To Love And To Fall

By Jessica Kuzmier

Meet Tom. He's had it really tough in his life, but he's made it good because he's worked hard. Growing up with drunks for parents that first abandoned him and then up and died, he's an up and coming star in the academic world, all before he's thirty, with nothing more than hard work and good old fashioned effort.

 

But no one seems to really appreciate all that he's done.

 

It's bad enough that his boss Scott at the university is on his back all of the time, and he can't get his dissertation done, and that his sister Denise is on her third husband with a pain-in-the neck guy named Nigel. No, his girlfriend Serena of eleven years has decided that she's an alcoholic, which is really just ridiculous because even though she can't hold down a job because she's drunk when she's there and the alcohol decides filters are not needed so she tells everyone off constantly, Tom doesn't see why she's overreacting and it really is just messing with his mojo.

 

In fact, things have gone so out of hand that Tom winds up at a sober meeting with Serena, after some guy in a liquor store tells her where these weirdo gatherings in church meetings are. Now, how bad can things go from here? Can it get any worse for this poor guy who only wants to make a name for himself and love his girl in peace?

 

Oh, yeah. It sure will.....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Kuzmier
• Release date: Jul 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223132165

Book preview

TO LOVE AND TO FALL

INTRO

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Lights beat down from above, reds and greens and blues.  Pulsating rhythms, a gyrating life form of its own.  I sit and reach for the beer in front of me, and with its ingestion everything merges into a kaleidoscope of colors and noise that blots out everything that is real, and that is exactly what I want.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic, or at least that is what I said yesterday when my girlfriend Serena and I ventured into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a musty church basement.  Which, absurdly was due to the care of a recovering alcoholic who worked at a liquor store who was worried about my girl. Yes, life is strange. 

I must add that I’m not a real alcoholic; that Serena wanted to go to this meeting, and needed me to come for moral support.  Plus I really knew I needed to see who this guy was who was stalking my woman, who luckily for his sake was absent this particular twenty-four hours from the cult gathering. 

In any event, Serena said on the way to the meeting, that she wanted to stop drinking for good; that after the last time she drank, which was the day before yesterday, she never wanted to touch the stuff again.  Today, we are here at our favorite club, Captain Nemo’s, same as last week.  I watch my lady as she struts across the dance floor.  Serena never dances unless she is drunk.

Serena has been my girl for what seems like forever.  I am twenty-eight and she is thirty.  We started dating at an age young enough that the two years’ difference between us was cause for contention.  I was a lowly freshman and she was a junior.  We met in a bar, of course.  Or maybe not of course, it depends on whether you think Serena drinks too much; she’s pretty good at hiding her problem, because it was only when we started living together five years ago that I noticed any problem myself.  She would hide liquor behind her drawer; I remember the time I came home to find my bedroom reeking of alcohol and discovering a broken gin bottle by her cabinet.  I cleaned it in such dazed shock that when I confronted her she not only denied putting it there but insisted she would never do such a thing, insisting with such vehemence that I began to question my own judgment.  I found myself putting my nose to the floor, trying to see if I was going crazy, trying to find any remnants at all of the smell of stale gin which had allegedly assaulted my sense hours earlier.  Perplexed, I went to the garbage can to see if I really had placed the remnants of the bottle there, only to find the can mysteriously empty, devoid even of its liner.  It had been a Thursday.  Garbage day was Sunday.  And then I knew.  I didn’t even have to hear the violent smashing of glass from outside as the bag was thrown behind the house, Serena nowhere to be found.  I knew then that I was in love with an alcoholic.

Not that any of this was new to me.  Where I grew up outside of Albany, New York, alcoholism seemed as common as raising kids.  It was like you were born, you tried to get a diploma, you got married, you got kids, you got alcoholism; not necessarily in that order.  When I first heard that the most fatal ailment in America was heart failure, I wondered what kind of world existed outside my neighborhood.  Where I lived, it seemed like alcohol was the number one killer, whether it was because of a drunk driving incident, because Old Man Joe passed out on his porch and froze to death, or like my  grandfather’s heart giving out at the rip old age of forty-seven after a three week binge.  The biggest businesses in my town were Minnie’s Tavern, The Pub Club, and Reynolds’ Funeral Home, the favorite place for family reunions.  I met my cousins at Reynolds’, at a funeral for my grandmother. She’d slipped and cracked her head open.  I was nine years old at the time, and hadn’t even known of the cousins’ existence until the previous day.  I have seen them only once since then, and that was when my mother died sixteen years ago.

I watch Serena on the dance floor, moving to the beat of TLC’s Waterfalls,  jazzed up to be played in high style house.  Her face is lit up in animation, the booze gives her no pain.  I go to the bar and get another beer.

Later on, I drive her home.  It is nearly three o’clock in the morning, and I have to drive to Albany to meet with my academic adviser later today. I am crabby from all of the drinking and angry that I managed to get duped into going with her to begin with.

I feel the sensation of her hair on my shoulders as I drive.  She is like a sleeping child, and I am strongly protective of her.  The perfect American couple is reflected in the rear view mirror of my car:  her with the perfect blonde looks, her coloring contrasting my auburn hair and eyes with the face that everyone trusts, just because culture told them it was trustworthy.  The perfect American couple, out on a date; a date that at once had gone completely awry and yet was strangely typical for them. For us.

