The Taste of Salt (16 page)

“But I'd be getting what I want. It'd be worth it to me to give up something to get something. To get you. To get to be with you.” My voice is high in my ears. It breaks. I hate the sound of it.

He doesn't turn around. “I'm not sure it's what I want. Or that I want to get it that way.”

My chest caves in at this. Can't he hear it? He must be able to hear it crash, my breastbone breaking open, blood all over the sheets. I struggle to keep my voice level. “Well, what
do
you want?”

“I don't know. I don't know, Josie.” His back is still to me. His skin is so seamless over the muscles and bone. “I really don't know. But I'm not sure it's this.”

Before I know I'm even going to do it, I've hit him between the shoulder blades as hard as I can. I've turned into a crazy lady. He wheels around and looks at me, shocked. “Josie?”

“What the fuck is this then? What have we been doing?” I'm so loud. I'm so loud and crazy.

“You need to go now. We can talk about this when you've calmed down.” He's standing over me now, clenching and unclenching his hands. I know he'd like to hit me. I can't
seem to stop shouting. “I mean it, Ben, what the fuck is this? If you're not gonna be with me and we're just gonna go on like this. Well, what the fuck?”

“Josie, you're not making sense. We never talked about trying to make this permanent.”

He is fully dressed now and I'm still naked, which makes me feel even crazier. I pull the sheet up over my breasts. He was just touching them. He was just kissing them ten minutes ago. How could this be happening? What is happening? He sits back down on the side of the bed, slightly calmed. He won't hit me now. I'm crying, not angry anymore. My chest is very tight. It's hard to breathe. “Josie. I didn't want to come to this this way. But I don't know what's gonna happen here. I'm not sure I can give you what you want. I'm not sure I can be what you need. I don't know if I'm the one.”

“I do. I think we're supposed to be together. I do.”

“That's not enough, just thinking that. Just
you
thinking that.”

“Ben, I …”

“Here.” He holds out my shirt to me. “You'd better get dressed. We can't talk about this anymore right now. You ought to go home.”

I just look at him. He doesn't touch me. Then I put my shirt on like a chastised child. I walk into the bathroom
and splash water on my face. When I would get to crying too hard in college over whatever a college girl might cry hard over, my roommate Sandra always took me firmly by the hand and marched me down the hall to splash cold water on my face. She wasn't particularly loving or gentle as she did that. But somehow her very firmness made me feel loved. I don't feel loved now.

I come out of the bathroom and stand in the doorway. Ben is standing with his back to me, looking out his bedroom window. His shoulders look strong, like they always do. He has a thin, efficient body—he was probably very gangly as a boy. Sometimes I wish I could see pictures of him when he was a teenager, squinting through his glasses. “Ben?” My voice is very small. He turns to face me. “I'm gonna go now. I love you.”

“I know you do,” he says. “Be careful going home, okay?”

I find my way to the door, blind, and step out onto the porch, blind, and make my way to my car, blind. How can I find anything now? How can I find anything now?

I
MADE MY WAY
out to the car, got in, drove. I couldn't go right home, not in the state I was in. I drove around, back and forth, up and down, trying to calm down. I wished I'd told a girlfriend about Ben so I'd have someone
to call and weep to on my cell phone. But this is such a small, small town—I didn't feel like I could say anything to anyone. So I drove. After a while, I found myself thinking not about Ben but about my father. I'm not sure why, but there it was.

He got sober a few months after he moved out, near the end of my senior year of high school, after I knew I'd be going to Stanford. After he was sober and had been gone from the house for a while, I began to visit him, cautiously. Tick was busy running the streets so we never went together and, at first, I was very nervous. We'd sit in the kitchen and talk awkwardly about this and that. Daddy was quiet, contemplative. He'd begun reading again. “I read
Invisible Man
again over the last few months,” he said to me on one visit. “It was good to go back to where I started from. I know you're not much of a one for novels, Josie, but you liked that one, right?” I nodded. There was a lot of it that I didn't understand but a lot I loved, nevertheless.

