Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  Then I remember nothing—not one word, feeling, plan of action—until the end of the hour, after she had told me she wouldn’t work with me until I got sober. I do remember saying that I couldn’t afford to see her, which was true; I was a freelance writer living on less than $10,000 a year. But I was also relieved that I couldn’t afford her, since that pretty much sidelined the notion of my stopping drinking. Which at that point in my life was absolutely, positively, never going to happen. Drinking was my air and water.

  I got sober three years later, after the air had become poisoned and it was AA or die. I never saw the woman psychiatrist again, and now, nearly four decades later, I am unsure of her last name or whereabouts. But I’ve imagined having the chance to thank her, for seeing and saying what I could not. For her gravitas. She must have seen a young woman in trouble, armed with defenses but conflicted enough to have gotten to her office. She heard my flippant words as a cry for help, understood that “self-destructive” had the same final destination in mind, whether slow or fast, conscious or unconscious. It was a long time before I had a glimpse of that correlation. I argued for years that I had never been suicidal, only drunk and desperate and depressed, addicted to any means necessary for escaping reality.

  By the time I began the real work of therapy, when I was thirty-eight and five years sober, my therapist had the temerity to suggest that finding alcohol in adolescence may have saved me—might have given me a shield against the depression, a temporary stopgap to grow up enough to save my life. He was a gentle, dry-witted psychiatrist who was the polar opposite of dangerous—of every thrill-seeking attraction that had driven my life. He knew by then of the history of suicide in my family, as well as the alcoholism. I think he glimpsed, too, probably because of my having stopped alcohol, that I had a strong enough superego to keep me from the cliff. I don’t know. He trusted me far more than I trusted myself in those years, and while I used to think that simply meant he wasn’t yet on to me, now I am flooded with gratitude for his vision and his understanding. Hope, where I had none. Charity, where I knew only self-blame. Steadfastness, above all else. Those eyes of kindness, in the middle of a tornado.

  We rebuild the house, the therapist and I. I cry and he stays, I panic and he breathes. The eyes are always on me and he is still, even when I don’t get what I want or I descend into rage or despair, the rooms of the past. I read everything I can on this mystical process I have begun, Alice down the rabbit hole of transference. When I stumble onto Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, I decide to start drawing, because her paintings revealed to her an unconscious she couldn’t otherwise reach.

  I spend entire winter afternoons drawing, sketches with charcoal and pastels that I find banal and unrevealing. I take them to the therapist and he gasps. I am a critic for a living, but that’s in words, not images, so when I draw it’s as though my mind has been let out to play. No observing ego here. I draw graveyards, lots of them, and locked fences, and a child crying, and one of a girl in a room, drawing. When the therapist asks me to explain, I say it is the wind blowing through an empty house.

  It makes me glad now to remember the pictures, because I did them with such earnest passion—my effort to create a story I didn’t know and couldn’t tell. I’m still not sure they were all that significant—my adult, critical mind says they were derivative tragic images, some invented icon of sorrow my young subconscious was trying to express. But none of that matters now; blessedly, what I thought about the drawings never mattered. What mattered was that the therapist gasped, and said Oh my God what have we opened up here? It was the psychotherapy version of taking a child’s sun-and-moon finger painting and giving it prime space on the refrigerator. For a long time he was the sun and I was the moon, and we rebuilt the house so well, I think, that much of our doing so is now a blur.

  Everything that mattered over the course of my adult life happened, or re-happened, in that room.

  I bring my first Samoyed here when she is nine weeks old. The therapist gives her a small brown bear. She destroys it and I bring home its tattered remains and when she dies thirteen years later I keep it with her ashes.

  We have been through a lot of death together, he and I, offstage and on. Vladimir and Estragon, reporting in from the front. Nothing scares him. Wearies, maybe. Never scares.

  The therapist loves me. I know this, though he is not allowed to say so. He has been a magisterial choreographer of boundaries over the years. A man on a wire. He has pitched and swayed and held on in the high winds of attachment and terror and awful grief, and still we never plunge from our perch.

