Waiting for Liz

Chapter 1

Chapter 1“This is my lesbian friend, Angela.”

That’s how she was introduced to Elizabeth by her sort-of friend Jack. Jack was that kind of person: he would introduce you by stating your name and then inserting some sort of qualifier, trying to be politically correct but accomplishing quite the opposite. Angela considered Jack a sort-of friend because she only sort-of liked him. Most of the time she found him irritating, self-absorbed, and inappropriate. Still, they worked together and drank together, and he always recommended good movies.

The exterior view of Angela’s life at twenty-nine was enviable. Having achieved much of what she set out to do in her early twenties, she found herself in a comfortable home with an adoring partner, a host of friends, minimal debt, a recently acquired degree, and a job that used it. In the view of certain types of people, she had arrived and was doing quite well. Yet to assume such things was to know Angela not at all. If anyone had bothered to penetrate the dark space that set off her smile, they would have discovered the ferocious little secrets and microcosm of brewing catastrophes. In truth, Angela was unhappy in the worst way to be unhappy—she didn’t even realize she was.

Around the time that Angela was introduced to Elizabeth, her relationship with her “adoring partner,” Dawn, had already begun to disintegrate. This trouble was of the same nature as her own soul and psychic trouble, made worse by the lack of acknowledgment that the trouble even existed. Two emotionally wounded people do not magically heal when they join, nor do they heal each other. Two alcoholics do not make a sober union. These facts are especially true when neither party recognizes themselves as such. For Angela, coping by ignoring was standard in her family of origin—if there was a problem, they were certainly not going to talk about it. Ever. Better to just pretend that things were fine until they were, even if they never were.

Angela and Dawn had recently introduced new substances into their relationship. m*******a was a sporadic indulgence and had been since they met. Angela had never tried cocaine, and Dawn had, so they made plans to do some together. The couple sometimes hung out with Dawn’s friend Mary and her husband, Ed, whose drug use and alcohol consumption was manageable, at least to Angela. In a group of people who indulge together, there is a euphoric contentment that warmly envelops those who are partaking. In oblivion, they believe there is no fear, no sadness, no loneliness. So Angela and Dawn snorted cocaine with Mary and Ed.

Their evening out began in one bar, migrated to several others, and ended back in the apartment. Angela spent a great deal of time observing the rest of her party, once she’d ingested the cocaine, to see how they behaved so she would know how to behave. She noticed that she could drink as much Jack Daniels as she wanted and not feel sick. She noted that her friends were a little extra friendly, that is to say, affectionate with one another and with her. The neon lights in the bars seemed brighter, people—known and unknown—touching her felt more electric. The songs she chose on the jukeboxes sounded better, even though she owned much of the same music and had the CDs at home. Angela liked this drug and wanted more of it.

Not long after that night, Angela was getting to know Carol, a relatively new coworker who other coworkers sometimes mocked behind her back because she was socially awkward. Angela was completely uninterested in Carol as a person or coworker or potential friend at first. But one day she overheard something new about Carol: “she has a really nice house, and she is very generous with her drugs.” And now Angela was very interested in pursuing a friendship with Carol. Eventually an invitation was issued.

Angela was nervous. She couldn’t immediately recall ever buying drugs in her life. There was that time she’d bought weed in Tompkins Square Park in New York City. But that was high school. In her adult life, she had always left it to others to do the buying, no matter the substance involved. But for Carol’s house, Angela was prepared. She had cash to buy a little weed, and she planned to inquire about some cocaine. She had not stopped thinking about that since the night with Dawn and Mary and Ed and Jack Daniels and the jukebox at the bar. Just the possibility of making the purchase was terrifying—and exhilarating. Angela had imagined several possible scenarios: In one fantasy, Carol said, “Of course I have cocaine, but I will give it to you for free. Let’s do some right now!” In another, “That s**t’ll kill you! Don’t you know that? And I’m offended you think I’m the kind of person who would do cocaine.” In still another, Carol was a cop—even though she’d smoked weed with Angela minutes before. None of those things happened. When Angela carefully brought up the cocaine, Carol—who would become a trusted friend, confidante, enabler, and, finally, an enemy—said, “f**k that s**t. I’ve got something better.”

Angela did not try the “something better” at Carol’s house right then. When she got home that day, Dawn was at work. Alone, Angela tried to balance her fears with her excitement, which was so tremendous she thought perhaps she would be crushed beneath the weight of it. She had asked Carol what this substance was.

“Crank,” Carol had said.

