The Monstrous Season (1) Imagine that suddenly, with no expectation of the impending event, you void your bowels on a stalled and packed rush hour subway. Imagine that the ventilating system has shut down and that the lights have remained on at full wattage. Also imagine that, stuck in a tunnel and still a half-dozen stations from your destination, your best choice will be to stay on the train when it starts to move and make normal stops again. Now think of being trapped in such a nightmare circumstance not for twenty minutes or an hour but for nearly two months. And that's just a piece of it. Imagine as well that throughout this period you feel as though a butcher knife has been planted in the very center of your heart. If you can imagine these things, you'll have some inkling of what much of the summer of 1994 was like for me. That monstrous season of very bad days, sandwiched by days that were worse than very bad, began in early July when Maryellen split. It would have been awful enough had Maryellen left me with only the aforementioned deep and abiding agony in my chest that derived from the loss of a woman I cared about. (And awful enough with only the cluster of collateral tribulations that would immediately follow the loss.) But because of what triggered it this breakup was, you could say, beyond devastating. What happened was that�I'll state it flat out�Maryellen, who'd been living with me in my apartment for nearly two years, caught me flagrante delicto with Debbie, her Cocker Spaniel. Coming out of nowhere, with nothing in my history to predict it, I wasn't sure at first that what I�d done was really so "perverted" and "disgusting," to quote Maryellen, and I didn�t agree with the character judgment implicit in her reaction. It didn�t seem fair. I felt this way because I�d always had a probing mind, a mind that, forever in search of recondite truths, often drove me to challenge things that others took for granted. It being a bit removed from what I usually focused on, and although I don't remember thinking about it specifically, the assumption that boundary lines in nature are fixed and inviolable would be an example. It was entirely possible that my philosophical bent had subliminally impelled me to take the leap from rumination to physical inquiry. Moreover, if a scientific motivation wasn't reasonable and innocent enough, when you name your dog �Debbie" you�re asking for trouble. And, Jesus, hadn�t Larry Flynt confessed to the serial raping of chickens without incurring any damage to his reputation? But thoughts like these ended quickly. It was impossible for me to deflect for long the horror in Maryellen's eyes when, on the evening in question, she came home early. With the stereo blasting, I didn�t pick up on the fact that Maryellen was there until, all at once, she was big in the room. Debbie I realized afterwards, was aware of Maryellen's untimely return before I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I understood later to be an expression of apprehensiveness as she turned her cranium towards me. But probably because her countenance was open to multiple interpretations at that moment, her heads up went straight by me. At any rate, I hadn�t seen the rage and revulsion Maryellen's face presented to me since, standing next to my mother, I barfed into the family �Important Documents� chest when I was five. The abhorrence it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking proportions, to have issued from the depths of creation itself. No, try as I might I couldn�t deny it. Diddling Debbie had been an egregious act�a crime against all that was sacrosanct. That it was, as I've indicated, unpremeditated and, in my case unprecedented, made of its true origin a mystery that would eat at me for quite a while. I mean, I'd always been indifferent to dogs and that included Debbie. If I perfunctorily scratched her head from time to time, and walked her when Maryellen couldn't, at no point had I bonded with her, not as a pet or otherwise. Well, what can I tell you? This turn my life had taken was more than I could cope with. I went, I guess, into something like shock. For the next three weeks I never once left my apartment. While I managed to phone my boss, Mr. Mintz, every couple of days to make reports on a virus of some mysterious, thoroughly debilitating and likely very contagious strain that I'd contracted, all I did besides that�and when I wasn't pacing furiously from room to room�was intermittently endeavor to lose consciousness for a few hours by consuming tall glasses of scotch mixed with beer. Now much as I'd like to, I won't pretend that, though it was not of a similar kind, I'd been without an emotional issue before the incident. In contrast to Maryellen, who worked for an investment firm and recently gotten a second promotion in less than a year, I've had, since my quite ordinary middle-class childhood, a childhood (if you skip the vomiting episode) free of any noteworthy traumas, some problems with applying and executing. I'm not good at those things. Functioning on an elevated level isn't my forte. My IQ is high, but I'd barely made it through a year of college. I think