I laid there and watched as she put on her make-up. There was something vaguely Calvinist in the way she put her face on in the morning. The deliberate strokes and touch-ups, scrunching her face, scrutinizing the flaws, the flaws which were the only thing about her she ever paid any attention to. We had a nice credenza in our apartment then. Her uncle Sal gave it to her when she moved to the Midwest for college. Looking at her as she was sitting on a ratty chair, wearing boy shorts and nothing else, it occurred to me again that I had no idea how I’d ended up with Clair, or how I had ended up staying with Clair as long as I had. With one final stroke of an eyeliner pen she was finished. She smiled at herself in the mirror, looked at me with one eye half-closed, and put that pair of designer jeans on.
“I’m going.”
“I know.” I roll over.
“You’ll be back around 11 tonight, right?”
“Should be.”
She always left in a hurry, even when she took an hour to get ready for the shit job she worked. We all worked shit jobs. She had small hands and liked French pop music from the late 70s. I worked later in the day, and spent the mornings after she went back to the saltmines feeling mixed-up about a lot of different things, but mainly about her. Thinking about her when she wasn’t in the room tapped in to this gargantuan well of ambivalence that made my brow furrow and my stomach feel bad. I couldn’t stand her, and I loved her. And it made no sense to me. But, of course, this isn’t really about me.
She grew up affluent, and I always held that against her. I never actually confronted her on this upbringing of hers, of course. That would take too much time. Everything took too much time with her. The dog got into her pills that morning. She preferred prescription bottles with pop-off caps. Said that childproof caps pissed her off when she tried to open them drunk. I told her she shouldn’t open them drunk. She said ‘thanks, dad.’ She said that a lot, come to think of it. The dog was a beagle. Her aunt passed it on to Clair when she moved here. I’d realized Sherman the Beagle had gotten into mommy’s 500mg of happiness when I got out of the shower and saw the open bottle, covered in saliva and God knows what else. I tried to reason with him, told him that it was very bad what he did. And then I realized I was talking to a dog, and it wasn’t likely that my life was going to turn into a Disney film any time soon.
I arrived at the vet’s in record time, running down the street looking completely ridiculous with that pet taxi swinging back and forth, my lungs telling me it was time to quit poisoning them at the rate of two packs a day. The girl at the front desk smirked when she saw the worried look on my face. She wore a turquoise headscarf and these campy earrings that reminded me of some bad horror movie from the 60s I’d seen a couple weeks before. She cleared her throat.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Sherman here swallowed a whole mess of Valium, and I don’t think that’s good.”
“No, that’s not good at all.”
Smart-ass. They pumped his stomach for the better part of the late morning. I had to be at work in a couple hours. I made this problem of mine clear to the vet, and he told me it was very irresponsible for me to let poor Sherman to get into the medicine. Rather than tell him to fuck off I asked him how much longer Sherman had to stay. It was going to be a couple days.
When I got home from work Clair wasn’t home. This was odd, as she had become a home-body after the heady days of higher education. She preferred staying in and doing not much of anything to the nightlife that surrounded our apartment on all sides. I walked to the kitchen and looked at the refrigerator. There was a note. It was a bad note. Sherman was mentioned by name. I suppose I’m going to have a find a new place to live.