“You look terrific,” he said.

“So do you.” Had my husband always had that pretentious accent?

“You here alone?”

“No,” I said, trying not to slur my words, “I’m with Fran.” I reached up and touched his shoulder in what I thought was a friendly way. “Where’d you get that shirt? I don’t remember it. Is it from Hawaii or something?”

There was something in his look I couldn’t read. He bent toward me and said into my ear, “Listen, I think it’s time for you to go home. I’ll take you if you want. We can get a cabdownstairs. Let me just tell Sukey.”

“Sukey? What kind of name is that?”

“Go wait in the foyer, Sally. I’ll be right there.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not my husband anymore.”

He straightened up and squared his shoulders. “Where is Fran?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see her. Over there.” Carey took me by the elbow and steered me through the crowd. I didn’t resist. The room was swimming.

In the elevator the two of them discussed how lucky it was that the Memorial Day parade had been over hours earlier, so we wouldn’t have any problems with traffic. Carey had his arm around me and I thought this wasn’t appropriate but didn’t say anything. Out on the street he hailed a taxi and kissed me on the cheek. “You take care of yourself.” By then I was concentrating on not throwing up. At about Twenty-third Street I thought I was going to lose the battle. Fran reached across me and rolled down the window but it turned out to be a false alarm.

“Franny, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve never done this before.” It was true. I never let myself get too drunk or stoned, even during our summer on the Cape. I was too afraid of losing control.

“Forget about it,” she said.

Miraculously, we managed to get into my apartment before I puked. In the bathroom I kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m so fucked up. I’m sorry you have to take care of me.”

“I’m not mad at you, Sally,” Fran said. “Why do you keep on acting like I’m mad at you?”

“I did this once for my sister. When she was twelve.”

“That figures.”

“Do you think Alicia will ever talk to me again?”

“You got sick here, not in her apartment. Besides, I happen to know that old Charlie was blowing lunch before we left. Sorry about that.” Her hand stayed on my nape as I aimed my head over the toilet again.

The phone was ringing. I knew it was early from the angle of sun through the half-opened curtain, and I was afraid to get up to answer it, afraid to alter the equilibrium of my body. It couldn’t be Fran, she’d left only a few hours ago, arranging the fans so they were blowing a cross-draft over me, a wastebasket by my head. The machine clicked on.

“Sa, pick up, pick up, I know you’re there.”

I slid out of bed, dragging the wastebasket with me, and practically crawled to the kitchen, where the phone was. “Marty?” I said into the receiver.

“You sound awful,” my sister said cheerfully.

“Where are you calling from?” I closed my eyes and managed to slide my body down into a sitting position on the floor, my back resting against the under-the-sink cabinet.

“Home. Listen, Sa”—lowering her voice—“I have to ask you a favor.”

“Would you please speak up?”

“I’ll try, but Ma’s out in the hall and I don’t want her to hear.”

“Okay, okay, what.”

“Can you lend me some money?”

“How much?”

“A thousand.”

“No way.”

“Please, Sa. It’s just to help me put down a security deposit and the first month’s rent. I’ll pay you back by the end of this year, I promise.”

“What happened to Dennis?”

“Are you going to lend me the money or not?”

“I can’t think now, Mar, I’m sick. Could you please call back later?”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Just later.” I hung up, opened the refrigerator, and got out a bottle of club soda, which I finished off in one gulp. My stomach roiled. I forced myself to my feet and hung over the sink, waiting. Nothing. Finally I went back to bed.

My sister had never hit me up like that before, she must be desperate. Maybe I’d give her five hundred. It was all I could spare, and not even that really. Why hadn’t she asked Ma for a loan? I’d call her tomorrow, when I felt human.

I lay back and shut my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I remembered Carey’s arm around me. Fran rubbing my back in the bathroom. Valeric doing the same in the emergency room.

This was my dream: I was skiing with Carey, or rather, he was doing the skiing, and I was following behind him, no poles, my arms wrapped around his waist, as if we were on a motorcycle. My ex-husband’s body shielded me from the wind and snow. There were no decisions to make, nothing to do but follow. After a while I realized that we were going to crash and I tried to extricate myself, but it was as if my arms were glued in place. Don’t, I tried to say, but I couldn’t speak, and we kept going, down, down. Then the dream changed. I was a little girl in Monterey, walking around the grass in the backyard. I kept falling. Every time I did, someone would pick me up by the shoulders, setting me back on my feet. All around us was the smell of jasmine.

25

The fallout from the party was not as bad as I’d expected. Fran called that evening from Boston to make sure I was okay, and told me that Charlie had asked Alicia for my phone number. Later in the week I got a message from Carey saying it had been good to see me, why didn’t we meet for drinks at the Brown Club sometime. I thought this was a good idea. There was a lot we needed to talk about.

My hangover lasted for two days. There are lots of things you can’t do well when you have a hangover, but painting isn’t one of them. Artist friends of mine tell me they sometimes do their best work when physically compromised—with a fever, for instance. It’s like the defenses are down. On the second day I got up and opened all my reds—cadmium, crimson, scarlet, rose madder, burgundy, geranium, ruby. I flipped through my sketchbook and studied the automatic drawings I had done in the hospital and St. Pete, and then I started to work.

Like my drawing at Willowbridge it came out fast and completely abstract. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. The background a silver-gray wash and on top of that incomprehensible graffiti that spelled out nothing, not even letters, most of the strokes slashing diagonally down, so that your heart would go the same direction when you looked. I’d been taught to be careful with red. The color called attention to itself, eclipsed all others, so that you had to use it sparingly. I wasn’t sparing. I tacked up a second canvas and tried again, without the background, for the shock of it on bright cool white.

I would have used my own blood if it weren’t for the limited supply and the fact that it did not dry true to color.

By the end of the day my studio looked like a massacre had taken place. I had to turn the canvases to the wall so that I could sleep.

“Aunty Winnie says she looks forward to see you at wedding,” my mother said on the phone.

“I don’t know if I’m going.”

“How come you don’t go? Such an old childhood friend.”

“Look, I’ll think about it, okay?”

And I did. Sitting on the floor of my studio with the sun pouring in, I decided, what the hell. But first I had to get back into my life. Slowly, Sally, I told myself.

“Why do you think she keeps calling you?” Valerie asked.

“Control, of course. She wants to keep tabs on me now.”

“Why now?”

“Before I wasn’t dangerous. Now she knows I could hurt her. I could tell everyone the truth about my father.”

“And?”

“If I tell the truth about Monkey King, I tell the truth about her.”

“And what truth is that?”

“She let it happen.”