She didn’t want to feel insecure. She wanted to feel strong, in control. Free and maybe a bit wild because that could be exciting. That night, because she couldn’t stand how upset she felt, how unmoored, she asked him for a Ritalin. “Really, honey?” he said, and she saw how happy he looked. That made her feel better but not nearly as good as the Ritalin did. It was as if she had been in a dark room and someone had switched on all the lights. She felt so young, so high, as if she were filled with starlight, and everything seemed possible. They talked for hours, finishing each other’s sentences, talking over each other in a kind of fugue. “Dance party!” she said, getting up and blasting music, pulling him up with her. The room vibrated. The music seemed to flash all around them and she laughed out loud because it was all so great.
How could something that brought them so close be a bad thing? They didn’t do the drugs every day or even every week. They most certainly were not addicts or using any of the really hard stuff. Stella took it with Simon only when she felt insecure, when she needed to feel more in control of herself and get that shot of happy. Vitamin R, Simon called it, and she thought he was right, because like a vitamin, it seemed to change her on a molecular level, she was convinced. It quieted the doubts that bored into her mind. She could get up again and go to work, her mind sharp, her body humming. No harm done.
Then she got older. By her late twenties, she couldn’t spring back as easily as she used to after doing drugs. It felt silly to depend on a drug to give you courage, to make you feel that all was right in the world, when your own experiences, your own bravery, should give you that. Each time, she took longer to recuperate, which sometimes made her fuzzy at work, and that was dangerous.
It felt ridiculous to be her age and doing drugs and drinking like a kid. It ceased to be fun waking in sheets littered with last night’s food and finding the carpet stained with wine because they’d been too drunk to put the glasses in the sink. And her face. Her skin rebelled with patchy spots. Her hair limped along. Gradually, Simon stopped asking her if she wanted to smoke weed with him, if she wanted a Ritalin, because her answer was always no. And though she had no way of knowing for sure, she thought he had stopped then, too.
Now he looked up at her. “We could share this and see what happens,” Simon said.
“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” she said.
“Remember how much fun we used to have? How easy it was? How amazing? We’d be up all night partying and talking. Remember the feasts we’d order in, how we’d dine in bed and talk for hours about everything—everything!—and not get up for days?” He looked longingly at her. “We were so good together.”
She blinked at him, noticing the pills in his hand, smooth and red and oblong like dots of jam. “We are good together,” she said.
“I’m just so fucking tired of arguing,” Simon said.
“Me fucking too.”
Simon held up the pills. “It could be like it used to be,” Simon said. “I always felt like you used to really know me,” and Stella was so tired that she thought maybe he was right. When they had gotten high before, he used to sit and listen to her so intently that she felt the world stop. No one had ever paid her that much attention, had wondered so much about her thoughts, her feelings, had cared so deeply. “What do you want out of life?” he used to ask her. Whatever she said, he not only responded, but he remembered her responses, too.
You know me.
Oh yes. She did know him. She had known him since they were both twenty-two years old. She was standing in front of the nursery window at NYU Medical Center, where she worked, searching for her friend’s new baby boy. Simon was there, too, scanning the cribs. Then she heard him talking to the infants, his voice low and serious: “So, what’s going on in the world of babies? The staff treating you right? Giving you clean towels every morning? No complaints about the milk service?” She had laughed and he turned to her and then she saw that his eyes were gray and mysterious as fog.
“Which one’s yours?” she said.
“None of them,” he said. “I’m visiting a friend’s baby.” She loved the look of wonder on his face.
“Me, too,” she said. She couldn’t help it. Right at that moment, she wanted to kiss the crook of his neck.
He had walked her home to her crappy little studio on Fourteenth Street where they had sat up talking until four in the morning and then fallen asleep together, fully clothed, arms around each other. In the morning, he was up before her, making her an omelet and squeezing orange juice. He had even set the table. “Who are you?” she said, laughing. He came over to see her the next night, and the next, and suddenly there she was, responsible Stella with both feet firmly planted, Stella who never missed a shift, who read books and adored classical music, falling heedlessly for a rocker with an impulsive lifestyle and a way with words, simply because he cared so much about her, like no one ever had before.
He was riding high on a hit song he had written for his band. “Next one will be even bigger,” he said. She didn’t tell him that she had never heard of him before they met, but she quickly went to a music store and found a CD. She listened, a mixture of relief and giddy delight because he was so good, because his melodies were as haunting as his lyrics. His songs were all stories she could get lost in: an old man talking about the young wife he had lost and never forgot, a woman who had killed her lover and now regretted it. Stella sat listening, holding her breath. When she saw him next, she blurted, “I love your music.” And then there it was, that impossible glow to him. He leaned forward so their foreheads were touching. “Zzzzz,” he said, making a buzzing sound. “We’re connected.” She laughed, because it was so silly. Because it was so true.
And he was good in other ways. He held her hand everywhere—at the table and in the street. He wrote little love poems that would make her blush because he rhapsodized about the curve of her breasts, the point of her hip, a particular ringlet of hair that always fell over her eyes. When she came home, tired from work, he was waiting on the stoop of her building, holding irises, her favorite flower, and take-out Chinese. A bottle of wine was in the crook of his arm. “Tell me everything about your day,” he said, standing to greet her.
She sighed and rested her head against his shoulder now. “It’s mild,” he told her, opening his palm to show her the pills.
“What is it? Who gave it to you?” She fingered the pill in her hand. “Is this Ritalin?” she asked, but he shook his head. “It probably does the same thing,” he said. Usually all she had to do was look at a pill and know what it was, but tonight she was brain fried. Did she really want to do this? All she knew was that right now she felt so far away from him that they seemed like ice floes moving in different directions, and she was desperate to have him back before it was another thing that would be too late to change, to fix. What if just one more time would unlock them, bring them back to that time when they were both young and so happy and remind her of how it was and how it could be again?
“We’ve been drinking,” she said.
“Come on. We haven’t had that much.”
“What is it?” she asked again.