Read Online Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady - Free Book Online Page A

vodka.”
    Walter nods.
    â€œWhen we went on trips. I used to dread vacations. I’d have to wash out bottles of shampoo and conditioner so I could refill them with vodka. And it still tasted like perfume. Jay would complainthat he didn’t see why I needed all those cosmetics when we were only going up to Lake Tahoe to sit on the beach. He still thinks that I never drank
that
much.”
    â€œIt’s hard not to develop a little contempt for people when you’re an experienced drinker. The way they always want to be fooled.”
    â€œI always felt I was just about to be caught. That I had to be so careful.”
    â€œI remember that,” Walter says. “Planning everything. So you could pretend you were in control.” He holds out his shaking hands. His cigarette butt shivers between his trembling fingers. “Would you look at me now? Sometimes I wonder what the point is of staying sober. I’m never going to want anything—not a woman, not my son back—like I want a drink.”
    If Jay hasn’t gone to sleep, he’ll be starting to worry about why I’m late. “You should talk to your sponsor.”
    He smirks at me. “Take it through the appropriate channels.”
    â€œMaybe he can help you negotiate with your wife.”
    â€œMy wife. She used to hide the car keys when I got drunk at home, ’cause once I reached a certain point, I’d want to go out and catch my buddies at the bar. She’d hide them in my kid’s room when she put him to bed. I’d go in and turn on the light and start tossing his room. And she’d be on the bed with him, crying, and I’d grab her by the neck and start pushing her around the room. If I was looking in the wrong place, she’d have to say I was cold. If I was getting close, she’d have to say I was getting warm. Hot, hotter, hottest till I found the keys.”
    Walter places a shaking hand on my wrist.
    â€œWill you be OK now?” I say. “I should really go.”
    Walter shrugs. “Aren’t you at least going to look under the bed and behind the curtains before you go?”
    The alcove that serves as his bedroom is so dim I can barelymake out the outline of the bed, the concave surface of the lousy mattress.
    He plucks at my wrist, so delicately. “That’s another thing,” he says. “I can’t go to bed now, not if I’m alone. It’s just so much work when you’re stone-cold sober. I usually wake up on the sofa with the TV still going.”
    I know that everything everyone in AA confesses is genuine. I know that Roberta joined because one night she left a cigarette burning and destroyed her apartment, everything in it, and was lucky to escape with her own life and her son’s. I can picture Walter’s frightened wife, speaking her lines—“you’re getting warmer”—wincing, dangling from his big, clamped hand. But Roberta has held me in her arms. Walter’s touch now is so light that I want to press my mouth to the palm of his hand and kiss it. Walter, Roberta, all my fellow drunks, are like nesting boxes to me, one confession snugly fitted within another—the sad enclosing the brutal enclosing the next smaller universe of regret.
    It’s hard not to feel blue when I come home from another session with Walter. He wants me to come upstairs every time now, and I don’t want to go, but I do. Jay is waiting up for me, sitting at the dining room table with a book. He always reads as if he’s studying, with a certain grim sense of duty and discomfort, slogging away at the painful process of decoding words to get pleasure.
    He slaps his book shut. “What’s going on?” he says. “You come home later and later from your meetings.”
    â€œI just have so many people to give rides to.” The habit of lying resurfaces so easily, and I want to blame Jay for this, for all the years when he so