this is because the ugly fate of decay and dissolution that awaits everything with a body rattles me too much. I know that the inevitability of death disturbs everyone. But where others are apparently capable of putting it out of their minds, and of masking their fear of it, I�m not. When the gods were distributing psychic forms of armor against the dread of death they'd been outrageously skimpy with mine. It isn't just that being born under a death sentence that could be invoked at any time scares me but that it also makes me feel guilty. I must have done some serious shit to be in so much trouble. And it makes me feel ashamed as well. Unable to alter my situation, to change the given, I'm incompetent where it counts the most. Brooding over my destiny, and persistently cogitating about ways to handle it, is a perpetual distraction that results in my tending to lose my concentration in practical matters a lot. And neither will I attempt to portray my relationship with Maryellen as unfettered by difficulties before the Debbie debacle. Four years younger than me�at our separation I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three�Maryellen, whose pleasing face (which brought to mind my favorite aunt), affable personality and sense of humor had speedily won me over, was from a well-off, straitlaced upstate New York family. Like her older sister, she�d majored in finance at a local college before coming to the city to pursue a career. Unlike her sister, who�d gravitated to the Upper East Side, Maryellen had what she proudly referred to as a �maverick streak" and she wanted to live in Greenwich Village. Planning to get a place in the Village once she�d found a job, she was staying, when we met, in the adjoining neighborhood of Chelsea, with Debbie and her college roommate Barbara. Charmed by my bathtub-in the-kitchen Village walkup near the Hudson River, visibly enthralled by my pontifications on subjects ontological and titillated by my regular, though (I swear) moderate use of alcohol, when she discovered I was on a first name basis with the bartenders at the White Horse she and Debbie moved in with me just days later. And that first year with Maryellen was nothing short of excellent. It was a year in which we had an abundance of sex, took long hand-in-hand walks around the Village, went to scores of cultural events in the area and hung with friends of mine, most of whom were of an artistic persuasion. But after that year and, it doubtless being relevant, a year in which she'd found lucrative employment, her �maverick� thing began to wane. Souring on the Village and our lifestyle, she would talk frequently about us moving to a "normal" apartment and to a neighborhood with different people, maybe somewhere near her sister. She also wanted me to make my drinking less than regular and moderate. When my responses were essentially evasive and transparently intended to delay such changes, she gradually became moody and distant and after a while it would sometimes seem that all of my foibles had become sources of irritation to her. My tendency to drool when I slept, which she'd initially been amused by, started to antagonize her. And, unnoticed before, the sartorial faux pas of wearing socks that matched the color of my shoes and not my pants, captured her attention one morning and incensed her no end. It was, however, my job and lack of real money that were the primary and most constant aspects of me to rankle her. A typesetter for a printing company housed in a rundown building on a still only partially gentrified street near the Garment Center, I made just enough to get along, had no opportunities for advancement and didn�t have to wear a suit, all of which grated on her not a little. Referring to me on more than one occasion as a �glorified typist� who worked in a �type factory� she took to calling me a "slacker" and was incessantly after me to connect with a �respectable� profession. I suspect that having her meet me at work one evening when I had to stay late played a role in much of what I've recounted. The last to leave, we were almost out the door before she said she needed to use the bathroom. Having only the men�s room key, it was the men�s room to which I sent her�utterly forgetting that the only person who hadn�t been granted a key to it was the janitor. I�ll spare you a detailed depiction of the men�s room. Suffice it to say that some unspeakable carnage appeared to have taken place there and that upon her emergence Maryellen was weeping. Still, her disdain for my job, her increasing displeasure with our way of life and, yes, her disaffection with me in general notwithstanding, I remained confident that Maryellen would stick around. I say this because we'd already lasted almost two years, and because she had a conspicuous flaw of her own, a flaw that limited the field for her. You could call it a weight problem, but it wasn�t so much that as a weight displacement problem. Spherical at her bottom and tapering markedly toward her top�and with a stem-like ponytail to complete the resemblance�Maryellen was the very picture of a pear, which is a fine shape for fruit (not to mention pendants and