Smacked Read online

  Smacked is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2020 by Eilene Zimmerman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Brief portions of this work were originally published in different form in “The Lawyer, the Addict,” by Eilene Zimmerman (The New York Times, July 15, 2017).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., for permission to reprint fourteen lines from “What the Living Do” from What the Living Do by Marie Howe, copyright © 1997 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Zimmerman, Eilene, author. Title: Smacked; a story of white-collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy / Eilene Zimmerman. Description: First edition. |New York : Random House, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019029770 (print) | LCCN 2019029771 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525511007 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525511014 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Zimmerman, Eilene. | Zimmerman, Peter. | Lawyers—Drug use—United States. | Drug addiction—United States. | Drug addicts—United States—Biography. | White collar workers—Drug use—United States. | Workaholism—United States. | Divorced people—United States—Biography. | Grief. Classification: LCC HV5824.L38 Z46 2020 (print) | LCC HV5824.L38 (ebook) | DDC 362.29092/2 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019029770

  LC ebook record availabl at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019029771

  Ebook ISBN 9780525511014

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Christopher Brand

  Cover photograph: Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: July 11, 2015

  Part I

  One: April 1987

  Two: August 2008

  Three: October 2011

  Four: Labor Day Weekend 2014

  Five: December 2014

  Six: February 2015

  Seven: May 2015

  Eight: July 8–10, 2015

  Part II

  Nine: July 11, 2015

  Ten: July 12, 2015

  Eleven: July 23, 2015

  Part III

  Twelve: Big Law’s Big Problems

  Thirteen: White-Collar Pill Popping

  Fourteen: Better Living Through Chemistry

  Part IV

  Fifteen: April 2018

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  This is it.

  Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

  What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

  whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and more and then more of it.

  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

  say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

  for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:

  I am living, I remember you.

  —FROM “WHAT THE LIVING DO,” BY MARIE HOWE

  ■ PROLOGUE

  July 11, 2015

  I PLUG IN THE code to the gate at Peter’s house and the door swings open to an expansive, rectangular backyard. The grass is mostly brown, the $20,000 fountain in the center no longer burbling, its white stones covered in algae. I go to the front door and put my key in the lock. It’s made of heavy glass and makes a whooshing sound as it opens, like the door to an office building.

  There’s a staircase immediately in front of me that leads to the main floor, and to my right is the only room downstairs. It was intended to be a family or rec room, and has a glass wall facing the yard. I always thought it would be a great place for a party. Now it’s been converted to a bedroom for our daughter, Anna, who is home from college for the summer. She stays here at her dad’s house a few nights a week. Down here she has more independence, as well as her own bathroom. The bed is unmade, clothes and a bath towel litter the floor. Anna hasn’t been here in two days. Neither has our son, Evan.

  I hate the smell of this house. It’s the smell of Peter, the smell of our divorce and all the heartache that came with it. His affair, his lies, his law career with its enormous pressure and salary and all the expensive things he buys with it. I also smell my own fear—of his relationships with various women, of his family life with our children, a life in which I’m no longer involved. It’s the smell of Southern California and the ocean half a mile away, an expensive, privileged smell, but musty, too, like the inside of a refrigerator that hasn’t been opened in a while.

  I always feel like an intruder here. It’s clear this isn’t my house. Mine is a one-floor, mid-century home near the state university.

  I call out, “Peter?” No answer, no sounds from upstairs. “Peter, are you here?” I climb the stairs to the main floor. It’s perfectly quiet and still. I take a minute to look around. The house is an architectural trophy, made of steel, wood, and glass, all sharp angles and sunlight. Through the windows I can just make out a white line of sea-foam hitting the beach. I turn toward the kitchen. On the counter immediately to my right, Peter has set up a 25-inch digital frame displaying a series of family photos, him and our children. The images play in an endless, silent loop. There is also a large, nearly empty take-out soda, the kind you get at a convenience store, and some candy wrappers on the counter, piles of work papers, an asthma inhalator.

  Peter has been sick for more than a year with some kind of ongoing, low-grade flu, constantly exhausted and weak. He’s lost thirty pounds, maybe more, since we split up five years ago. But in the last six months, it’s gotten worse. My kids say he sleeps the whole weekend when they are here, forgets to grocery shop, never makes meals. He doesn’t seem to be going into the office much. The last time Anna and Evan were here, two days ago, their dad could barely lift his head off the pillow. Evan tried to take him to the hospital, but Peter refused, got angry and snapped at him. Then he vomited onto the bedroom floor, threw a washcloth over it, and went back to bed.

