Choosing the Right Drinks

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

 

Clemency was a fat girl. She spent her time caring for others, for she had nothing else to do. She was twenty-six years of age and she would frequently hide in the linen cupboard at work so that she could cry for two minutes and then recompose herself before picking up a clean towel and exiting the cupboard behind a convincing smile of contentment. Sister Mary, the ward sister at Saint Vincent’s Hospice, marvelled that Clemency would always so quickly volunteer to make these trips to the linen cupboard, only to return each time with that enviable expression of satisfaction which Sister Mary had come to loath. How could the girl find contentment in such menial tasks, day after day?—pondered Sister Mary, who was, herself, too busy seething at life to spare the time to consider the mystery—seething at the way her husband used a particular turn of phrase, or the way Mister Ford in her local newsagent’s looked at her each day as she purchased her daily newspaper and snack bar from him, never smiling at her, nor thanking her for her purchase, but instead demeaning her with his glance as she handed over her hard-earned coins—yes, she loathed him too, along with the daily tribe of other souls who seemed bent on simply being happy.

“Well done, Clemency,” she said, secretly loathing the girl. “After you’ve finished, can you take care of Mister Brunswick.” She watched Clemency’s back as she carried the towel away and found herself wishing that she would, if only once, trip and smash her head on the floor. She licked her lips, turned away and called out over her shoulder: “Over here when you’ve finished,” pointing towards Mister Brunswick.

Clemency carried the clean towel to the bedside of Joseph Milan.

“And how are you feeling today?” she asked, not really expecting a reply, and, indeed, not getting one. She started tidying his bedside locker. “Can I get you anything?” she asked, but again, not expecting a reply. “Some fresh water?” she asked, stopping to peer through the window at the exposed bellybutton of the paunchy, unkempt builder who was working on the scaffolding outside. They were re-pointing the brickwork of the hospice’s decaying fabric. She found herself wondering if the builder, being so apparently undesirable, might be interested in her.

Beside her, Joseph Milan said, “Dying is a sobering business.”

These were the first words she had heard him speak. She found herself awestruck, as by a baby who had not only just spoken his first words, but appeared to have an intellect beyond her own. He grabbed her wrist, discovered her with his hazy gaze and asked, “Does this mean that life is merely an intoxication?”

She felt his hand gripping her wrist like a shackle. She attempted to pull away but the shackle held firm. Arresting though the moment was, she was not finished fantasizing about the undesirable builder at the window and she found Joseph’s grip irritating; she wanted to angrily snap at him to let go of her but as these words were erupting towards her mouth, she thought of Sister Mary and the hospice and her entire training and these things seemed to bear down on her like a mountain. She swallowed her irritation and smiled at Joseph, picturing in her mind how her smile would look to the builder, whom, she was sure, was watching her every move—and in her picture, she next saw herself replying to Joseph in a caring manner, demonstrating her concern and compassion—since she was sure that that was what men would find attractive; all men, even that rough piece of work at window—so she adopted an artificially pleasant tone and said, through her still-smiling mouth, the only thing she could think of, which was: “Would you like some water?”

Joseph’s eyes seemed to burn like a window onto an endless night of torment. As Clemency watched the dark, churning clouds through that window and thus shared his torment, if only for a moment, her smile wilted and her own concerns escaped her, leaving her with an empty head and feeling as though she were standing alone amid that endless night. She could still feel his cold hand gripping her wrist. There was nothing, she thought, in her training that had prepared her for this moment. What was there to say—what could she say? She looked into his tormented soul and simply nodded towards the water jug.

