Running to spare his suffering, I forgot / My name, my number, how my days began
—James Wright, “Saint Judas”
In the nursery, my husband reads a poem from the perspective of a dog. The poem is in Saint Judas, James Wright’s second book. Wright disavowed this book, which is unfathomable to my husband—he has been reading this book, and it is remarkable, he believes. Remarkable? These are rhyming poems, before Wright renounced rhyme. My husband says this kind of rhyme is a rarity, but I am wary of rhyme’s insect-buzz in my ear. I distrust its power over my husband.
In the poem, a dog crosses fallow fields. I can’t remember what else. My son is lying across my lap, lips soft on my breast. Eyes closed, forehead slick with sweat, he is sleepy—he keeps forgetting to suck, then jolts half-awake: reaches his neck, stretches his throat, and gulps my nipple.
The poem about the dog is the second poem my husband reads in the nursery—he was inordinately, intimately moved by the first. Now, as he reads of a dog enduring a storm of midges, his voice hucks in his throat. His words go to mud.
Slurring, slur, first a noun—thin, fluid dirt—then a verb: smeared, smirched, disparaged.
I hold my son close when he nurses, as if we are two passengers on a life raft. I watch his cheeks hollow and fill. Listen to his breathing, not the poem. Even if I give my husband the benefit of the doubt—maybe he is merely moved by the poetry—I suspect he is drunk. I can’t look at him. I focus on the bookshelf, where three ladybugs play dead.
Our bedroom is adjacent to the nursery. It has high ceilings and no heat. It’s an attic, shoddily converted with piecemeal flooring and ugly office-park sconces. Plus, the electrical is sketchy. The last owner of the house left an old radiator on wheels (“The Incredible Heat Machine,” it says in jaunty Schoolhouse Rock font), which we run at 1500V to warm up the space. Over the hum of The Incredible Heat Machine, the last notes of my son’s mobile decrescendo. Brown puppy, gray bunny, white pony—I picture the puffy plastic animals on the mobile, coming to stillness over his crib.
I have just slid under the comforter with my notebook. I am undressed, down to my soft black underthings. There’s a lightening in my chest that comes whenever my pencil hovers over paper, where I can write and life feels paused, untouched by alcoholism, even if I’m writing about an alcoholic, when I realize my husband is looking at me.
Would you read a poem? he says. He is sitting up at the foot of the bed, still in jeans. Read a poem to me?
I set my notebook on the nightstand.
You don’t have to if—
Another James Wright from Saint Judas. I take the paperback without touching him. The battered cover is missing a corner. The spine is worn with narrow gray couloirs. The poem I start to read is about a child drowning. A man counts gulls, combs a rocky beach. Saline breeze. The poem spans two pages. I read, enunciating clearly, through the final line.
My husband’s eyes are closed. He is hunched over, on top of the duvet. He has read the poem three times, he admits, pawing the words. Slowly, he says, I wanted to hear if it sounds like waves.
(Is he drunk here?) I wonder, eyeing my notebook. Does it? I ask.
It does, he says, pausing. Finally, he opens his eyes. I want to tell you about last night. Last night’s AA meeting. Spiritually Speaking. Because it was very impactful. If that’s okay—
I want to say it’s not okay, and I can’t. I shrug. I cross my arms. I don’t make eye contact. My mouth is a dark line. I send every signal I can that I want to get back to my notebook, without explicitly saying so. I feel guilty. Guilty for being unable to say what I want and guilty for being uninterested and guilty because I know what happens when he’s like this—pausey, overwrought, slow. He gets lost in a rant or a morose sermon, and I accuse him. Not at first. Not outright. At first I’ll say, is everything okay? Are you feeling all right? Then he will get angry. He will tell me that he has more of a spiritual life than he’s ever had. That’s he’s more cogent than he’s ever been. He will tell me that I’m persecuting him. That he lives under a microscope. He will tell me I’m arrogant and self-righteous. He is committed to sobriety for our son. Our marriage. He has no interest in drinking. It’s not for him. Do I think so little of him? Will he never be enough in my eyes? He knows that I am compassionate, a lapsed Catholic, and a perfectionist: guilt is easy to implant. My therapist recently said addicts don’t take accountability for their actions. They lay blame on you. It was the first time I had thought of my husband as an addict. Don’t take it on, my therapist said. The blame.