I was always uncomfortable during these visits. I couldn't forget the looming silences, the nasty remarks, the beer stench I grew up with. What happened to that man? How'd I know he wasn't going to reappear?

And then of course, he did. It was just before I left for my senior year of college. I took the bus over to his house—my
mother needed the car for something—and rang his bell. He came to the door in his undershirt, which was my first clue; he didn't do that kind of thing anymore. He was always nicely dressed. “Hey, baby girl,” he said.

“Daddy? Are you all right?”

He rubbed his face. “Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Whyn't you come on in, I'll get us something to eat.” He leaned forward to kiss me and I smelled it on him. I lost it—kind of like I did with Ben. I have never been so angry in my life, I didn't know what I was going to do until I did it. I shoved him away from me, shouting as I did it. “You're drunk, aren't you? Admit it! Admit it! Goddamn it, admit it, you've been drunk almost my whole goddamn life.” I
pushed
him; I pushed my big father back into the doorway of his apartment. I pushed him away from me. I kept yelling, “Why should I believe anything you say to me? You spent your whole life like this disgusting, miserable mess. I'm not dealing with it anymore. I'm done!” I ran out, crying. I could hear his voice behind me but I didn't stop. I didn't dare stop. I cried the whole way home on the bus as people strenuously avoided looking at me. Once I got off the bus, I stood on the corner long enough for my face to dry. I took a lot of deep breaths. And when I got home, I didn't tell my mother anything. But I'll tell you something that I knew
in that moment. I was done with him. He wasn't getting another chance.

I've stuck with that. He apologized to me about the whole thing a few months afterward; that slip didn't become a binge. The apology was part of his making amends, I guess. After he made his little speech, we hugged each other. But I didn't believe him. Not really. I didn't dare. I couldn't stand the disappointment when he failed me again.

There is a great deal of evidence that shows that addiction lies in the brain, in its very makeup. That's why not everyone can quit; sometimes you just can't outrun that circuitry. It seemed my father had done it—he had certainly been sober for a long time since that slip. I was furious but not too blind to see that. But even so, if it was in your brain, it was in your brain. I understood that now, in my bones. Because that's how I was with Ben. After that fight with Ben, after I got myself together, I told myself sternly that I had to pull away a little, but then I would take one look at him and it was like being hit with a two-by-four. I was felled by desire. I wanted to feel the way I felt—the way we felt—that first time we made love. That's an addiction, of course. But you can never get back that first high. You just keep looking for it, no matter how much damage you cause.

Tick woke up … where? He didn't know where. There was a leg thrown across his, a heavy, smooth, brown one. He supposed he ought to take some pleasure in this. It seemed to be a woman's leg. But he couldn't remember anything about the person it was attached to, where he was, how he'd gotten there. The room smelled of cigarette smoke. He coughed and his head pounded, slowly, rhythmically. His tongue felt like sandpaper and his nose was running. The owner of the leg snored and rolled away. A name distantly floated into his head. Tonya? Was that it? He lay there. Looking at the ceiling. Yellow, pockmarked with cracks. He'd begun his evening in a bar. He did remember that.

He was supposed to stay out of bars now. They were bad for him. Full of what ailed him. Packed with nothing but his sorrow, Mom's and Daddy's broken hearts, my disdain, everything he wanted to avoid. But last night, without warning, that siren song struck up again Just like that.

The funny thing about his slip was, just like they said in all those twelve-step meetings, it wasn't a special day or a special occasion or like he'd decided
Damn it, I'm gonna drink again.
He didn't even know it was starting when it started. There was this girl, one of the many girls who were always around the parking lot at the end of the day hoping for the slightest magic touch from one of the magic men on the team. Or even someone associated with the team. Someone like him. This girl was a little more desperate, a little more used up. The players, all of them so young and strong and full of themselves, could smell it on her. None of them took her, the casual way they'd take one girl and not the other; sometimes they'd take two. But they didn't even see her. When Tick came out of the locker room into the late-afternoon sun and headed toward his not-giant, not-shiny car, she sashayed up to him with a big open smile, and said, “Well, what do you do for the team?”

