Authors: Pamela Klaffke
What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?
This pounds through my head as I walk—it’s a recorded loop set to an annoying and infectious beat that I just can’t shake.
What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done
?
I flag a taxi. It’s effortless, like it is for those smiley girls-on-the-go in tampon commercials. I check my bag to make sure I have a handful, which I do, and ask the driver to take me to Pointe-Claire. I don’t know the exact address but I think I remember how to get there. I wash three Advil—no, four—down with the iced tea and wait for the pain in my head to subside, which I’m sure it will by the time I make it to Ted and Gen’s. Or is it just Gen’s now? Ted may have fucked Eva, but he’s too guilty to screw Gen out of the house, if she even wants it, that is. I don’t know if I would. I think I might want something new, plus it would be best to be the one to walk out and give the big fuck-you to the asshole who fucked you over. Maybe Gen’s not going to be there and instead I’ll find Ted, drunk on cheap cans of beer, answering the door in his boxers, his eyes red from crying and consumption. I won’t offer him even one of my Advil.
I instruct the driver to go up the main street and then turn so we drive past Eva’s parents’ house. From there I know it’s six blocks, a left and two rights. This may not be the most efficient way to get there, but it works and the driver doesn’t complain: the fare comes to over forty dollars.
I ring the doorbell and practice my face—looking down, sad, sheepish, ashamed and upset. The box with my new keyboard is long and awkward under my arm and just as the door opens I drop it. “Fuck!” I scramble to the ground to pick it up only to find a bemused-looking Ted staring at me.
“Always graceful,” he says. He doesn’t seem drunk and he’s fully clothed. He looks tired but not a mess.
“Can you just tell me where Gen is?” I’m not here to talk to Ted.
“She’s upstairs with Olivier.”
Gen is here. Gen is here? Ted is here. “Can I talk to her?” I shouldn’t have to ask permission to speak to my best friend.
Ted steps outside and closes the front door. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Sara.”
“But, what? She’ll talk to
you?
I’m not the one who cheated on her—that would be you.”
“I know, and we’re working through this. But she thinks you betrayed her.”
“By not telling her you were fucking Eva?” This is insanity.
This
is what I should be writing the book about and pitching to Ellen’s agent.
“She’s pretty upset. She says she can’t trust you anymore.”
“But she can trust
you?
”
“We’re working on it. We’re
married
. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t want to understand.”
“You should go. I don’t want to upset her any more than she already is.”
“Of course you don’t.” My voice drips with sarcasm. Ted watches me balance the keyboard box under my arm and hoist my bag to a secure spot on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he says. I see now that his eyes are rimmed red.
“So am I.” There’s nothing else to say so I go. I avoid walking by Eva’s parents’ house but find my way back to the main street all the while keeping an eye out for a taxi. I’m no longer a smiley girl-on-the-go in a tampon commercial but a puffy, sweaty mess of a woman carrying a box with a new keyboard and fighting a nasty hangover headache. And there are no taxis—no taxis at all.
“Hey, sexy. I thought it was you.” It’s Ben, Rockabilly Ben, Eva’s ex-boyfriend Ben who kissed me the night of her cocktail party.
“Not too sexy today, I’m afraid.”
“You’re lookin’ good to me.” The stupidity of his words evaporate when he looks at me. “What’re you doing around here? I thought you were allergic to the suburbs.”
“I am.” I play with one of my short ponytails.
“You must be traumatized.”
“I am.” I’m flirting. I can’t help it.
“I guess I’m going to have to buy you a drink.”
“I guess so.”
“There’s a pub about two blocks from here.” Rockabilly Ben moves closer to me. He lights a cigarette and my impulse is to ask him to put it out—people are staring. Street smoking makes suburbanites hostile. A woman walks by us and lets out a loud—I’m guessing fake—cough. Rockabilly Ben is oblivious.
“I have a better idea,” I say. “Do you have a car?”
I wait for Rockabilly Ben at the end of the driveway of his parents’ house as he fetches the car and says whatever a twenty-four-year-old man who still lives with his parents says when he’s heading into the city with a thirty-nine-year-old
unemployed woman who’s lost her best friend and has a great idea for a book but no idea what it is.
