Toxic

TOXIC

I could not wait to get out. I was late leaving and had to take the last seat on the commuter-express behind the bus driver, a tall blond man with a braid down his back as thick as my arm. My shoulders bowed with failure, another week of nursing school over, another mishandled exam. I put away my books and focused on the driver, his quiet competence as he maneuvered us through rush-hour gridlock, bottleneck on the bridge. We caught each other's eyes in the wide rearview mirror, his green and lively, mine gray and tired, ringed with heavy circles. Still, he smiled, and I spent the long ride home making up stories about him -- how he would take me to his cabin by the coast and undress me, slowly and with care, the kind of luxury possible only with strangers. We would make love anew, the sort of sex no longer possible with Steven in this last year, our lives so easily foretold.

Reluctantly, then, an hour and a half later, I whispered goodbye. He looked me over before saying, "Now you have yourself a real good weekend"; he winked and shut the doors behind me. Steven's truck was not there; he would probably he late, as was his custom, perhaps already drunk. I wanted to get drunk, so tired of unmet expectations, the barely perceptible progress of study making me gnaw my nails and smoke and eat and wish for anything to lift me from routine. I tried to read my textbook on toxicity in the blood, but mounting impatience blurred the print, raced each sentence off the page. Steven always meant well, but he was always late. I thought about the driver some more, gave him an unscarred body, excitable hands, and a life where infidelity was unthinkable.

Twenty minutes later, Steven drove up in the welding truck, smelling of sweat and discouragement, his green clothes greasy with overwork. He looked thinner than usual, his skin pallid from his chosen profession of indoor airlessness and noxious fumes. He often forgot to eat his lunch and compensated with many afternoon beers. Thick glasses magnified his blue eyes, and his hair, graying, tied with a string, limply grazed his shoulders. He kissed me hello on the lips, and we eased out of downtown, headed home.

"I'm glad to see you honey." He rested his palm on my thigh. I did not bother to ask why he was late; there was always some good reason, his intentions always the best.

"Ben and Julia showed up a couple hours ago and invited a bunch of people over. There's a party going on in our living room, and I don't even know half of who's there. Everyone's ignoring me."

I could hear the frustration in his slow, deep voice; others often took advantage of his easygoing nature, his calm, his unwillingness to fight. But I was pleased that Bennett and Julia had finally arrived from up north; they were the only friends of Steven with whom I could enjoy myself. Both were sharp and funny and liked to talk. I looked forward to our house noisy with laughter instead of the exhausted silence of Steven and me.

"Sorry you had a bad day, sweetheart." I tried to sound sorry. "Could we stop at the store for some wine?"

"Grace." He stared at me for as long as he could safely take his eyes from the road. "Now you're not going to get crazy tonight, are you? I know it's Friday, and it's okay when it's just you and me, but I don't like you getting stinko around everyone else."

"I won't. Really. I promise." I smiled and kissed his stubbled cheek, recalled the clean, tan skin of the bus driver, the passionate expectation. Steven grumbled, parking the truck at the liquor shop, where I bought three bottles of Napa table red.

Our small house brimmed to overflowing with bodies and music slipping out the doors, Jesse Collin Young wailing "Ridgetop" at full volume. Marijuana and eucalyptus perfumed the air, enticing me to leave the week behind, to start anew. Now.

Bennett and Julia, dope growers from Humboldt County, descended from the mountains twice a year to use our house and phone for their marketplace. In thanks, they bought us dinner, fed us booze and occasional cocaine, repaying our hospitality in decadent pleasures. They stayed only a weekend, and when they left we would be worn out and hung over, but I always appreciated how they upset our rituals, forcing us to quit our drudgery: full-time welding and full-time study, our house courting decay, our leisure time spent shoring up what was not yet damaged, especially during the rainy season.