When we get home, I carry her to our bedroom, undress her and put her under the covers like a child who has fallen asleep.  Despite the coolness of the night, she sweats profusely and her skin is red, as though all the life is burning from her.  I fall in next to her and feel her arm across me as she rolls towards me in her stupor.  Soon I am asleep, and her beauty makes me forget the she has duped me again.

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ONE

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I awake to a noise, and the gleaming sun of dawn beams on me radiation poisoning.  Every bone of my body aches, and I feel heartburn rising in me like it is Mt. Saint Helens revisited.  My ears strain wearily to find the noise that has disturbed me, and I hear raspiness in the direction of the toilet bowl.  Suddenly alert, my body responds automatically as it has many times before, rushing to the bathroom to find my sweetheart making love to the toilet bowl.  I watch in disdain as she heaves, oblivious of my presence, as the stench of vomit fills the room.  It does not smell much differently from the bar we visited last night.

When there is a lull during her attack, I go to her and embrace her.  This is an unspoken ritual between us.  In our early years, when the porcelain routine happened less frequently, I would watch her, unable even with all my experience with drunks to know what to do for her.  She would cry and beg for me to hold her while I was busy doing things like worrying about dehydration and replenishing fluids, unknowing of her physical need for me, forgetting until the next time.  Eventually I got the pattern down.  The increasing frequency of these episodes solidified it.

She is sleeping again, her body collapsed where she had been in her throes.  I carry her slender body back to bed.  She is like a feather, and I am startled to notice her ribs protruding through her shirt, ashamed for not having noticed this dramatic a weight loss sooner.  As soon as I set her down, I go to the freezer to get some ice.  I have the ice trays for the smaller ice cubes, specially for times like these.  I take a handful of ice cubes and put it in Serena’s favorite glass from the time we went to Busch Gardens in Florida together.  I remember hearing the kids screaming as they went down King Kong. I never had a chance to go down it myself.  We spent our day with the free beer instead.

Six-ten.  I need to be up by nine to get ready for my three-day trip to Albany.  I am meeting my advisor for dinner at five, and I need to be spiffy and gauche for the occasion.  I am being considered for a research grant for social history.  If I receive this, it will procure me a position as an instructor at the university as well as full state benefits.  The security of a real academic position and money seems like welcome relief after eleven years of odd jobs and intermittent unemployment.  Eleven years is almost the entire length of my relationship with Serena.

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.  Sleep evades me though every atom in my body feels like lead.  My ears ring and my head wants to implode  on itself.  In my panic over Serena, I have overlooked my own coppermouth. I lean over her body to grab the remaining ice, which is just about all of it, while Serena sleeps away.  The instant I put the ice in my mouth, I feel a stab of guilt, so sharp that my mind wonders for an instant if I have been physically attacked.  I feel like a thief stealing gold.

I look at Serena.  My soul feels dark.  A blonde bombshell at first meeting, now a pale ghost just a shade deeper than the white linens covering our bed.  She seems to fade into the distance, soon to slip away, never to be seen again.  

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TWO

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I arrive at Albany five minutes before my preordained dinner meeting; despite the best of plans to arrive early and settle in.  I didn’t get to sleep until nearly seven o’ clock because of Serena getting up and down all night, so when my alarm clock whined at nine o’clock, I inadvertently shut it off and never woke up until noon.  Considering that I had to pack before I got here, luck was on my side as far as timing.  I am nervous about this meeting, even though I am only meeting with my advisor today.  He is supposed to be on my side, but somehow I don’t believe he really is. 

We meet for dinner at Garbalo’s restaurant in downtown Albany.  I feel completely overdressed in my three pieced suit (the only thing I own that is more formal than jeans and a T-shirt) as I greet Dr. Scott C. Arbuckle, who is dressed neatly but casually in a tweed suit. Arbuckle gives me a once over that confirms my uneasiness as he shakes my hand.  I make a mental note that when I return home I make trip to the mall, something long overdue.

Arbuckle is a young guy, probably only eight or nine years older than I am, pretty young for a full professor.  He’s got small eyes that are squinted constantly in  thought, giving whoever who is at the receiving end of his gaze the feeling that they’re under a microscope.  He is not intimidated by anything or anyone, not even someone like me, who works out just about every day and seemingly could take him out in one punch.  In fact the first time I wrote a paper for him when I was in undergraduate school, he gave me a D.  It had been the first D in my life.  I went to his office to protest the grade, and he proceeded to laugh in my face, which really pissed me off.  He told me that he didn’t like my attitude, that I thought I was so smart but I didn’t know anything.  He was going to teach me humility.  I told him I didn’t give a shit about humility, I just wanted a decent grade from him.  He rebutted by saying that with my attitude, I was going to be a failure and I was a waste of his time.  So I proceeded to spend the rest of the semester trying to prove him wrong.  I guess I succeeded, because we wound up being friends after I graduated, and he offered to be my adviser for the duration of my postgraduate work.  He said that I reminded him of himself.  I have never quite figured out if that was an insult or a compliment.

Our table isn’t ready when we arrive at the restaurant, so the host leads us to the bar.  I feel a sense of relief at the smell of alcohol.  I am keyed up and a drink sounds nice after the tension of today.  Then I have a sudden vision of all those AA people who hounded me after that meeting, and I feel a sudden wave of disgust.  I order a cola.  Arbuckle orders a pina colada.