I will not. I read the poem. I can be done.
Sure, I say.
This is how I start hearing about “Mauricio” from Revere, Massa-chusetts, the speaker at Spiritually Speaking. I have changed Mauricio’s name, but I don’t want to. With recovery, naming is the first prayer. Centuries ago, farmers in Europe said the Madonna’s name when aphids overtook their crops and they repeated her name when shiny, red-backed, seven-spotted beetles offered salvation. In its few-year life-span, a ladybug will eat five thousand insects. Beetles of Our Lady. Ladybird beetles. Coccinelladae. The speaker’s name is an authentic detail. I change the speaker’s name, but I will not change other details—the speaker’s hometown, for instance.
I am sorry, “Mauricio” from Revere.
His mother was a waitress at the Boston Garden, his father worked at Suffolk Downs. He was ten, a hockey player, when his older brother and his friends held him down and blew a cloud of crack smoke in his face.
I have such a visceral reaction to my husband saying this, to the thought of a boy being held down, that, quietly, I start to cry. I inch back into the pillows, pulling the comforter with me. Outside, a freight train brakes two blocks over, shrill and unhaunted. Gin-blue dusk colors the skylights, draping the door to our son’s nursery in shadow. I want my husband to stop. It’s too much. I want him to prepare me, warn me, be real with me about this story and his recovery: It will only get worse.
Staring at the door to the nursery, I think of our fourteen-month-old son so happy, peaceful, sleeping in the room off our room. The room was my husband’s office; now it’s a nursery, overrun by ladybugs. It has a slanted ceiling, and the ladybugs perch on the line where the wall and the slanted ceiling meet. In nine years, my son will be ten. He may have no memory of ladybugs sizzling on the sconces, pucking off the blades of the ceiling fan. He may have lost his orange hair, it may have darkened—the color of a shell submerged in sand on a muddy beach, a drowning beach. I once searched “Do ladybugs bite” and read that they’re good luck, but I still hate the ladybugs in that room with my son while he sleeps. Lurking on the changing pad like spilled punctuation. Staggering around the rug. Hiving in his windowsill.
Everywhere. Here’s one, on the wall across from our bed. Frozen. A red wart. As my husband talks, I grow angry, having to hear this “impactful” story—my husband keeps using the word—especially before bed, in our house, with our son. I am angry at myself for being angry about hearing what is obviously an impactful narrative, when I should be interested in my husband’s recovery process: I should take this as a sign of trust.
Instead, I cannot help remembering last week, when I caught my husband digging in the yard.
He had been long gone with the recycling, the night before Thanksgiving. I hugged the baby to my chest and went over to the front door. We stepped outside. I saw my husband beside our car, on the north edge of the driveway. He was bent over, clawing and kicking at a wet mash of leaves decaying by the row of arborvitae.
My husband was angry when I called his name and turned on the porch light. He came in and told me that he’d almost fallen on the fucking leaves. Almost slipped. He said, Today is shit.
An hour later, while I was nursing, he went outside again. I heard the door. He came up to bed. Arms smattered with dirt.
That night, when he was asleep, I found pieces of grass and flecks of leaf in the bathroom sink. The sink stained with muddy water spots was new, with an apron lacquered clay-pink and satin brass hardware. Mounted to the wall. The pipes beneath the sink are visible: they tempt my son when I bring him into the bathroom with me, when I am in the house on my own or do not want to leave him alone with my husband. Often, I have visions of him pulling on the pipes and dislodging the sink from its mount and the hand-forged enamel basin crushing his small body while I sit on the toilet, peeing as fast as I can. It hurts, to rush urination. But I do it, out of concern for my son.