  He has shown me how to give up anger, a toxic substance I didn’t know I craved until I tried to go without it. He never told me to do this, or even suggested it. Instead he showed me what power looked like. It was the force of love, of radical authenticity. No victims were involved.

  The therapist’s beloved wife dies. I cry until I think my heart will break. I cry like a child, as though someone has thrown a stone at the magic house in the forest, which was supposed to stay protected. I cannot bear that he must bear this pain.

  I keep the drawings for years and years, and then one day I unceremoniously throw them away. Nothing was lost. I drew, he responded. Cast out the net. My message in a bottle.

  * * *

  —

  I tend to remember arduous efforts more than triumphs. Maybe it’s because the triumphs seem easy in retrospect, when one is standing on the hill at the end of the ascent. The climb takes longer, is more telling: being cold or alone, wanting to give up, getting to your feet and staggering forth. The rest is gravy.

  Then a friend reminds me that Tyler would not leave out her triumphs. She’s right: Tyler’s stories—knights on flying horses, a broken leg that mends overnight to win a race—are always victories. So here’s one of mine.

  April 2001. On a Friday afternoon in early spring, I find out from my editor at the Globe that I have won the Pulitzer Prize. The prizes will be announced on Monday, and I am sworn to secrecy until then. Within hours I will break this vow by calling my best friend, Caroline, who is out of town until Sunday, and my eighty-six-year-old mother, who is in Texas. But for now the news is mine, a mind-blowing, humbling piece of news.

  I am completely adither, so I go for a row on the Charles River. The river is empty: cold, cloudy, nobody out at midday. I row along in a mild stupor, grateful for this moment of suspended time.

  Each October, the boathouse that I row out of hosts the Head of the Charles Regatta. What the Boston or New York Marathon is to runners, the Head of the Charles is to rowers. I know the three-mile course, know where the understated concrete post is that marks the finish line. The post is like a tiny Stonehenge to racers, many of whom are world-class athletes. I thrill to watch it every autumn, but I lack the skill ever to row in the Head; I’m too slow, too small.

  Today, though, with no one around, I row part of the course. I turn around and angle my boat in the right direction when I’m nearing the final stretch, and in the last twenty yards I manage a rare set of masterful strokes. I cross the finish line on an empty river and throw up one hand, mime a victory cheer.

  One of the reasons I love this memory is that it happened when Caroline was still alive. She was the only person I ever told about it. A year later, almost to the day, we would find out she had stage four lung cancer; seven weeks after that, she was gone. She was forty-two. But during that spring of 2001, we were both still rowing, still laughing about how someday we would row the Head together. We thought we had all the world and time.

  ONE SUMMER AFTERNOON TYLER CONVINCES me to let her train me as an entry-level genie. Tula is snoring in the foyer; it is too hot for a walk and too early to swim. Why not study genie-ism? Soon I am sitting on the couch in the lotus position, eyes closed, and she elbows me if I open them. For homework, apparently, I must read the Odyssey—a book Tyler picked at rando
m off a living room shelf, probably because it looked ponderously long. She has laid down a few critical rules of the training: “Number one: You must never use your magic for evil purposes. Number two: You have three wishes, and you can always wish for more wishes. And number three: You are not allowed to wish for a nap.” (I suspect another inductee got sleepy during training.)

  We are knee-to-knee on the sofa, as quiet as we have ever been. I drift into a happy, dreamy space. After a while Tyler’s dramatically deep voice says, “You may now open your eyes.”

  When I look at her, she is right up next to me, her eyelids fluttering, her body still as stone. In a kind of Exorcist-but-not-scary voice she says, “My name is Sunshine and I am a thousand years old. You can find me anywhere and I will come to you. You may even come to me while I am sleeping and I will find you.”

  I break position and put my arm around her. Nobody need worry about this child’s sense of self. She feels tethered to the entire universe.

