Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

I look at the row of bottles behind him. “Sprite,” I say.

He pours the soft drink from a hose beneath the bar and sets it in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I see the woman’s drink, a martini. My mouth actually starts to water.

There is a television above the bar. Oprah Winfrey is telling everyone about beauty secrets from around the world. Do I want to know how Japanese women keep their skin so smooth?

“You some kind of professor at Brown?” the woman asks.

I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. Why the hell not? I’m never going to see her again.

The truth is, I don’t even have a college degree. I flunked out of URI a hundred years ago, when I was a junior. Unlike Reid, the golden son, who’d graduated with honors and had gone on to work as a financial analyst at Bank of Boston before starting his own investment firm, I had majored in Beer Pong and grain alcohol. At first it was parties on the weekends, and then study breaks midweek, except I wasn’t doing any studying. There is an entire semester I cannot remember, and one morning, I woke up naked on the steps of the library without any recollection of what had led up to that.

When my dad wouldn’t let me move back home, I crashed on Reid’s couch in his Kenmore Square apartment. I got a job as a night watchman at a mall, but lost it when I kept missing work because I was sleeping off that afternoon’s bender. I started stealing cash from Reid so that I could buy bottles of cheap booze and hide them around the apartment. Then one morning, I woke up, hungover, to find a handgun pointed at my forehead.

“Reid! What the fuck?” I yelped, scrambling upright.

“If you’re trying to kill yourself, Max,” he said, “let’s speed it up a bit.”

Together we dumped all the alcohol down the sink. Reid took the day off work to come with me to my first AA meeting. That was seventeen years ago. By the time I met Zoe, when I was twenty-nine, I was sober and had figured out what a guy without a college degree could do with his life. Thinking back to the only classes I’d really liked in college-geology-I figured I’d better stick to the land. I got a small business loan and bought my first mower, painted the side of my truck, and printed up flyers. I may not be living the lush life, like Reid and Liddy, but I netted $23,000 last year and I could still take days off to surf when the waves were good.

It was enough, with Zoe’s income, to rent a place-a place that she’s now living in. When you are the spouse that wants out of the relationship, you have to be willing to actually leave. Sometimes, even though it has been a whole month, I find myself wondering if she’s remembered to ask the landlord about getting the furnace cleaned. Or whether she’s signed a lease for another year, this time without my name on it. I wonder who carries her heavy drums up the entryway stairs now, or if she just leaves them in the car overnight.

I wonder if I made a mistake.

I look over at the crossword woman’s martini. “Hey,” I say to Irv the bartender, “can I get one of those?”

The woman taps the pen against the bar. “So you teach geology?”

On the television, Oprah is talking about how to make your own salt scrub, like the ones Cleopatra once used.

“No. Egyptian,” I lie.

“Like Indiana Jones?”

“Kind of,” I reply. “Except I’m not afraid of snakes.”

“Have you been there? On the Nile?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, although I do not even own a passport. “A dozen times.”

She pushes her pen and newspaper toward me. “Can you show me what my name would look like in Egyptian?”

Irv sets the martini down in front of me. I start to sweat. It would be so easy.

“I’m Sally,” the woman says. “S-A-L-L-Y.”

It’s amazing what you’ll do when you want something bad. You are willing to do anything, say anything, be anything. I used to feel that way about drinking-there were things I did to get cash for booze that I am sure I’ve blocked out permanently. And I certainly felt that way, once, about having a baby. Tell a stranger the details of my sex life? Sure. Jab my wife in the ass with a needle? My pleasure. Jerk off in a jar? No problem. If the doctors had told us to walk backward and sing opera to increase the chance of fertility, we would not have batted an eyelash.

When you want something bad, you’ll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Like: The fifth time’s the charm.

Like: Things between Zoe and me will be better once the baby’s born.

Like: One sip isn’t going to kill me.

I once saw a TV documentary about giant squid, and they filmed one shooting its ink into the water to get away from an enemy. The ink was black and beautiful and curled like smoke, a distraction so that the squid could escape. That’s what alcohol feels like, in my blood. It’s the ink of the squid, and it’s going to blind me so that I can get away from everything that hurts.

The only language I know is English. But on the edge of the newspaper, I draw three wavy lines, and then an approximation of a snake, and a sun. “That’s just the sounds of the name, of course,” I say. “There isn’t really a translation for Sally.”

She rips off the corner of the newspaper, folds it, and tucks it into her bra. “I am totally getting a tattoo of this.”

Most likely the tattoo artist will have no idea that these are not real hieroglyphs. For all I know, I might have written: For a good time, call Nefertiti.

Sally hops down from her stool and moves onto the one beside me. “You gonna drink that martini or wait till it becomes an antique?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I say, the first truth I’ve offered her.

“Well, make up your mind,” Sally replies, “so that I can buy you another one.”

I lift the martini and drain it in one long, fiery, mind-blowing gulp. “Irv,” I say, setting down the empty glass. “You heard the lady.”

The first time I had to leave a semen sample at the clinic, the nurse stepped into the waiting room and called my name. As I stood up I thought: Everyone else here knows exactly what I’m about to do.

The literature Zoe and I had been given said that the wife could “assist” in the sample collection, but the only thing that seemed more awkward than jerking off in a clinic was having my wife in there with me, with doctors and nurses and patients just outside the door. The nurse led me down the hallway. “Here you go,” she said, handing me a brown paper bag. “Just read the instructions.”

“It’s not so bad,” Zoe had told me over breakfast. “Think of it as a visit to Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

And really, who was I to complain, when she was getting shots twice a day and having constant pelvic exams and taking so many hormones that something as simple as crossing the street could make her burst into tears? By comparison, this seemed like a piece of cake.

The room was freezing cold and consisted of a couch that had been covered by a sheet, a TV-VCR, a sink, and a coffee table. There were some videos- Pussy in Boots, Breast Side Story, On Golden Blonde -various issues of Playboy and Hustler and, weirdly, a copy of Good Housekeeping. A small window that looked like it belonged in a speakeasy was to the right-this would be where I left the sample when I was done. The nurse backed out of the room, and I pushed the lock in the door handle. Then I opened it, and pushed it again. To make sure.

I opened the paper bag. The sample cup was enormous. It was practically a bucket. What were they expecting from me?

What if I spilled?

I started to leaf through one of the magazines. The last time I’d done this, I’d been fifteen and had shoplifted the December issue of Playboy from a newsstand. I became incredibly aware of how loudly I was breathing. Maybe that wasn’t normal. Maybe that meant I was having a heart attack?