Love Me (27 page)

I walked outside in a daze and there was a squeal of brakes and I threw myself into a doorway, expecting a burst of hot lead, but nothing. Only a car full of teenagers.

I got blind roaring drunk in The Dublin House that afternoon. I beat the house record for consecutive whiskeys, the bartender told me, a record previously held by Brendan Behan, and he gave me my prize, a double on the house. I was a crazy man. I staggered around Riverside Park singing “Rainy Day Woman” and throwing my shoes up into the trees, terrifying the little kids in the Hippo Playground, and finally a mommy called the cops on her cell phone and I was hauled down to the precinct station. I threw up as they took my mug shot. Not a proud moment in my life. The desk sergeant told me to pull myself together. Wash my face with cold water and gargle with Listerine.

“I am down in the dumps because I’ve been fired by The New Yorker magazine after shooting the publisher through the forehead,” I explained.

His name was Halloran. A little bald guy with a Groucho mustache. “You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you?” he said.

“Right.”

“The K-shaped one. Near Chicago, right?”

“Right. About five hundred miles from there. Not that far nowadays.”

He said he could hear Minnesota in my voice, the way I pronounced the r in New York. “So you know someone from Minnesota, then?” I said. He had an uncle in St. Paul, he said.

“Odd you should mention it. That’s where my wife lives.” I showed him a photo of Iris from my wallet. “Quite a looker,” he said.

I explained that I was living in New York and she was in St. Paul, but it was a temporary thing. I still loved her and everything.

He said he wanted to give me a word of advice. He said he wasn’t a churchgoing man, but sometimes a guy needs divine intervention, and maybe I had come to that point, he figured.

“I know all about the Crossandotti business and I say good riddance and thanks for the memories and let sleeping dogs lie, but—if I were to hear that you missed that 11:40 plane to Minneapolis tomorrow morning, I would have to throw you into Rikers Island. And there you are apt to meet people you’d never want to know. Don’t make me do it. This is your Get Out of Jail Free card, kid. Don’t waste it.”

I promised to go home to Minnesota and never again let myself get into such a sorry condition. “Good,” he said. “Remember, we got your mug shot on file. The one with food coming out of your mouth. Believe me, it’s not you at your best. Nothing your mama is going to frame and put on the top of the piano.” He tapped me on the chest. “If you ever get in trouble again anywhere in America, that picture is the one that’ll be in the papers. People who thought of you as an author will look at that picture and think different. Go. Don’t sin anymore.” I went home and packed my bags. I called a real estate lady and put the apartment up for sale. I walked out on the terrace and thought long thoughts about my future.

I had behaved badly. I had shown no common sense whatsoever for a long time. I was a guy in a horror flick who goes down the cellar to see where the raspy breathing is coming from. The beast in the cellar is booze and when you hear it breathing, you should turn around and get out of there.

Bad enough to go around throwing your shoes in the trees and scaring the kids on the teeter-totters. Does a guy need to find out what comes next in the story? Does he need to wake up in the gutter clutching an empty paint thinner can? Or wind up living in the backseat of a 1972 Buick and listening to talk radio? Do you need to be shipped off to a nursing home because your vital organs have turned to sawdust and lie in the dialysis ward and watch TV all day?

No, I do not want that. Not for me, thank you, Lord.

RIP Tony Crossandotti. Good-bye to Manhattan and 25 West 43rd. I am done with all of that for now. I will return to Minnesota, a good place, home of humorous, charitable, modest, soft-spoken people. A state on the same longitude as Italy, so the same slant of light that moved Raphael and Michelangelo illuminates our trees in the afternoon. A state of passionate hockey teams and world-class choirs. I took a cab to the airport and got on the 11:40 flight. Practically empty. I had 26A, B, C to myself and pulled up the armrests and slept. I return to St. Paul, where, God willing, I shall gain some clarity in my life.

I thought about calling Iris from the airport, but was afraid she’d be not happy enough to hear that I’d come back home. I didn’t want to have to plead my way into my own house. So I took a cab downtown to the Embassy Suites, the one with the duck pond in the lobby. The cabdriver was a large feverish man who was irked at the presence of other cars on the road. “Where you coming from?” he said. “New York,” I said. “Big town,” he said. “But I’m from here,” I said. I told him I was moving back. “You’re nuts,” he said.

I had him drive down Sturgis Avenue past my house, which was dark except for the upstairs hall light. No cars parked in front. I have nothing in this world but you, my love. Nothing but you. You’re my music and my wine, you’re my roof, our love is the only good book I ever wrote. I said, “Stop here.” He stopped. I walked up the drive-way and looked in the garage. All the grocery carts were still there. The crazy people were in their loony bins, or dead and in the ground, but Iris had promised and her promise was good, death or no death. Harry, Wally, Evelyn, Luverne, Agnes meant nothing to the world at large, but they were real people to my wife. So maybe there was hope for me. I got to the Embassy Suites and up to room 502 and it felt grim. To come home and plop down in a hotel and look up the hill to the cathedral with the beacon on the dome and know that my darling could see it too and that I wanted her more than she wanted me.

The cure for the blues is to go to sleep and wake up in the morning. A good night’s sleep can change everything. Don’t base your life on what you think at 3 A.M. Go to bed early and be asleep in your bunk as the train chugs over the Donner Pass of the soul, and awaken fresh and happy in San Francisco.