“I'm a trainer.”

She took a step toward him. “Ooh, a trainer. Does that
mean you get to go to practices and work with the players?” She took another step. “Did you used to work with LeBron?”

In fact, he never had. Only the most trusted senior trainers got anywhere near that priceless body. But she was looking at him with such steady admiration. It had been so long since a woman had looked at him like that. What would be the harm? “I used to. It was kind of fucked up the way he left with that ESPN shit. But he had to do what was right for him. I get it.”

She shifted her body in a way that let him know she was his for the evening. Just like that. “Yeah. You gotta do what's right for you.” She twirled a strand of her long weave around her finger. She had long fucshia-colored fingernails. “I'd love to hear more about your job. My name's Tonya.”

“Well, why don't we go get a drink and I can tell you all about it.”

When he said that, he was thinking he'd just stick to Coke. No harm in that. No harm in sitting with a girl and having a Coke, right? It was like something out of one of those fifties shows like
Leave It to Beaver.
So they got in his car and they drove and they found a little place called Pedro's.

It was a golden-colored late afternoon. The downtown streets had that internal quietude that so much of Cleveland
seemed to have. Tonya chattered away—something about the Cavs—but he wasn't really listening. For some reason, he thought of me, how much I hated Cleveland. He didn't understand why I felt the way I did. He was used to his city. Its small grayness felt like home to him.

They entered the bar. There was the neon, the friendly neon he always loved. This time it touted the virtues of Heineken. There was the gentle wood glow of the bar. There was a small patch of afternoon sunlight on the floor in the back. It looked inviting. They sat in the back, not at the bar. It was safer there. The leather was warm and giving, like skin, like the skin of someone he loved. Tonya was still talking. When was the last time he had touched a woman he loved? When was the last time he'd touched a woman's skin at all? When he wasn't watching TV, he spent a lot of time jacking off like a lonely teenage boy. He leaned back against the seat. A tired-looking waitress, the only one in the place, asked them what they wanted. He ordered a burger and a Coke. Tonya ordered a cosmopolitan. What they brought her looked something like Kool-Aid in a martini glass. The hamburger was surprisingly good, a little charred on the outside and rare on the inside, not overhandled, just the way he liked them. The Coke was fine. It was a Coke. When the waitress came back to ask them if they wanted anything else, he asked for a Corona. He didn't think of
the steps. He didn't think of calling anyone. He thought it would be okay. She went to get it. She didn't make anything special of his request. He drank it as soon as she brought it. Not frantically. But with a quiet, sober pleasure. Then he ordered another one. He put his hand onto Tonya's thigh and she quit talking and smiled, looking down at the table as though she'd been told a secret. That was pretty much it for the sobriety. The next thing he remembered was that cold, cold morning and that leg thrown over him in an apartment he didn't recognize. He sat up. He wished he had a beer right then. Was that all there is to it? Just giving in? He wondered if he could get out of the apartment before Tonya woke up. God only knew what they'd done together. God only knew. That's the only one who could help him now, he feared. God Almighty. And despite what he'd said over and over in all those AA meetings, he wasn't at all sure about that guy's existence.

So after he left Tonya's house was the beginning. It didn't take long to get to the middle—a couple of weeks, maybe? He wasn't sure where the end would be. But he wasn't there yet. This part, he remembered. There was the enormous pleasure at first. But it was gone quickly. Then there was only the need. The drink he had to have. The hit he had to buy, the rush and run of it. He got to the middle so much faster this time. He wasn't even enjoying it anymore.

It didn't take long for them to see it on him at work. So it didn't take long for Bob Trumbull to call him into his office and, with eyes that looked like he'd just seen his best friend lying dead in the street, say, “Tick, I gotta let you go. This was your last chance.” Tick protested—“Just one slip. Give
me another chance. I'm not going back there, no sir”—and Bob looked at him with a gaze so gentle and unconvinced that Tick was afraid he might cry and rather than do that he stood up and left the office and went to his locker and got his stuff and left the arena and that was that. That was the end of one thing he loved.