I slipped on my old restaurant clogs and a coat, and stuck my phone in my pocket. I opened the storm door and guided it shut so it wouldn’t bang. I walked down the steps, avoided the gutters, and pointed the flashlight on my phone at the leaves tamped down along the line of arborvitae.
I had seen a dead baby chipmunk at the base of these trees a few months earlier. Furless, mealy pink, flaccid. I had put on two pairs of latex gloves and scooped the raw animal into a dustbin with a piece of cardboard, avoiding its comma eyes, tiny branchlet fingers, screaming each time I tried and failed to lift its body. I had avoided that spot, even after the trash with the chipmunk had been collected, as though my fear itself might spawn a new corpse. Now, I studied the glistening muck. I nudged the sludge with the toe of my clog, feeling for a bottle, some plastic.
I crouched down, aiming the light. There was nothing, a streak of mud on the driveway, the padded-down decomposing leaves from two enormous maples. I felt around in the wet leaves, the sodden clumps. They were cold and sticky, slimy wet, mixed with needles from the arbor vitae. For a few minutes, I pushed them about. Then, after I found nothing, I went to bed.
The next morning, before the baby woke up, I came downstairs to discover coffee brewed in the kitchen. The sunrise was glowing red out the window. I took out a pie dish and brown sugar and Ritz crackers from the pantry. My husband came in the side door.
We said good morning. I thanked him for making coffee. He asked if I was going to make a pie. I was.
I need to ask you about the leaves, I said. I told him he could trust me. It was really unnerving, seeing you like that, hunting in the dark. I said I was worried about him. I said I understood —Relapsing. Slipping. I said, Please—you can tell me. Did you drink?
He shook his head. I found a bottle, of cheap whiskey. Stashed in the garage—honestly, I don’t even remember buying it. I was taking out the recycling and it just caught my eye. I don’t even know how long it’s been there. And I was going to bring it inside and wrap it up and throw it away in the garbage so you wouldn’t see it and then I fell and dropped it.
I listened. I looked at him. His hands were muddy again.
Thank you for trusting me, I said. That had to be hard to find.
It was, he said. It’s in the recycling now.
I thought of the walk he had taken yesterday before dinner, the Conoco station half a mile from our house. I thought of how many times I’d been in our garage this year, never once seeing a bottle. How I could spot a ladybug in the magenta zigzags on the rug in the nursery. I dumped three sleeves of crackers into the food processor and pulverized them.
Now is the time I thought I would be sleeping, but instead my husband is on his back, glasses on, snoring, and I am looking down the bed at him, writing about Mauricio from Revere. Who began sniffing cocaine, drinking, selling cocaine shortly after the crack incident.
I cannot picture this person at all: I can only hear him. I cannot picture my husband as an honest person any long-er, but I keep listening. Wiping the mud from the sink.
Not only was Mauricio sniffing and selling cocaine, he was sniffing it with his mom. Her, I can picture. Hard, tan jaw. Pouchy eyes. Masses of black hair. Thick. Like mine. The way, when I am nursing my son, thinking how any day he may want to stop feeding, he might wean himself, I press my cheek to his cheek, bowing, bending my neck, my hair spilling over him as I try to fuse our faces together. My lips to his scalp, kissing his fine hair, auburn in the bedroom light. Tonight, during our last feeding, I saw another ladybug extend its black wings and perch on the humidifier. My husband fills the humidifier, an innocuous volcano with a purple plastic tank. I have never succeeded in filling the tank, which requires a maneuver that eludes me: filling and then flipping it over, planting the mouth of the tank on the base of the humidifier.
How does the water not pour out?
How do you say no when your mother asks you for coke?
Hot mouth on your ear.
