Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘Did they?’ Severance asked.

  ‘Certainly not. What do I care?’

  ‘You didn’t feel angry?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just a game.’

  ‘It’s not a game, Gene, and they weren’t just trying to make you mad. They meant it. That’s exactly what Daisy said to me in Group her first morning last Spring, when I called her a lousy superior bitch and asked her what there was so superior about her. Vin had been playing psychodrama and she said, “You’re all freaks.” Everybody was furious. I hit her and she looked at me across the Group and said, “You’re just trying to make me mad.” It was ten days before she caught on.’

  ‘Caught on to what?’ Gene asked with interest.

  ‘Caught on that I wasn’t kidding. Found out she was a freak.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You mean I should have pretended to be angry?’

  ‘No. You should have been angry.’

  ‘What about? I’m very easy-going.’

  ‘The hell you are. What do you drink for?’

  ‘That’s a question,’ Gene said seriously. ‘That’s a real question. I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Do you get mad at work?’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why bother?’

  Severance, peering into the thickets of the newcomer’s delusion, saw he might be of some real help. ‘Come down to my room and chat a little, want to?’

  They took their coffees down the corridor. Severance sat, Gene stood at the end of the bed.

  ‘Listen,’ said Severance. ‘You’re nowhere.’

  ‘I know that. God almighty, my dear new friend, I know that. Something is going on that I cannot get a clue to. I feel as if I were in fairyland. What in the name of Christ is the point of all this business? What does it have to do with drinking? I’m here for drinking, not because I happen to be a tranquil type, with everything under control.’

  ‘Everything under control!’ Though he knew it was foolish, Severance felt his heat rising. ‘Hospitals, accidents, blackouts, your wife’s left you twice, you tried suicide at least once that you told me—’ He drove down the list.

  Gene was standing white-faced, holding the bedrail.

  ‘God,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘It’s true, it’s true, isn’t it? Your life is a nightmare. You are an alcoholic, pal. You are almost as sick as I am, maybe more so. You are insane, and you tell me everything’s under control.’

  ‘I tried one other time too.’ Gene put his left hand to his face. His left lid was jumping. ‘I know I’m mad. I see it must be. Can you help me, Alan?’ He was pleading. ‘Can you give me just one point of connexion. I’m absolutely lost. I don’t know what’s happening. What ought to happen?’

  Severance felt terrible himself. What could he do? ‘I can’t really help you yet, Gene, God knows I would. You’re going to have to get in touch with yourself. It takes time. It takes miracles: two or three or four miracles.’

  ‘I don’t understand—“get in touch with myself.” I am in touch with myself. That’s the trouble. I see the whole story and I wish I were dead.’

  ‘You do not see the whole story. You do not see any part of the story. You are deluded. Look, two minutes ago you said you were absolutely lost, now you say you see the whole story. Put the two things together, will you?’ He waited. ‘But you can’t. They don’t go together. They come out of different worlds.’

  The temperature in the room was 112 degrees. Total darkness at the end of the bed.

  ‘Listen. Even in my condition, I could take any one of your statements and tell you the entire score in about five minutes. But you would not understand, much less, accept, one word of it.’ He tried to think. He thought. It was possible. ‘I might just be able to give you an opening. Listen closely. If you can see where you are, or rather are not, on just one point, it might help a lot—if you could hang onto it.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve got to have. Just one point.’

  ‘Okay. Here it is. What do you do at five o’clock?’

  ‘I get stoned.’

  ‘I knew it. Why do you get stoned?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘No doubt. He knows everything. But the point is that you know too.’

  ‘I do not know. I swear to you.’

  ‘I know that. But you also do know. Look here, do you remember that you said to me a minute ago, when I asked you why you did not do anything about your rage at your bosses, “Why bother?” Do you remember that?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Okay. Crap.’ Severance’s voice was as hard as he could make it, which was not as hard as either titanium or zirconium but hard.

  Gene flushed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you are lying when you say you do not do anything about your anger. You get bombed. It is called medicating the feelings, pal. Every inappropriate drinker in the United States does it, and in France, Chile and Norway. Cause and effect. Visible to a child. Not visible to you. Don’t you see how weird, how unacceptable, your little put-off, “Why bother,” is, in the light of the fact of your daily self-destruction and progressive ruin?’

  ‘I don’t see the connexion. I admitted they made me mad.’

  Severance gave up. ‘I know. It was just a try, Gene.’

  They looked at each other, Gene entirely reconstituted —regrouped, the term was—intellectually puzzled, disappointed, skeptical, condescending, quite okay now. Severance felt something like despair, though he knew that in a few weeks this would (probably) all be mere history. Anyway, he had tried. Having been there so often and so long himself, he felt very close to Gene—though very distant too, undeluded in that particular corner—and he was inspired to put his own insoluble sweat before the younger man. Besides. Help was about as plausible here as a Biafra airlift from General Foods, or rather from Appalachia—edibles from the starving to the even more starving—but you never knew.

  ‘You don’t even know you’re in trouble. I know I’m in trouble, and it’s worse than yours. When I admit it they’re going to throw me out of hospital. I don’t buy the first half of the First Step. I just realized this afternoon. I’ve had it.’

