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“Naw. Don’t be sorry. Just don’t
think it. Can you do that? Could you trust me and not think I’d do
that?”

“I—sure. Yeah.”

“You’re lyin’.”

“I’m not. I am not
lying.”

“Full of shit.”

“I just told you. I don’t know what
else you want me to do.”

“You can drink what’s in that glass,
for starters.”

“Getting drunk will—”

“Did I ask you to get drunk? No.
What’d I say? I said drink what’s in the glass. It’s one little
glass and it’s mostly cola, anyway.”

I take a few swallows and try not to
gag.

The buzz comes abruptly.

“That ain’t all of it.—Now, there
you go. Mia, you’re a beautiful angel. You know that? What d’you
think your boyfriend would say ‘bout you bein’ here?”

I hold up my glass. “I don’t really
care. If he doesn’t, why should I?”

“Have I told you I love
you?”

“Do you?”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“Ain’t nothin’ but a kid.” He
narrows his eyes at me. “If I was younger, though…Boy, if I was
younger. Don’t mean I don’t love you, though. Love ain’t got to be
about that.”

I don’t want to talk about it
anymore. My head is spinny.

Love.

Me.

What he loves, and who—not
me
me, of course, because
he doesn’t even know me—and…but…
why
does he? Love.
Love.
Sounds like ‘lub’ in my head so
I think the word over and over, and whatever it means, I shouldn’t
like it, not from him. He loves me.
I love
you.
I rub my finger on the glass and go,
“Mm.”

“It don’t mean nothin’. Don’t—look,
I love people. People get me here, in my heart. It’s the spirit I
love. Artistic love, it’s different. Deep. Like it—it transcends,
y'see, what most people think love is. Superficial. Not mine.
Theirs.”

“You don’t know me.”

“You’re goin’ to argue with me ‘bout
this? I damn well—I know what I know, and I love what I know. You
can’t tell me who I love and you can't tell me who I don’t. Listen,
no man anywhere—or woman, all right? or woman—can say what’s right
to feel. If I say I love you, you just sit there and take it. All
right?”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Okay, Donny.”

“You hear me?”

“Both times.”

“Well, all right.”

It’s not bad, the drink, even if it
burns my throat a little. Bourbon spreads delightfully warmer than
vodka. Yes. Delightful, like I’ve just swallowed a vial of Anbesol
and have been numbed stomach to chest. And he loves me, he says,
which may or may not be true, and I am beautiful, he says, and
safe, he says, and love is love, real or imagined.

“Ready for another?”

“I am.”

While I wait alone, the rain returns
and pats the windows, then pelts harder with heavy winds. He comes
out of the kitchen and something’s changed. His head bows and I
know the expression, now, know the face, the mood. Quiet time, but
I’m bourbon-filled and brazen, and when he passes by I slap his leg
and say, “What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden?” I am him:
“What a goddamn baby,” and laugh and look up at him. He hands me my
drink and sits down.

“What d’you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’
Nothin’s wrong. What’s the matter with you? Why you sittin’ like
that, all curled up? What, I scare you?”

I tell him no, of course not, that
I’m just a little cold. “Lighten the hell up, will you?”

“Now, what the hell’s gotten into
you?” He watches me.

But no, not
me
, and when it goes on for too long I
say, “What?”

He slides along the couch toward me
and reaches for the lamp and nudges it to one side, to the other,
and then tilts the shade to shift the light. “Sit there just like
that. Don’t you move.”

No more wind, no more rain, no more
storm. The tornado missed, touched down somewhere else about three
miles south, they say on the radio. Donny turns it off, then, and
says, “Damn weathermen. I like a storm. You like a storm?” I say
yes, I like a storm, and maybe next time.

My chair has been turned to face the
dining room and my hair is loose from the ponytail, pulled
forward—by him—to hang down the sides of my face. I haven’t been
able to look at my watch—“Quit movin’!”—but the last time I
checked, it was midnight. Soon after, he started filling my glass
with plain soda.

