Come Up and See Me Sometime

“Give me some,” I said. I was just testing him, to see what he would do, I think.

“No.” He put his arm around me. I let him pull me down to the floor and kiss me. It was unreal. I thought about the Mormons and their planets.

I touched that place inside his arms, the small red dot. I was strangely moved by this part of him, so soft, so violated. He kissed me again. Before he closed his eyes, I saw myself curving away in their darkness, and wanted to go to that place where he was.

All that night, I stayed awake and watched over him. He whimpered and reached out for me every now and then. He looked so soft in sleep, fingers curled under his chin. I tried to fit everything together in my head.

I couldn’t help it. I know it’s very bad. But as I watched him sleep, I felt a strange kind of new respect taking shape. This was a man who sought out a controlled substance and injected himself on a daily basis. Say what you will, but that takes initiative.

I RENTED a movie called Drugs and You. We watched it together in Cliff’s apartment. It talked about heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, crack, smack, heart attacks, insomniacs … I could rap the whole thing. Cliff barely listened. He caressed my hand.

“What you need,” he said midway through the rehab stuff, “is a pet. I’m going to buy you a hamster.”

“No.”

“Everyone needs an animal to love.”

“Who says?”

“Nietzsche.”

“But I’ve got you. You’re a fucking animal.” I gave him a raunchy smile, even though it wasn’t true. We barely ever had sex.

“You need something else,” Cliff said.

We watched the movie until Cliff got up and disappeared into his room. In a few minutes, I followed him. He was cooking up. This is what my life had become—I knew phrases like “cooking up.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Why? What did you expect, honey?” He put the needle down. “Listen. This is my life. I don’t want to change. On the other hand, I love you. You can do whatever you want with that information.”

“Well, tiger, don’t get all emotional on me.”

He stared at me for a minute. “Once I got so emotional about you, I threw up.”

“You threw up over me?”

He brought home a parakeet and named it Fido. He tried to get it to talk, and to sit on our fingers. But whenever Cliff opened the cage door, Fido flew at me, biting. He latched onto my earlobe, or the skin of my neck. He drew blood. I grabbed at Fido and stuffed him back in his cage each time.

“You taste like chicken,” I told him through the bars.

Cliff gave up and kept him inside the cage while I was there. I always walked right over to the cage in the corner whenever I came over. Fido and I tried to stare each other down through the bars, his little round eye pitted against my own.

“I might leave you,” I told Cliff. But I didn’t leave him, and I didn’t leave him.

IT WAS OUR anniversary, three months. We were going to go to dinner at La Cocina, and then have sex. We had to plan sex in advance, to make sure that it fell on a sober day—my rules. Mostly because there was no other way to do it.

I showed up at Cliff’s apartment but he was late, so I let myself in as usual. I mooned around, in love. I touched things—his calculator, his shirts.

By the time he opened his door, I was already there to greet him. He grabbed me around my waist and held me. I put my arms around him. He said into the air above my head, “I shot up tonight.” As his mouth opened to say these words, I felt something drop into my hair. I touched it. It was his gum.

“Oh no, I got gum in your hair. I got …” Cliff was distraught, groping the top of my head.

I stepped away and stared at him.

I went into his bathroom and grabbed the edges of the sink. I looked in the mirror. The face that looked back was so ordinary, not the kind of face that can change the world or even the sheets. Cliff soon appeared in the door with a jar of peanut butter.

“I heard that if you put peanut butter on it—” He started painting my hair with peanut butter.

“Forget the hair.” I whirled at him. “Forget it.” I picked up his nail scissors and cut out the whole wad of hair, gum and peanut butter. I threw it at him.

“I can’t live with an addict. I don’t want to come home and find you dead in the lotus position.”

“We’re not living together.”

“This is already a very unhealthy relationship,” I told him.

He looked slightly relieved.

“I mean, it was,” I said. “I’m out.” I spread my hands wide, fingers stretched open.

Cliff looked down immediately. Then he went to the bedroom. After a second, I followed him. He opened the drawer with all the drugs and paraphernalia. I got suddenly scared, thinking about that little dab of heroin. I started grabbing at his arms, pulling them away from the needles and things. He pushed me away, gathered everything up, and left the room.

I stood in the hallway and listened to the sounds of a toilet flushing, a hammer against metal, plastic bags rustling, then the door slamming. I went back into his bedroom and lay down on his bed, holding my forehead.

I live like a bug, I thought. Crawling around, wondering when I’m going to get squashed. This relationship is a bug.

In a few minutes, he was back in the bedroom before the front door had fallen shut. “You won. It’s gone,” he said. “All of it.”

I sat up.

“Poof,” he said.

AT FIRST there was an element of now what? In fact, I asked Cliff. “Now what?”

“Well, what did you do with other boyfriends?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

But we tried stuff. I read some trashy novels and got ideas. There’s always the section of the book after he almost loses her the first time and then gets her back, and they do things during those times. Go to dinner, go dancing. Talk about their family lives. So these were the things that Cliff and I did. We talked about the world. We talked about each other. We saw a counselor who once put her hand on Cliff’s knee during a session. We found another counselor and then decided that things were pretty good, so I moved in.

We mixed his books (War and Strife, Strife and Socialism, Socialism and Revolution) with mine (Wuthering Heights, Lolita, National Velvet). We took the TV set out of the fireplace and built fires out of pinion branches. We made homemade tamales. We watched Santa Fe’s lava sunsets, when the clouds lurk around the east edge of town like ghosts afraid of fire.

But no matter, he shot up again, of course. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. I had just come home from grocery shopping. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t have to—the way he passed his hand over my face before saying anything, the way his facial expressions appeared one second too late, as if he were following cue cards. I looked up at his face and started to cry.

I wondered how long he’d been doing this. Months? I had long ago stopped checking the insides of his elbows while he slept. Or he could have been smoking it. It didn’t matter—it didn’t matter. I grabbed his shirt and cried into it, while he just stood there, arms at his sides.

“I don’t know how to save you,” I said and wiped my nose on his shirt.