Michelle was taken aback by the man’s bluntness. She had wanted to talk to him. Paul was very annoying but he was also sort of wise.
Do You Love Beatrice? she blurted. Do You Really, Really Love Her For Real?
Of course, Paul said.
No — Really, Really Love Her? Or Are You Just Resigned To Her? Is She Your Habit? And Speaking Of Habits, Should You Really Be Spending All Your Time Dreaming?
One world is the same as the next, go to the world you like best, Melissa. He sighed. Are you afraid love is not actually real because you’re experiencing romantic sadness?
Michelle nodded. I Think It Might Just Be Like Sexual Attraction Plus Codependency. Desire Plus Your Own Personal Damage Melding You To Another.
Interesting, Paul stroked his grimy beard. I do think we have an interesting relationship with personal damage in this culture. The ways our lives, our families, and our childhoods ruin us is exactly what makes it possible to be in relationships with other people. If I hadn’t been raised by such a depressed mother, could I tolerate Beatrice’s constant weeping? I think it would creep me out.
It Is Disturbing, Michelle confirmed.
I’m sure it is. But it feels familiar to me and I accept it and I don’t try to make Beatrice change, you know. She can cry all she wants. I buy her hankies.
Why Is She Always Crying?
She’s just sad, Paul said. Some people feel that more than others. Anyway, listen, love is real, I love Beatrice very much, I love her because I am a damaged person, not in spite of it — damage opens your heart, you know, if you allow it to — and, oh, that’s all I have for you. Good luck with the rest of your life. I wanted to give you the bookstore.
For Real? Like I Can Have It?
Yeah, take it. We’re done. We’re retiring. We don’t need anything, I mean we’ve got enough food in the house for the rest of time — we’re not expending very much energy sleeping so we don’t need a lot. We’re just going to sleep as much as we can until the world ends.
What About Joey? Michelle asked. Shouldn’t He Inherit It? I Just Started Working Here.
Oh, Joey picked up his heroin habit again, Paul said with a shrug. I don’t think he’ll be around much. I made sure he had food, but junkies don’t eat a lot.
That’s Not Good, Michelle said.
It’s fine, Paul said. The worst thing that can happen is he dies a few months before he dies. It makes him happy. It gives him better dreams, he told me. Paul clapped his hand on the counter, done. So, do what you like. He gestured around the store. There’s a safe under that patch of peeling linoleum in the back room. The key for it is on that key ring, one of those. Buy yourself some food, canned stuff, that’s all you’re going to need. If Joey comes by, you know, share it all with him, but it’s yours I’d say. Nice knowing you, Melissa. He smiled through the web of his beard. Who would’ve known when you got hired here that I’d end up giving you the place? That you’d be the last human I spoke to, huh? He shook his tangles. You gotta love life, just for things like that. Gotta love it. Listen. His sleepy, bloodshot eyes widened with a sense of seriousness and bore into Michelle’s like they were seeking out her soul. There’s not enough time on the planet for you to get over your heartache, but you should just trust that if things hadn’t all gone to shit you would’ve gotten over it. You would have been in love a bunch more, I can feel it. You’re one of those people. I bet you fall in love easy, don’t you?
Michelle shrugged. I Suppose.
Nothing to be ashamed of. Doesn’t make the love less real. It’s just your state. It’s a gift. Anyway, you’ll probably never love again, but just know that you would have. Just know that. Sayonara. The man lumbered out the door, exiting with the familiar chime. He was no longer her boss. Michelle looked around her workplace, the bookstore. She was a business owner. She owned a bookstore. It had ceased being a functional bookstore, of course, and was more of a strange library, a place for addicts and fragile people to come out of the killing sun and find some peace, maybe leave with a book or a dollar in their pocket. Michelle supposed it was becoming a sort of social service agency, which was not the worst thing.
She locked the door and grabbed the ring of keys from beneath the register. There were about fifty keys on it, all sort of grimy, stinking of metal. She rattled them in her hand as she walked to the back room, that corner of linoleum. She’d kicked it idly during lunch breaks, listening to the flick flick flick of it beneath her combat boot as she heated up leftover pasta in the microwave. She pulled it back and saw the cubby that had been created beneath it, found the solid safe, heaved it out with some difficulty.
On the twelfth key the top came off. Lots of money was inside. Michelle could imagine an earlier moment, maybe even last week, when finding such booty would have filled her with adrenaline, such joy, that she would have had to lie her body down on the floor and wait till the feelings passed into something functional. But the money looked oddly like any collection of anything. A box of seashells, a jar of marbles, a store full of books. Paul was right, all she really needed was food. She’d stopped paying rent and that seemed fine. She’d stopped drinking and cigarettes didn’t work without alcohol to both feed the compulsion and numb her of its grossness — the stink, her moist and yellowy fingers, the swamp in her lungs. Michelle needed hardly anything and now had more than enough to secure it for her. She took out a small bundle of cash and sunk the safe back into its cache beneath the floor.
22
Michelle had stopped drinking — because it was killing her. This story isn’t bound by what really happened, but Michelle’s sobriety in this book and in life is a rare moment of narrative resolution. She’d be a fool not to exploit it.
But telling it, really telling it, would be too much. Michelle tried to encapsulate it in a sort of montage, like Rocky Balboa training for his big fight. Flash, Michelle meditates. Flash, she overcomes a moment of craving. Flash, she learns how to pray. Flash flash flash she goes to a bunch of AA meetings and gets a sponsor, someone she can’t write about because of the anonymity thing. Actually, Michelle worries that writing about AA violates the anonymity thing.
Michelle could make Michelle get sober without AA, but that would encourage any alcoholics who deeply want to believe they can do it on their own. I mean, who wants to go to meetings in churches and listen to weird strangers who’ve ruined their life talk about God? Michelle didn’t. She, too, tried to get sober without AA and found that her twisted life minus the familiar coping tool of alcohol was more hellish than a hangover. She hadn’t known then that people went to AA to learn how to live. She thought it was a support group for losers who needed help with the fact that their life would never be fun ever again.
Michelle didn’t want it to seem like she was the rare person who could get sober and achieve actual sanity without AA. And Michelle thought it was weird that she could write a bunch of stories about being wasted all the time but then couldn’t write honestly about how she had become sober. But from here on out, Michelle doesn’t drink anymore.