She moved away now, going into the kitchen that was separated from the living room by a bar-high counter with two stools. She called it part of the hot-setup contemporary decor. The place, she’d found out, was full of young swingies who turned their hi-fis up in the evening and invited each other in for cocktails and sangrнa at their studio bars. She had gone to one party and sipped coffee and the swingies had lost interest. It had been fun watching, though, she said. Like amateur night.
Ryan looked around the room again before going over to the counter. The place was freshly painted white and didn’t feel lived in. There wasn’t any worn-out furniture, things that had been handed down or bought at garage sales. There was beige carpeting and an Indian-looking rug. There were no curtains: a limp plant hung in the window. What dominated the room was a drawing board tilted up, with a straight chair, and a table littered with tubes of paint and brushes, a few ceramic pots, coffee mugs, and a full ashtray. There was an aluminum floor lamp that looked new, and a pair of director’s chairs with bright-yellow canvas. Most of the wall area was bare and stark white except for a number of black-and-white sketches of whales above the drawing board, stuck to the wall with pieces of masking tape. There were the two blue-looking finished canvases and a word, Kujira, painted on the wall in thin, flowing black letters that seemed more a delicate design than a word. Ryan didn’t know what to say when they came in and Denise turned on the floor lamp and he stood looking around. He said, “Did you do all this?” He studied the oils, not knowing what they were until she told him whales. The design on the wall, Kujira, was the Japanese word for whale, and the technique, the flowing, stiff-armed brushstrokes of ink, was called sumi. Denise said she was thinking about doing No More Bullshit in sumi. Ryan said it was a nice place. Clean. Denise said it was funny, she never thought of a place that way, being clean or dirty.
Leaning on the counter, he watched her as she put a kettle on to boil and dropped tea bags into blue ceramic cups.
“You mentioned, I think it was at that Saint Joseph meeting, you almost went home. Where’s that, your home?” He had to think before he spoke and not refer to anything about her he had learned on his own.
“Bad Axe,” Denise said. “You know where it is?”
“Everybody knows where Bad Axe is. Why didn’t you go there?” He was interested. He was also groping, looking for a way to ease into telling her what was going on. Relieve his own mind without disturbing hers. Maybe if they got talking about real feelings and were honest with each other…
“I almost did,” Denise said, “I guess, wanting to feel protected. But when I’m home, I’m not ever really me, I’m somebody or whatever my mother expects me to be. You know what I mean? I have to pretend I’m still her little girl and, oh gee, is it nice to be home, it’s so good to see you, Mom, and all that shit. I love her, I really do, but I can’t be honest with her and tell her how I feel. She wouldn’t understand. She’s full of shoulds and shouldn’ts and she’s not going to change now. So I thought, why get into all that? I’ve got enough of a problem getting myself straight without worrying about offending good old Mom. In her own way, she’s as unreal and fucked-up as I am. But she doesn’t know it and that makes a difference.”
Denise looked at him as she turned and placed the mugs of tea on the counter. “That’s a habit I’m going to have to break.”
“What is?”
“Talking dirty. I always said ‘fuck’ a lot when I was drinking.”
“It’s okay as long as you smile.”
“The past year, I don’t remember having much to smile about.” She looked at him again. “Does that sound like ‘poor me’?”
“Maybe a little,” Ryan said, “even if it’s true.” He wanted to lead her along, get her to talk about herself. “How come you didn’t paint?”
“I was too busy drinking.”
“I asked you one time,” Ryan said and stopped. “No, I guess I didn’t.”
“What?”
“When you started drinking.”
“At State, I guess. I went to East Lansing, did the wine and pot thing. I guess I drank quite a bit, but I didn’t worry about it then. Everybody got high or stoned, one way or another.”
“Then you went to-what, art school?”
“Detroit Arts and Crafts. Did I tell you that?”
“Yeah, I guess. Or else I just assumed you studied somewhere.”
“It has a different name now,” Denise said, “like the Creative Center or something, and a new building. I went there three years, got very involved in fine art, mostly oils and acrylics. Then, well, I was living in the art center area, you know? around Wayne and the art museum, the main library-”
Ryan nodded. About ten blocks from where he had found her in the Cass Avenue bar, the Good Times.
“-and I felt I was into real life, there was so much going on around there. Sort of a Left Bank atmosphere with the art and the freaky students at Wayne and the inner-city stuff, the hookers and pimps in their wild outfits, all sort of mixed together. At the time I thought, wow, beautiful. Or bizarro, if it was a little kinky. That was one of the words. Or something would berserk you out, like a wine and pot party in a sauna. You see, I was very arty and open-minded, I mean as a life-style, not just on weekends playing dress-up. I was going around with a couple of black guys most of the time…” She paused.
Ryan waited.
“Yeah? You trying to find out if I’m prejudiced?”
“No, I was thinking, if I’d ever told my mother, God. Maybe that’s what I should do sometime, say, okay, here’s your little girl, and unload everything I’ve done. If she survives, fine. If she doesn’t…”
“What?”
“Well, it would be her problem, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think you’d be unloading,” Ryan said. “I think you’d be dumping on her, paying her back. You don’t have to do that.”
“No, I guess not. I keep looking for reasons, how I got here.”
“We can save guilt and resentment,” Ryan said, “if you want to keep it light.”
“And my Higher Power, God Honey,” Denise said. “I’m having a little trouble with that, too. I’ve got a long way to go, but already I feel good. I say it at a meeting and try to describe it, the feeling, but I don’t tell everything I feel. I don’t want to name names and put anybody on the spot.” She was looking directly at him now. Her eyes were brown. She was in there feeling good things about him, letting him know.
“I don’t think anybody tells everything,” Ryan said, “at a meeting.”
“Can I tell you?”
“If you want to.”
“Maybe I’d better wait,” she said. “Everything’s working out, then I begin to worry maybe it’s a false high. I get up there and find out it isn’t real but an induced feeling, or else something happens.”
“Were you on drugs,” Ryan asked her, “when you were doing the arty thing?”
“No, downers once in a while when my nerves were bad, but that was part of the drinking. I smoked, there was always grass, but I never cared much for the smell. What I liked to do best was drink.”
“The two, you mentioned a couple of black guys, did they get you going?”
“No, I didn’t need help, I sort of went that way naturally. They didn’t care. Then-well, I started drinking more and more until I was at it most of the day. It was what I did in life.”
“Was there a reason? I mean at first, were you depressed or just out for a good time?”
“Both, I suppose. I used it either way.” She hesitated and looked thoughtful as she fooled with her tea bag. “I got into a bad situation. I was married…”
Ryan waited. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to go on.
“… in fact, I still am. We’re separated now, we haven’t been together in-I haven’t seen him in months. I don’t even know where he is.” She paused, holding her tea bag, and looked at Ryan. “Bobby was black, too.”