one breaks my body, and the other breaks my soul

if love were all (part one)

The neighborhood breakfast place closed down almost a year ago.

I haven’t gotten over it yet.

The owners actually opened up another restaurant, right next door to the old one.  A sausage and pizza place.  It’s pretty good.  I had a sticky drink there once made with Bacon Bourbon.  By the time I got down to the last sip, though, I was pining for grits and eggs.

On Sunday mornings, the new place serves “brunch” from a menu featuring some of the items from the old place, at new and inflated prices.  My favorite, two poached eggs atop two tamales, is now nearly $13.00.  I boycotted this for a while, but those bastards knew I’d come crawling back eventually.

The old place was sort of like a dim, crowded cave.  You placed your order at the counter with one of their rotating staff of mean-spirited and/or incompetent cashiers, and one of the cooks would bring your plate out to you when it was ready.  I could sit in there for hours on a Saturday morning, writing in my notebook, reading the paper, or talking shit with one of my neighbors.

At the new place, you get the sense that they’re only doing this “brunch” thing begrudgingly.  I don’t even think they run the air conditioning on Sundays, and the wait staff invariably forgets to refill your coffee.  They bring the check while you’re still forking the last bite into your mouth.

And then there’s the matter of this one waitress…

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sam

Even years later, he still wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what it was about that night that had hit him so hard.  Maybe it was just that, for the first time, he really understood the shape of things, what it all really meant.  His stomach churned at the thought of the thousand or so half-baked, adolescent, lesbian sex fantasies he’d previously enjoyed.  He’d never be able to think about it that way again.  Well, not soberly anyway, and not for a very long time.  

sam and alice excerpt (still trying to figure out this chapter)

Something had changed in him that first year after high school.  He and Alice spent the last two weeks of the summer down at Uncle Len’s beach house in Florida, each of them trying to make sense of the mess they’d been in since graduation.  Her parents had been keeping her in captivity from the moment they’d found out, as if limiting her exposure to the outside world would somehow stop it from happening.  And they’d only agreed to let her go away with him, he suspected, because they didn’t know anyone in Seaside, and maybe even because they thought that some time alone at the beach with him might change things somehow.

It was a fantasy he himself hadn’t entertained.  No.  From the moment Alice had told him, he’d known it was unshakably true.  And he realized he’d known it was true maybe even before then, too.  Like the way you know gravity is true even before you know what it really is.  And he also knew that whatever it was that had happened to Alice had happened long ago, when some conspiracy of God and man had composed the code from which Alice Martin was created, the same code that had given her those green eyes, the freckles on her right cheek, her sense of humor.  The code that had given her all the things he loved about her had also given her this. 

She’d carried it in silence for almost eighteen years, and the only thing happening that summer was that the rest of them were trying to figure out how to live with it, now that it wasn’t a secret anymore.

He’d hoped that by pulling her out of the immediate battle zone, he could find a way to cheer her up somehow.  But she’d been so restless at the beach, afraid to sit still for too long or for things to get too quiet.  And at night he could hear her muffled crying through the wall that separated their bedrooms.  He’d felt helpless then, and selfish, too, because he knew she wasn’t really crying about her parents.

“I’ve been crying about them finding out about this for years now, Sam.  I’m cried out over it,” she’d told him on the drive out.  And he was caught off guard (and perhaps even a little offended) at the idea of her having been so upset about something without his knowing about it.  It took him a moment to remember that, no matter how close they’d been, this was something completely different, something she’d kept secret, maybe even from herself, for a long time before they’d ever even met.

and then…

march turned to april, my favorite month.  jesse and i switched from drinking spiced rum and egg nog out of mismatched coffe mugs to fruity flavored rum out of brightly-colored juice glasses.  i tried not to think about the fact that it was nearing the anniversary of the beginning of everything that happened with jessica, but it felt like i’d only ever really been alive since that random sunday when i’d come out to her, and thus every little milestone needed to be commemorated, memorialized, savored.

jesse pressed a juice glass into my hand as i walked in the front door, and we pushed the tv out into the backyard so we could watch while we ate.  it was pretty much the best i had felt in a long time.  drunk, but happily so.  sated.

breton sidled up next to me.  “you look better,” she said.

“i think i feel better.”

