Elizabeth was up to many tricks these days. For instance, now there was always a pint of whiskey in the study closet in case she needed one or two supplementary sips, or in case James was not there for the night. Sometimes it made her remember the scene in The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland’s second bottle of rye, hidden in the chandelier, its shadow on the ceiling, but she knew she was nowhere near as far gone. This second bottle business was just a phase, but her secret frightened her: a furtive aristocrat who pushed wrapped empty pints down deep in the garbage can. She was drinking too much in the terror that James would find out how much she needed to drink.
But though, granted, a long one, it was a phase, so it would end.
“Here you are.”
He exhaled and began to rave. He was having an episode.
Why would anyone care about his version of things? He had no talent, no story to tell. It would be discovered that he was not nearly so bright as his grades and banter suggested. He was going to have to get a job.
He was turning out like his father, was in fact becoming his father, and would consequently grow fat and bald and would need bypass surgery.
One of his molars was abscessed. He would need an expensive crown, and he was running out of money, and when the dentist did the root canal, the tooth would splinter and have to be picked piece by piece out of his gums. It would make The Deer Hunter look like child’s play.
He had been under such financial and professional stress for so long that he was probably riddled with cancer. Soon his moles would begin to change color; sores wouldn’t heal.
Elizabeth brought him a salami and cheese sandwich.
He was incapable of truly loving another human being. He was a hoax. He was depressed and obsessed all the time. He was secretly so furious about so many things—his father, his height—that he couldn’t go ahead and let himself feel furious, because it would destroy him; if he let any of the black slime out, a flash flood of terrifying emotional pain and insanity would ensue.
She rubbed his neck.
He was probably going to become impotent pretty soon.
She studied his face, watched him go from animated despair to a wide-eyed numbness, saw the gaze of a dead man in a movie, where you can’t imagine how he can keep his eyes open and still for so long. She suspected that he felt like the knight in The Seventh Seal. She knew the feeling.
“What can I do to make you feel better?”
“You’re doing it. Being with you is helping.” He picked up a burnt match, toyed with it, drew a charcoal line down the middle of his index finger.
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“I just want to sit here and brood.”
“Okay.”
“What if I never sell the book?”
“If you do sell it, you’ll be faced with a brand new set of anxieties and doubts. About the reviews, and whether you have another book in you....”
“I don’t want to die without having published a book.”
“But writing is its own reward. It makes you happy.”
“Yeah, because I think I’m good. But if it turns out that no one else does, I have to face facts and start over. I have no idea what I’d like to be if I can’t be a writer.”
“One thing in your favor is that you work so hard. I think you’re going to make it. You’re brilliant, you’re funny, and you’re dedicated. You must put in forty hours a week. You know what Renata Adler said?”
“No.”
“That everybody likes to go around saying that writers write. But that, really, writers drink and sleep and talk on the phone, and that she had met very few writers who wrote at all.”
James smiled and lit a cigarette.
“So the odds are in your favor.”
“Oh, thanks, Elizabeth.” He hung his head.
“Now, let’s take another drink up to bed.”
“I won’t be able to get it up.”
“I don’t care. You look like you feel like crying.”
“Men don’t cry, Elizabeth.” He smiled at her.
A broad wedge of moonlight fell across Elizabeth’s bed. She lay on top of him, fully clothed, and told him the story of Rae and her magic weight-loss shorts. He laughed but lapsed back into his brood, so she rolled off and lay watching him. Finally he unbuttoned her blue silk blouse, unhooked and removed her bra, and put his head in the crook of her shoulder.
She stroked his fuzzy hair, ran her fingernails up and down his downy back, and shifted so as to nurse him. He buried his head in her breasts for the longest time.
When they made love, she couldn’t kiss him hard enough, would have chewed on his teeth if she could. They grew so slippery and wet together that she felt they were two hands, soaping each other in warm water.
Later, still and intertwined, they talked about nothing in particular. She knew how much better he felt, and it made her full and warm. She must be in love.
“Are you still awake?” she asked when his breathing grew soft.
“Yes,” he said drowsily. “I’m listening.”
She loved that he needed her. “James?” She felt him twitch.
“Vasco da Gama,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t take the pocket off.”
“Good night, James.”
***
Several days later, he took the Fergusons to a double bill in the city, at the Surf: Ninotchka first and then I Never Sang for My Father. Rosie fell in love with Garbo, and the three of them laughed their heads off.
“Wasn’t Melvyn Douglas handsome?” James asked. “Yes.”
Rosie dozed off during I Never Sang for My Father, awoke with a jerk, tried to watch the movie but couldn’t. She fell asleep again, with her chin on her chest, lurched back to consciousness, and finally gave up. Elizabeth put an arm around her shoulders, and Rosie slept against her chest.
James and Elizabeth held hands. Gene Hackman was terrific. Douglas, so tall and debonair in Ninotchka, was old and sick and tedious, had settled like the contents of a cereal box. Jesus. Could it really be the same person?
