At the end of February, on a Friday night, she starts a fight with Josiah for no reason and he’s not fighting back and it reminds me of my childhood, not the particulars of the dynamic, just, hazily, Mom and Dad fighting.
I leave the apartment. I go to a student party, and there I meet a man named Christopher, a watery-eyed sculptor with incredible bushy eyebrows, and I go home with him and we have breakfast together the next morning in a diner, fried eggs and toast with butter and jelly and orange juice made from concentrate and all the coffee in the world, and I hug him goodbye on the street and he asks me for my number and I tell him, “I don’t have one,” which is true. And then the next night I go out drinking in Wicker Park and I meet another man, sort of a grown-up guy with a real job, and we get extremely drunk and I go home with him and he tries to get me to give him a blowjob, not overly insistently but it’s still annoying, like just drop it already, buddy, I get that it’s your favorite thing in the world but it’s not my favorite thing in the world, and so I fake pass out until I actually do. His apartment is huge with high windows that face the street and in the morning the sunlight wakes me, and it’s deceptive, this sun, because I know outside it’s a bitter cold Chicago winter morning. I sneak naked across the apartment, the floors are freezing, and I shudder as I dress. When I walk outside the snow is dirty and I put my hand to my eyes. I have no idea where I am.
Eventually I find the Brown Line but I get on it in the wrong direction, and I don’t realize it for a few stops and then by the time I do it’s just easier to transfer to another line to get home, but then that train ends two stops before the one I need because of track construction. I think: Why am I being punished? Finally I arrive at Felicia’s, and silently we work together, both of us ignoring the fight I had witnessed a few days before, and my ensuing disappearance. I puke once in the afternoon and then that night I go to another student party, and I run into my friend Matthew, a sad-faced scarecrow, jittery, talented, incredibly sweet, and he feels suddenly like the only person on the planet I can talk to, so I go home with him and that feels good, I just collapse for a while, and he doesn’t want much from me, he just lets me be, and so I just sit.
My mother’s birthday is in mid-March, and I call her for the first time in two months and she says, “All I want for my birthday is for you to come home.” Which is strange because my mother is not an extraordinarily needy person when it comes to me. I wasn’t even sure she would notice I had moved to Chicago. And I say, “Mom, have you been taking your meds?” and she says, “What are you talking about, I don’t take medication,” and I say, “Oh, you just sounded like you needed some for a second,” and she says, “Why can’t you just say happy birthday to me like a normal person?” Then she hangs up on me. I couldn’t even be nice to my mother on her birthday. I am sorry now that I was so selfish then but I swear I was hanging on for dear life.
And now it’s the end of April, and Felicia’s upset about every single thing in her life. I’m on the floor, cross-legged, imitating calm, while Felicia stands above me complaining. The show, the Germans, the pipes, the plane, the students. She ignores my offer of assistance. Josiah and I exchange the lightest of glances, pointedly insignificant, but where else would I look? He was the only other person in the room not yelling. I think: Help me, tell me how to become a person she’ll love. I’ll never know what he was thinking, because Josiah was unknowable to me. When I look up at Felicia, she is twisting her head back and forth between us. I see on her face a presumption being formed. Josiah, across the room, also seated on the floor, suggests they take a walk together, she and him. “You take a walk,” she says. “The two of you. I can’t look at either of you.” She points toward the door. “Go.” I bend forward like an animal and make my way up awkwardly. Josiah crouches and then rises, lightning quick. Together we leave.
“We should probably drink something,” I say.
We go to a bar a few blocks away: fluorescent Old Style sign in the window, jukebox half indie rock, half blues, pool table, dartboards, Polish men. We order whiskey and beer. I eat every pretzel in the bowl and ask for another. I want him to tell me the truth, though about what, I do not know.
He tells me about his childhood, growing up in the cult. Intense day-, week-, and month-long Bible study sessions. Running out of money, often. Starving, often. A beautiful child, hair down to his waist. The father who freed him when he was fifteen. Family members spread across South America. The true-believer mother whom he alternately loathes and loves.
“I talk to her once a year on her birthday,” he says. “And even after everything, she always asks when I’m coming home.”
“I know that song,” I say.
“You think Felicia is tough but I’ve seen worse,” he says.
“I didn’t say Felicia was tough,” I say.
“I did,” he says, and we both laugh, and it is nice we are laughing, though I don’t think it’s about quite the same thing.
We go home, toasted, noisy, wired but still calmer than before. The house is empty, who knows where Felicia went? This is a trap, I think. Do not even hug him good night. I go to my room, by myself, proudly. Look at you, doing the right thing, I think. Look at you not sleeping with the wrong man for once.
But I might as well have done it, scaled him, straddled him, slid between his sheets. Because a glance is as meaningful as a fuck. There is Felicia at three a.m., drunk, knocking on the guest room door, soft, laughing, cursing, then loud, rude, sneering, saying things I can’t understand, until finally she opens the door and I hear one hissed, hovering word: Quit.
The next day I leave. I take a train back to New York. My brother is having a housewarming party; he and his smart, pretty, stable, magazine editor girlfriend have moved in together. All of his band members are there, and I very publicly and drunkenly pick one up and leave the party with him because apparently I want to destroy everything. I bum around the city with him for a few days, until we tire of each other. In his bedroom, desperate, I call my mother.
“I heard you’re a mess,” my mother says to me.
“I heard you’re a mess,” I snap.