“I want a cigarette but I’m gonna wait till we leave instead of going outside now,” announced Carrie, apropos of nothing. She had something like twenty-two days clean — unless you counted chain-smoking, the last acceptable fix of the recovering junkie — and she was a mess, a ball of bad, shaky, nervous energy, constantly pulling at her lip and looking away. But fuck, she was cute.
“You look a little like Jean Seberg,” Mateo told her.
“Who’s that?”
“Are you serious?” he asked. “You never saw Breathless?”
“No. What’s that?”
“It’s a Godard movie.”
She shrugged at him. “I don’t know what that is, either.”
“He was a filmmaker.” Okay, he thought, so a cutie, but not so well versed. Where had she said she was from originally? Arizona? That probably explained that.
“Maybe you can show me the movie someday,” she said. She was glancing at him sideways while she pretended to look at the vast breakfast options on the laminated menu.
“That could be arranged,” he said in a coy kind of maybe-maybe voice.
It’s not like H ever came up. It was more like, when they swapped numbers before everyone parted ways outside of IHOP, he just knew it wasn’t a good idea. He didn’t tell his sponsor about it, just like he hadn’t told his sponsor he’d been thinking more and more about Hector, missing their dream sessions, wondering if Hector was in Palm Springs, not two hours away. He didn’t tell Drew and Christian. No wonder he felt so crappy that afternoon throwing all his shit in his bag, plucking those credit cards out of Drew’s wallet, out of her bag, on the kitchen table, and slipping out of the house while he knew she was deep in her writing time. He took the cards almost as a kind of self-guarantee; from here on out, it’d be easier to go ahead and use than to turn back around, hand over the cards to Drew, fess up to his aborted plans.
His heart was pounding as he clomped his way down the winding streets out of the hills toward Sunset. On some level, he knew he was going back to square one, undoing absolutely anything he had achieved in the past eighty-six days — that whole expensive time he’d spent at that second, fancy rehab with the yoga and the organic food, the goodwill he’d built up with Drew and Christian since he’d been out. And he knew the text he was about to send was wrong, that he was pulling someone else down with him. But he had no choice. The time had come. In his heart, he never really believed he’d go more than, say, ninety days without the stuff. That just wasn’t a viable way to live, and part of him pitied the AA people who truly believed it was. In fact, he liked the hard, pragmatic focus it took to sideline every other intervening thought and wend his way, deftly and efficiently, toward the prize. It was a bit like making art at its best — a clean, totalizing focus.
“U feel like hanging out?” he texted Carrie while waiting for a bus on Sunset, where every stray glance from the folks around him — the elderly ladies in faded housedresses and the Honduran cleaning women in T-shirts and jeans — seemed to signaclass="underline" We know what you’re about to do. But whoa, he was free! L.A. had never felt like this before, a wide-open playground. He could probably hook this up with Carrie, but even if he couldn’t, he knew he’d do it by some other means, probably within hours. There was the joy of that wild, blank canvas in front of him. Which reminded him. . ATM? He knew he had only so much time to get resources before Drew and Christian discovered the cards were absent and canceled them. He hit an ATM outside a convenience store, withdrew the maximum allowed sum of $400, then, still enjoying the hard, lean focus of liberation, trucked it with his bag a few more blocks until he came to another ATM and took out another max of $400.
Right after that, he got Carrie’s text: her address, then “u coming now?”
“u bet,” he texted back.
“u r not far. take the bus south on Alvarado.”
She gave him more detailed directions after that and he started walking. Eventually he got to Westlake, her nondescript neighborhood, found her pale yellow apartment complex with the scraggly palms outside, buzzed her unit until she let him in, then walked down a dim hallway with faded industrial carpeting and water stains on the ceiling.
Carrie answered the door in a tank top and cutoff jean shorts, barefoot. “Heeey,” she said, her eyes widening at the sight of his huge duffel bag. “What’s up with the bag?”
“Well,” he began, taking in her place: an ill-lit studio with a futon, a thirty-two-inch TV, a laptop and speakers, piles of clothes everywhere, and a poster of Debbie Harry circa 1979 on the wall over the futon. “I’m over it. I’m just over it. I’ve had enough.”
She took a few paces back from him. “You’re going back to New York?”
He hadn’t even thought that far ahead. “First I really just wanna get high,” he said. There, he’d said it. He shrugged and laughed sheepishly.
Carrie put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, shit. Really?”
“Couldn’t you kind of get that’s what I was talking about when I asked if you wanna hang out?”
She put her arms around herself. “Well, I mean, I wasn’t really sure.” She continued hugging herself nervously. He knew she had about thirty days clean at that point, her most time ever. But here was where he had to have discipline, focus! Human feeling must be pierced through with laser precision if he was going to pull this off.
“I would like to do this with you just once,” he said. He knew he had to work fast. He stepped toward her and took her face in his hands, massaging toward the back of her neck, down her bare shoulders. “We can both go back and start counting again after that.”
“Oh God,” she said. She had her hands on his arms now but she wasn’t exactly pushing him away. “It’s been so hard getting to this point.”
“I need a break from the effort,” he said.
She made a tortured sound, digging her nails into his arms. “Mateo, you have to go,” she finally said.
They stared at each other. He knew he was giving her the blank, lost, little-boy sheepdog look. How to play this? he wondered. Perhaps best to walk it back for a moment.
So he did, literally. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll find my own. Sorry I came over. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“I wish you’d just go to a meeting,” she said. “Do you want to go right now?” Carrie had a car, a crappy little 1994 Civic.
He couldn’t tell her he felt it was too late for that — his bag was packed, the credit cards were stolen. “I’m just gonna go do my own thing,” he said, reopening the door to leave. He turned back, kissed her quickly on the forehead. “Take care of yourself.”
He felt the loneliness he was leaving behind: her single, sad room; the total lack of connection to L.A. except for those early, tenuous friendships in meetings; the TV with a talk show on low volume. He was counting on it.
And it worked. Carrie sighed. “Put your bag down, Mateo. We can drive over to a guy I know.”
Ding, ding, ding. Now was the time to play it carefully. He turned. “You can just call him for me and I can go myself,” he said. “You don’t have to be part of this.”
She’d turned to put on her flip-flops, grab her car keys and sunglasses. “Just shut up,” she said flatly, averting her eyes as she walked past him toward the door. And there he felt the moral split! Look what you’ve just done, he thought, you are the devil, basically. But he also thought: Mission accomplished. Now he just had to be steely and keep all ambivalence and feeling tamped down until the spike went in.