I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I eased my haunches down on the floor in a pile of pillows — there was no furniture in the usual sense — and shrugged out of my coat. It was hot as a steam-bath, Helen had left the room through a set of bead curtains that were still clacking, and a beer had magically appeared in my hand. I tried to relax, but the image of what was to come and what was expected of me and how exactly to go about it without ruining everything weighed on me so heavily even the chugging of the beer had no effect. Then Helen returned in a white terrycloth robe, her hair freshly brushed and shining. “So,” she said, settling into the pillows beside me and looking suddenly as vulnerable and uncertain as I, “you want to get high?”
We smoked hash. We listened to music, very loud music — Buffalo Springfield; Blood, Sweat and Tears; the Moody Blues — and that provided an excuse for not saying much of anything beyond the occasional murmur as the pipe was passed or the lighter sprang to life. The touch of her hand as we shared the pipe set me on fire though and the music invested me with every nuance and I thought for a while I was floating about three feet above the floor. I was thinking sex, she was thinking sex, but neither of us made a move.
And then, somehow, Adele was there, compact, full-breasted Adele, with her sheenless eyes and the dark slash of her bangs obliterating her eyebrows. She was wearing a pair of black pantihose and nothing else, and she settled into the pillows on my left, languidly reaching for the pipe. She didn’t say anything for a long while — none of us did — and I don’t know what she was thinking, so natural and naked and warm, but I was suffering from sensory overload. Two women, I was thinking, and the image of my father and my sad dumpy mother floated up in my brain just as one of the cats climbed into Adele’s lap and settled itself between her breasts.
That was when I felt Helen’s hand take hold of mine. She was standing, and she pulled me to my feet with surprising force, and then she led me through the bead curtains and down a hall and into her bedroom. And the first thing she did, before I could take hold of her and let all the rest unfold, was shut the door — and lock it.
AND SO WE MOVED in together, in the house that started off smelling of freeze-dried mouseshit and wound up taking on the scent of patchouli. I was content. For the first time I was off on my own, independent, an adult, a man. I had a woman. I had a house. Two cats. Heating bills. And I came home to all that pretty religiously for the first month or two, but then, on the nights when I was working and Helen wasn’t, I started staying after closing with Jimmy Brennan and a few of the other employees. The term Quaalude speaks to me now when I think back on it, that very specific term that calls up the image of a little white pill that kicked your legs out from under you and made your voice run down like a wind-up motor in need of rewinding. Especially when you judiciously built your high around it with a selection of high-octane drinks, pot, hash, and anything else you could get your hands on.
There we were, sitting at the bar, the music on full, the lights down low, talking into the night, bullshitting, getting stoned and progressively more stoned, and Helen waiting for me in our little house at the end of the road by the frozen lake. That was the setting for the second wreck — or it wasn’t a wreck in the fundamental, literal sense of the word, because Helen’s VW bus was barely damaged, aside from some unexpected wear and tear on the left front fender and a barely noticeable little twist to the front bumper. It was four or five in the morning, the sky a big black puddle of nothing, three feet of dogshit-strewn snow piled up on either side of the road till it looked like a long snaking bobsled run. The bus fired up with a tinny rattle and I took off, but I was in a state of advanced confusion, I guess, and I went right by the turnoff for our road, the one that led to the little house by the frozen lake, and instead found myself out on the main highway, bouncing back and forth between the snow berms like a poolball that can’t decide on a pocket.
There was something in the urgency of the lights flashing behind me that got me to pull over, and then there was a cop standing there in his jackboots and wide-brimmed hat, shining a flashlight in my face. “Out of the car,” he said, and I complied, or tried to, but I missed my footing and pitched face-forward into the snow. And when I awoke this time, there were no firemen present and no flames, just an ugly pale-gray concrete-block room with graffiti scrawled over it and three or four hopeless-looking jerks sitting around on the floor. I got shakily to my feet, glanced around me and went instinctively to the door, a heavy sliding affair with a little barred window set in the center of it at eye-level. My hands took hold of the handle and I gave the door a tug. Nothing. I tried again. Same lack of result. And then I turned round on my companions, these pathetic strangers with death masks for faces and seriously disarranged hair, and said, as if I was in a dream, “Hey, it’s locked.”
That was when one of the men on the floor stirred himself long enough to glance up at me out of blood-flecked eyes and a face that was exactly like a bucket of pus. “What the fuck you think, motherfucker,” he said. “Your ass is in jail.”
THEN IT WAS SPRING and the ice receded from the shore of the lake to reveal a black band of dead water, the driveway turned to mud and the ditches along the blacktop road began to ululate with the orgasmic cries of the nondescript little toads known as spring peepers. The heating bill began to recede too, and to celebrate that minor miracle and the rebirth of all things green and good, I took my Alien — Helen, that is — out for dinner at Capelli’s, where all the waiters faked an Italian accent, whether they were Puerto Ricans or Swedes, and you couldn’t pick up a cigarette without one of them rushing over to light it for you. It was dark. It smelled good. Somebody’s grandmother was out in the kitchen, cooking, and we ate the usual things — canneloni, baked ziti, pasta primavera — and paid about twice what we would have paid in the usual places. I was beginning to know a little about wine, so I ordered a bottle of the second-highest-priced red on the menu, and when we finished that, I ordered another. For dessert, my balled fist presented Helen with two little white Rorer Quaaludes.
She was looking good, silver-eyed and tanned from an early-spring ski trip to Vermont with Adele and one of the other waitresses. I watched the rings glitter on her fingers as she lifted her glass to wash down the pills, and then she set the glass down and eased back into her chair under the weight of all that food and wine. “I finally met Kurt,” she said.
I was having a scotch and Drambuie as an after-dinner drink, no dessert thanks, and enjoying the scene, which was very formal and adult, old guys in suits slurping up linguine, busty wives with poodle hair and furs, people of forty and maybe beyond out here in the hinterlands living the good life. “Kurt who?” I said.
“Kurt Ramos? Adele’s ex?” She leaned forward, her elbows splayed on the tabletop. “He was bartending at this place in Stowe — he’s a Sagittarius, very creative. Funny too. He paints and writes poetry and had one of his poems almost published in the Hudson Review, and of course, Adele knew he was going to be there, I mean that was the whole point. He’s thirty-four, I think. Or thirty-five. You think that’s too much? Age-wise, I mean? Adele’s only twenty-four.”