Digging the Vein by Tony O'Neill Page B

CHRISTIANE
     
    That night I got back home around seven. I found the note from Christiane telling me that it was over on the living room table. She couldn’t take me anymore. She couldn’t take the booze and the drugs anymore. She wanted out, she was filing for divorce and I was to leave the apartment. If I was looking for my manuscript, it was out back.
    I opened the back door, and there it was; she had dumped it on the concrete steps leading to the parking space, covered it in lighter fluid and reduced it to ashes. It had mostly blown away into the evening but some pages remained, damaged but recognizable. I wondered if she’d read it. It had become something of a journal over recent months. It was all in there—Joan, the speed induced sex with Miro, the failed attempt at sex with Melissa, the drugs, the way I had begun to hate her. It made sense, I suppose, that the book was the final straw.
    I felt a vague sadness that the book had been destroyed. All I had now were older versions without many of the more recent revisions. Still, I had made no effort to hide the writing from her. I left it in plain sight day after day. I suppose a part of me thought she would never read it, as she showed absolutely no interest in anything I did anymore. Then again, a part of me had wanted her to read it. It would mean that the truth would be out and the situation would be resolved one way or another. A vague sense of panic gripped me as I realized that what had happened here by very definition had to be final. There was no more pretending now. My relationship with Christiane, barring some kind of miracle, was over.
    I grabbed the note again and reread it. She was going to her friend Susan’s place and would stay there tonight. She wanted me out by the time she returned tomorrow night. My shock receded a little and I started to get angry. I recalled every bit of hurt inflicted upon me, every stinging rejection. I wandered into the bedroom, and looked at the neat double bed with its grey sheets. The room looked like the rest of the apartment: bright, airy, practical. Christiane all over. I remembered going down on her here once, sometime towards the end of our sexual relationship. Sucking her clit in the dim bedroom, the first sexual contact she had allowed in a month or so. I stopped for a second, balancing myself on the bed and as I did so she looked down and hissed, “Keep sucking my CLIT, fucker! Jesus Christ can’t you do fucking anything right?” I had stood up and grabbed the bedspread and yanked it off the bed, flipping her off of it onto the wooden floor with a thud. And then she was on me, throwing punches and screaming curses, and I turned over the bedside cabinet, sending her trinkets and bullshit skittering across the floor, then grabbed her by the throat and tossing her back onto the bed. Standing over her yelling, “Fuck you, cunt!” stumbling into my jeans, storming out and walking shirtless and shoeless in a blind rage to the liquor store on the corner of Normandie and Hollywood.
    Just thinking of it I was gripped by that same rage again. I looked about the room for something to break. Then seized by the utter futility of it, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a sheet of aluminum foil and prepared to smoke some more junk.
    That night I walked to Bob’s Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard to get wasted. On top of the heroin, the whiskey and sodas I ordered started to get me very drunk indeed. The barmaid knew me, and always made them seventy percent Makers Mark with just a splash of soda. I drank three quickly, and asked her to line up another. The bar was half empty. A couple of older Hollywood alcoholics sat nursing wine and beer, grey, spectral, broken-toothed, and huddled over the bar in the darkest corners they could find. Nobody talked tonight. The jukebox played Television’s Marquee Moon .
    A drink later she walked in. A young black girl, high on ecstasy … she danced across the room to Blondie’s “Rip