Dear Mr. You (10 page)

I won’t forget you sensing I was about to lose it one night at a restaurant when things were not good. Let’s get you out of here, you said, swooping me up and taking me all the way home. Most of all I see that narrow staircase to that apartment you rented by me when I was having a rough time. You literally moved around the corner. In the next couple of months you had to be away, you said, but you’d be home intermittently and wanted to be nearby if I needed anything.

That first day I stood at the bottom of the stairs and started up, knowing there was someone at the top who cared enough to move his endless pieces of stereo equipment, countless Playbills, and high-end cookware to a walk-up only steps away from me. I got to the top floor and you were moving stuff around. You said, hey did I ever burn you this bootleg of Rickie Lee Jones? You were holding a CD in one hand and a take-out menu in the other. Justin was there and he was leaning out the window, shouting at the delivery guy, “Are you Cozy Soup and Burg? No, I am coming down! Stay. Please.” He stuck his head back in the window and saw me there, “Hey baby, can you believe it’s snowing?”

“It’s gorgeous,” I said.

“Babe, I know you’ll say you aren’t hungry but we ordered for you anyway,” said Justin, on his way down the stairs.

“Black and white shake, right?” you said, moving a speaker over so I could sit on it, “I figured I knew what you’d want.” We sat by the window. Looking across the park, I realized that if it wasn’t for one tiny square of a building, we could have waved at each other from our windows. We watched the snow and the people struggling to make it down MacDougal without slipping on the ice. The snow was still fairly pristine so no one was bitter about it yet. We sat there over ten years ago, no idea where we’d be now, but starting to grasp that we couldn’t predict anything. We’ve been terrifically wrong about an awful lot but we did okay. We’re still watching each other’s dreams be dashed or actualized. Still saving each other a seat.

This is a once upon a time that happened too much.

I’m telling this grim tale to you three. You were the worst of those I called darling. There you are now, cowering. Well,
Konnichiwa
! Remember me?

I’m the gal who sat dumbly in a living room on the Upper East Side while one of your kind lifted me off the couch by my hair in the few seconds it took your wife to go fetch more pistachios. Didn’t you. I put my fingertips to my scalp and they came away bloody as you whispered, “Keep your mouth shut about this.” Didn’t you.

Now don’t be frightened. This isn’t an indictment. This is addressed to you, yes, but also to myself, because guess who stood for it?

I don’t believe in endings, happy or sad, so my relationships with you continue to this day. They are the kind of relationships you have with a pair of skis you know you’ll never have to strap to
yourself again. Maybe you never really liked skiing, but enjoyed being a person who could say, “Looks like I’ll be hitting the slopes this weekend!” So you kept on even though it cost too much to get down a hill. Gave you windburn. I see nothing weird about keeping those skis in the basement. They offer a little nostalgia for crappier times. More importantly, they serve as a reminder that
I no longer have to ski.

Wake up, please. I listened to you enough. I listened until I thought you made sense, which is saying a lot.

I can do anything now, from where I sit. I have five decades behind me, practically an elder, and I’m turning you into:

One mangy dog with three heads.

You are Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of Hell. I’m in this story, too! I get my own Disney soundtrack, coming to a speaker near you. You’ll hear it whenever a hummingbird lands on me, or a dwarf ambles by hammered on Jägermeister. Rufus Wainwright can sing it if he is avail.

Don’t pout. You’ll still have a pack of fans. You’ll appeal to those women who write letters to convicts in flowery script, affixing
good job!
and
nice try
stickers to their letters. They’ll still call.

Get comfy. Curl up on your vintage gynecological chair with your flask or your cigar. You’ll see yourself in one of the heads of this angry dog. You mistreated me. You know who you are.

There was a time and there was a girl
she was funky and dreamy, with real baby fat and a wiggly mouth. Floating through the East Village, she was a muse waiting to happen.

She was I.

One afternoon I stopped on Spring Street for a soda break. I tugged at my tutu and looked across the way at an abandoned couch. There you sat, squinting. You didn’t growl. You sniffed the air, acknowledging me with a head cock as I knelt down.

“Oh my goodness,” I said. “You’re so sweet!”

I tried to run my fingers through your coat but it was dreading on top. You needed someone. “Let’s go back to my place,” you said, putting your head in my lap. My head started to spin and you said

Please come back with me. When I’m not with you all I’ll do is think of you

I moved into your cage that night. There was plenty of floor space for my routines, which delighted you. I discovered I had a gift for making you laugh. Sometimes my antics worked on the street and that was the best—you’d throw your head back in hysterics and pull me close, kissing my forehead. We looked like a candid photo from a tabloid with everyone staring. I felt famous. I’d always wanted to be that girl! The one with a dog so consumed with her that every passerby would take one look at us and want to go home and overdose. It was glorious; faces of all nationalities falling into the same mask of failure:
I’ll never be loved like that
, they all seemed to say, while you pawed me.

One evening you came home with a pair of yellow stockings for me and I put them on and did a jig that made you howl. I was your favorite, you said. There was loads of time for me to read while you went to your therapist, who would call me privately to
remind me to make your life more fun. “Smiles are contagious!” she advised. “Be his ticket to F-U-N! If you are gloomy it will only hurt you!” I said, “You can count on me, Doctor,” and she said, “What?” and I said, “CAN DO, DOC!” She reminded me that she was clinically deaf and I should listen more than speak.

