Kathleen Alcott - The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

She is a schoolteacher with apparently quite the gift for children; she is Midwestern with a rather pleasant phone voice and a warm laugh; she seems, according to my father, to be just the support system J needs in a time like this. He calls him “J.” I can’t remember him ever calling him “J” before.

My heart quickens and toes curl, but I stay quiet and do not ask my father to stop speaking of her. Instead my mind wanders and I think of the face that Jackson would make upon waking and surveying the damage he had caused or was still in the middle of causing: to find me up against the headboard, both my wrists pinned by his one, all of our bedding thrown to the floor and little pieces of down illuminated by the early morning coming through the window. His forehead crumpled from alien rage to bewilderment and desperation; he looked at me with disgust and pity, searching my face for a sign of guilt or fault. He had then, of course, turned away in shame and said nothing while I rose and showered and began to clean.

A coincidence, the fact that it has ceased since Us, is what those close to me have gently suggested out of obligation, but I remember that look. Though he wouldn’t come out and say it, Jackson believed I had something to do with it, because why else would I go on forgiving him?

At the height of his teenage fling with speed, James spent a great deal of time with this guy who could do the New York Times crossword puzzle in under ten minutes. He (James) could make vivid sense of his math homework (and mine, though I was a class ahead) — he had not just memorized the theorems but could apply them, as we’d so often been urged to do, and did so fiercely. The mental image that burns for me here is of James in a well-worn T-shirt in the middle of winter on my front porch, trying to whisper so as not to wake my father but failing miserably, sweating and gesticulating with both a need and the self-imposed authority to explain. He began writing songs that were both catchy and disturbing, often with Dillon, the crossword guy, who was also into speed and had been a good five years.

While Jackson and I waited for an explosion of some sort, James coasted on his high with a no-matter-is-created-or-destroyed-type efficiency. He got a job as the graveyard shift desk clerk at a cheap motel chain way across town, which he took joy in walking to. He was always clad in secondhand suits and wingtips eerily reminiscent of his father’s, and embodied that brand of extremely clean speed freak: hair always combed, no stubble whatsoever, hands raw from washing with the bar of soap he kept wrapped in wax paper in his pocket. He chain-smoked but also kept mints and cologne and tiny bottles of mouthwash in ready supply. His alert demeanor was perfect for the hours and even more perfect for the clientele: the drug addicts, the plain old homeless or near-homeless alcoholics, the crazy, the sad, the longtime alone — as a general rule, they all responded to James with submission and a vague assimilation of respect. If they attempted the usual hijinks, hot checks or soap theft or prostitution from their rooms, they forfeited almost immediately once he appeared at their door and bared his canine teeth grin offering a cigarette and a heart-to-heart. He spotted them stamps to send their insane letters, gave them more than two free refills of coffee; it was well known that if they wanted to wander in at four or six a.m. and sit in the little plastic lobby chairs while he composed his songs and talk or not talk, that was just fine with him. He was king of that place, and was after two months promoted to assistant manager.

With an obsequious shrug we accepted what the drugs made him and spent the night in the motel rooms he snuck us into. When it was just Jackson and me, we watched cable, passing the plastic ashtrays both listlessly and with an air of luxury, and later did what our parents would call making love but what we were still trying to figure out the nomenclature for. Some nights it was a whole group of us, and we did just the things you’d expect teenagers with free rein in a fourteen-by-twelve room all night to do. James would come in for ten minutes every once in a while, or however long it took to drink a beer; phone calls to and from the front desk just for the sake of a joke or were common and didn’t lose their charm. We demanded three more pillows, six towels, a plate of gilded duck and in a hurry. The hours slipped by until we had to stumble out into the early morning onto the concrete balcony and make our way, reluctantly, back home.

To feel the person I loved most thrashing beside me, to wish I could intercept the antagonists of his nightmares, led to such feelings of powerlessness that at first I accepted the way he reached for me as an honor or at least a duty; I was glad that even in the depths of his unconscious, he knew I was there. He would kick so hard the bed shook, rip the blankets and sheets from his limbs like they were leeches, encircle his arms around me and work his fingers into my flesh so intricately it was as if he was trying to reach my bones. Deep in my rib cage, the small of my back, the curve of my shoulder. The first time I bruised, he was horrified, but I skirted the issue with dark humor— Oh, honey, I know you only hurt me to teach me a lesson —or lessened the blow by identifying shapes, as if we were cloud watching. A purple that bloomed not unlike a cactus, another whose abstract likeness suggested a fish. He felt awful but I assured him I placed no blame, that I’d never fault him for holding me too hard. At least you’re not out smashing up buildings, I said. If the worst damage is a few points of soreness on my body, I’ll wear them like badges. He kissed my forehead before we fell asleep each night. “Apologies in advance,” he murmured darkly. Generally, our city wavered above or below a foggy sixty degrees all year long, and so the marks on my person rarely showed themselves. Jackson took to kissing them, somberly, slowly, and I petted the hair on his head and continued to forgive him.

There was no couch to sleep on in the San Francisco railroad flat we moved into shortly after college, but even if there had been, I doubt I would have retreated there or requested he do so: we’d shared everything since the beginning, and I couldn’t see how his nightmares weren’t mine. The children I nannied saw evidence of the bruises once in a while and wanted to know, like those their age always do, why, why, why. Accidents! I’d say brightly, knowing how they loved that word, its all-encompassing forgiveness. You could break, drop, lose sight of anything: cry accident and the universe said okay, all right.

One evening, amid a relative stillness, he brought his knee up so swiftly that it made contact with my lip. I stood in the bathroom, negotiating the swelling and bleeding, watching myself in the mirror, searching for signs of age and finding them. When he woke and witnessed the irregularity of my mouth in the morning, he wept and turned away. Asked me, please, not to touch him.

Shortly after Jackson’s twenty-fifth birthday, I began to hand him pieces of charcoal and large expanses of paper, glue, bits of tulle peculiar in color, string, broad-stroke paintbrushes. What followed were images so compelling that I could not help but put my palm to my mouth and tilt my head sideways and breathe a little quieter, out of respect. Skeletons of lovers slumped toward each other in embraces beneath the earth, almost part of the roots but not quite assimilated, their backs, you could tell, broken. Sad-looking monsters with jagged triangles of teeth, trying to hold the too delicate in their large claws: pretty little boxes ruined, birds dead or dying. All of it in lines make-no-mistake deliberate. Though there was a softness, it did not come from any hesitant or small movements on the part of the artist.