Toward the end, Elizabeth heard faint sniffling, detected a quivering of James’s shoulders. She took her hand out of his and put her arm around his shoulders. He sniffed loudly while taking a deep breath, collecting himself. Rosie was snoring softly. Elizabeth, holding them both, felt like a father.
Rosie slept all the way home in the back seat of his car, with his corduroy coat folded up to make a pillow. He lifted and carried her into the house, did not see her eyelids flutter open in the hall and then close again, did not see her small drowsy smile, the smile of a cat that has just had cream.
He smelled like a father to Rosie, smelled like Sharon’s, strong and clean. Marry Mama, marry me. Thinking she was asleep, he kissed her eyes. God Bless James, she prayed, and Mama, and Rae...
The next day, he asked Elizabeth if she wanted to read what he’d written so far.
Her heart stopped.
“Well, yeah. Sure.” What if it wasn’t good—would he truly want, and could she give, criticism? She thought no, on both counts.
“I can give you all but the last chapter of the first part. And I’ll be done with that in a week or so.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, I can wait a week.”
“It’ll be scary for both of us. That’s what’ll make it exciting.”
“I know it’s good. You work so hard, and you’re so good with words.”
“The best lines in it are yours.”
“What?”
“I’m going to have to share the by-line with you.”
It pleased one part of her, the part that was proud to have thoughts worth recording—it wasn’t theft, she had no use for them. But part of her worried that this was the reason, that James had an ulterior motive for loving her.
“Is there a kid in it?”
“Yes,” he said, “now there is; how did you know?”
“Will you get rid of me when my well runs dry?”
&n
bsp; “You and I are inexhaustible.”
If so, she thought, then they might marry and live together for a long time, so she absolutely must gain control of her drinking. She must stop letting herself go down the tubes, must not be a slave to it. But how? She meant to, pretended to, even sometimes tried to, but she knew the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and she couldn’t stand the reality that inner change was a journey of a thousand miles, one step at a time, like the Indian shuffle. She wanted to get quickly to wherever she was going, wanted to wake up already there. And on some nonconscious level she sensed that something in her had to play itself out—had to snap or hit rock bottom—before she would admit defeat, and change.
So when James proposed that they take “a bit” of acid, for the adventure of it, for the fun of it, and because he wanted to write a section on altered states of consciousness, she said yes. It was pushing her luck, utter lunacy, bad timing, she must be out of her mind. Or would be out of her mind, after the LSD. Which was an attractive prospect at certain moments, when her mind was a dulled battlefield, her worst and only enemy.
And if she could have foreseen the madness, foreseen the horror, foreseen how it would hasten the inevitable and unavoidable day, she would still have said yes.
One bright blue August afternoon, when Rosie was going to sleep at Sharon’s, they swallowed a weightless square of celluloid the size of a mica chip. Elizabeth felt great, beautiful and brave. It had been years since her last psychedelic adventure; six, to be exact, with Andrew in a cabin overlooking the Pacific Ocean—great fun, sex and laughter. James said that his friend had said it was the perfect light dose, and, as it turned out, it was.
They sat out on the porch swing half an hour later, waiting for the show to begin.
“Oh, well,” said James.
“Oh, well, what?”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Famous last words.”
“When will we be halfway to Barstow?”
“Soon.” She was only a little afraid: adventure.
After a few minutes more, he said, “Still not a thing,” looked down at his shoe, and asked Elizabeth if she would brush the spiders off it. They laughed. Booooooooooooom.
In a silent roar the world turns every color in the rainbow; Peter Maxian, kaleidoscopic and extravagant. The sky, garden, trees, and smoke from his cigarette are so beautiful and compelling that you have to laugh to have ever despaired: it is Heaven. She laughs.
His eyes are luminous green slats. Love for and trust in him purls in her blood. “I’m deliriously happy,” she says.
“So am I. You cannot imagine how beautiful you look.”
“It’s the drugs.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, so do you. Your eyes are so green right now that they’re making your lashes green.” And so on for six hours. Elizabeth becomes sentimental about the orangeness of an orange, the perfection of smell and sight and—ahhhh—taste; James becomes weepy at the glory of jade green kiwi cartwheels against a china-blue plate. Elizabeth, out loud, ponders the golden mean, le juste milieu, whether a human body is equidistant between the infinitesimally small and large, between quarks and stars. James, with much difficulty, manages to write this down in the notebook in his pocket, shows her the previous entry: Merton, p.35, thesoul’s structure. awareness, thought and love. Awareness, thought and love. Elizabeth’s mind is boggled with insight. So that’s what the soul is, a life-changing revelation. She understands what they mean by soul, for the first time in her life; she has one. She considers, as she considered the orange, the Elizabethness of Elizabeth: images from the past, major incidents of pain and loss and mortification that she’s carried around in her suitcase for all those years, come to her and she cries, thinking about her dead mother and father and husband; and she knows that every single thing that has ever happened to her parents and herself, and to James and his parents—backward in time like a geometric “St. Ives” progression—everything has happened to get her to this place, being with James and Rosie in a fine old house with a garden.