“that’s good,” she smiled sincerely and took my hand.  “i’ve been wanting to tell you…you know how in the lovely bones you get to make your own heaven when you die?”

“yeah.”

“i think my heaven’s gonna have you in it.  you, me, all of us, just like this.”

i could actually feel my heart lifting in my chest a little bit after that. 

the will anymore to wonder

i hadn’t seen her since february.  valentine’s day.  we’d gotten back together over the christmas holidays, but i was too thick to realize that that was the extent of it for her: a home-from-school fling.  i’d brought her a book of f. scott and zelda’s love letters.  she told me to stop giving her stuff because her girlfriend was getting suspicious.  i was used to not being the only one in the picture, so i still didn’t get it.  when i got there, we made out, heatedly fumbled around with each other as usual, but she asked me to sleep in her absent roommate’s bed.  how was i still not getting this?

when i got home, she asked me to stop calling for a while.  i did.  and i drank more instead.  a month later, i was sitting at breton’s kitchen table, fondling the phone in my hands.

“this is ridiculous, you know,” i slurred.

“you’re damn right it is!”  jesse slammed his hand down on the table.  he was sitting across from me, even further in the tank than i was.  breton and ann were baking cookies in the kitchen and shooting us nervous glances. 

“i mean, she was the one who wanted to get back together with me, and now…i’m just gonna call her and put a stop to this once and for all.”

“you should!  you should call her!” jesse, who was ann’s boyfriend at the time, always seemed to have my back in schemes such as this.  he was tall, curly-haired, enthusiastic, and always getting into worse drunken trouble than i was.  how could i not love him?

i dialed her number, and before she even had a chance to say hello, i blurted out, “are you ready for this to be over?”

“yes.”

it was almost as if i didn’t hear it until later.  yes, later, after i had dropped the phone and burst into tears.  later, after jesse had hung it up for me and disappeared from the apartment.  after breton had washed my face with a cool dish towel, and put me to bed on the floor in the living room.  after i had fallen asleep.  that’s when i could finally hear it, that hesitant, honey-toned death knell,

“yes.”

and then for a while it seemed like i couldn’t stop hearing it.  it was pounding in my ears, in my skin, in my guts.  “yes.”  she was done; and i just…wasn’t.  

six

The bar that had once been home was tucked away by the river in the Warehouse District.  Alice parked her car around the corner, cut off the engine, and rested her forehead against the steering wheel.  She’d decided to give herself two minutes, two full minutes there in the car to collect herself, to make up her mind to take this step away from Jess and into the future. 

It was the first time she’d ever passed up an opportunity like that.  In fact, she’d spent the last five years mastering the art of making something out of almost nothing, going so far with so very little to go on.  But now she just felt tired and homesick and thirsty.  She lifted her head with a sigh, and felt for the keys, still dangling from the ignition.  It would be so easy; just a twist of her wrist, and she could take it all back.  Fight for her old life, for Jess, one more time.  But the two minutes were up, and her car still sat parked on Constance Street, the decision made for her.

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five

It was shocking how much of that last encounter she was still able to remember, given the amount of alcohol permeating her blood cells at the time.  Catherine had only just left, which wasn’t saying much, considering she had never really moved all the way in, and already Alice was pinned against a wall, sweating gin and pulling Jess toward her by her belt loops.  Her hand had unceremoniously slipped beneath the waistband of Jess’s jeans, and she’d delighted in the way Jess was laughing, panting, moaning into her ear. 

And it was all happening so fast that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from gasping, “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

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four

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three

The note was waiting for her on the kitchen table when she got home from work:

                        Al-

Don’t sit home all night listening to Joni Mitchell or some other sad girl crap.  Don’t get drunk and go looking through those photo albums in the hall closet.  And definitely don’t clean the apartment.  I’ll be home in time for breakfast tomorrow, and I WILL KNOW if you’ve broken any of these rules.

                                                                                    Love,

                                                                                    Sam

            She smiled for a moment, in spite of herself, before going over to the stereo and flipping it on.  Joni Mitchell’s voice flooded out into the living room—

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68, and he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday

—as she returned to the kitchen to fix herself a glass of gin.  Taking a deep gulp of the stuff, she glanced at the clock over the stove.  In just a few minutes, she would turn twenty-three.

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