“Quit it, now. You was sittin’
straighter before.”

Painting has sobered him—impossible,
it would seem, since he’s gone through at least six rim-full
drinks—and what I think is number seven sits on the floor against
the baseboard where he won’t kick it over. He moves around the
canvas like a hummingbird, stepping aside to add some shading,
aside to fix the curve of my left nostril, and I wait, fingers
tight around my glass, for him to fall, to trip over the easel or a
toe-trap in the drop cloth, but he never does. Wrinkles are
anticipated and he smoothes them with his feet without looking, and
when he is so close to the easel that the legs might get in his
way, he steps around them, dances with them, dips for his drink
while staring at his work and then swiftly replaces it, his
charcoal pencil fast returning to the face staring out from the
corner. A hair gets in my eye and I blink. It won’t go. I shake my
head, but just a little because it’s so heavy.

“Naw, naw,” he says, and he kneels
in front of me and touches my cheeks with warm hands, turns my head
to the left, brushes down my bangs so they hang in my eyes. His
fingertips are gentle and his breath is pleasantly strong and I am
taking it, making it mine, noticing his long, curled lashes and
falling forward just a little bit. I start to put out my hands—a
hug, just a hug, a touch, a body—and he stands again and steps back
to the easel, to the face that looks nothing like my
own.

Her eyes are deep and dark, not
plain and light like mine, and her nose is narrow, low, elongating
the face. My cheeks are round, but hers are sharp—pointed, even—and
with dark hollows underneath. Her jaw is weak, the mouth thin with
a down-turned upper lip. I check the eyes again. The bottom lids
are missing, just upper lashes and irises and whites that pour into
the face.

“Almost there.” He draws the hair in
straight, quick lines criss-crossing over my forehead, uses
scribbles to cover my ears and shoulders, then drops his pencil on
the floor and picks up his drink and steps backward until he is
standing beside me. “Beautiful,” he says.

I tell him thank you, but that it
looks nothing like me, though—slowly—I’m starting to see
it.

“It’s you, all right.” He sits on
the couch.

I turn the chair back to the living
room and tuck my feet, but I can’t get comfortable.

He closes his eyes and swoops his
fingers in front of his face, drawing closed an invisible curtain.
“I
see
,” he says.
“What I see with my eyes closed is what you see there.” He points
at the canvas, opens his eyes. “Artist. Capital ‘A’.” He squints at
me. “Doctor.” He laughs. “Donny Donaldson. Doctor. Artist.” He
lights a cigarette. “Doctist.”

“Actor,” I say. It’s too bright
because he turned on all the lights again, said the one lamp wasn’t
enough to ‘reveal’ me. “Where’s the light switch?”

“There by the door.”

I hold steady both ways with a hand
on the back of the couch.

“What do you mean, ‘actor’? You
think I lie, or—damn, just like my wife,” he says. “Do somethin’
for her and two minutes later she’s kickin’ you in the head. Don’t
like me doin’ nothin’ for others, neither. Got mad ‘cause I helped
out a friend—so what if it’s a woman?—and took everythin’, went to
her mother’s.”

I try to remember. He said she was
somewhere else, that she left to stay with someone, but not her
mother. “I thought you said she was at a man’s house.”

“Now, why would I say
that?”

“I don’t know. But you did. I
remember.”

“You think I’d be sittin’ here with
you if my wife was with some other man? What kind of a man would I
be to let that happen? You think I’m some piece of shit, candy-ass
that’d let someone get on his wife?”

“But you said—”

“Naw. I thought you had somethin’
beautiful and kind and decent inside, but then you go and say what
you did.”

“Donny.”

“Don’t you know me? I ain’t goin’ to
lie to you. Not you. You’re my angel. I love you.” He slides off
the couch and hobbles over to me on his knees, stopping at my legs.
“I know you don’t mean what you say, and sometimes what comes out
of you is ‘cause you’re upset about things. Let me do my—let me fix
it for you.”