They make love in the sunlit bedroom, stoned out of their minds, requiring more trust than there are words for. The sensations are so intense and pleasurably disconcerting that it’s like standing at the edge of the surf, as a child, with the tail end of waves rushing through the sand under and around her feet, water rushing toward shore and back to sea at the same time so that it feels like skiing through water and sand.
Who could have thought up balls, those hairy, bleached figs? Staring lovingly at her lover’s wrinkles and blackheads was one thing, and somehow increased her faith and love, but staring from several inches away at his cock and balls and asshole is another: grotesque one second, fabulous in a laughable sort of way the next. The first time she had seen her own asshole, bending forward in a bathroom with mirrored walls, eight years old, repulsed and titillated, she had almost gasped out loud. Oh Jesus, she had forgotten, she had been caught bare-assed, examining the puckered brown hole, by her friend’s older brother. The most humiliating event to date. What could she have said: I dropped a contact? She laughs out loud at the memory and it is too loud and maniacal and his cock falls from her mouth and she feels his body stiffen, feels his mouth pulling away from her pussy, and in a split second the variety of terrified alienation and madness which is the reverse side of the LSD coin—the psychotic, demonically insane side—has bitten Elizabeth, and his penis looks obscene and ugly and threatening, and a frenzy starts up inside her and she feels she will forevermore live at the far end of the wind tunnel, in hideous distortion, living on the dark side of her soul, living in hell....
“What’s the matter, angel?” His voice brings her back to earth. It is James, James has shown up to save her from herself. She turns around and puts her face next to his, on the pillow, and he holds her, nuzzling. And she’s got a grip again by the skin of her teeth, hasn’t lost it, hasn’t had a great psychic blowout.
“Things got weird there for a second.” Boy, I love you, James, she thinks, looking into his peaceful bright-green eyes, into a new sort of inner space, not her own, and she’s not in the least bothered by the red fleshy lips on his forehead or the big gold ring in his nose.
“I’ll protect you,” he says.
Elizabeth has a rare cigarette with James, propped up on the pillows, amazed by the splendor of the room at dusk, at the warmth and softness of his leg against hers, at the silver blue doilies wafting from the Camels, glad to find herself not nearly so stoned as before.
“I’m coming down,” he says, looking at the V of his fingers holding the cigarette.
“Me too.”
“Cigarettes felt like cigars earlier. That was a day, Elizabeth, one of the favorite days in my life.”
“It was perfect.”
“I love that you giggle so much on acid.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I felt so happy with you all day that sometimes I couldn’t tell where you stopped and I started up.”
***
They came down off the acid as gracefully as a hot air balloon landing safe in the right meadow, a soft, cushioned bump and the wild stonedness was over. Elizabeth, feeling sexy and loved and exhausted, put on her white kimono and suggested Kahlua and cream.
“Perfect. Let’s bring it back up here to bed. I have a bit of jangles, do you?”
“Just a bit. There’s always that little bit of speed.”
“I think I’m still stoned; I’m just not tripping anymore.”
“Me too.”
“You sure look beautiful.”
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll go down and get it. Keep the bed warm for us.”
When she returned with the bottle of Kahlua, cream, and two wineglasses filled with ice, he was reading cummings by candlelight, with the radio turned to the classical station, smoking another cigarette.
“God!” he said. “I missed you so much!”
She set the tray on
the table by her side of the bed, and while she poured the thick dark liquor over ice, floated cream, he read to her: “‘Humanity I love you because you/are perpetually putting the secret of/life in your pants and forgetting/it’s there and sitting down.’”
“Cheers.” They clinked glasses, kissed, drank. He read more Cummings to her and they drank several Kahluas on very empty stomachs: Elizabeth had never felt such peace of mind in her life, could now understand what people meant by peace of mind.
“Are you still stoned?”
“In a funny way, yes.”
“Me too. But I’m so glad to have landed.”
“The speed’s still making me kind of jangly, though.”
“Have another drink,” she said.
“I sort of feel like smoking a doobie—you know? Just to take the edge off? Or would that be gilding the lily?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know.”
James put the book on the floor, began pawing through his effects on the night table until he located a hearty roach of sinsemilla and a match. “I want to smoke a little dope, drink another drink, make love, and fall asleep.”
“We’re out-of-control drug abusers,” she said, smiling and taking the joint. “But, you know. The Russians are coming.”
Several hits and minutes and half a drink later, listening in silence to a trumpet concerto, he turns to her.
“So,” he says, suppressing a smile.
“So,” she says, suppressing one too, and is horrified the next second to see that he looks like the devil, that the windstorm in the tunnel has started up again, that her room is a white vacuum with no borders and the walls, when they rematerialize, are crawling with spiders, and suddenly the world has turned inside out and it’s Days of Wine and Roses meets The Shining, and she knows that this time she will truly lose her mind.
It is like being stoned on a strobe light, with every color and texture roaring and flashing; even the silence is roaring and flashing and James’s face is frozen with terror, and they look to each other, seeing monsters, and they lie back on the pillows, not blinking, not touching, not loving each other, utterly alone.