On the porch, an attractive man I had never seen before was talking to Bennett, whose pinpoint eyes lit up to see me --his "favorite old lady" after Julia. "Gracebaby! the sexiest nurse in California. Whew-ee!" he looked me over in my prim jumper and blouse, which revealed nothing in the way of skin, hugging me hard and tight, kissing me on the ear. I might have blushed if I didn't know that he said these sort of things to all women he liked. Bennett always cheered me initially; I did get tired of him after too long, bored by his repetitious alcoholic stories. But now I welcomed his enthusiastic flouting of the rules. People I knew and people I didn't, all pleasantly high; I wanted to make up for lost time and drank fast.

Julia came up to greet me, and we took a bottle to the yard to talk. She was nine years older than me, my closest friend in the state although I saw her rarely. We caught up on her farming, my schooling, our respective "old men." Like me, she was a child of the eastern suburbs, come west on a quest for escape, ended up somehow with a hippie-redneck California native. We adopted their ways, learned to chop wood and drink, adjusted our plans to theirs. Julia, however, loved her life in the mountains -- with or without Bennett. She had studied horticulture and liked to think of herself as a scientist who did interesting hybrids with canabis genera. But my two-hour, too-long commute to college resulted from Steven's refusal to live in the city, and my desire to please the first man who ever cared for me.

"Bennett's as crazy as ever," Julia said, shaking her head but smiling. "I almost left him yesterday, for at least the thousandth time. His flirting drives me up the fucking wall." But they had a crop to sell, profits to divide, and he had been sweet all day; she was satisfied. And me?

I rocked on my hands in the spring green grass, trying to focus on the positive qualities in the man I had lived with for the three years since I turned eighteen and left home. "I love Steven, I do. But he's so shy -- Mr. Laid Back California. He's so strong and silent I can't stand it sometimes. When I say 'Talk to me' he gets mad sometimes, says I'm trying to pull words out of him that don't exist." I remembered that his steadiness had attracted me, his lack of arrogance, his slow calm next to my frantic anxiety. "He's got no energy outside of his job --no desire to do anything, really. His job is non-union. Did you know he makes just over minimum wage?"

Julia wasn't surprised. "He's a very sweet man, Steven," she said. "Not like Bennett at all."

We finished the wine and returned to the living room, where Bennett introduced me to Dan, the man he was talking to earlier.

"You two are neighbors, practically, and you don't even know each other -- my two favorite people in the flatlands."

Dan and I exchanged rich smiles. His handshake was warm and overlong, insistent pressure in his touch. He had wide eyes like the bus driver, thick dark lips I wanted to kiss. I excused myself and headed for the kitchen, hoping to escape Dan's suggestive stare.

Steven appeared in the hall and grabbed my shoulder.

“Grace, we've got to get these people out of here. I'm sick of Bennett's bullshit. This is the last time he uses our house for his drugstore. Let him use a bar next time, or a motel." His voice sounded small and far away, a lost echo of reason in the throb of the party. If I had not traveled so far toward oblivion, if I had not yet grazed that desire, then I would have agreed.

"Oh Steven, I'm having a good time." I could hear myself whine. "I just want to relax and have a drink and talk to Julia."

"Shit. You're already gone, aren't you."

"No I'm not." But I was. Glad and glory-bound for euphoria, leaving him sober for a change when usually he drank and I didn't, and he passed out while I drove home, and he fell asleep in the middle of me telling him something important. He was a quiet drunk though, not much different than he was straight.

I got loud when I drank, laughed hard, made sudden movements.

He let go of me with disgust, as if I had some contagious disease, and retreated out the back door. I found Julia talking to Dan, who was opening another bottle of wine. She started to introduce us when Dan said, "Yes. I know Grace. We've already met," and stroked my cheek with his fingertip. Shocked and flattered, I held onto Julia's arm, looking around for Steven, but he had not returned. We drank, spoke of mountains and marijuana, Dan and I fantasizing about how perfect it would be to live like Bennett and Julia, so far from rules and nine-tofive tedium, paychecks and loan checks with all that tax taken out. When Dan mentioned a wife and children, I felt relieved, as if nothing further could happen now that I knew he was married and unavailable. I wouldn't do anything; I wouldn't pursue him.