“I don’t need you to
fix—”

“Doctor Donaldson! I want to
help.”

He is close enough for kissing, his
eyes shining and brown and two inches from mine, but he doesn't
waver, doesn't fall in. His hands wrap tight around the chair arms.
I close my eyes and he is Donny-in-the-picture, peacenik hippie.
The before image.

“Donny.” I open my eyes and reach
out for him and he pushes off to stand. My drink falls in my lap
and bleeds through, cold, to my thighs.

“You know Judy?—Naw, you don’t know
Judy. I’m the only one that knows her, ‘cause she’s like me.
Artist, but she’s better. Genius. You should see what she—me and
her, no one else gets her, you hear what I’m sayin’? I tried to
tell Emily—no, not sex, not lust, not with me and Judy. We don’t
live in the world of sex and lust and—Sex! Sex! She’s always makin’
something real into somethin’ else. Y’see? We, me and Judy,
we
are
the—the
earth, or—the veins, like blood. The love and the shit of it, all
of it, and you can’t talk about it, can’t tell someone about it.
That’s why, art. You…people like you…you take good bourbon and you
mix it with Coke ‘cause you can’t take it, got to make the hot go
away.” He bends to grab my hands and closes them in his, kneels
again in front of me. “Artist,” he says. “Understan’?”

“I guess I don’t.”

He leans forward until our shoulders
touch and holds me and whatever he said is already gone, lost in
settling bourbon-heat. I am in someone’s arms, snug, not tight, and
breath falls on my neck just under my earlobe. I hug him back and
his hair brushes my eyelashes and I hug him back and feel a pulse
that isn’t mine and I hug him back until he stops and pulls away,
telling me again that he loves me, that I am an angel. He stands
again and asks if I’m ready, now, for another bourbon. “You ain’t
drivin’ tonight,” he says. He smoothes my hair off my forehead.
“But don’t worry. I got clean sheets for the pullout.”

APRIL 17, THURSDAY

Before-morning darkness. I can feel
it without opening my eyes, recognize the shape of my chair and the
fold my body forms to fit. Chancey purrs on my hip. A commercial
jingle plays. I feel around for the remote control and find it
under my arm, press the power button, try to remember how I got
home. Not my car. Lionel. He charged full price and accepted the
tip. I might have begged him for my job back while we waited for my
burger and shake at the drive-through, and he might have said to
ask again later, when I’m sober.

My head throbs and I’m
thirsty.

I close my eyes.

________

Scratching, rapid and insistent. The
corner of my chair is sleep-breath rancid and my back and shoulders
ache when I stand.

Chancey’s bowls are empty. I fill
the water dish. Pour in food. Chancey doesn’t come, but instead
guards the front door, meowing. Through the peephole I spot the
rear end of one of the downstairs cats, the gray one, and across
the hall a couple of newspapers in yellow cellophane on the
neighbor’s straw welcome mat. I push Chancey aside and go out to
the hallway, carry the gray cat down the stairs and drop it in
apartment three’s open doorway. Back upstairs I check the wrapped
papers, find today’s, and bring it in. I open it to the classifieds
and fix a drink.

Secretary. Secretary. Medical
technician. Truck driver. Factory worker. Factory worker. I crumple
the page, my fingertips ink-sticky and black, and toss it in the
living room for the cat.

________

Blue sky outside and green-studded,
slender branches on the oak. The woman from downstairs—I try to
remember her name…Safia?—stands out on the sidewalk, looks up at
her first floor window and waves, then turns her back to the wind
and exhales, the smoke immediately whipped away from her cigarette.
She is barefoot with colored toenails, and the frayed hem of her
peasant skirt blows around her ankles. Sitting nearby in the grass,
her black cat. I open the window.

“Safia,” I call down—hoping it is,
in fact, her name—and mime smoking. “Can I have one?”

“Of course!” she says. She points,
jabbing over my head, and nods.