Iris kissed me when I paid a call that afternoon. She offered me tea. Her old DFL poster wasn’t on the wall. A landmark, gone. She had thrown out a lot of stuff, including some of my old LP’s. “Maybe things are over between us and we just don’t know it,” she said.

I expressed shock.

“How many years do we need to spend finding out how we feel about each other? Either we’re married or we’re not.”

I could not believe that she would toss my LP’s. The Grateful Dead’s
American Beauty
with “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace” and the Bernstein
Messiah
with William Warfield and the Leo Kot tke 6 & 12
String Guitar
and the Coasters and the
St. Matthew Passion.
That was the music of our life.

And then she dropped the bomb. “I’m seeing somebody.” I thought my heart had stopped. Like somebody’d poured Liquid Eraser on me.

“He’s only a friend. We have dinner and stuff. But I like him a lot.”

I had to sit down.

“I want to be honest and tell you what’s going on with me,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “Would you like to take a nap?”

“You mean, have sex?” She shook her head.

“Just lie down with me for old times’ sake.”

She rolled her eyes and I took her hand and we toddled up those well-worn stairs. She had stripped the bedroom bare except for the old bedstead and a bedside table and lamp.

She lay down on the left side and I on the right, as usual. She lay on her back, her hands clasped on her belly, her eyes closed, more or less as you’d lie in your coffin at the reviewal, waiting for everyone to close the door and leave you alone so you could begin your well-earned rest. I told her that I was coming home and she could take her time deciding about me but I was there. She was very quiet. Then she said, “Did you remember it’s our anniversary today?” “Yes,” I said, and I had a small package to prove it. Wrapped in silver paper, with a blue ribbon, a book of love sonnets, the covers made of dark chocolate. And a card: “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom.
”

“I don’t think they are yet,
”
she said.

“
Oh. Okay,” I said.

 

 

 

I called Frank Frisbie the next morning.
“
It’s Larry,” I said.
“
I’m in town for a while and—I don’t know if you knew this or not—Iris and I are sort of in a separation kind of thing right now—”

“
Actually Iris told me. I heard you were having problems. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” I said. “You two see each other often these days?”

“No, but I know she’s worried about you. Your drinking, especially. Have you ever thought of going to AA?”

“
Never gave it a thought.
”

He wanted to tell me all about a book he’d read about alcohol and how it affects the neocortex, where neuron impulses are stored, and also the amygdala, which gives emotional weight to memories. Memory is one of the sweetest pleasures of life as you get older. Alcohol short-circuits this stuff, he said.

I told him I don’t drink anymore.

“
Oh? What happened?”.

“Nothing. I just stopped.”

“Were you in a program?”

“No. I didn’t want to be in a program. That was my second reason for quitting.” He seemed disappointed. Here he had the answer to my problem and I’d gone and turned the page.

“The reason I called is I’m wondering if you know about any apartments in your neighborhood, ” I said. “Iris refuses to move up the hill so I figured I would.”

And he did know of one. A studio; furnished, on the first floor of a big brick manse on Summit Avenue. He met me there an hour later. “The Humphries house,” he said. A three-story château with a drive and portico and pitched slate roof. “Emmaline Humphries was in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald when they were kids. She was the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan. Scott came back here in 1939, the year before he died, to see her. He was on his way back to Hollywood. He was on the wagon but he was a wreck.” Frank gave me a pitying look. “Sometimes people fritter away their chances and then wake up and it’s too late.”

He handed me a copy of Emmaline’s diary that the historical society had published, and his latest book,
The Lavender Muse,
and the phone number of the owner of the Humphries house. I rented the room for $600 a month. Furnished. I moved in the next day.

Frank thought it was sad that I used to write for
The New Yorker
and now was back in St. Paul, living alone in a rented room. I had to tell him that I was okay. Really. I simply moved on. In America, we do this. If New York disappoints you, try Minnesota. If whiskey gets you in trouble, try herbal tea. If you shoot a publisher in the forehead, do something constructive about your marriage.

“What are you working on these days?” he said.

“I am working on living my life,” I said. “Living life is all I can handle for now.”

I sat on the front steps of the Humphries house and thought about how nice a glass of cold white Bordeaux would feel in my hand right now. Wine in hand, and Iris there, seated prettily on the rail, and I say a funny thing and she squinches her eyes and kisses me with her Bordeaux mouth.

A lovely picture, but we don’t live in pictures, do we—no. I believe I can live without alcohol, and so I am trying to do. I have had enough, thank you. I drank a lot because I enjoyed it. Then I didn’t enjoy it as much. So I stopped. As simple as that. We puritans over-dramatize these things. We want there to be lions stalking us, whereas it’s only some old coyote. Not utter degradation: just poor choices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Bewildered, Put the past behind you, which is where it is anyway. The story of Sandy and Bernie and the sausage exchange is an ancient story and not so interesting as a new chapter could be. In another twenty years, you could forgive her easily, but you don’t have that long to live, so do it now. Just do it. She is a part of your life and it’s too late to be replacing cornerstones at your age. She loves you, and you love her and face it: you’re no great prize. People imagine that they can keep starting over anew: well, guess again. Better make do with what you have. It’s never too late to wake up and face facts.