Billie Holiday ruined my marriage. I had no idea she slammed heroine, or that her love was a venereal disease. I just fell in love with her through her songs.
“Listen to her range, Alan.” My wife loved to flex her psychiatric muscles first thing in the morning. “Why do you think she can bring you up and down, make you go from angry to happy to horny to so sad you want to kill yourself?”
Once again, a perfect version of “All or Nothing at All” destroyed by my ranting wife.
“She was the equivalent of a modern-day crack whore.”
That woman of mine ripped the nearest poster of Billie from the wall and shook it at me like trash the dog spilled.
"This scrawny ass and skeletal face of hers ain’t natural, sweetheart.”
Strung out, loose slut, tramping to success. Phrases my woman usually uses to describe the love of my life. Skank, druggy, and home wrecker are a few others.
I often received emails from that wife of mine, with anti-Billie links pasted into them. After a rash of these harassing, paparazzi, bullshit letters, I tagged her as a spammer.
“I lost all my addresses because of you, damn it.”
“Perhaps, you should have considered that before you sent all that junk.”
She liked to accuse me of not wanting her anymore – not Billie, my wife. She accused me of imagining her as “that wretched woman” when “in coitus.”
“Never forget, dear wife, Billie brought us together. Never forget that night on the pier outside of Romano’s. The night we stared at each other, listening to the salty waves lick the pylons below us. Do you remember how we could taste the salt on our lips? Or, how our souls seemed to bore into one another, but we could do little more than open our mouths as if to speak? Then a man smoking a Swisher-Sweet held open the door of the little Italian joint and let Billie croon out our song, the song that solved it all, ‘Don’t Explain.’”
“Don’t remind me.”
Then we’d roll in opposite directions so I could dream of Billie. She sang her blues as we shared a pigfoot and a bottle of beer. She’d sing “Them There Eyes” to me in a crowded club and end the song by dragging me backstage to make her “really sing.” And I’d maul her only to wake to my squirming wife pinching my ribs to make me go back to my side of the bed. I rushed back to sleep to spend the rest of the night searching my dreams for my diva.
***
“What the hell were you thinking last night?”
“It’s just one of those things.”
“Again with her?” My wife tossed her chair on its back and kicked it across the tile floor. “I can’t take this much longer.”
I thumbed the Billie Holiday action figure tucked away in my terry cloth robe.
“Where do you live, Alan, ’cause it sure isn’t with me.”
My forefinger slid up along the doll’s thigh, past the slit where the legs met, down the other thigh, then back again, wearing a groove in my flesh. All the while, “I wished on the Moon” ate at my brain.
“I’m inclined to think you a grave robber. I could deal with a cradle robber easier; at least little girls are alive.”
The old necrophilia argument. My wife had an argument for every day of the week. She used to think I was fine and mellow. Now, she liked to speak low of me to those arrogant and wealthy rapists, I mean, therapists who asked at the fancy cocktail parties. She liked to say, “God bless the child who’s got his own,” and those who knew Billie’s songs roared with laughter, and those who didn’t still chuckled from the condescending tone. Most my wife’s friends call me “strange fruit,” another joke at my expense I’m not sure how to take.
“I have a new 45 needing a listen, you know.”
“When was the last time you went with me?”
“You know I’m not into your crowd, Sarah. They’re too damned uptight.”
“They’re not uptight. They’re well educated, an example you should emulate.”
I dug deeper into my lounger and grabbed for the cellophane-wrapped album on the side table. “I prefer easy living, that’s all.”
My wife smacked the LP out of my hand so hard it zipped across the room to snuff the candles burning below the autographed photo of my beloved Billie. Burnt wick and cooling wax scorned my nostrils.
“You want some Billie, Alan? I got one for you.”
She thrust out one of her hips and lay her hand upon the shelf the pose formed. The other hand crooked toward me as she began to sing:
Love me or leave me
Or let me be lonely…
I want your love
But I don’t want to borrow
To have it today to give it back tomorrow
Just like my old lady to pick out the parts that serve her best. Guess that’s why I didn’t care when she grabbed her scarf and muffler and threatened to never return if I didn’t say those three words.
“I am sorry?”
The door slammed. A pane of red glass popped out and shattered on the threshold behind her.
***
That woman of mine is so prone to tantrums. I just hoped she wouldn’t come back ready to harp me to death. Billie kept me company, soothing me past midnight. We went to bed together and woke together at 5:30 in the morning. She dimmed out of sight from the light-blue filtering in from the sun rising through the curtains. Two pillows lay indented from my knees and I could smell Sarah, Aussie Brand hair spray and chalky foundation. But, she wasn’t there.
I felt the emptiness before I saw it, the feeling that space has expanded around me, offering my body the odd sensation of ultimate relaxation and breaking tension, sprawled yet stretched.
Most of Sarah’s things vanished with her assumed return in the night. I slept through it all, dreaming of Billie. She even left a yellow post-it note:
Press Pause, Sarah
Then I wondered if I knew my wife at all. Was she capable of vindication? Had she set some booby trap as payback for my “neglect”? No, not my wife. I pushed the button and heard Billie:
Good Morning Heartache
You old gloomy sight
Good Morning Heartache
Thought we said good-bye last night
The song played on to speak of returning and staying together, giving it a go one more time, but that wife of mine was nowhere around – just Billie singing “Monday blues straight through Sunday blues.”
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