He kept touching me -- my hair or arm or shoulder -- his eyes hiding nothing. Where was Steven? People were leaving, and the music beat more insistently in the emptying room, rattling the panes. A rhombus of light slashed the back yard, and I saw Steven silhouetted at the bench in his shed, head in his hands, alone. I knew I should go to him, my sweet Steven who was not suave or smooth-tongued like Dan, Steven who asked for little. I stood swaying at the window, watching his shadow so far away. He never looked up. Jimmy Cliff sang "The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall" as I drained my glass and tried to get my body moving out of the house, toward Steven, but I could not lift my feet. He was not so far away.

Lips on my neck and shoulders, arms around my waist, Dan spinning me around and into his embrace. We kissed, and I pushed him away.

"Wait. Wait. You're married, right? And that's my boyfriend out there." I pressed my hand to the glass, willing Steven to look up and see us, but his head was down on the bench, resting on his arms.

"So?" he kissed me again, his mouth inviting exploration. "So what? I like you. You like me. Let's go."

"Go where?" I knew that was the wrong question.

"My house. Nobody's there."

I turned away and poured one more drink. Everyone had left except Bennett and Julia; I could hear them laughing behind a closed door, bedsprings creaking. If Steven were in this room, I thought, this would not be happening. But his body was still a shadow across the grass. Perhaps he had fallen asleep, as weary on Fridays as me.

Dan pulled me to the couch and onto his lap, his broad hands climbing under my skirt to stroke me. He was a tall man, as good-looking as the bus driver but his smile unkind. He was the type of man I would hate if I met him any other time: vain, arrogant, cruelly charming. He would not stop touching me, and I did not get up and walk away. It seemed like hours passing. I heard a noise and saw or thought I saw Steven's green uniform streaking through the door, or maybe it was my imagination.

"Come on Grace. You want to."

I followed Dan to his truck and got in. The engine would not turn over. He tried a few more times and gave up.

"Can we walk?"

"Fuck no. It's a couple miles from here." He drummed his fingers on the dashboard. "Hey -- I have a blanket."

A blanket; he said the word as if it would save us. From behind the seat he pulled a plaid, ragged bedspread and set it down unevenly across the stubbled lawn. His truck stood between us and the living room windows.

"No."

"Come on Grace. He won't see us. He's passed out back there anyway." He pulled me down with him, kissing me too hard, tugging my hair too vigorously. We did not take off our clothes or pretend to be tender, our attempt at sex a hard contest. But he was too soft to get in me.

"Damn this cocaine," he said, and looked at me accusingly.

We tried for a while before he gave up. When he put his key in the ignition, the truck started right up. I got off the blanket so he could fold it, and he said "So long Grace," and left me sore on the lawn, sober with guilt. I crept into the house; outside, Steven's motorcycle revved up and sped down the street. It was still dark.

Julia stood by the stove, wrapped in my robe, watching coffee perk. The smell and sound of it was so warm and familiar yet completely foreign, that comfort. She shook her head at me, half-smiling. "Grace, when you screw up, you do it all the way, don't you." She poured me a cup.

Bennett came out of the bedroom wrapped in a sheet, holding a half-empty bottle of bourbon. "You're gonna need this today, Gracebaby."

I never drank in the mornings. Never before and never since. I took it and added liquor to my coffee. It was dawn. Dark rivulets of rain cross-hatched the windows, dank air penetrating my bones. I could not stop shivering, seeing Steven alone on his bike, probably without a jacket, without a helmet, spinning his fury at me against the slicked roads, screaming into the rain what he would never scream at me. I wondered if he would come back today, and I wondered if he would talk to me again. Our house would explode with silence, the unspoken fury in which I had grown up and remembered well.