He drives a black SUV that I suspect is his mother’s because there’s a customer loyalty punch card from a tea-to-go shop I noticed on the main street and Rockabilly Ben doesn’t strike me as a tea drinker or the kind of guy who would use a customer loyalty punch card unless it was for cigarettes and buy-five-get-the-next-one-free smoking incentives are surely illegal. Ben tells me how sexy I am at least a half-dozen times and this makes me feel good and turned on through the fog of my hangover. He may well be saying I’m sexy, I’m sexy, I’m sexy because he doesn’t know what else to say, but I choose to believe he says it because I am sexy. I make a point of filling in the conversation gaps with rants about Ted and Gen. Rockabilly Ben agrees that Gen shouldn’t punish me for what her husband did. Neither one of us mentions Eva.
My apartment smells like stale smoke, liquor and some sickly scented spray air freshener that’s supposed to replace all those bad smells with the fresh scent of early-morning dew but doesn’t. Rockabilly Ben says nothing about this. He finds his way to the kitchen where, surprisingly, there’s an unopened bottle of French red on the counter and he opens it. He doesn’t take off his shoes. As soon as a whiff of wine hits my nose I involuntarily gag. I pour a glass of water to chase down the wine and keep me from puking.
Ben kisses me hard and tells me he wants to fuck me, that he wanted to fuck me that night at Eva’s. I giggle and purr and touch his chest through his T-shirt. He takes my hand and leads me to the living room. He sits on the couch and pulls me to him but won’t let me sit. I stand in front of him and
he touches my breasts. He runs his hand over my belly and I flinch. It’s soft and pudgy and I don’t want him to know that. I try to guide his hands but he pushes them away. He pops the button on the front of my jeans and slides his fingers down. I squirm and jump back. My period. Fuck.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Yes, you can.” He holds my legs between his and pins my hands behind my back.
“I have my period.”
He laughs. “And that means I can’t fuck you?”
I start to explain that usually, in my experience, it’s the guys that you’re having a long-term relationship with, the guys that you live with who think they might change your mind about never wanting to get married and having kids who will fuck you on your period. Ben rolls his eyes and growls, “I’m not one of those guys.”
He’s not. I like this and he fucks me after I go to the bathroom to pull out my tampon. He tells me to strip, after which he keeps my hands pinned behind my back. He shoves a cushion under my hips and fucks me on the living room floor while I bleed and come three times. He flips me onto my back and positions my feet over his shoulders. I’m spread and open, bloody and wet. He grabs the Polaroid from the coffee table and the flash hits my eyes just as I’m about to come again. We take a wine break and move to the bedroom and he fucks me some more until I feel raw and swollen and sore. He holds me down, restrains my body with his, he teases me and fucks me relentlessly until there’s blood all over the sheets and we’re both spent.
He asks me to set the alarm for 4:00 a.m. He has to be back in Pointe-Claire early, for work. I do as I’m told and fall asleep.
The bleating of the alarm startles me. I roll over and there’s Ben, sitting up, pulling on his black jeans. I want him to fuck me again. I tell him this and he screws up his face. “Can’t. Gotta go to work.”
“Maybe later, then?” I say, too eagerly. I prop myself up on an elbow and arrange the sheets so they’re covering my breasts and most of the bloody mess underneath.
“Sure. Yeah, maybe. Look, Sara—I gotta run.” He looks at the clock.
“I know. Work. What kind of work do you have to do this early on a Sunday?”
“It’s a publishing thing.”
“Publishing thing?”
“It’s just a part-time thing until my band gets going again—we’re looking for a new drummer.”
“That’s tough.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So what’s the publishing job?”
“It’s just temporary.” He finds his wallet in his back pocket, pulls out a card and drops it on the bed. “I’m late—I gotta go. It was great running in to you.”
“Yeah, you, too,” I say as he walks out of the bedroom.
Ben Miller, Independent Adult Carrier Contractor.
The front door opens then clicks shut. I look at the card again and decipher the language. Rockabilly Ben is a paperboy—a paperboy with a business card.
Kick back the covers and assess the damage. Menstrual blood stains the sheets in Rorschach blobs. One resembles a two-headed baby and this makes me laugh. I would have made a terrible mother.
