Bad Thoughts

Chapter 9

Susan Shannon had been out of it all day, making mistakes, losing her concentration. As the afternoon wore on, her frustration built, severely creasing her brow and tensing her small face. When she lost an hour’s typing by hitting the wrong mouse button, the color dropped right out of her. She sat frozen, struggling against the impulse to smash her computer against the wall. Then she stood up, her body rigid, and held her breath before heading towards the ladies’ room. Sid Lischten, one of the law firm’s partners, spotted her and was about to start bitching about how long it was taking to get his contract typed up. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Even though Susan Shannon stood only five-foot-one and weighed at most ninety-five pounds, at that moment she didn’t look like anyone you wanted to tangle with.

When Susan saw herself in the ladies’ room mirror she let out a disgusted giggle. Her face looked like a ridiculous parody of itself-frozen into a hard, anxious mask.

She leaned over the sink and splashed cold water over her face. After a while she could feel the hardness softening. She glanced in the mirror and saw her face was almost back to normal, only a little tightness stiffening her mouth.

There were obvious reasons for her anxiety. The workplace was stressful as all hell. The associates for the most part were bastards, the partners petty little tyrants. They were adapting well for the nineties, cutting three secretaries and dividing their work among the remaining four. The official message given to the office staff was just be thankful you have a job. The unofficial message was a little more blunt; if you complain about having to work lunches or coming in an hour early or leaving an hour late, then your ass-even if it’s as pretty as Susan Shannon’s-will be out on the street.

But that was only a small part of it. She could live with all that. What she couldn’t live with was what was happening to her husband. As much as he promised her this year would be different-that he was making progress with his therapist-she knew it was going to turn out the same as it always had.

It was all starting up again. A week ago he jolted up in bed at four in the morning, moaning, his body soaked in sweat. It took her almost a half hour to get him out of it. Since then, the nightmares had come nightly. After the nightmares came the moodiness, the depression, his just staring into space. She didn’t have a clue if he’d gone to work today. She had tried calling home a half dozen times and no one answered, but that didn’t mean a thing. If he was home, he’d just let the phone ring. Probably wouldn’t even be aware of its ringing.

Once he got out of bed he was better, almost functional, but getting him out of bed was becoming harder and harder.

She knew the signs as well as she knew anything. She’d been living with them for over ten years. Two days ago he had stopped showering or shaving or even brushing his teeth. That was bad. That meant the drinking was only a few days away, at best.

Dave Zeltserman

Bad Thoughts

And once the drinking started…

Her stomach tensed thinking about it. Absentmindedly she put a hand to the pain and massaged it. Once the drinking started was when the real fun began.

The drinking would be heavy and intense, but it wasn’t even like he’d get drunk. More like he’d just fade away from her. Sometimes he’d become catatonic, other times he’d move around their apartment like a zombie, looking through her as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t have any idea where he was. The more alcohol he’d pour into himself the more frequent his trances would come. Sometimes they would last ten minutes, sometimes an hour, and then he’d be back, staring at her blankly, not even aware that anything had happened. Not even able to remember that anything had happened.

Then one day he’d be gone. Just plain disappear. He’d usually come back a week later looking emaciated, like he’d just gotten out of a P.O.W. camp. One year, he was almost dead with pneumonia when he staggered back to their apartment. Another year, he had rat bites up and down both his legs. Then last year, he was so dehydrated he had to be hospitalized. The doctor told her another day and she would’ve been out shopping for a casket.

He would never be able to tell her what went on during his disappearances. The way he would explain it was that one moment he would be drinking in a bar or restaurant or out of a bottle in some alley and the next moment he would be someplace else, realizing he’d better get home. He could never remember what happened between those two moments even though they could’ve been more than a week apart.

They never found out what happened during his disappearances. Except for one year…

Three years ago, he had ended up in a crack house in Chelsea living with a prostitute. A few weeks after he came back home, the girl showed up at their apartment to give Susan back Bill’s driver’s license. She also wanted to tell Susan about it. She was no more than eighteen, haggard looking, thin, her skull just about shining through her flesh, her arms nothing but a mess of scars. It broke Susan’s heart to look at her. The girl was pretty much doped up but she was able to describe in detail her week with Bill. She thought Susan had a right to know about it. She was also hoping that maybe Susan could give her some money.

Susan almost left him then. She came within a heartbeat of packing her clothes and getting the hell out, but she knew he didn’t have any idea of what he’d done. That it was a completely blank screen to him. So he begged and pleaded with her, his eyes as tortured as anything she’d ever seen, and in the end what choice did she have? Besides, at the time she probably still loved him. She wasn’t sure, though, whether she could forgive him.

As it was she wouldn’t have sex with him for six months, and after that only with condoms for another year. And there were his periodic HIV tests. And time fixed things, at least it dulled the hurt.

That was three years ago. The year after that was when he came home with the rat bites up and down both legs. And then last year

…

It was all starting up again…

Of course, he would never tell her what triggered his yearly breakdowns. Whenever she pressed him, he’d become silent and distant. He knew what was behind it, but he wouldn’t trust her with the knowledge. That was the one thing she couldn’t forgive him for. Maybe more than anything that was why she thought constantly about leaving him.

Susan dried her face with a paper towel and then gave a quick glance in the mirror before leaving. She didn’t like the look in her eyes, but under the circumstances she looked as normal as she could expect. On her way back to her desk, Sid Lischten, having been laying in wait, sprung out at her.

“You were in there twenty minutes!” he accused. He was an old man without much flesh around his face or body. As he stood staring at Susan, his mouth twisted unpleasantly.

“Excuse me?”

“What the hell were you doing in there, your laundry?” he demanded, his voice booming throughout the office. It didn’t seem possible for so much noise to come out of such a withered body. Susan could feel heads turning towards them.

“No, I wasn’t doing my laundry,” she stated slowly, her own voice trembling.

“What else could you’ve been doing in there for twenty minutes?” Lischten asked sarcastically. The unpleasantness around his mouth had spread throughout his face, leaving his small eyes bulging. “Unless you just needed to get away from it all. Is that it, a little vacation, huh? You’ve had over an hour and a half to get me the Haines contract. I could’ve typed it myself in half that time.”

“I’ll have it for you as soon as I can.”

Susan turned and started towards her desk. Lischten yelled out to her back that if she thought she was too pretty to lose her job then she’d better think again.

By the time she sat down she was shaking. Donna leaned over and whispered to her that it would do the old bastard right if someone slipped Ex-Lax into his coffee. “Maybe it would loosen him up,” she added. “He looks constipated, doesn’t he? Anyway, we all know he’s full of shit.”

“I hope he chokes on it,” Susan muttered.

“Yeah, you’re not the only one. What do you call a hundred dead lawyers on the bottom of the ocean?”

“A good start.”

It was a lame joke, one that they told each other whenever things got unbearable. Donna gave Susan’s arm a little squeeze before turning back to her work. Susan was still shaking. She hugged herself tightly trying to stop. She couldn’t afford to lose her job now, not if she was going to leave Bill.

The thought stopped her. Had she already made the decision?

The phone rang. It was Joe DiGrazia calling to tell her what had happened to her husband. She listened quietly and then thanked him. After getting off the phone, she sat for a minute and then forced herself to type up the Haines contract.