All day I drank bourbon and coffee. Julia told me to eat, but I couldn't think of food. Before leaving, they patted me on the head, said I would just have to face consequences. "Why didn't you sleep with me if you wanted to cheat on Steven?" Bennett asked. It was a joke, but Julia set her lips. "Steven's a good man, but he'll be pissed," Bennett said in parting. And Julia told me to take care of myself.

I built a fire in the woodstove and tried to keep warm beside it. By nightfall, I'd finished the bourbon and forced myself into the shower to wash off my smell. Although drunk, I was no longer high, Friday night's ecstasy some distant memory of someone else's life. I thought myself so evil I should be dead. If I were dead, I reasoned, then Steven would not have to live with the shame of what I had done to him. I found a steak knife and cut my wrists; I didn't know how much it would hurt. The blade pierced my flesh but not enough. Or perhaps I put too little pressure and could not bring more to bear. I hardly bled at all, and my wrists hurt too much too try again. I lay in bed and remembered bloodletting, that killing cure of the middle ages. So much toxin, and I had failed to bleed it out of me. I listened to the rain, waiting for the sound of Steven's motorcycle. Drunkenness dissolved to a dull thudding in my head, I began to cry. I wanted to do penance but nothing would suffice. I vomited, finally, examined my scars and thought myself an ass.

Sometime in the darkness, he came back. I heard him at the woodstove, stoking the dying fire. He was soaked -- hair, jacket and jeans -- as if he had been underwater all day. I pulled long sleeves over my wrists, buried my hands in my armpits.

"Steven. You should change your clothes. You'll get sick."

"Why would you care?" He wouldn't look at me. He spoke softly, and droplets of water fell from his skin to sizzle on the stovetop. "You bitch."

He had never cursed me, never raised his voice or his hand in anger. I shrank from him, retreating to the bedroom door.

"I care," I said, knowing myself a hypocrite.

"Yeah? You sure show it in strange ways, Grace, like fucking my friends on the front lawn, so drunk you can't even see."

"I'm sorry." I did not bother to say that we had not actually fucked. I crouched on the floor and cried, the few feet between us an impossible gulf. "I'm so sorry Steven. I'll do anything to make it up to you."

"Bennett says I should kick you out. I talked to him downtown."

It seemed a reasonable reaction, although I was surprised it came from Bennett. I was going to offer to move out when Steven added, "but I can't do that. It's always been good with us, Grace. Not perfect, but good. You know I've never loved anyone else."

As far as I knew, there had been no one before me in Steven's life; and he was five years older.

"I can't get rid of you like that, like throwing something out in the trash. But I can't trust you." He finally looked at me. "Grace, I'll never trust you again. I know that's a horrible thing to say, but you've made me this way." He began to cry, and then reached for me.

We rocked together by the stove, his wet hair drying in my hands, his burn-scarred arms wrapped fast around me. I thought we might make it to the other side of the weekend. He was generous, and I would make it up to him. Then he saw my wrist.

"What is this?" He tugged at my sleeve. "What the fuck is this?" His voice climbed hysterically as he uncovered my other wrist. "Now I'm supposed to feel guilty? is that it?"

His eyes open with horror, he let go of me, as if I had suddenly become poisonous to the touch. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he whispered, "No. No, Grace. I will not feel sorry for you."

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown

Synopsis

Watts Freeman, an African-American man from Los Angeles, flees Jonestown on the day of the massacre, Nov. 18, 1978. Thirty years later, he is interviewed for an Oakland radio program on the rise and fall of the Peoples Temple. This interview intersects the novel as Watts reveals more and more about life under the influence of the Rev. Jim Jones and his “white chick” inner circle.