What have I done? What have I done
? The chant starts again but it’s worse this time—this time I know the answer.
What have I done
? I’ve quit my job, I’ve left my boyfriend, I’ve lost my best friend, I’ve fucked a paperboy and I still haven’t picked up my dry cleaning. Jesus. I’ve fucked a paperboy. This is what I’ve done.
I had options, I know this, I read it in Ellen Franklin’s book, which is really quite good and smart and I’m thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have returned that extra copy I had because I could have sent it to Gen and she might see past this
married
thing and see that there’s more than Ted and her reality show and her house in the suburbs—there’s me and it’s not too late to make that chick-flick. I had options and I chose to fuck a paperboy. The saddest thing is I’d do it again and have spent the morning masturbating in my bloodstained bed to thoughts of Rockabilly Ben holding me down and fucking me hard.
After noon I resolve to get out of bed and do something—anything. I change the bedsheets, I shower, I am clean but feel anything but as I stand in the center of the living room surveying the damage. Two-day-old wine bottles, ashtrays on
overflow, stacks of Polaroids and open notebooks remind me of Ellen and that tomorrow is Monday and that I’m supposed to call her agent Tuesday and give her the rundown of my fabulous book idea. More pressing, however, are the red spots on the rug from the menstrual fucking, though on close inspection I’m sure I could get away with telling people it’s wine. And there’s the Polaroid that Ben took, a close-up of my face right before I came. The picture is fuzzy and I’m slack-jawed, my eyes half-closed. I look pained. I shove the picture into my notebook upside-down between two random pages.
I’ve quit my job, I’ve left my boyfriend, I’ve lost my best friend, I’ve fucked a paperboy and I’m dizzy and short of breath but there’s no mutant baby to blame.
I gather my things: Lila’s notebooks, my notebook, a box of tampons, Ellen’s book, the Polaroid camera and a makeup bag. I check my wallet for the dry-cleaning ticket. I find it and my breathing steadies. I fucked a paperboy. I have to go.
I call Esther on my cell in the taxi on my way to her place. She asks me how I’m feeling and I tell her not so good and she insists I come over right away. I feel like an asshole and a baby. I offer Esther money—I can pay her to let me stay for a few days, to clear my head. She refuses the offer and makes me tea, which makes me feel small and useless. I can’t think of anything to give her in exchange for her kindness. But I can’t think about her kindness for too long because I’ll start crying and want to hurl myself into a four-liter box of wine. I tell Esther about Jack and Gen and my job and my alleged book. I leave out the part about Rockabilly Ben.
Esther finds a pair of short-sleeved black cotton pajamas in a drawer in Lila’s room and then I’m wearing the dead
woman’s clothes again and things seem better and like I could sleep for a thousand years.
I wake up in Lila’s bed. I’m sore all over and my eyes are sticky. Esther stands in the doorway with a cup of what I’m hoping is coffee, not tea. “We have an appointment in an hour,” she says. “Help yourself to anything in the closet.” She hands me the mug. It’s coffee. I want to give Esther a reward, an international prize.
“What kind of appointment?” I ask.
“Doctor, then lawyer. You need to get your affairs in order, my dear.”
I don’t have affairs—I have unconventional relationships. Ted has affairs. Cunts like Eva have affairs. But I know what Esther means and I’m too tired for clever wordplay.
The doctor is old, probably as old as Esther, and his hands are clammy and look like raw chicken skin. He asks me questions about exercise and smoking and eating and drinking. I say I walk a lot and that I only smoke when I drink and I lie when I say I don’t drink much. He asks about the regularity and flow of my periods, he listens to my heart and asks me to breathe deeply in and out while he listens to my back with a cold stethoscope. He orders blood work and gives me a sterile plastic cup with an orange lid to pee in and deliver to the lab when I go in for the blood tests. He asks me many questions about stress and takes my blood pressure, which is a bit high but not particularly worrisome. He says I’m having anxiety attacks. He says I’m a good candidate for generalized anxiety disorder but can’t be sure so he refers me to a psychologist and prescribes me Ativan, which I know is a tranquilizer, to calm me down. He tells me to take the medication on an
as needed
basis, which I interpret to mean
pretty much all
the time
. He tells me not to drive when I’m on it; he says not to drink. He tells me to come back for a refill if the problem persists, which I know I’ll tell him it does even if it doesn’t. Before I leave he reminds me to be sure to call the therapist.