He said, “I now have nothing to do but regret my intoxications.” He coughed a little and then seemed to focus more clearly on her as she peered deep into his troubled eyes. She found herself still pointing towards the water jug. Her hand slowly lowered to her side as she recalled the biggest regret in her own life. At nursing college, there had been an older porter who had, one day, stepped towards her as if to kiss her but she, being so surprised, had stepped back and he had then quickly walked on along the corridor and the laughs of the other student nurses echoed around the corridor, pursuing him, and in return he increased his pace and never addressed her again, nor even so much as looked at her. And the other students teased her mercilessly; they had found a new joke, which they never seemed to tire of, and she would live that moment again and again; if only she had not stepped back, then her life might have been different. But she did step back and now here she was, with only her patients to care for and, when they needed her, nothing to say to them; for what could she say to Joseph; she had never lived, had never experienced what he had; she had nothing to say. She merely watched him as his cold hand continued to grip her wrist.

“What’s the worth,” he asked her, “of being intoxicated if you must sober up in the end?” And he went on, through his occasional coughs, to speculate: “Or is life supposed to be an intoxication? Is that what we’re here for—to become drunk on life, only to then sober up and, in this last moment of sobriety, pull the saloon door closed behind us as we leave?”

Clemency found herself picturing a closed saloon door, and she was standing on the outside; the door was closed to her; all the pleasures of life were contained within that saloon and she was barred. She thought, “There is no door for me to close; I haven’t even opened one yet.” She recalled the sight of the porter rushing along the corridor, away from her, pursued by the mocking laughs of the other girls. Joseph was still watching her; she felt the need to reply to him, so she said the only thing that came to her, even though she felt it was inadequate, still, she had to say something, and she said: “Is there a draft? I could get you another blanket——”

His eyes continued to burn, though the fire seemed distant, so distant that its flames seemed black.

She added, “—If you’d like?”

He said: “I’ve been wondering how I chose my drinks. Did I choose the right ones? Or has my whole life been wasted?”

Clemency was only aware of the shackle round her wrist. His grip truly felt like a ring of iron. She could feel that his flesh was cold, and it seemed to be draining the heat from her wrist.

“Have I——?” he insisted.

She looked up and noticed that the builder was watching her. He pouted at her and rubbed his crotch. She recalled the sight of the porter fleeing along that corridor. She wondered whether the builder was mocking her; did he somehow know that she was undesirable, and could he tell that she had coveted him and was this his response?—He knew; yes, he knew; he somehow knew that she was worthless and he was now mocking her for thinking that she might be good enough for him. She wanted to sit down, but she was shackled beyond reach of Joseph’s chair. She asked him:

“What do you mean?”

“First,” he told her, still gripping her wrist, “I spent twelve years learning to play the saxophone,” and then he paused, as if waiting for his cough to speak—as a disturbed dog will bark; not really saying anything intelligible but merely letting its owner know that it was still there, now an inseparable part of him that he must accommodate whenever it becomes uneasy—but it remained silent, so he continued: “I was obsessed. I spent every spare moment on that instrument.”

“And what happened?”

“I decided I didn’t like the sound of the saxophone.”

“So, you just stopped?”

“Well, what was the point of going on?” he told her, pausing here to allow his agitated dog to bark a little, then he continued: “It would have been a waste of time.”

“Your hand is cold,” she told him. And for one moment, this was all she was aware of and the only thought that occupied her mind; she was not thinking of the porter, nor the laughing girls, nor her bedsitting room in the nurses’ quarters—where no other soul ever ventured—nor even of Sister Mary’s daily derisive comments and her look of disgust whenever she spotted Clemency and imagined that Clemency could not see her—Yes, she knew also, like all the others, that Clemency was worthless, unlovable, that she was here for some other purpose; they all knew, even the nameless people that Clemency passed in the street; everyone knew—no, her mind was not occupied with of any of these things; it was simply empty and she just listened.

“And then,” continued Joseph, “I spent seven years playing golf.” And he went on—while occasionally tending to his agitated dog—to describe how he had become obsessed with improving his handicap; he had practiced in every spare moment and it was his last thought at night and first thought on waking. And then one day he had just begun his swing when he had to pause to let a bird glide across the path of his shot. Its flight was majestic and he was transfixed. The moment seemed to go on for an eternity. And it was during that moment, while watching that bird’s progress, that he found himself wondering what he was doing there. And by the time he heard his friend’s voice asking if he was alright, he had realized that it was all a waste of time. “So,” he told Clemency, “I dropped my club, walked off the course and never played another shot.”