Marceline Baldwin, daughter of a Midwestern minister, an altruistic and inexperienced young woman who plans to use her nursing skills to heal the world, meets the charismatic Jones in Indiana, 1949, and spends the next three decades as his wife and primary workhorse of the organization. When the church moves to California from Indiana in 1965 after attacks on the integrated congregation, she is instrumental in the smooth exodus of dozens of families, black and white, including infants and the elderly. While the couple adopts many children and has one natural child, Jim begins his lifelong sexual promiscuity, sweeping both men and women into his magnetic orbit, all the while preaching sexual restraint. Taking amphetamines to accomplish more and more good works, he becomes dependent on drugs. During this transformation of her husband, Mother Marceline turns the other cheek, works diligently, is faithful to her husband, and makes a profitable business setting up eldercare facilities. Even when her husband impregnates one of the flock, the chief “white chick,” Marceline continues to look at the larger picture: improving lives for the poor, the elderly, and the children of the church who need practical help. She is by her husband’s side up to the lethal last day.

In the mid-1970s, Virgil Nascimento, Guyana’s ambassador to the United States, finds himself drawn to a white American Peoples Temple officer, Nancy, who makes herself available to him in the capital of Georgetown, a 24-hour boat trip from the Peoples Temple jungle home of Jonestown. The group has fled the United States and in 1974 re-established itself in this English-speaking South American nation. Unbeknownst to Virgil, Nancy’s interest in him is purely political; she is one of the many women the paranoid Jones persuades to work as spies, to glean information and influence policy in the nascent and corrupt Marxist government of the former British colony. In Washington D.C., three years after the massacre, destroyed by the ruination of his country caused by the death of nearly a thousand Americans in Jonestown, Virgil will kill Nancy and their child before taking his own life, leaving behind a journal indicting Jones and all who collaborated in the nightmare of Jonestown, including himself.

Decades after the massacre, Truth Miller, who was in the group’s San Francisco office when it happened, will travel to Guyana for the first time and find herself a Guyanese man to impregnate her, all the while pining for what she perceives as a vanished paradise of an interracial utopia in the jungle, which might have thrived had not the U.S. government persecuted Jones and his followers to their tortured end. Despite all evidence, Truth will go on believing in Jones as savior, spiritual father of her son, though life’s difficulties will find her back in New Jersey, a single mother leading an ordinary life trying to pay the bills, remembering the glory days when Jones and people like her could sway an election, helping George Moscone become mayor of San Francisco.

The novel ends with the airing of the interview with Watts, a broadcast which illuminates the story of the Peoples Temple and its spectacular demise while continuing the media exploitation which followed Jim Jones and his followers all his life and well into the aftermath, still powerful today, 37 years later.

Paradise Undone draws on extensive research and interviews, creating a fiction that uses historical fact to tell a cohesive and credible story of the United States’ greatest single loss of civilian lives in the 20th century – 919 American citizens died that day in the jungle. Four protagonists -- two dead and two living, two men and two women, two Blacks and two Whites – tell their stories here, illuminating the formerly shadowed places populated by those who believed in Jim Jones.

This is from my story, "The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew," published in GLIMMERTRAIN STORIES, about one family's intersection with the events of Sept. 11, moving between one family's Jewish history, the present moment, and world politics.

“THE CLOSER YOU WERE, THE LESS YOU KNEW”

-- NYPD Chief Joe Esposito, September 11, 2001

Sept. 10, 2001

East 88th Street, NYC

10 a.m.

When Jules drops Ina off for the procedure, he kisses her deeply, embarrassingly, in the back of the cab and says, “Last time I caress the dear old face of the dear old gal I married.” Smiling, he exits the car to open her door with a flourish and a bow, “Break a leg, baby.”

Ina laughs. “A broken leg would be easier to fix! Remember how bad I’m going to look when I see you tonight, okay? Just think the worst, and it won’t be that bad.”

Jules directs the cabby to his office at the U.N. Plaza, and Ina inhales before entering the offices of Drs. Stein, Moore and Greenblatt. Discreetly, the brass plaque reveals nothing of the sort of doctoring which goes on in these tasteful Upper East Side rooms. “Vanity, all is vanity,” she whispers, then pushes open the solid oak door.