I’m disappointed that the pills are so small and that the doctor has only prescribed me thirty. We stop at the pharmacy and wait until the annoyingly thorough pharmacist rattles off every possible side effect one by one in the slowest voice ever, pausing between each
dry mouth
and
drowsiness
for me to signal that I understand with an
uh-huh
or nod of my head. Esther drives me to the lab for my blood work. I tell her I can do it tomorrow, but she won’t hear of it. “If you wait until tomorrow it’ll never get done,” she says, so I pout the whole time in the waiting room, brooding and silent, reading three-month-old copies of
People
with the crossword puzzles done in ink with incorrect answers. Hilary Duff did not star on
Full House
.
The Ativan kicks in by the time I’m sitting in a chair in a tiny room with a strip of elastic around my upper arm and a needle shoved in my vein. The drug makes me mellow and calm but I can’t look at the needle. I wonder which I would be worse at: being an intravenous drug user or the mother of a two-headed mutant baby. Thoughts of the two-headed mutant baby prompt me to think of Jack, who may be, could be, might be in town now. I hope he works things out with Ted and
Snap
and I feel bad for not feeling more, but maybe that’s the one side effect the pharmacist failed to mention.
At lunch I want to order wine, which I think is perfectly reasonable since it’s after noon and I’m eating—and I’m not alone. It’s social. I’m a social drinker—this is what I told the doctor and now this information is official because it’s documented in a file in the office of an old doctor in Montreal
with clammy hands that look like raw chicken skin. I skip past the poultry selections on the menu and order a spinach salad with bacon and chopped hard-boiled eggs. Gen ate this kind of thing a lot after Olivier was born, when she was avoiding carbohydrates. Esther orders a toasted turkey sandwich—no wine, only mineral water, and I change my order to the same.
I tell Esther about Ellen’s agent and my genius book idea that I can’t recall. I feel no shame explaining this to Esther. She’s seen me fucked up and babbling, crying and incoherently drunk and the Ativan numbs me enough to be able to talk about my idiocy without worrying about tears or pride. When I tell her I blacked out she doesn’t seem surprised.
“There are notes, but I can’t make sense of them,” I say.
“You could call Ellen—fish around about the book. Ask her for advice on talking to her agent. Tell her you’re nervous.”
This could work. I want to hug Esther, but of course I don’t. The drugs have me loose and slumped in my chair and I’m content to watch the waitresses smile and take orders, and listen to the people at the table behind us laugh and wonder what could possibly make them so happy.
The lawyer’s name is Susan and she’s the daughter of a friend of Esther’s. She’s forty—Esther told me this on the ride over—with severe hair and a no-nonsense manner. There are three pictures on her desk: one of her wearing sunglasses and a giant backpack and grinning at the peak of a big, impressive mountain; one of her huddled over a table of umbrella drinks with a group of women in leis; and a professionally shot picture of Susan and two German shepherds. No husband, no kids—we’re not that different, I suppose, except for the mountain climbing and Hawaiian getaways and the dogs and
the fact that I’m sitting stoned on prescription drugs in her office wearing a dead woman’s dress and trying to forget that I fucked a paperboy and she’s a grown-up sitting behind a mahogany desk asking me questions about my business that I can’t answer. I swear I see an actual sneer when I shrug and say
I’m not sure
for the trillionth time. I sign the papers where Susan tells me to and her assistant takes my credit card information and now Susan is my lawyer. She shakes my hand and says she’ll write a letter requesting full disclosure of
Snap
’s finances and have the documents couriered to her for review. I think she hates me but I couldn’t care.
Once I’m back at Esther’s I’m feeling very
proactive.
Ted was always feeling
proactive
and encouraging me to be
proactive,
too, or at least not mock him endlessly about using the term
proactive.
He’d be proud of me now, taking matters into my own hands, calling Ellen Franklin, seizing the fucking day like a teenage Ethan Hawke in
Dead Poets Society.