  12

  When I was hired as a book critic by The Boston Globe in 1985, I did a first round of interviews with seven editors. One of the questions I got was about working for a big-city daily. The Globe had a readership large enough to freeze my hands before the keyboard when I thought about it. My background was in academia, and as a freelancer for alternative weeklies, where I usually had several days or weeks to finish a story. Would I be able to keep up with the time imperatives of writing on deadline, file from the field if necessary?

  I swallowed and said yes, absolutely, but it was a bluff of confidence. I’d never written so fast for so many. A year later, when the PEN writers’ congress convened in New York for a week, I flew on winged feet to cover it. I was thirty-four, and roaming the lobby of a midtown hotel with the likes of Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, Grace Paley, Salman Rushdie. The place was lousy with famous writers. There hadn’t been anything like it in fifty years, since the writers’ congresses of the 1930s, and I was determined to do it justice.

  I filed every day, sometimes twice when there was real news, like the protests that Norman Mailer led over the appearance of then–secretary of state George Shultz. I wrote my stories in longhand and dictated them from a phone booth to a night editor and felt like Lois Lane. The last night of the convention, I went to a nearby well-known steakhouse and asked the waiter for advice. He looked askance when I mentioned a particular piece of meat, and I ordered it anyway, assuming he was treating me like an out-of-town rube.

  Always trust a side-eye from a waiter. I woke up heaving at three A.M., the start of a case of food poisoning that still humbles me to remember it. For hours I was too sick to move, but there was a closing keynote address by Mario Vargas Llosa at ten A.M., and I needed it on tape; then I could write the final story from Boston. Somehow I made it downstairs and found rice pudding and tea at the corner deli, and got inside the main ballroom. The last thing I remember is holding my tape recorder high in the air.

  When I came to I was on the floor in the women’s lounge, surrounded by New York City firefighters and a kind woman who had been standing next to me in the ballroom and had seen me go down. She said I looked green before I fainted. I explained about the food poisoning. I must have already been packed to leave, because someone got me and my suitcase to the office of the midtown doctor on call for the hotel.

  I can still see the glaring sunlight coming through the windows of his examining room, the nurse disappearing with a frown on her face. And I can hear the slimy tone in the doctor’s voice as he leaned close to my face. I was so ill, so dehydrated, and yet there was no mystery about what was wrong with me—I had told the firemen and the people at the hotel and this nurse that I had food poisoning, had eaten a bad steak.

  The doctor speaks softly in my ear. “I can give you a shot of Compazine that will make you feel better. Would you like that?” The voice is silky, creepy, as though he has the magic potion but I must dance for it. I know about Compazine, a powerful (and sedating) antiemetic that stops nausea on a dime, and I nod through my groans. Then his voice is coming from the end of the table, where he is standing between my knees. “Now I need to do a full pelvic exam.”

  I drift off. There is the voice again, near my head, a hand on my waist. “You can sleep in here. The nurse is leaving soon and you can stay here as long as you like.”

  I come to scrambling, clawing my way awake, thinking I have to get out of here. I am so weak I can barely walk. I get dressed lying down, grab my bag, stagger out toward that too-bright sunlight. The waiting room is empty and the doctor calls out, half-plaintively. I keep going. Wonder of wonders, I get a cab in ten seconds and make it to LaGuardia.

  A close friend in Boston is an ob/gyn. When I tell her the story a few days later, her brow furrows. I watch her face and see her decide to display calm rather than distress. “I suppose you could make a case that he had to check for a perforated bowel,” she says, wanting to console me. “But that would really be a stretch.”

  I get a bill from the doctor’s office. I could easily add it to my expense account, where it would be taken care of. Instead I throw it away. I never hear from the doctor again.

  * * *

  —

  We are walking on a deserted beach, the Famous Writer and I. I’ve pursued him for an interview, traveled to his summer home to find him, and after a day of talking we discover that we both love dogs and walking and swimming. I know a place, he tells me, we’ll go there tomorrow. We pile in the car with his two sweet retrievers, and because I’m staying at a B&B and unequipped, he assures me he has towels for the dogs and for us.