  I turn back to survey the loft-like living area, with a kitchen that morphs into a dining area that morphs into a living room, all of it filled with stylish modern furniture. The long table made from one piece of wood, splits and knots included, surrounded by six white leather and metal chairs. A side wall is covered in wallpaper that depicts trees in winter, gray renderings of trunks and branches against a white background.

  No one has been able to reach Peter since Thursday morning, when Anna and Evan left to come back to my house. What if they are exaggerating? What if he’s just sleeping? Or not here at all and I’ve just let myself into his house without permission? I have come here to check on him, to make sure he’s okay and take care of him if he isn’t.

  I turn down the hallway where the bedrooms are located. “Peter?” I call again. “Peter, I’m coming down the hall to your bedroom, okay?” His bedroom is at
the end of the hallway. Its door faces me and it’s open, but I can’t see anything except a corner of the bed and a cluttered night table. I walk past my son’s bedroom, with its one orange wall and IKEA bed, past Anna’s old bedroom, one wall painted deep pink and another wallpapered in a forest of black trees with little blackbirds resting on branches. Someone has cut out a silhouette of a rat and pasted it onto a branch.

  I am nearly at his door and start calling his name again in earnest: “Peter? Peter?” I can see into the room. “I’m coming into your room, Peter. I’m here to check on you.” The covers on his bed are drawn back, and I can see the crumpled white sheets. There are a few tissues in the bed, with spots of blood on them. I’m starting to shake badly as I walk into the bedroom.

  Peter isn’t in the bed, so I turn toward the master bath. Then I see him, lying faceup on the floor between the bathroom and the bedroom.

  I stand there, unable to really understand what I’m seeing. My mind is struggling to comprehend this. That’s him? What’s that on his face? There’s a cardboard box under his head like a pillow. I walk over and kneel down next to him. His right arm is bent at the elbow and resting on his chest, a gesture he often makes, even when he is standing up. He holds his arm that way when he is making a point, pressing his thumb and first two fingers together for emphasis. Our son does the same thing.

  I touch Peter’s arms to shake him awake. They are stiff and hard to move. His fingernails are blue. I put my hand on his chest to try and feel his heart. I suddenly remember lying in our bed when we were married, spooning, my chest up against his back, especially when I was cold or couldn’t sleep. I would listen for his heartbeat—so much slower and stronger than mine—and feel safe. Now I feel nothing. His chest is like unfinished wood, stiff, dry. And still. Is he dead? I don’t know what a dead person looks like, so I tell myself that maybe he’s unconscious. Maybe he needs CPR.

  Then I look up at his face. There is a dried, black crust over most of it. His mouth is open slightly, the lips pulled back, a clear foamy fluid around the teeth. “Peter?” I say. I am crying, begging. “Peter?” Then I look at his eyes. They are open but something is wrong. At first, I can’t figure it out but then I realize, slowly, what it is. His eyes have risen out of their sockets. No one alive has eyes like that, of this I am sure. I start screaming “ohmygod ohmygod” over and over again while I dig the phone out of my purse.

  My hands are shaking so badly that I have to set the phone down on a table and use the speaker. I press 9, 1, 1 and hit the little green button. “I’m at the house of my ex-husband and I think he’s…I think he died. Oh my god. I think he is dead.” The woman on the other end sounds unmoved. “Ma’am, we can’t help you if you don’t calm down. Can you give me the address where you are right now?” I go outside and read it off the house because suddenly I can’t remember it. “Ma’am, are you sure he’s dead?” asks the 911 operator. I second-guess myself. What do I know about death? Maybe a person’s eyes can look like that but they can still be saved, defibrillated or CPR-ed back to life? I agree to go back in and start chest compressions.

  “I’ll stay on the phone and guide you through it,” the 911 woman says. “Okay, okay,” I say, shaking and shivering. “I can’t look at his face, though, I can’t go near his face.” The operator says, “That’s fine, don’t look at it.” She tells me to move Peter’s hand away from his chest. I pull gently, then harder. “I…I can’t. It’s, oh my god,” I sob. “It’s stiff. It’s really stiff.” The operator says, “Okay, don’t worry about it. The police and ambulance will be there in about four minutes.” I ask if she will stay on the line with me until they arrive. As I leave the bathroom I notice a small bloody hole below Peter’s elbow. That’s odd, I think. Then I run downstairs and out the front door to wait for help.

  The shock of what is happening is starting to grow roots inside me. I can’t keep still. I am a bundle of live wires—jittery and shooting hysterical sparks—and yet, at the same time, all business. I have the phone pressed to the side of my head, the 911 operator waiting with me for the police. I’m crying. Two boys on skateboards come down the street. They stop and hop down from their boards, one foot off, one foot on. The taller one asks, “Are you okay?”

