, “But feel free.” When the wooden pipe came to me I said, “Maybe just one.” I could tell what my husband’s look meant: one hit would make me dangerous and sexy and I’d get fucked tonight; any more would frighten him. Not that this wasn’t a temptation, but just the one did it for me: I was able to get through the first few minutes of panic—the whiskey must have helped—and found myself in a remote yet easeful state where the music sounded like the best thing I’d ever heard. “Is this jazz ?” I said after a while. It was probably still that first song. “Indeed it is,” the pianist said. “Don’t tell me we’ve made a believer out of you.”

Had my husband betrayed to his friends the secret that jazz made no sense to me? But I mustn’t start worrying about that . “It’s like a garden,” I said. “Actually, that’s crazy.”

“No, no, you’re exactly right,” the pianist said. “Earth and flowers.”

While that wasn’t what I’d meant, it made me see that different people had different minds and that this was all right.

“Can I pour you a little more?” my husband said. It was so obvious that he wanted to bring me down from this place he couldn’t get to.

“I’m okay,” I said, meaning both that I had enough in my glass and that I was handling this. And I did get fucked that night, like the high and wicked girl I was. Turn out the light , baby.

The next day I got the pianist’s number out of my husband’s book. “Could we sort of keep this between us?” I said.

“We did make you a believer,” he said. “I don’t know, it puts me in a funny position. I thought I was picking up a little disapproval. I don’t want to cause dissension on the home front.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “If anything, you’d be helping out. Sort of like a marital aid.”

“Thanks for putting that picture in my head,” he said. “I guess he’s a lucky man. This is really just between us?”

You’re wondering why I didn’t have an affair with the pianist, since it amounted to that anyway, and of course he’d called my husband a lucky man. But really, I wasn’t the fuck-dolly you must think I am. Here, I’ll count up my partners. Collaborators. Whatever word you like. I make it an even dozen, up to that point: we’ve got the two husbands, the Newsweek writer, the man before him—my only bar pickup, so handsome that I preemptively gave him a wrong phone number in the morning—and that girl from the gym, then the starter partners, two during high school, both male, five at college, two male and three female. And I’d engaged in the usual half-dozen different activities and passivities. So what would you say? About average for an American woman of my age and background? A hair above? A hair below? At any rate, neither maidenly nor unselective, and never out of control.

In the early afternoons, then, when I’d finished my thousand words, I’d take my one little hit—what I got from the pianist was far more fearsome than what I’d smoked at my mother’s knee—and amuse myself, not that “amuse” is the word, for the three or four hours, just about the right length of time, before my husband appeared, summoning me sometimes to a seduction, more often to the first drink of the day. In good weather, I’d take a walk, staying on the roads so I wouldn’t get lost, though I’d sometimes think I’d gotten lost, or recline on the deck in a lounge chair, looking out at the river and the mountain and listening to music on my headphones. I could never get back to whatever peculiar pleasure I’d found in that one jazz record that night—a garden , for God’s sake?—much as I felt I owed it to my husband to try. I only wanted to hear what I’d gotten high to as a teenager: the Pointer Sisters, Fleetwood Mac, Donna Summer, Carly Simon—all that sexy sheen. When I had to stay indoors, I listened while playing computer solitaire. Only once did I make the mistake of trying to read over what I’d written in the morning: I was too high to follow from the beginning of a sentence to the end, but the falseness and glibness revealed itself so plainly that I couldn’t bring myself to write the next day. Maybe by this time you know the tone I’m talking about?

One stoned afternoon on the deck, I saw a UPS truck coming up the driveway—my husband was expecting stuff from Pearl Paint—and I ran into the house to hide in my workroom. I heard a chime so angelic that I had to try to find the note with my own voice; by then I’d forgotten someone must be at the door, and why I’d come in here. I lay down on the bed—the narrow brass bed I’d insisted on bringing from the house in Rhinebeck—and kept singing. Hours later, when we were sitting on the deck, having our first drink and watching the sun go down behind the mountain, my husband said, “I heard you in there this afternoon. You sounded so happy.”

—

For our fifth anniversary, he took us back to the same hot spring in Montana—this time we flew—and from there we were to go on to Portland, stay overnight with his daughter and her partner, then back with a stopover in Cleveland, where he wanted to show me a library he’d designed in 1971, now ruined by a new wing, done by a young architect who’d once studied with him. There must have been some method of bringing weed on an airplane—wrap it in layers of plastic and hide it in your underwear?—but with all the new security I was afraid to try. Anyway, much as I might’ve liked it out in that hot pool with snow falling, I didn’t want to be high around my husband, and how would I get away from him? It was just as well: the first night at the resort, he pissed our bed in his sleep.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I was dreaming that I was pissing and I just—Jesus Christ. Maybe I had too much to drink. How can you go on living with me?”

“It could happen to anybody,” I said. “Let’s just get some towels and then—”

“Right, and then what? Jesus, it went right through to the mattress. Am I dying, is that what’s happening?”

“Of course you’re not dying,” I said. “You had an accident.”

“That’s what they say to children.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands.

“If you’re seriously worried about this,” I said, “you should see a doctor when we get back.”

“Who’s going to tell me what? ‘Welcome to old age’?”

“You’re only seventy-two,” I said. “Why don’t you to take a shower and change into your sweatpants.”

“And that strikes you as not old?”

I sat down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, which seemed to be the thing to do, little as I wanted to. He stood up again. “I’ve done you a disservice,” he said. “I don’t intend to drag on for twenty more years like this.”

“Now you are being a child,” I said.

He was on one knee, pawing through his suitcase, and I looked away so as not to see his wet pajama bottoms. “That’s a new tone,” he said. “I thought I knew all your little ways. I guess we’re entering into unexplored territory.”