One night you called me to the office. Your eyes were icy. I started to do a time step but you said, honey, this is serious. I stood in the corner while you played back my answering machine. Any messages from dogs, which said, even, “Hey, I’m in town, call me,” or “Hey, my house burned down, call me,” or “Hey, this is the pharmacy, returning your call, call me,” no matter what, you’d look at me and point to the machine until I said, “It’s okay to erase that one,” and you’d hit erase while we stood listening to those voices all high-pitched and jumbled as they ran away. I wondered why everyone sounded the same sped up like that, earnest and slightly hysterical, like cartoon mice planning a funeral. When you’d finished with that you patted me on the head and a second before the door slammed you shouted, “Be back later.”

I went into the bedroom. My legs were quivering; I laid down, whispered “help.” Lately I’d said my prayers standing up, before I got into bed. There was no time, once I crawled into bed with you. By then God was too busy. God was always closed.

Two weeks later you came back not speaking and wouldn’t look at me. When we went out I tried to break up the bar fights and miscommunications with gas station attendants. I showed up at your favorite restaurant in a sassy new outfit: black leather vest and tight mustard-colored riding pants. Rickrack was sewn across each butt cheek like a parenthesis so you’d understand
that my ass was always right in the middle of a thought. This seemed clever, and F-U-N, but you were L-I-V-I-D, dragged me to the bathroom by my hair. Pushing my nose to the mirror you said, “You look like a slut!” I said, “Ouch, my hair!” You barked, “Honey! You need to quit picking fights,” but then you shoved your hand down my pants and said, “Don’t get me wrong, you never looked hotter, but these pants are beneath you.” You ripped them down and rammed inside me from behind as a woman came out of a stall and said, “Hey, aren’t you that dog?” You snarled, “Lady, could we have some privacy, please?” “Oh sorry,” she murmured, slipping out as you slipped out too and threw your sweater at me, muttering, “Cover yourself.” You left me staring in the bathroom mirror, pants down. That’s actually a swell game if you play it right, but this was not that.

I found my way to the table but there were only men there.

“Hey, weren’t my friends coming?” I asked, and you pointed to my two girlfriends on the street outside the restaurant holding each other and crying. “The redhead didn’t like men, I could feel it,” you shrugged, “the blonde was just out of line.”

I laid my head down on the table, eyes even with the dish of olive oil. I didn’t need to look up. I knew the girls would come back, and they did, kneeling by your chair and asking for your forgiveness. I saw your hand on the lower back of one of them, moving in small squares. I had dry mouth. I said I was tired. No one heard me. I got up to go. No one said bye.

I walked home and marched to the office, took the top drawer out of your desk, and carried it with me to the bedroom without ceremony. I dumped it on the bed and started to go through every
piece of paper. In about four seconds I thought, OH. I thought MY, I thought, DUH, I thought, OUCH.

There was a note from the salesgirl who’d sold you my yellow stockings telling you to wash them because they’d “gotten messy” when she modeled them for you in the dressing room. It seems you’d met a thirteen-year-old girl at the arcade? Her mother’s lawyer wrote about complications from the plastic surgery you got her and there were nude pictures of her holding a stuffed gorilla. (Nudes were of the mother, not the daughter.) The dog-walker had written lovingly about your affair (this almost made me like you because she had a withered arm, which made you seem like an equal-opportunity misogynist), letters from a Dutch girl, a French girl, and a girl from the Yucatán peninsula, where you’d been last week when you said you had a charity thing. Ripped in half were photos of a blonde with you in Norway, sitting on a raft.

I was too weak to be angry and I could not get the theme song from “It’s a Small World” out of my head. At least now I was cured of devotion, and phew to that. Phew.

You were at work when I left. I admit I took back my green sweater that you liked to wear, and my garlic press. As I ran onto the elevator your housekeeper dropped her hands at her sides sadly and said

Oh not you, too. I hoped this was different but they always leave crying.

Years later, you came a callin’ Dog #2

There were whispers of your canine reputation but you seemed too good to be true. We went out at night, coming home and
falling into bed with an eagerness that was embarrassing, both of us shocked by the comfort of the other’s skin.

We wrapped in quilts and watched Looney Tunes. We ate fried fish sandwiches and did shots of tequila while soaking our feet in the kitchen sink. After two days the bed would look like a crime scene but we’d stay in until someone had the dentist or jury duty. I was covered in bruises and teeth marks, and your back looked like you’d been attacked by a raccoon. You wrote me letters when I napped and I woke to a crinkling sound when I turned my head, an envelope under my pillow.

Then your pack came to town.

Some quality male time was in order, you said. I cheered, go get ’em, tiger, and you said don’t wait up, and I said, I won’t, have a blast!

The next day I realized you’d slept through breakfast and then lunch. I was famished but you were disappointed when I ate without you so I waited, spacing out with a cat’s cradle on the beanbag chair.

I snapped to it when a hissing sound came from your general area. It was like a radiator turning on, and your shoulders were twitching. I fell back, horrified. The neck of your bathrobe drew down and another black wet dog snout emerged, followed by new dog eyes and ears appearing in slo-mo. I gulped. An extra head lay on your pillow and it belonged to the mangy dog I’d escaped years before. Sitting up, both of you looked at me. The new head grinned at me and went flaccid. It hung there attached but only panting.

Was he your understudy? Were you so spent from a night of carousing that you had to call for second team? I didn’t want to
be rude, so I acted breezy and made a choice to ignore the bonus dog head.

“Do I have something in my eye?” I asked lightly.

“Come here. I don’t have X-ray vision,” you said.

I opened my eyes wide.

“Your eyes are fine, I see nothing.” You laid back and adjusted your extra head without comment.

I tried not to stare but your eyes were different. They reminded me of the foam that comes in with the tide after an oil spill. Water combined with a compound not meant to marry anything clear. You sighed. You said last night was a throwback to the days when you worked the Underworld. “Those were some times.” You sighed.

“I can believe it!” I said cheerfully, my stomach churning acid. “Hey, if I go to the drugstore do you need anything?”