Sister Mary swept through the ward as if being pursued by a swarm of relentless insects and as she passed Clemency, she angrily instructed her to tend to Mister Brunswick, and then to see to Mister Drake, and to, “Get a move on!—what have you been doing?”

The next day, Clemency waited for a time when she knew she would have ten minutes undisturbed and then made her way to Joseph’s bedside, smiled and asked, almost in a conspiratorial whisper: “How are you today, Joseph?”

He watched her in silence, apparently not willing to speak. She began tidying his already-tidy locker and then he said, while watching no-one in particular: “Is it of value to speak, or is that also a waste of time?”

Clemency started to consider this but before she could reply, he had again shackled her with his grip, as though he were hanging from a cliff’s edge and she were his last remaining contact with life itself, and he told her, “I have nothing; I’ve done nothing. I’ve wasted my whole life.”

“But you learnt to play the saxophone. I can’t do that.”

“Well, I’m not you.”

Clemency could only agree with this. Joseph’s face seemed feeble and jaundiced but there was no disputing his logic. She asked him what had happened after he had stopped playing golf.

Joseph was silent for a moment, then he said, “Another intoxication.” And he went on to tell her how he had spent four years painting. There was something about that moment when he had watched the bird gliding across the golf course; he had to capture it, and also any other moment like it, whatever it was; he became obsessed again. He went to night school and weekend retreats; every spare moment, he practiced his craft. And then one day he was painting a scene outdoors and a young boy had looked at his work and said, “That’s rubbish. I could do better.”

“And in that moment,” Joseph told her, “I realized the boy was right. I’d been kidding myself. I was rubbish at it. I walked away and never painted again.”

“Well, I can’t paint at all,” she told him.

“But you didn’t spend four years trying to, obsessed, intoxicated, on a high, seeing nothing else, and then finally realizing you couldn’t do it—you already knew that.”

Clemency said, hesitatingly, “I suppose so.” And she began, perhaps for the first time in her lift, to toy with the idea that perhaps she had an admirable quality—somewhere, buried somewhere deep within her—perhaps, perhaps. But then she became aware again of her biggest failing, which was never far from her mind and which her heart wore like an open wound that was as debilitating to her as any physical disfigurement might be to another person. And she said to Joseph:

“But people have loved you.”

“No-one has loved me; I did not have time for love.”

“But haven’t you been married?—you look so handsome.”

“She left me—and what does marriage have to do with love?”

Clemency looked up at the window, which was now framing a different builder who was working there today—much like the display window of an enclosure at the zoo. He was nagging the wall with his trowel while allowing his one eye to leisurely investigate every contour of her body. He began whistling a joyful tune that sounded like a summer’s day.

Sister Mary swept into the ward again, now apparently driven to distraction by her pursuing swarm of insects as she muttered to herself: “…and there was nothing wrong with my seasoning; if she wasn’t so stupid, she’d see how busy I am. And he did nothing to defend me—isn’t that what husbands are suppose to do?—but all he could do was pompously prattle on about nothing—what does it matter if Jonathan used the wrong grammar?” and then she shouted: “Clemency! Why have you stopped going to the linen cupboard? Have I got to do it all myself now!”

The following day, Clemency was kept too busy for her to be able to talk to Joseph, who was left to quietly decay beneath a fog of morphine and jaundice and the same whistling workman.

That evening, after she had finished her shift, Clemency changed out of her uniform and returned to Joseph’s bedside during visiting hours. She asked him what had happened after he had stopped painting. He told her—while occasionally tending to his agitated but ever more ailing dog—that he had been working in a warehouse for washing-machine parts. A promotion came up and, at that stage, he had nothing else to do with his time, so he took it. But then he became obsessed with perfecting the running of the warehouse; he took on endless overtime and began developing new systems to make the warehouse as efficient as possible. He would even lie awake at night, thinking about it, developing a brilliant new storage system and even redesigning the database.