  The swim is a good one: brisk late-summer waters under a cloudless sky. I’m always outfitted for a swim, whenever I travel: two black racing suits for ocean or pond water, cap and goggles and spares of each. We both swim far out, away from each other, and after half an hour or so I walk in to the shore. He has a bath towel waiting for me and spreads it on the ground so that I can sit.

  Then I realize there is just the one towel.

  He sets his two-hundred-pound, twenty-years-older body next to me, about four inches away, and smiles companionably and looks out to sea. We are on a keyed beach, accessible only to the gilded few. “You know there’s no one around for miles,” Famous Writer tells me, his eyes straight ahead. “We could be here for another hour and never see a soul.” Then he moves a little closer.

  I spent months trying to get this interview. I’ve gone around his publisher, jumped the gun on a radio silence he agreed to with his agent, gotten access no other paper will have for several weeks. We’ve sat for hours in the afternoon shade of his study, talking about families and despair and art and drinking and how to build a day or a life that’s worth keeping. I will go back to Boston and write my story, my big triumphant scoop of a story. But not before FW makes a self-congratulatory, quasi-chivalrous pass at me.

  We sit there in silence and I am slightly embarrassed for him. I cough out something like “It’s really beautiful here” and then get up abruptly. “I’m going in again,” I say, and wade back into the ocean. Ten minutes later the moment is over. He has taken the hint and shrugged it off, his ego untouched, as though he just wanted me to know that he was available for a quickie on the beach, while his wife prepared our lunch back at the house.

  I tell no one about this encounter because I like FW and I think it’s unseemly and puts him in a bad light. More important to me are his wife and children, whom I would not want to hurt or embarrass. When after weeks I confide to a friend what happened, someone who knows him and who I believe will be discreet, she tells me, to my horror, that she thinks I should be flattered.

  After my story appears, I listen with a mask of composure if people comment on the depth of the interview. I have left out the towel, the one moment when he fell from grace and then recovered, because I respect him and, seriously, such things happen to women journalists all the time. I too sh
rug it off. For the year after the story appears he stays in contact occasionally, writing several times from another state and making similarly polite, one-towel offers. “I could drive up and we could go for a ride.” That sort of thing. I demur, decline, plead a busy schedule. Always polite.

  Decades later this still pisses me off, partly at myself. Because, as usual, the woman winds up protecting the man, the one who crossed a line, insulted me, acted like a patronizing literary giant trying to get a little on the side. Up until today, I thought I’d never write this story, because who would be helped, why does it matter? The usual inner narrative where I swallow and look away.

  And then I realized what I wish I had said, what I might not have known to say then, as my fortysomething self, and so I can say it now.

  I wish I had sat on that towel and not moved an inch, and stayed looking out to sea, like he did. And said quietly, “You know, you probably don’t realize it, but I’m the one with all the power here.

  “Sure, you’re the renowned writer who’s making a pass and trying to do it politely. And I’m just a tyro who’s pursued you, hungry for copy, fawning and asking all the right questions, talking about you and your work for hours.

  “But here’s the thing: I work for a newspaper with a circulation of more than a million, and my story isn’t written yet. It could go either way.”

  Then I might have gotten up, patted the dogs, and said, “Great swim. Should we go have some lunch?”

  13

  I saw a coyote this morning at the cemetery, his tawny profile only a few yards away. It happened fast, and the dog didn’t even seem surprised. Her nose tells her far more than I can comprehend about who’s been here ahead of us. We all three froze: the coyote, insouciant and wild, went still in protective camouflage; the dog, bigger by ten pounds, watched and waited. And I, the apex predator, just froze in order to grab the image, etch it onto memory. It was the nearest I’d ever been to a coyote. Then the moment broke and I called the dog and clattered a stick on a tree, loudly. And off he went.