Do you have anything, baby?
What were you doing in the leaves?
The mother in Revere puts her chin on the drum table. Stretches a nostril. Smells the years crocheted into the doily her mother’s mother made. Sees, doesn’t see, the reproduction, gilt frame, Raphael’s Holy Family with Lamb. Ewe with the snout of a seal. Four years, he sniffs cocaine with his mom in secret, before Mauricio is arrested on a drug bust. Terror, fear, rage: that is what Mauricio’s story provokes in me, hearing my husband relay it, repeat it in our bedroom, spitting the word sniffs. The way last week he said the Evan Williams whiskey was staring at him from the shelf. I don’t believe him. Why wouldn’t he betray me? When it feels so good, night secrets juxtaposed with morning decency. Like how when Mauricio comes out of jail, he gets into treatment and, for a period, holds a union job.
Union job, my husband says, imitating the butter-knife-in-a-socket accent.
Union job, back home, then, in no time, he’s using and selling heroin. Selling heroin to the guys at his union job. And his mother comes to him again and says, Do you have any heroin?
He did. He injected his mother. He sold to his union colleagues. He started using himself.
Now the ladybug on the wall across from our bed is moving. Coming towards me in a splash of gold light thrown by the lamp on the nightstand. There are dead ladybugs in the carpet. The husks of their bodies dimmed. Dark. Whereas if I pinch one alive between my fingers, they are carmine red. Smell like turpentine and vegetable scraps. They die on their own more often than I kill them, and I feel guilty killing them, too. In the winter they look for warm, private places to hibernate. “Rotting logs,” I read, “even inside houses.” Thousands can breed in a nest. I can’t stand what hearing Mauricio’s story makes me wonder: Will my son grow up to stretch a rubber band around his bicep, needling for a vein, nodding off into a nightmare of blurry old photographs, littered with ladybug bodies scattered underneath the chair where I nursed him?
A horrible saga unfolds: Mauricio’s mother overdoses, he is arrested; she goes into a coma; he goes again to jail. This is the penultimate tragedy. While Mauricio is in jail, his mother dies. When he gets out, his father expresses unbounded anger. Unforgivable, his role in his mother’s death. My husband’s cheeks are flushed.
And like that it is over.
What is the relationship between addiction and devotion? I wonder. What did you connect with in Mauricio’s story? I ask. I am waiting for his answer, listening to the murmur of The Incredible Heat Machine. Suddenly I feel naked in my nursing bra. Hearing this story with so much bare skin makes it all the more awful, when ten hours from now my son will be urgently sucking my breast. He will taste the tar, iron, whiskey, leaf scum, mouthwash, tequila, box wine, brandy, mug mouthful, salt in the air on the beach in Santa Monica, staying away from the breakers, avoiding the belly of the pier: Mauricio has been living clean, no slips, the last six years.
When I nurse him, I like seeing his mouth open around my nipple in a U. Only last week, the day after I found my husband scrambling in the leaves, I told a table of people, a friend and my husband, that U is my favorite vowel. I would follow U sounds anywhere. The sexiest vowel. A whole book devoted to the U? I did not take my slavering that far at the table, but the idea occurs to me now. The French word for colleague strengthens the U by eliminating the A and pluming the first E with an accent. Mauricio’s family was Italian, not French. Uovo is a word in Italian with especially ripe U sounds. Ube my husband yearns to put in his rice. Ugly face I get when James Wright bores me and AA Mauricio repulses me and I feel unmoved, cruel, exhausted, used, numbed, blunted. Hail Mary, make me stronger. Use me. Don’t touch me.
My husband says, I just wanted to share because it made an impact on me.
I hear the ladybug on my side of the bed throw itself into the wall. They’re suicidal creatures. If you ask me how I know this, I have no answer.
JoAnna Novak’s short story collection Meaningful Work won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Prize. New Life, her third book of poetry, will be out later this year.