He gripped Clemency’s wrist again and told her, “It was beautiful; I had no idea you could become so obsessed with such things. And that was when my wife left me. It had never really been a marriage anyway. I realized after living with her for a few months that I didn’t really like her. But the marriage dragged on for a further twelve years. And then she went off with some rich guy and left me the house, which I was pleased with, so it turned out okay.”

“Strange,” said Clemency, “Your hand seems even more cold today, but stronger.”

“—At least I thought it did,” continued Joseph. And he went on to tell her how he was then made redundant. The warehouse was closed. It was no longer needed, even though it had worked beautifully. It had been his best creation so far and he had felt as though they were burying his only child, condemning him to death at the start of his life—a beautiful, healthy child. And again, he had nothing. He returned to drinking in the bar where he used to play saxophone, and he drank and drank. Then one evening, he was watching a girl singing on stage and he became spellbound. It was the majestic bird all over again. He became obsessed. She was a struggling novice and he began promoting her. He spent the following two months arranging gigs, transporting her, paying for accommodation. And then along came the accountant, whom she seemed to somehow know. The accountant had a contact in a record company, who came to a gig and then wanted to sign her up. The accountant negotiated a contract whereby the record company would commit to spending £250,000 on promotion provided that the girl paid £95,000 towards the recording and production costs. She was Joseph’s life, his obsession, was all he had at that time, so, of course, he mortgaged his house to pay for the contract. Two days later, the accountant, the money and the girl had all disappeared. There had never been a record company or a contract.

 “Of course,” said Joseph, “I didn’t care about singing or the music business; it was the girl I was obsessed with. I was in love. I just wanted her to have what she wanted.”

“Of course you did,” whispered Clemency, overawed at the spectacle of love.

He told her that just before he had handed over the money, the girl had had sex with him for the first time. He had then noticed her retching in the bathroom afterwards and had thought it was something she had eaten. But two days later, when they had all gone, he realized that it was him she was trying to vomit up. She was repulsed by him. She had only had sex with him to persuade him to hand over the money.

“You know,” he told Clemency, “the funny thing is that she only had to ask and I would have given her the money. There was no need for her to have sex with me. And I’ve come to realize that it was that moment, watching her retch in the bathroom, when my life had ended. Then a year later I became ill and now here I am, with only weeks, or days, left to live.”

In her mind, Clemency connected the image of the girl retching in the bathroom with her own recollection of the porter fleeing along the corridor. She then recalled how she had recently bought a dining set for her bedsit, consisting of four full settings. It had occurred to her that she only had a single plate and cup and that, if she were ever to get a visitor, she would not be able to cater for him, so she had bought the dining set, and that evening she had laid out two full settings at her small table and imagined the porter sitting opposite her, eating his evening meal after his day’s work. As she looked at Joseph now, she found herself picturing him sat at her table, sipping tea from one of her new cups after having finished his evening meal, for, in her fantasy, he was now well, had recovered, and he was sat across her table from her, smiling at her.

She looked at him in his hospital bed and asked: “And how do you feel now?”

“Sober. Stone cold sober.”

She looked into his eyes and that night of turmoil still seemed to be burning within his soul, only now the fire seemed not so distant.

He went on: “And now that I think about it: ‘confused’. I don’t know where it all went, my whole life. I’ve done nothing except pursue obsession after obsession, and for what? And now I’m done; I’m sober—and scared; I’m scared. Is that all there was to it? Being alive is a string of intoxications and then you sober up to die! Is that it?”