Ted would be proud—he might be—but now I’m the shrew with a mountain-climbing lawyer on retainer. My anxiety returns with a familiar thud—a fat man is sitting on my chest and it’s hard to breathe. I set down the phone halfway through dialing Ellen and pop another Ativan into my mouth before trying again.
“Heeey, Ellen. It’s Sara.”
Do I sound stoned?
“Hey, Sara. I was just thinking about you. I talked to my agent this afternoon and she’s really keen to talk to you. She said Ballast Books is looking for new titles for its
Ordinary Lives
series. She thinks it could be a good fit—just pitch her tomorrow and whip up a proposal she can shop.”
Sure. I’ll whip something up.
“Sure. I’ll whip something up,” I say.
“And don’t forget you’re mine on Friday night.”
“Friday…”
Friday?
“The interview for my book.”
“That’s
this
Friday, right.”
It could have been next Friday, the one after that, some Friday next year. This is not impossible.
“I’ll call you at seven—and no cocktails until after we’re done.” Ellen says this playfully, but I know she’s not kidding. I pull the quilt covering Lila’s bed up over my head as if it’s going to shield me from the reality that Ellen knows I’m a fucked-up lush.
“I’m not sure if I’ll be home, so I’ll call you.”
I never want to go home to the smell of cigarettes and wine and paperboy fucking and the dirty sheets in the hamper and the stains on the living room rug.
“And where might you be? Something you’re not telling me?”
Yeah, that I never want to go home to the smell of cigarettes and wine and paperboy fucking and the dirty sheets in the hamper and the stains on the living room rug.
Ellen would understand about Rockabilly Ben; she’d probably laugh and ask for details. I’ll tell her another time. “Nothing too exciting—I’m staying at Esther’s.”
“Lila research. Smart. You’re barely out of
Snap
and you’ve dived headfirst into something new. Your focus amazes me, Sara.”
My eyes are at half-mast but I press on. Maybe my focus is amazing. I’m sitting in the den off Esther’s living room, which is really more of a nook, tapping away at Esther’s antiquated PC, trying to gather information about Ballast Books and this
Ordinary Lives
series Ellen was talking about. Ballast Books publishes those books about regular people that everyone’s always surprised are so interesting.
Because everyone has a story.
That’s their slogan. It takes me an hour to navigate the pub
lisher’s Web site to learn this. Esther has a dial-up modem and after an hour of waiting for pages to load and for
graphics that cannot be displayed
I’m fraught and wired and I call the phone company and order Esther a high-speed Internet connection for the new Mac that I’ve arranged to have delivered tomorrow. And there’s not enough Ativan in the world to stop me from helping myself to a glass of wine as Esther putters in the kitchen. She’s making Lila’s casserole for dinner.
Do I ask Esther if I can write a book about Lila? Do I tell her? This is not something I know how to do so I fumble and choke on my babble until Esther stops me. “Sara, dear. Whatever are you getting yourself so worked up about?”
“I’m writing a book about Lila—I want to write a book about Lila.”
Esther sets down her fork. “I see. And this is the book you’re going to be talking to your friend Ellen’s agent about tomorrow?”
I nod. “I remember now. The notes make sense. You see, there’s this series of books called
Ordinary Lives
, and it’s very successful, but the whole point is that these ‘ordinary lives’ aren’t ordinary at all, and obviously Lila’s life was anything but ordinary so Ellen thinks it would be a good fit, and I have some of her notebooks already and maybe you could help fill in the blanks for me?”
“It’s an interesting idea. I have no doubt that Lila would have loved it. It’s an awfully ambitious project, Sara. Are you sure you’re up for it?”
I have no fucking idea.
“I think so. It might be good for me—for my focus.”
“Well, then. We’d better get straight to work after dinner.”
Esther lays out Lila’s notebooks chronologically—all of
them, including ones I haven’t seen before—on the floor in Lila’s bedroom, in front of the shelves of vintage magazines that get me more flustered and lusty than I ever was for Jack. We start from the beginning; the first notebook begins shortly after Lila married—at twenty, Esther says. There are pictures of an apartment, a man, the same man she’s posed with in the picture where she wears the dress with the jagged neckline and looks so unhappy,
Portrait of a Lady Undone
. “That’s Luc,” Esther says. “Lila’s husband. He was very dashing from what I heard—certainly handsome.”