Angela had no idea what crank was, although she had heard of it—or read about it, she couldn’t be sure. She had asked what was in it, but Carol had intimated that if Angela knew that she wouldn’t want it. For someone else, that might have been perceived as something to perhaps consider before proceeding. It might’ve even convinced said person that trying crank was a terrible idea, something to be avoided. But for Angela, an addict who didn’t know she was one, such a statement made it all the more alluring. She thought, “I’ll just try a tiny bit. I know how to snort things; I’ve done that already.” Carefully, she dumped a tiny bit of the white powder onto a compact mirror. It looked like cocaine; how different could it be? She chopped it up with a credit card and pushed it around the mirror into a thin line, as she had seen Mary do in the bathroom stall at the bar, with the cocaine. Then she fished a dollar bill out of her wallet and rolled it up, also as Mary had done, not to mention countless actors in movies. Finally, she snorted it.

Immediately, her face became hot and tingly and, for a moment, she panicked. But the flush passed. She went out to the kitchen and started doing the dishes that were in the sink. For a while, she thought, “I don’t feel anything.” And then she did. She realized she was doing the dishes with vigor, that it felt wonderful to have her hands in the soapy water. She recalled that Carol had said this drug had a significant body buzz, and Angela had not known what that meant. Once the crank had really settled into her bloodstream however, she knew exactly what a body buzz was. She would’ve described it as something that had to be experienced in order to really understand how it felt, like s*x or skydiving or being underwater. By the time Dawn came home from work, Angela had m*********d to orgasm three times, organized their CD collection alphabetically, rearranged the kitchen cabinets, and was vacuuming the floorboards with all the living room furniture pulled away from the walls. When Dawn walked in, she just blinked, smiled, and then asked, “What did she give you?”

Within a month, Angela and Dawn (although usually just Angela) were making regular visits to Carol’s house to purchase small baggies of crank. The couple did not engage with this drug every day at first, but they did every weekend. A small crevice opened in their relationship as the use of crank became a regular thing between them, the result of individual preference: although Dawn enjoyed this new thing that they had discovered, she still preferred alcohol. Angela, on the other hand, practically stopped drinking altogether. That sort of buzz no longer interested her. Only crank brought her the kind of high she craved. She felt more productive than she ever had before. She was better at things than she was without the drug, both at work (for they did eventually start using during the week) and at play. Focused. Driven. Purposeful. These were ways that Angela thought she should be—these characteristics gave her great value in the world, and she knew that crank was the reason she could be those things. These feelings, these qualities became not merely valuable to her, but essential. And so the cracks widened and spread in an intricate web deep within Angela’s relationship with Dawn. As the veins of decay spread, deadly gases were leaking into the ground beneath them. It would only require a spark to ignite the explosion.

* * * *

It was under these circumstances—increased drug use, unacknowledged problems of a five-year relationship, Angela’s own untethered soul—that she was introduced to Elizabeth. Jack was showing Elizabeth around work on her first day, not so much for her comfort or her benefit but to satisfy his own ego, trotting her around and showing off his trophy. That was all. Initially Angela hadn’t paid any attention. Elizabeth was a kid—eighteen, maybe nineteen—and she was in a romantic relationship with Jack, who had made sure to get her hired where he worked. In fact, Angela didn’t really think very much about Elizabeth or even notice her much. Until she did. One day at work, Angela realized she was feeling unusually off balance, almost anxious. She felt flushed and hot. There was a scent on the air that reminded her of…something. It got stronger right then. Angela noticed that Liz had just walked by, and now she was even more flushed.

As the weeks passed, Angela began to notice this would happen even when Elizabeth was just alluded to in conversation. She also noticed that she had a running catalog of all of Liz’s outfits and would make mental notes when she repeated something especially attractive or noteworthy. She sometimes went over and over her mental images of Elizabeth in these outfits when she was feeling particularly daydreamy. New words popped up in Angela’s vocabulary, and she realized it was due to overhearing Liz using them or reading them in one of Elizabeth’s work-related messages. Then Angela noticed that Elizabeth had apparently noticed her a great deal too.

Jack was involved in several local theater productions, and one weekend he invited Angela and Dawn to attend. He was starring in this one, and Elizabeth was directing. Although the play itself was good and Jack’s performance was good, what Angela primarily focused on that night was Elizabeth, who was sitting in the left aisle seat of the third row wearing a short blue summer dress, her hair falling around her shoulders. After the play, Elizabeth and Jack invited Angela and Dawn to dinner along with several other friends and family members of the cast and crew. There were about twenty people at dinner around a big table in a very loud restaurant. Angela could tell that Dawn, meeting Elizabeth for the first time, found her attractive because of the way Dawn looked at her and flirted with her.

Dawn always flirted with pretty girls. Angela thought Dawn embarrassed herself when she did this but never said so, especially because sometimes these pretty girls responded to Dawn’s flirting. Angela presumed they liked the attention of a much older woman. Angela herself had been flattered in the beginning, as Dawn was nine years older (making her nineteen years older than Elizabeth). But none of that mattered because Angela knew that Elizabeth was flirting with a lot of people, not just the three of them in her direct orbit. She was a coquette by nature. As a pretty girl, she was an expert at negotiating the attention of others. Of course, Angela knew, all pretty girls were.

