“Well, I’m sure it’s good to see Amy, too,” she said, in a clipped, formal tone. “You guys have known each other for so long. It would be terrible if you just, you know, never spoke.” Curtis nodded slowly. He appeared to be slightly afraid of her, which only made her more angry.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said carefully, after a while. “I was a terrible husband to her and I feel like I can kind of make it up to her by being a good friend. She can’t really take care of herself. It’s hard for her, being alone.”
Emily refrained from pointing out that Amy had a boyfriend who lived on her block—whom she’d started sleeping with while she and Curtis were still living together—and so she wasn’t alone, was she? She also managed to restrain herself from mentioning this development to her friends, since she knew they would make too big a deal out of it. But she added a third Curtis to the list: the Curtis who spent time with Amy on Sundays. She would never meet this Curtis and that was absolutely fine with her. She wondered whether he and Amy talked about politics or their mutual friends or the weather or what, and whether, in doing so, he studiously avoided mentioning Emily, as he avoided mentioning Amy to Emily.
Not that it mattered. On Sunday afternoons she went about her chores with the specter of Amy trailing her, like some kind of hovering, bewinged Disney witch. Come Sunday night she often felt that she’d rid herself of this ghost, so content was she in her small, neat home, her three plants watered, her hair freshly washed, her bed lined with clean sheets, her laundry folded and put away, her face pink and exfoliated, a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove. Some Sundays, she even found herself dreading Curtis’s Monday invasion. Maybe, really, she was meant to be alone. Maybe she preferred being alone and she’d simply been conditioned by the media—or society in general—to think she had to partner off with someone and start a family and so on.
This was how she felt on some Sundays. On other Sundays—like this one, the day before their anniversary—Amy remained unvanquished, a convenient repository for all Emily’s fears and anxieties. As the evening wore on, she practically had to sit on her hands in order to keep herself from picking up the phone and calling Curtis. This was another thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t do: call him on Sundays. She didn’t want to seem incapable of going a day (less, really!) without speaking to him. Nor did she want to appear to be checking up on him, making sure he actually came home from Amy’s place, though of course she did want to make sure, particularly since the Monday, back in April, when Curtis walked in the door, kissed the top of her head, and announced, quietly, that he was going to quit drinking.
“Quit drinking,” Emily parroted, shocked. Curtis loved to drink. More than anyone she knew. She put down the bottle of wine in her hand. “Quit drinking,” she repeated. The phrase sounded strange and false to her, like something from a Jimmy Stewart movie or an Arthur Miller play, as though drinking were Curtis’s occupation and he’d decided to leave it and pursue something more lucrative, like selling aluminum siding. “Why?” she asked, hearing a whine creep into her voice. Curtis shrugged and smiled, sitting down on Emily’s gray couch. He picked up that week’s New Yorker, which lay open to the movie reviews, the section Emily read first. “Curtis, why?” she asked again, sitting down next to him and taking one of his hands in her own. Instead of looking at her, he glanced blankly at the bottle of wine on the counter.
“Emily, I mean, come on. Why does anyone quit drinking?” She pursed her lips together so as not to ask him to please stop using that ridiculous phrase.
“I don’t know anyone who’s ‘quit drinking,’” she told him primly.
“Sure, you do,” Curtis said. “Clara.” Emily recoiled at the mention of her sister’s name.
“Clara stopped drinking,” she told him, feeling that now-familiar switch click on, unleashing an electric jolt of anger; there was something strangely exciting, even sexy about it, that odd, off-kilter feeling that anything, anything, might fly out of her mouth, “because she’s crazy. You’re nothing like Clara. Are you”—she was on the verge of screaming, the muscles in her arms strangely taut, her temple pounding—“are you saying that you’re an alcoholic? Is that what you’re saying? Because you’re not. You don’t know anything about it, Curtis. You’re not an alcoholic.”
“I could be,” he said, his eyes still on the magazine. “And I am like Clara in some ways. I have a problem with addiction. I smoke. I drink too much coffee.”
Emily threw up her small hands. “Curtis, this is crazy! My sister has serious problems. It’s offensive to say that you, your, I don’t know”—her voice sputtered—“the fact that you smoke, like, a pack of American Spirit Lights every two days is in some way the same as my sister being an unreformed junkie who can’t function in normal society.” She was screaming now, her voice ragged, and Curtis had put down the magazine and dropped his head into his hands. His legs were so long that his knees poked up in sharp angles from the low couch.
“Please calm down,” he said, in such a quiet, heartbreaking way that Emily burst into tears.
“This is Amy, isn’t it?” she said. “This has something to do with Amy.”
“No, no,” he told her. He’d been thinking, a lot, he said—with the album coming out and the tour and all that—and realized that everything he and Emily did together involved drinking. They never sat and talked without a glass of wine in their hands. “You just have one, but I always want another. I get a taste for it.” And he thought, just as an experiment, that he’d stop and see how things progressed without alcohol as a “lubricant.” Amy, she thought. That sounds like Amy. And sure enough, when pressed, Curtis confessed that Amy had planted the idea in his head: she’d been insisting, lately, that Curtis’s drinking had driven them apart. And she was concerned, sweet girl, that it would do the same to him and Emily. Alcohol was a depressant and Curtis had depressive tendencies anyway, she said. He should really think about Prozac or Zoloft or something.
“Curtis, that’s just stupid,” Emily said. “You don’t need to be on antidepressants.” But she was remembering that in college he’d gone through an amphetamine phase (“It helped me focus”) and an LSD phase (“It helped me write”), and she was counting the number of his lyrics that had something to do with one drug or another. Or self-loathing. Or suicide. Okay, Emily thought, maybe I’ll give her this one.
“According to Pfizer, we all need to be on antidepressants,” he said, smiling, but she would not, no, she would not, let all this go with a laugh.
“Oh,” she said, folding her arms against her chest. “Well. Then. Why don’t we hook up the IV right now.” Curtis shrugged again, maddeningly, then let the real bomb drop: Amy had decided that they shouldn’t divorce until Curtis “sobered up.” Not, he insisted, because she didn’t want the divorce—she did, he said—but for Curtis’s own welfare. She didn’t want him to go through with the divorce in some sort of alcohol-induced fog only to regret it later.
“Why would you regret it?” asked Emily. “And why does it matter? If she wants the divorce, too, then why should she care if you regret it.” Curtis sighed and gave her a look of great tolerance, as though Amy’s logic was flawless and Emily a dolt for not understanding, but he would be kind enough to explain it one more time.