I find my feet and crutch my way into the kitchen. The address book is still in the cabinet above the stove. I place a call to Jake’s apartment. As the phone rings, I look at the microwave and see that it is 2:54 a.m., but I remember that Jake is at a swanky hotel party and won’t be home until tomorrow, so I decide to leave a message.
Hello, you’ve reached Jake and Caitlin’s machine. Please leave a message after the beep. Beep.
“Jake, it’s your brother, Pat. I need a huge favor …”
Best Intentions
Pat,
It’s been a while, hopefully long enough.
If you haven’t ripped up this letter already, please read until the end. As you have discovered, I am a much better writer than I am a speaker at this point in my life.
Everybody hates me.
Did you know your brother came to my house and threatened to kill me if I made contact with you? His sincerity scared me—enough to keep me from writing earlier. Even my parents have reproached me for pretending to be Nikki. My therapist says my betrayal might not be forgivable, and by the way she kept repeating the word “unforgivable,” I could tell she was very disappointed in me. But the truth is, I did it for your benefit. Yes, I was hoping that once you found closure and got over Nikki, you would want to give me a shot—especially since we are such great dance partners, we both enjoy running, we are in similar housing situations, and let’s face it, we’re both fighting hard to maintain our grip on reality. We have a lot in common, Pat. I still believe you fell into my life for a reason.
Because I love you, I want to tell you something I have never told anyone—except my therapist. It’s sort of screwed up, so I hope you will be able to handle it. At first I wasn’t going to tell you, but I figured the situation couldn’t get any worse, and maybe a little honesty could go a long way right now.
I don’t know if you know this, but Tommy was a cop. He worked for the Meadowville Police Department and was assigned to the high school sort of as a counselor. So half of his hours were spent working with and counseling troubled teenagers, and the other half of his hours he was just a regular cop. I’m telling you this because it is important to understand that Tommy was a good man. He did not deserve to die, and his death absolutely proves that life is random and fucked-up and arbitrary, until you find someone who can make sense of it all for you—if only temporarily.
Anyway, Tommy was really good with teenagers, and he even started a club at the high school designed to raise awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving. Many of the parents thought the club condoned underage drinking, because it was not an anti-underage-drinking club but just an anti-drinking-and-driving club, so Tommy had to fight really hard to keep it afloat. Tommy told me that a lot of the high school kids drank every weekend, and underage drinking was even condoned by many of the town’s parents. And the funniest thing to me was that the kids came to him and asked him to start the club because they were worried that someone was going to get hurt or die if their friends kept driving home after parties. Can you imagine talking to a cop like that when you were a teenager? That’s the kind of guy Tommy was, people trusted him instantly.
So Tommy organized assemblies and even put together this teacher karaoke night where students could pay money to hear their favorite teachers perform the current hits. Tommy could talk people into doing things like that. I’d go to these events, and Tommy would be up on the stage with all those teenagers, and he’d be singing and dancing with the other teachers, all of whom he had convinced to dress up in wild costumes—and parents, students, administrators would be all smiles. You couldn’t help it, because Tommy was such a burst of positive energy. And he always gave speeches during these events—listing facts and statistics about drinking and driving. People listened to Tommy. People loved him. I loved him so fucking much, Pat.
A funny thing about Tommy was he liked to have sex a lot. He always wanted to make love. I mean, as soon as he got home from work, his hands were all over me. I’d wake up every morning and he’d be on top of me. We could hardly eat a meal together without his hands sliding under the table, searching for my legs. And if Tommy was home, there was no way I’d ever get through a television show, because as soon as a commercial came on, he’d be rock hard and giving me that look. It was pretty wild, and I loved it for the first ten years of our marriage. But after ten years of nonstop sex, I got a little tired of it. I mean—life is more than sex, right? So one bright sunny morning, after we had just finished making love under the kitchen table, the teakettle whistled, so I stood and poured two cups.
“I’m thinking maybe we should limit sex to so many times a week,” I said.
I’ll never forget the look on his face. He looked as if I had shot him in the stomach.
“Is something wrong?” he said. “Am I doing something wrong?”
“No. It’s not like that at all.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Is it normal to have sex several times a day?”