She tried to pretend that she was not impressed with Elizabeth, her charm, her wit, her intelligence. But Angela had never been very good at hiding her feelings about much of anything, especially people. Several times during that dinner, the two women made eye contact, and those moments felt to Angela like they were lasting a little longer than they should have. Perhaps the others wouldn’t notice the slight change in Elizabeth’s voice, the almost imperceptible coy head tilt, fingers running through her hair almost compulsively. But they likely would notice that Angela abandoned her plate of food, that she had filtered out all the conversations happening around her to focus on just the one, that the presence of her partner barely registered for her, that her face was flushed almost the entire evening. Angela felt exposed, but Elizabeth didn’t seem bothered at all by the danger in the glances, the sly smiles. Eventually, all the food was eaten and all the wine drunk—some, in fact, by Angela, because Elizabeth made her feel nervous, and Angela needed everything possible to cope with that. When everyone was saying their goodbyes and goodnights, Elizabeth clasped Angela’s hands within hers and said, “Thank you so much for coming.” And that night, in that moment, a lightning bolt struck Angela’s core and ignited it. Still, for a while, she did not acknowledge to herself that it had happened. She was with Dawn. Elizabeth was with Jack.

* * * *

When Jack had shown off Elizabeth to his friends, they had only been dating for a short while, a few months maybe. But Angela would soon discover they had a rollercoaster relationship that had begun very passionately and quickly deteriorated into a bit of a circus. The next thing Angela heard around the office was that some sort of threatening phone call had been made and recorded and brought to the police. Elizabeth got a restraining order against Jack, which rather complicated their work situation. In the end, he quit. Elizabeth stayed. Angela thought it was interesting that her employers and coworkers actually seemed to side with and favor Elizabeth. She had only been there a few weeks at that point, while Jack had worked there for a few years. Apparently, Angela was not the only person that only sort-of liked him.

Angela and Elizabeth started to interact more, talking more and emailing one another from across the office. The barrier between them was gone now. Angela started calling her Liz rather than Elizabeth when she addressed her aloud. In her thoughts, she still called her Elizabeth always, though: it seemed somehow more romantic. Jack had always spoken of her as Elizabeth in her absence also but called her Liz to her face. She suspected he did this for the same reasons—romanticism, idealization. But, yes, now, always when speaking her actual name to her actual face, she was Liz.

* * * *

“Honey?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how we always joke about having a hot young plaything to share?”

Angela and Dawn had joked about that. Frequently. Except they both knew that they were really only half joking. At least, Angela had been only half joking when it had come up over the past year or so. Or maybe it had been the last two years. Or maybe it had been always, she couldn’t be sure. Maybe Dawn had only ever been teasing, never expecting Angela to actually pursue such a thing.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I think I may have a candidate for that. Do you remember that girl that broke up with Jack, the one I work with?”

“Do you really think she’d go for it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it.”

They did not speak about it again for several weeks.

* * * *

Angela had met Dawn in a bar just a few months before she had been scheduled to relocate to another state. She had decided at twenty-four to pursue her education since she had not done so right after community college. She still moved, but the fervor of a new relationship made the move more difficult—and also more dramatic, which Angela had liked for reasons she didn’t understand—and the only thing that had made it bearable was knowing that Dawn would eventually follow her. The longer she lived without Dawn, the more she knew she’d be fine on her own. But she also knew that she needed to be with Dawn because she needed a hero, and she also needed someone who was also willing to martyr themselves for her. She needed to be a sort of kept woman because that is how she could feel safe in the world.

After being separated for five months, she and Dawn met in Florida for a vacation. The first night they were there, Dawn dropped to her knees on the beach and gave Angela a ring. She said, “My whole life, all I ever wanted was someone to love.” And Angela responded by saying, “My whole life, all I ever wanted was someone to love me.” This was a lie, of course. She wanted much more. Dawn had told Angela that the ring was not a real diamond but a simulated diamond. This was fine because Angela knew somewhere deep within that theirs was only a simulated relationship. She knew that she had settled for something, though it had been a conscious decision to do so. That is not to say that she did not love Dawn—she did. As Angela understood things, there were many varieties of love, and this love she knew to mean that she cared about Dawn, that her happiness mattered to Angela, that she had a sort of respect for Dawn’s ability to take care of things. She also accepted that her love for Dawn was not the same as Dawn’s love for her. Angela also acknowledged that she did not love Dawn the way she had loved other women. She was fine with that because the way she had loved other women had not yielded any rewards, and somewhere inside she acknowledged that all the past loves had been unhealthy, obsessive, even addictive. So Angela believed—or at least tried to convince herself that she believed—that it was her lack of burning passion for Dawn that would hold the relationship together, that what they had created was what mature adult love looked like. She surrendered to the belief that romance, infatuation, falling head over heels, being crazy in love, all were fantasies of youth and could not be counted on to sustain any kind of long-term commitment.

But then…Elizabeth.