Throw Like A Girl (33 page)

I asked her the same question, love? and she shrugged and said that once in a while somebody came along, but something always went wrong with the transaction, didn't it? And that she had gotten really serious about a man who turned out to be bipolar. It hadn't come out until he was arrested for carrying a gun to work. Talk about dodging a bullet. I asked how she knew him and she said from the bar she hung out at. “Oh, don't raise your eyebrows that way. Drunks can be good company, if you stay away from the dual diagnosis guys.”

Besides, she added, being a single girl wasn't so bad these days. Look at us, right?

It wasn't so bad, I said, not really meaning it. I didn't tell her that I was becoming too used to being on my own and having things my own way, and that this felt like a kind of death, narrow and ungenerous.

We ordered new drinks. I was getting a little drunk, trying to keep up with her, a morose drunk that might end as tears. Janey turned her head to blow her cigarette smoke away. “Filthy habit,” she apologized, not really meaning it. “Oh love love blather blather. I'm sick of the whole damned subject, why is it always so important?”

“Biology. The baby thing.”

“Who needs men for that, we can put their stuff in jars. I know plenty of women who went to the sperm bank, made a withdrawal, and they're perfectly happy with their lives.”

“Good for them,” I said, and then we were silent for a time. I didn't want to start talking baby talk, the whethers and the whys. It was one more morose thing. I was pretty sure that if I had to go to any extraordinary measures to have a child, say, opening a phone book, then it wasn't going to happen.

The bar was getting crowded and the talk around us helped to fill in the silence between us. I was leaving town tomorrow. Pretty soon one of us would say it was time to call it a night, and how great it had been to see you, and that would be the end of any sentimental effort at reconnecting. Janey said, “OK, I have to ask you something. Were we always really competitive with each other?”

“I guess so.”

“Don't wimp out. Yes or no.”

“Yes.” I didn't like where this was headed.

“All
right
,” Janey said, as if she found my answer encouraging. “Because you really really were. You signed up for ballet the same time I did and then I sprained my ankle and had to drop out and you said it was just as well, the combinations were pretty hard. Like practically telling me I couldn't do them.”

I couldn't tell if she was joking or not. “I did?”

She glared at me, full of soggy anger. “And you know what, it was my idea to take ballet to begin with! You flat-out stole it!”

“I can't believe you even remember this shit.” But as soon as she'd started talking, a wave of something close to relief came over me, as if I was guilty of this or of other forgotten transgressions, and guilt fit me like a pair of old shoes.

“You always acted like everything you did was so much more important than what I was doing. Like you were a big deal and I was some spacey lightweight.”

“How did I do that? Tell me one specific thing I did.”

She mentioned the magazine she'd first worked on, more than a dozen years ago. “When I told you about it, you said it sounded 'interesting.' Which is patronizing and dismissive and it's code for 'completely uninteresting.'”

“That's just stupid.”

“Maybe you could quit calling me stupid, huh? See what I mean?”

I know better than to argue with a drunk; there's no way either of you will ever be right, you just stagger round and round in the same dumb circle. But I wasn't entirely sober myself, and she was really pissing me off. “How about the time you patted me on the back and went, 'Oh, I thought you were wearing shoulder pads, but those are your real shoulders.' How about all those snotty little putdowns, you think I don't remember them? Look, I'm sorry your life hasn't turned out the way you wanted it to, but it's not my fault. It never was.”

She stared at me, so red in the face and her expression so unchanged that I didn't at first realize she was crying.

I said, “Oh crap. Janey.”

“My life,” she said, bawling now, the words coming out in bursts of sobs and snot, “isn't through turning out yet.”

“Of course not. I'm sorry.”

“Now you hate me. I'm a big sloppy mess and everybody hates me.”

“I don't hate you,” I said. And I didn't, I was pretty sure.

“Have you ever thought about the best way to kill yourself? I have. Lots and lots.”

“Stop it,” I said.

She flicked her cigarette lighter open and held it up like a torch. “I want to be burned alive,” she announced. “An inch at a time.”

“Give me that thing and sit back down.”

“A ceremonial thing, a kind of performance art thing. A holy barbecue.”

I slapped the lighter out of her hand and it skittered sideways across the floor. A man sitting at the other end of the bar retrieved it and brought it back to Janey. “Thank you,” she told him. “You have a kind face.”

I said, “If you're trying for pathetic spectacle, this is the way to go about it.”

She started bawling again. People were looking at her. I was aware of the bartender standing in some calculated, professional proximity. “It's all right,” I told him. “We just haven't seen each other in a really long time.” He put the check down in front of us and walked away.

I got Janey out of there, and we went up to my room, and drank some more, and talked some more, and we were sorry about everything. There's something about people you knew when you were young that lets you fall back on that early common ground and retrace your steps to the present.

Janey passed out on the other bed. When I got up to get ready for my flight, she was still asleep. I was out of the shower, I was already dressed and packing when she sat up, wild-haired and blinking. “Apache mouth,” she croaked, and I got her a glass of water. She got up to go to the bathroom. When she came out, she flopped onto the bed again, face down in the pillows. “What time's checkout?”

“Noon, I'm pretty sure.”

“I'm going back to sleep.”

“Don't you have to go to work?” I said, but she waved that away. “You drink too much.”

“Yeah. You're probably right.”

“Don't just agree with me. Do something about it.”

“Glib. You were always glib.”

“This isn't about me.” I waited, but she didn't come back with anything. “Go to a doctor. Go to AA. Start somewhere.”