tones) but not that terrific for human bodies. Understanding from the start that this imperfection had contributed to making her available to me I was actually grateful for it. Bottom line: She was a woman whose figure was suitable to my station in life. (And to my own physical composition. I was all of five foot six, more skinny than slim and with a nose you would think must obstruct my vision.) So when, after a call to her sister�who had a car and who would wait in the hall to help her�Maryellen hurriedly packed her things and, with Debbie clutched under one arm, fled the apartment, I was stunned all the more by having dismissed the signs that our union was in jeopardy to begin with. And in those first three weeks I just wasted away. Indeed, I lost twelve pounds I didn't need to lose. This was mostly due to the lack of an appetite. But it was also because Maryellen had, without my catching it in the state I was in, emptied the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator of the victuals she�d purchased, leaving me to survive on an economy-size jar of Marshmallow Fluff and a dozen frozen waffles (along with my booze stash which was untouched). If that wasn't enough, my wretched condition was soon compounded by a number of physical ailments and handicaps. For one thing, thick clots of mucous were continually sliding from the back of my nose down into my throat. For another, a tooth with a chronic abscess was acting up again. Although the pain it caused was only occasional, I knew it was on its way to meaning business this time. In addition, I had a substantial eye crisis. Already living with one frayed contact lens, which clouded my sight and made it feel like dirt was enmeshed inside it when I blinked, the other one blew off my fingertip one night and vanished down the sink drain. And just minutes after that happened, I proceeded, while I was pacing, to step on my backup glasses. These misfortunes forced me to view my surroundings and myself with what amounted to one crippled eye. But even with this impediment I could still perceive, when I looked in the mirror, a growing bump in my jaw and, in need of a barber weeks earlier, that my head was now crowned by a wild man's hair. But leaving my apartment for any reason at this point was out of the question. I couldn't even summon the will to shower with regularity, or to shave at all. It might have helped to talk to a friend about what was going on. But reaching out would have involved a discussion of my transgression, a transgression I had no stomach to reveal to anyone who was ignorant of it. The few times someone called me, and knowing it would not be Maryellen, I didn't answer and disregarded any messages that were left. To cap it off, I was enduring my loss, humiliation and physical maladies with only a semi-functioning air conditioner to combat the onset of a hellish heat and a level of humidity that would have suffocated a rainforest. I did consider suicide. Craving eternal oblivion, dying to that end would have been a blessing now. But absent the assurance that my grievous Debbie offense wouldn't lead the gods to punish me with an afterlife, one even more gruesome than the life I was living, I rejected it. With suicide off the table as a means with which to escape my forlorn straits, I concluded that to feel any better there was really only one recourse. It was to get Maryellen to forgive and return to me. Accomplishing this objective became an all consuming goal. And the way to go about it, I reasoned, was to reconstitute myself. I would rebuild myself into a healthy-minded man of purpose and ambition. This notion got me fired up. But as eager to begin as I was, my enthusiasm was soon dampened by a disconcerting thought. An undertaking of such dimensions would require time to complete. (Especially when I was clueless as to how to begin.) Unaware of it, Maryellen would only get further away from me and one day�it was bound to happen eventually�take up with someone else. Prudence dictated that I tell her of my plan and the new me it promised. So impersonating an old friend, I rang her parents and learned that she�d gone to stay with Barbara again until she could get a place of her own. And that evening I called her there. Actually, prodded by the magnitude of my news, I called her there every few minutes because each time Barbara would answer and hang up at the sound of my voice. With that, I knew I had no alternative but to tell her in person, and the size and urgency of my mission overrode my reluctance to face the outside world. Assuming that Maryellen would be home, I picked a Saturday and set out for Barbara�s apartment with a dangerously racing heart to accompany the now throbbing bump in my jaw and the commencing of a soreness in my throat from my post nasal drip. The headlines on the newsstands I passed announced �ANOTHER SCORCHER,� and at only ten in the morning my shoulders were already burning under my shirt when I came upon a major street fair replete with merchants of every category, live and loud music and some seriously teeming humanity. Worse, an upward slope on the main avenue made it clear that this thing went on for blocks, smack