“Mrs. Schoenfeld, how are you?” Here, the nurses wear black Donna Karan; all are flawlessly coiffed and maquillaged. Nothing yet distinguishes the surroundings from an ordinary beauty salon.

Ina smiles ruefully. “I’m entirely prepared, Mia. Better not delay, or I might change my mind. Again.” This is Ina’s third attempt at lifting her face back into youth, aiming to re-capture the beauty of Ina the mother, teacher, wife, “Ina the energetic,” her friends called her, Ina at 61 seeing this fresh promise in Leah, her eldest daughter, herself a mother of two adolescent daughters. At 51 and 57, Ina had confronted her growing despair at the discrepancy between her lively spirit and wizened face, found herself on the verge of surgery here in this office, then about-faced. Her body was lean and strong, the result of daily three-mile runs through Central Park for the last fifteen years. But her face, the face of her own mother, was the picture of age, a crone’s face.

“If you’re ready then, Doctor Moore will see you.”

As the procedure begins, Ina tries to talk herself out of the panic that rises in her belly from the first drip of anesthesia onward. “Fool,” she thinks, “Oh foolish woman. You are not your face. God gave you this mirror of Mama, and you’re de-facing, effacing your own mother, who would never agree to such a barbaric act.” Of course, her mother hadn’t lived to this late age, dying of breast cancer at 30, her only child ten. If Ina had been permitted to weep, she would have. A retired high school English teacher, Ina borrows insults from poets she’s taught. “I will show you fear in a handful of … botox.” She feels strong in herself as an older woman, each year more confident in the decisions she’s made, the ones she makes daily. Yet, here she is, joining the masses of women afraid to age naturally. Now, she is wholly committed. Her life – all lives, she believes – remains a series of trials.

As the seconds pass, the doctor’s deep, expensive voice gentles her: “Now I’m going to do thus and such; you’ll feel a little prick,” etc. This latter makes her want to laugh. Indeed, she had felt little pricks in her time, though her sexual experience was limited to two groping freshmen at Columbia before she’d met Jules. Jules the Prodigious, Jules the babymaker, one, two, three years in a row, and there would have been four if she hadn’t insisted on the abortion. Another Dr. Stein, this one out in Newark, his door opening onto the hallowed back alley – the son she might have had. Without any basis in science, she’s convinced herself that the weeks’ old fetus was male. But she doesn’t regret it, at least, not often. Every few years, on the anniversary of that day, Jules will raise a glass: “To the unknown soldier,” he’ll say – all that needs saying. Without marking the calendar, he keeps track of the date, not Ina.

Later, when she lies resting, taupe curtains masking the sun, the walls sponged a subtle gray, she tells herself: “It’s done. No going back. Like every hard thing in the world.” Without success, she tries to resist reciting her personal list: her mother’s death; her father’s remarriage to the dreadful blonde, whose name she knows but refuses to say; the early and awful deaths of her in-laws; Leah’s left eye meeting a traveling I-beam at an unsupervised construction site on Third Avenue, her young life commencing as a series of operations, brutal, the recoveries from successive procedures longer and longer. But of the three girls, Leah was most like Ina; she toughed out every surgery, as she later bested law school as a single mother, her philandering husband lost to his trust-funded drug habit. He’d “forgotten” to send child support for the last four years, but Leah was proud to support the girls on her own. Ina wonders how her own life would be had she divorced her philandering husband but doesn’t dwell there. Jules had eventually calmed down, as she knew he would. The last affair – as far as she knew, and her information was usually impeccable – had been the year he turned 50. It was to be expected. Her marriage was good, her greatest achievement.

Mia comes in to check her bandages, to see if there’s anything she needs. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you?” The nurse’s voice quavers.

Eventually, Ina falls into half-sleep, sirens serenading her visions of Rachel and Naomi at their Sedona commune, back in the eighties, their unlined faces turning away from hers.