Clemency watched the agitation burning within his eyes, as if his soul were tied to a burning stake and his life were evaporating before her eyes. By now he had released his grip of her wrist, and so she held his hand tightly, as if offering him a lifeline, a point of contact with this world, with some other soul who cared for him and wanted him to know it—to know that he was loved and cared for as his soul went on burning:

“—Where’s my whole life gone? I’ve been cheated. My life has been stolen from me—by who, by who——?” he said while looking round the ward, as though some practical joker were hid behind a bed somewhere, sniggering at him.

Clemency told him, simply: “But you still have me.”

His gaze seemed to properly focus on her for the first time. He seemed present, distracted from his turmoil. “What?”

“I mean here, now; you have this——” indicating the ward.

“What?”

“We care for you.”

He looked at her, as though at a con man. “What do you mean?—this!—this!—what is this?” also indicating the ward.

She repeated: “We care for you.”

That night, and the following days, Clemency was plunged into her own turmoil, as though, for the first time in her life, she had been given a real problem to consider, a problem that seemed outside of herself, bigger than herself.

Clemency had originally taken up nursing because her aunt (who had been a nurse) had told her that men threw themselves at nurses. “Clemency,” she had told her while eyeing her sagely, “if you become a nurse, you will be fighting them off.”

Clemency had never heard a more wondrous fact in her life. Her aunt’s words seemed to sparkle like freshly polished gold and they seemed to ignite a fire within her heart that glowed for days and days and cheered her step and lighted her spirit. But after beginning her training, the breeze of the other student nurses’ excitement seemed to extinguish that fire as they endlessly poured out the news of their exploits with men while she herself still remained invisible to every man’s gaze. She completed her training and began her nursing career, all the while nursing her own deeply wounded heart. She tended other people’s wounds while carrying her own, deep inside her, way beyond the reach of any bandage or salve.

She was then assigned to the hospice, and working with terminally ill patients seemed only to highlight her own torment, for she would watch each of them, tended by their loved ones, and: “Who,” she would think, “would tend me if I were dying?—I have no-one; no-one would come.” And such sights seemed to agitate the poisoned blood within her wound and she would carry her aching heart to the linen cupboard and, in darkness and silence, would let out the pain in tears and silent sobs, until she felt soothed enough to face the first sight that would greet her when she opened the door back onto the ward—the sight of relatives sitting vigil at the bedside of their dying loved ones.

Week in, week out, Clemency would smile and bear the sight, until, one day, Joseph Milan appeared, who had no visitors and seemed, like her, unloved. She was immediately drawn to Joseph, to his silent bedside, and would feel comfort there, from simply standing close to him, and then he began to speak, and the more he told her of his story, the more this seemed to be filling a void within her. She had no idea what was happening, or why, only that she felt compelled to return to hear more, and now that she had heard his full story, she found herself relating his words to her own life. She realized that she too had been intoxicated, but was now in a moment of sobriety. She had been so obsessed with her own unhappiness, her own lack of worth, her own unlovability, that she had not realized that most other people probably felt the same. How had she spent her own years so far? She realized that she may have been perpetuating her own pain by remaining intoxicated with it, by, almost, delighting in its flavour, by revelling in the taste of self-pity—as Joseph had been intoxicated with the saxophone, or painting, or golf, or work; and Sister Mary was perhaps intoxicated with being offended. In the same way, Clemency realized that she herself had been intoxicated with being unloved. This had been her drink. But what value was there in this particular intoxication? Could she find a different intoxication, sip a different drink?

Through days of distraction, she found herself realizing that she did not want to arrive on her deathbed having spent her whole life simply being unloved; there must be some other state that was of more value; she could be something else. She decided that she would take some other drink, something of more value. She would tend the dying, listen to their story, hold their hand to let them know she cared. She would sit with them in their last moments of sobriety.

Clemency realized all this, but on some emotional level—without words, either spoken or unspoken—and after several weeks of pursuing her new intoxication, she then also realized that her heart was no longer wounded and that a different problem had begun to nag at her, to irritate her during her days. She was now having to fend off the unwanted attentions of man after man after man.

 

6 November 2009

 

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