to the border of Chelsea. Barbara�s building was just on the far side of the fair. But the fair also stretched down intersecting streets and this made circumventing it more daunting than advancing directly. So arms tight at my sides, I walked right into it. As it turned out the disaster that had befallen my appearance worked to my advantage here. Instead of being bumped and jostled or repeatedly forced to stop and wait behind ambling fools who, unlike myself, had no important business this day, spaces were opened up for me. So fast were people to move aside it was like stepping through a series of automatic doors. Then, as I made my way, I passed a stall of grilling sausages. The aroma of them took me back to an evening in the third week of our living together when we�d gone to a festival in Little Italy and, tossing softballs at a mechanical monkey and pitching quarters into a glass, I�d won, in rapid succession, a can of Spam Lite and a yellow parakeet. That the very next day the bird, when we released it from its cage, would fly headlong into a closed window and expire, took nothing from my memory of that extraordinary evening. I felt perfectly centered that evening�and fearless. Unencumbered by my chronic engrossment in my body�s eventual disintegration, I was absolutely without inhibition. I could, I felt, have excelled at anything I cared to do. It was also on that evening, and just after I won the Spam Lite, that Maryellen unexpectedly turned toward me while we were walking to the parakeet stand, pulled me to her, kissed me squarely on the mouth and told me, for the first time, that she loved me. Arriving at Barbara's street, I saw her building, took a deep breath, entered the vestibule and found a sign that said the inner door buzzer was broken. Expecting the usual reaction, but with no option other than to go home, I went to a phone booth on the corner. Presumably Barbara was out because it was Maryellen who picked up. Too taken aback for any salutations, I went, following a startled pause, directly to the meat of it and said: �I need to tell you something.� After a long silence she said: �You need to tell me something? I don�t want to hear it. Just the sound of your voice creeps me out.� Although I would rather have received a warmer reception, that she stayed on the phone made me giddy, so giddy that I lost sight of my purpose in contacting her. �Maryellen, I love you, but you know only my grandmother�s allowed to say that.� �This is a mistake,� she said. �I shouldn�t be talking to you. I�m going to get off. I�m cringing right now. You don�t seriously think...? God, I�m so embarrassed for you. I knew you were warped and a slacker�the drinking, that job, the saliva thing, always putting things off, those morbid, convoluted�musings�oh yeah, that reminds me. That thing you said about why people procrastinate. What was it? �The longer you put it off the longer you have to live�? What the hell does that mean? Who knows what that means?� �I told you and you seemed to understand. There's no such thing as 'lazy'. It�s about the sense the procrastinator has that he�s suspending time. Did you ask somebody?� �Why would I ask somebody?� She'd obviously vetted my intellect with someone who'd been critical of me. I was stung by her need to do that and by the negative verdict, but I did stay giddy. �I've been wanting to explain the hidden genius of the slacker to you," I went on. "You�re forgetting the benefits. If you don�t stick out too much, don�t achieve too much, the gods might just forget about you. Forget, you know, to kill you.� �You�re an idiot, too.� �This attitude you�re taking. It�s really about that driving mishap in Rochester, isn�t it? If you remember, even the judge said I wasn�t entirely to blame. He said that family must have been really stupid to build their house just a hundred yards off the highway.� She didn't laugh. �Look,� she said, � I know you have serious problems and I don�t want to be insensitive, but I have a major meeting today and I have to go.� �It�s the weekend, Maryellen.� �That�s what I told my manager.� �Listen,� I said. �Please. I can see how what transpired might have tainted my mystique for you, but if you really can�t stand me anymore, maybe we could be best friends.� �Friends? With you? My God, you�re lucky you were born before they invented amniocentesis!� She hung up. I called her right back. �Can�t you find someone else to call? Like maybe a doctor?� �Something�s terribly wrong here. I did call someone else. Just this morning I called Jeanne Dixon. She said �Reunion with a loved one, today.� That�s got to be you.� �Well, it�s not. Maybe Lassie�s coming home again.� She hung up once more and the only thing I could do was wait for her to go to her meeting. I didn�t have to wait very long. Just a few minutes later I saw her distinctive silhouette behind the shaded glass of the outer door. But when she came out and saw me, she pulled back and the door shut. I didn't know what my next move should be. Reckoning that she�d returned upstairs, I let a minute pass before calling her again. �You�re not afraid of me now?�
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