The Mare

Ginger

Paul and I bickered about having Velvet up on weekends. Then we fought. He repeated the things he’d said about my needs, her needs, expectations I would not be able to meet. He said we had nothing in common. Then he started about race. He said things like “white benefactor” and “She’s too different from you” and “What are you going to do when she gets pregnant?” Which made me yell, “And you think I’m racist?” before I left the house and slammed the door.

We made up. And fought about it again. Maybe once a month, he said. If her mother agrees. Twice a month, I said. If she keeps her grades up. If she continues the good work, we’ll make it every week, I didn’t say.

Whatever I said, I was afraid Paul might be right. Not so much about race but about need; about my feelings. A few days after we had the argument, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took the train into the city to go to what used to be my favorite AA meeting there. People I knew in the ’80s go to it, artists and failed artists mostly, whom I can talk to better than anyone upstate. After I hung around for the meeting after the meeting and wound up talking with an old enemy who had been a loved friend for about six months a long time ago; someone I could not help but see as a half friend. I talked to her about Velvet, starting with the organization that had brought her to see us. My half friend put on her program face and said, “It sounds like you’re really wanting to nurture yourself. I think you need to be looking at your own shit.” I said, “I’ve spent the last ten years nurturing myself and looking at my own shit. It’s time to nurture somebody else now.”

She didn’t push it. But her precise little needle had struck home. Because even though she spoke ignorantly, she did know something about me. She knew the way I had lived: blank loneliness broken by friendships that would come suddenly into being, surge through the color spectrum, then blacken, crumple, and die; scene after drunken idiotic scene, mashed-up conversations nobody could hear, the tears and ugly laughter quieted only by the rubber tit of alcohol or something else. Friendship was bad, sex was worse, and love — love! That was someone who rang my doorbell at three a.m. and I would let him in so he could tell me I was worthless, hit me, fuck me, and leave unless he needed to sleep over because his real girlfriend was — for some reason! — mad at him. It was not pleasure, it was like a brick wall that a giant hand smashed me against again and again, and it was like the most powerful drug in the world. Paul knows about this, but he doesn’t know. Because how can I describe it? It was like being locked into a nightmare more real than anything until I woke and couldn’t really remember the details or make sense of it, knowing only that it was terrible and that I would do it again.

“Sex addiction”; “addicted to emotion”; these were the sober terms by which I learned to describe this dull little hell, and for a while such terms helped me the way crutches help a broken-legged person to walk. They helped, but they did not heal.

Yes, my enemy-friend knew me. Or rather she had known me. She had known me in the hard, ungiving way she knew herself. She did not know Velvet’s eyes when I read to her. She did not know what it was like to walk with her in soft, earth-smelling darkness or to see her on a horse. Maybe that bitch Becca was right; maybe that was playing at something if that was all I did. But I could do more, and I was willing.

I rode home on the train and I looked out the window at the shining dark water with its glowing rim of light left over from the day and I knew: Just because I had been in hell, I don’t have to be there always. Love is not always a sickness, and I don’t need grim, dry terms in order to walk. I have changed. I can trust myself. I love Paul. I love Velvet. I can trust it.