“Oh what do you care what I do. You only drop in every ten years or so.”

“I will come back next month and kick your drunk ass down the stairs.”

Janey rolled over and refocused her eyes to peer at me. “I guess we're stuck with each other, huh?”

“Not if you don't get your stupid act together.”

“God, you're a pain. Kiss kiss hug hug.” Janey buried her face in the pillows again, and I wrestled my suitcases out the door.

After that, I'd call or Janey would call. She started going to AA. She said she didn't buy into all of it, the praying parts, mostly, but it was all right. She hadn't had a drink for a couple of months. She was losing weight and her brain felt less like an old sofa with sagging spots where the springs were giving way. I said that maybe she could find herself a nice recovering alcoholic boyfriend. Janey said call her a snob, but she wanted to steer clear of guys who lived in their vehicles or at the YMCA.

“Besides,” Janey said, “we should quit talking about boys all the time, it's dumb. We're getting to an age where some fantasies are insupportable.”

I told her I'd come see her again but she put me off, and I could tell she didn't really want me there. From long distance it was hard to tell what was really going on. I knew that untruthfulness was a part of alcoholism, and that it was perfectly possible for Janey to tell me one thing and do another. But the fact that I was hearing from her regularly seemed hopeful. She was holding down a job. She wasn't making any more resentful accusations about indignities she'd suffered at my hands long years ago. I was glad we'd found our way back to each other. There are some friendships that come to be more about longevity than anything else. Like Janey said, we were stuck with each other.

I was pushing forty, and then I was past it. I'd settled and slowed into my own routines. There was work, and work had allowed me a little of the world's goods, and there was the house I'd bought and the things the house required. There was the occasional love affair, though more and more often they took place only inside my head. Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes not. I realized I'd never been able to imagine any other life for myself.

I didn't see Janey until a couple of years later, at a wedding. Our friends who had been married were all starting to get divorced and to pair off again, the hopeful process of serial monogamy. Janey didn't drink, or if she did, I didn't see it, and I didn't press her on it. She looked both a little better and a little worse, that is, she was no longer untidy or bloated, but it was as if she'd had a pin stuck in her and was shrinking down to some wizened core. But then, we all looked older. We made droll jokes about it. We professed admiration for (but were secretly appalled by) the friend who'd let her hair go entirely gray and chopped it off short.

Janey and I went out for coffee. She said there were still times, plenty of times, when she felt like drinking, it didn't go away. Any more than the desperate and unlovable parts of ourselves had ever gone away. But she hoped now that she could feed them something besides alcohol. “I was pretty mad at you there for a while. I felt you were looking down on me for drinking, the way you always looked down on me. Oh don't worry. Blaming other people is just part of being a drunk. I blamed my mother. Every guy I ever fucked. Then once you take away the alcohol, you start to get it. None of those other people are wasting time sitting around bitching about you, well, my mother probably is, but the point still holds.”

She said that she felt lucky to be getting sober right when it was turning into an industry. She meant, look at all the paperback books, look at all the rehab places and talk shows, it was downright trendy to be in recovery. And AA meetings were rollicking, really; they were the best free shows in town. I said that she had always been a trendsetter. She thought about that and said, Yeah, she guessed so, but she wished they were better trends.

She was the first one to get breast cancer. She called to tell me she'd already had the biopsy, she was scheduled for surgery, followed by chemo, radiation, the works. They were hopeful, the treatment team. That's what they called them now, a team. Rah rah. There had been all sorts of medical advances. They had really come a long way.

I said I was sorry, not knowing, in the shock of the news, where else to begin, and Janey said impatiently that it wasn't my fault. I asked her how she was doing, really, and she said, “How do you think? How do you think you'd feel?” The mass—tumor, whatever—was deep inside, you couldn't tell it was there, but she kept trying. It was compulsive, she said. She'd lie in bed and prod and poke and squeeze, as if it was something she could pinch out. There was the sense of the body's betrayal. It was dizzying, really, to think of all the thousand thousand things that could, and did, go wrong with the human physical plant. It was another compulsion, the enumeration and cataloguing of them all. Diseases of the brain, the blood, the skin, the bones, the circulation, the musculature, the digestion, of the apparatus for breathing, and for locomotion, and for speech and the control of speech, and for sleep. Sleep! Did any of us appreciate sleep until we were deprived of it? The miraculous meshing of heart rate, brain waves, all the involuntary processes. We took everything for granted until it was too goddamned late.

I let her talk on. I figured that was my function for now, to be the ear, the receptacle. I asked if she wanted me to be there for the surgery and she said no, she had enough people to help her out. Maybe I could come later. She said it would really make her feel like a goner, if all the old crew started showing up.

I thought of that when she was actually dying, and all we could do was send chocolates and flowers. Did she wonder where we were? Did it make any difference, as the cancer burned her alive, inch by inch?

I went to New York four months later. She said not to come until she was done with the chemo, that she was as bald as a light-bulb and besides, she felt like shit. I took a cab from the airport to the Manhattan address she'd given me. The landscape of the city was familiar only because of my inability to make sense of it, its parkways and throughways and frantic traffic and unimaginable density.

Janey's building depressed me, even with what I knew by then of rents in New York and how people had to arrange their lives. I rode a creepy, rattletrap elevator up to Janey's floor. She'd buzzed me in, and waved at me from the other end of the hallway. “It's OK,” she said as I stooped to hug her. “I know what I look like.”