David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

As to my husband—it didn’t kill him, I’ll say that. He’s in his eighties, still in his house; he’s got some sort of nurse-companion. Which, after all, is what I would have been by now. He and I don’t speak, and why would we. The pianist he used to play with visits him from time to time, if you’re wondering where I get my news. I say “used to” because he’s got arthritis in his hands and sold his bass for enough money to buy him a few more months’ help; I suspect that the banker brother, who must now be retired, kicks in a little. Before leaving the house that day, I’d hunted up the card with his lawyer’s number, but it was a Sunday and I didn’t get around to making the call till Tuesday. He would never have disappeared for so long without letting me know he was all right. He would never have disappeared. Just add it to my total for when the reckoning comes. I told the lawyer only that I’d gone, wasn’t coming back and wanted nothing; he could deal with it from there.

She and I had agreed that no one should know we were together, not for now; I believe the word “hurtful” was used. And how could anyone find out? I would still be here on the East Coast, she would tell Madeleine she’d gone to visit friends in Seattle—they’d promised to back her up—and this would give us time to figure out how to explain to the principals that this was the right thing for all of us, and then when everybody was used to the situation, it might not be right away, but maybe someday we could actually all be together again and—well, God knows what . We probably thought we were innocent. It only took a few days for the knock at the door to come—we had credit cards, the Subaru had license plates—as we must have wanted it to.

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We stayed together for six months. She was a child, as you’ve seen: moody, scattered her clothes all over the place, stopped washing her hair. She always had to have music—she said silence made her anxious, but what didn’t ?—and she wouldn’t use earphones for some reason having to do with, I don’t know, the air in the room? She still had the copy of Rumours she’d appropriated, but most of her CDs were hand-lettered in marker pen: electronic noises, some with a beat, some without. I couldn’t read with that racket going, and she didn’t read, except on her laptop. We used it to play chess—click on Human vs. Human—and she complained that I wasn’t good enough to make it interesting. Of course she found out where to get heroin, and one night she laid out some for both of us—she gave me what she said was a safe amount for a newbie. I vomited while she held my hair away from the toilet, humming to herself. When she took off her fetching high-tops, her feet smelled.

Reader, she dumped me.

We rented a motel room by the week, a few blocks from a beach on the Outer Cape. “Now we really can be out,” she said. Her father’s daughter. We couldn’t think where else to go—you’re supposed to head west to start a new life, but west was where Portland was—and what did the place matter anyway? I’d add “as long as we were together,” but I don’t want to play the throbbing violin here. By November it had gotten cold, and we bought a ceramic space heater to plug in by the bed. She was young and perky enough to get a job at Starbucks in Hyannis—she could do perky when she had to—and took the Subaru six mornings a week. I worked at a drugstore in a strip mall that was close enough to walk to, just one more lady in a blue frock. Between the two of us, we made enough. I really could play the throbbing violin about those first couple of months, but it’s nobody’s business: only hers and mine. When she finally left, Madeleine wouldn’t take her back, and I could never have returned to the house on the hilltop. We both gave up our lives for nothing. Which sounds akin to some holy undertaking, like saints renouncing the world and moving toward the pure empty light, except I suppose that what we did to other people wasn’t so saintlike. But at some point isn’t that on them, how much they decide to suffer? Something else we’ll understand when we all see face-to-face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known .

No, my brother hasn’t swooped in and body-snatched me, if that’s where you thought this was going, me with my little desperation prayer episodes and him with the Lord at the ready. He knows I’m a lost soul—I mean, we took acid together—and I think he secretly respects that. But when he heard I was living alone on Cape Cod, he emailed to invite me to Colorado for Christmas and asked if I needed money. The Lord, he said, had blessed them with a little extra this year, which was probably a lie. And he included a link to a passage that he said had been a comfort to him: 1 Corinthians 13, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and so on. I thought it would be another sales pitch for Jesus, but He didn’t even get a mention—just general wisdom, and a little bleak at that. Apparently if you didn’t have love you weren’t shit, that’s what I took away from it: you weren’t shit and you didn’t have shit and you didn’t know shit and you get the rest of the picture when you’re dead—the glass darkly thing. Like, where do I sign up to be a servant leader?

Comforting as it may or may not be to know that this life is just a prologue, I feel like I’m living in an epilogue, and given my state of health (tip-top, thanks for asking), it could be a long one. When I’m out in public, at the theater, say, in the lobby at intermission, each handsome young man and lovely young woman seems to be lit with a spotlight, while I’m invisible. O for the tongues of men and angels, to dilate on the unfairness! The long-awaited diatribe from the author of 5 Blondes . Ah well. I just saw that my first husband has a piece in Outside magazine, about rock-climbing in the Shawangunks—I give him props for plugging away at the sweet futility—and the photo on the contributors’ page shows a man whose tanned face belies however many years it belies. He must be getting fan mail. From the girlies, and I hope from the boys too; I still think I was right about him. And I wish him a few months of joy too, even a few minutes, whatever that might cost him. Or his new wife, no longer new. A first wife’s bad-fairy blessing.

—

In case you’re waiting for the where-are-they-now, she’s turned forty, not dead, not famous—a regular Everywoman. I gather you can find her on Facebook. I can’t imagine that she ever sees her father, having stolen his wife (or vice versa), but that was years ago, he’s old, and they loved each other and whatnot.

—

I don’t know what all this is supposed to add up to: it seems to be about damaged and selfish people, the waste of money that could have helped somebody, the waste of gifts that could have given somebody pleasure—am I leaving out anything? I’m sorry to end without some note of redemption. See you after the shitshow, I guess.

When we left the church, Andrea wanted to go for drinks with a couple of the Newsweek people, and we ended up at a bar on Lafayette Street, in a dark back room with upholstered chairs and dim lamps on little round tables. Outside, it was still the middle of the afternoon.

I remembered one of the women: she’d worked in the makeup department, and I used to sit with her fitting stories on the page after the writers had gone home. Cut a word to bring up a line, add a word to make a last line full, if need be put on tight bands—who even knows what tight bands are anymore? When the magazine offered its second round of buyouts, she’d gone back to school and was now teaching third and fourth grade in Newark. Often, she said, she had to buy her kids pencils. She said taking the buyout was the best decision she’d ever made. I drank two martinis, excused myself—Andrea was lining up another woman to write a piece for her about sex trafficking—and walked back, drunk, to the West Village in the afternoon sun, through crowds of young people. This was a day that offered every temptation to get maudlin, but I had a book to finish reading, and a piece to write about it. As I passed the gated cul-de-sac where the distinguished dead had lived, I saw a drunken young woman screeching at her drunken young man and trying to pull him up off the sidewalk. They were in a miserable moment of their lives, and it occurred to me to pray for them, but really, why these two out of the multitudes who were suffering?