  It is a spectacular summer day, the sky deep blue and cloudless, a slight breeze off the ocean. And these two beautiful blond boys are having fun, just skateboarding down their street like they probably do every Saturday morning in San Diego, the land of endless summers. I want to tell them the whole world changed ten minutes ago, but instead I say, “Something happened to my ex-husband. He lives here. An ambulance is coming.”

  PART I

  ■ ONE

  April 1987

  IT’S A WARM SPRING afternoon and I am riding the 165 bus from northern New Jersey into midtown Manhattan, a long and nauseating drive. I’m heading to an appointment with a recruiter named Peter at Adam Personnel on 44th Street, in the hope he can help me find a job. A few months earlier I was laid off from my first post-college job, as an administrative assistant at CBS News in the Election & Survey Unit. The domino effect was swift. Not being able to pay rent meant leaving the apartment a friend and I had been renting near my alma mater, Rutgers University, and moving back to my mother’s house in northern New Jersey. I’m depressed, I’m broke, and I’m cocktailing a few nights a week at a bar called The Orange Lantern, where I’ve also been going out with an over-muscled bartender who drives a Trans Am. I’m sleeping in my childhood bedroom and everything feels like 1975 instead of 1987—the mustard-colored walls, the gold and brown shag carpeting. I hope this recruiter can help me find a job, maybe even one that requires some writing.

  My previous position at CBS News, ironically, involved no writing. During my year there, I climbed in rank from receptionist to administrative assistant, which raised my pay from $6.75 an hour to salaried staffer earning $18,000 a year and five minutes of television fame when I answered the “Decision Desk” phone on camera during the midterm-elections broadcast. At the conclusion of the broadcast that night, I was given a Polaroid of myself on television. I was standing, a phone to my ear, wearing a black-and-white-checkered suit, credits rolling over me. Then the stock market crashed on Black Monday and shortly afterward, I was laid off.

  My political science major, unfortunately, hasn’t set me up for a well-paying job with lots of growth potential. The next step is often graduate school or law school, but I don’t want to consider those. I’m not ready to give up on writing. Not yet, anyway.

  Both my sisters, one older and one younger, still live at home, and the place feels like a halfway house for women who lack the ability to emotionally regulate. Instead, we all just scream at one another. “You used up all the hot water!” or “Who ate the last banana?!” and “Get out of the bathroom!” My mother, exhausted from spending all day, every day, on her feet serving up cheese samples—she’s an assistant manager at Swiss Colony, a cheese and sausage shop in a nearby shopping mall—shouts, “Stop yelling!”

  I make my way to Adam Personnel. The receptionist lets me wait there for a moment, and then looks up. “You’re here for…?” she asks. “I have an appointment at ten with Peter,” I say, the name on the ad I circled in The New York Times.

  When he comes out to the tiny reception area filled with other job seekers, I’m surprised at how young he is. “Hello,” Peter says, shaking my hand and smiling, which causes his moustache to wiggle. There’s something odd about the right corner of his mouth, which I will later learn was surgically reconstructed after he bit through an electrical cord as a toddler.

  “So you’re a writer? Really?” he asks, walking me back to his black metal desk, one of a dozen or so in a large, noisy room.

  “Well, I’m a writer, but, I’m, well…I’m not really writing now. I’m trying to find a job that will let me write,” I say. I have few clips to show for myself—a couple of pieces in the college news
paper and several summaries of NBC Radio shows I wrote as a summer intern.

  “I’ve got a few things that might involve some writing, but we don’t get many actual writing jobs,” Peter says. “I’m sorry.”

  He starts asking me what I like to write and that leads to a discussion of my desire to write about music, which leads us to talking about bands we both like.

  This guy is so sweet, I think. I wish I were feeling even an ounce of chemistry, but it’s not there, although we are having an awfully long interview; in fact we’re not even talking job prospects, we’re just getting to know each other. Peter tells me he isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life (being an employment counselor is just a stop on this unknown journey) other than play bass in a band that he and some friends are starting. He lives rent-free in a house in New Canaan, an affluent Connecticut suburb, where he is the resident tutor and guardian of a bunch of low-income minority boys participating in a program that lets them attend New Canaan’s posh public high school. He helps them with their homework, gives them guidance-counselor-type advice, and makes sure they don’t break any rules (or if they do, that they break them discreetly).

  Our small talk tapers off. I’m here, after all, to find a job. Peter turns to a stack of papers on his desk. “I’ve got a couple of things you might like,” he says, flipping through the pages. “There’s a job at the Junior League. Administrative but with a lot of responsibility,” he says. I’m not sure if he’s joking. The Junior League? What is that? Sounds like the Girl Scouts. I shrug. “Okay,” I say. “I need a job.”

  “I’ll be in touch then, probably later today or tomorrow,” he says. I smile.