  ‘How do you mean? You don’t accept it?’ Gene did not sound greatly concerned.

  ‘How can I? It’s not a fact. “Powerless over alcohol” —horseshit. I drank and drank and drank and drank and drank, and stopped and stopped and stopped and stopped and stopped. Six or seven slips in two months. Dry two whole months after that. What the hell.’

  ‘But here you are.’

  ‘Pure accident. I’ll tell you what happened. It will be nice not to be confronted about it, for a change.’ He actually did smile, with bitterness. ‘I started drinking on the plane to Buffalo to give a lecture, first part of week before last. I forget why, God damn it. Trips are hell on me; I got through ten days in Mexico without anything, but I had my family with me and even so I sweated in airports; if I ever get through a trip alone, that will be the day—I may have to give up travelling, though I have a bloody tour agreed on, damn it, this December. Anyway, I slipped off and on in Buffalo and some other city upstate New York, got through a TV interview etc., tapered off and arrived very much in order back here, something past ten o’clock Thursday night. Called Ruth from the airport not to meet me, she was just going to bed in any case. Well, suppose she’d met me, that would have been the end of it, no? back on the programme. Okay. I got a taxi. The taxi happened to take the long way, around through Bristol Square—happened, mind you—and by pure chance I happened to look up—I was hunched down in the back brooding without pleasure on my imminent confession—happened to see across the Square, we were stopped at a red light, my favourite bar. Bad luck. I was willing to postpone a bit the unwelcome announcement of my new slip—first in two months—maybe she’d go to sleep and it could wait till morning—so I said, “Drop me over at The Masters.” I admit that, then, from tha
t point on, I was doomed. I blacked out around midnight and woke up next day in the bed of an Arabic poetess, sent her out for a bottle, and was holed up blind until Sunday afternoon when I formed a detailed suicide-plan for Monday morning when shops opened, we went downtown and drank in a bar until suddenly for no reason whatever I abandoned my plan and told her to drive me home. Chain of accidents, Gene. Suppose Ruth had collected me, or the flaming cab had gone the usual route, Lake Circle, or I hadn’t glanced out and seen the one of only two bars in the city that menaces me, nothing—nothing—would have happened. I would have been safe!’ His tone was triumphant. Q.E.D. Irrefutable.

  ‘Until next time.’

  This small phrase, pronounced sternly by his deluded new friend, produced a cataclysm in Severance. He felt his brain might burst out of its cradle. He felt: It’s true. His very heavy momentum either reversed itself in a split-second or came to a dead stop and then tore off in the opposite direction. All doubts departed. He could stay in treatment without a qualm. This sense of irresistible conviction, as real as an abscessed tooth, was not new to Severance. He had experienced it in science, in life, and in literature. But it was very very rare in his long history. Only two instances flashed as he stared at his instructor. After an awful night-flight from London with his first wife (layover five hours for repairs in the makeshift airport at Reykjavik, Deirdre just out of hospital with a slipped disk trying to rest on the narrow red imitation-leather hard bench-cushions), she had turned to him in their hotel room as the bellboy closed the door and said, ‘You know I’m going to leave you.’ These were the worst words ever spoken to him, and although the idea was in fact absolutely new he felt no doubt whatever from the instant he heard it, it even seemed to him that she was as usual right and he had known it, forever, or at least during the second half of their marriage, the six years of his uncontrollable drinking. Horror and assent. No protest, no attempt. Just so, at the climax of one of Cervantes’ most convulsive tales, he saw again ‘Rindióse Camilla, Camilla se rindió.’ It was intolerable and unavoidable, the product of the siege to her laid by her husband’s best friend:—Camilla gave in; she gave in. Severance succumbed to this truth in the same way, with agonized satisfaction. He could never, comfortably, never comfortably, drink again. ‘It must be by his death,’ Brutus’ First words, after the long wait and underground wondering where he stands on the tyrant (his best friend, maybe his father, governor of his will). No half-measures: Rejection. Christ’s horrible gesture against the damned on the end-wall of the Sistine Chapel.

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ he said very slowly. ‘I see that. I am obliged to you, for pointing out to me that the earth is not flat. If I live twenty years, as I may do now, I will never be able to render you thanks.’

  ‘Maybe you were just trying to get yourself off the hook,’ Gene suggested.

  They talked on, like thieves making common cause against their own (stolen) property—raids planning—and certain things were not quite the same for Severance after this particular dyad.

  When Gene took himself off, Alan opened his journal and closed it again, too tired to write. He lay down and passed into a weary but not unhappy half-hallucinatory state. His body flat out, his scrotal state neither contunding nor quite still, he wandered through old adventures. He was in mid-town Manhattan one evening twenty years ago, unusually drunk, convinced that he was an FBI man with Communist agents after him. He fell into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Bronx ‘by the most indirect route.’ As they zigged and zagged north he kept a terrified watch out the rear window. Finally the driver stopped at a light and asked for the street address. ‘Never mind,’ said Alan urgently, ‘Take me to Greenwich Village. Bedford Street. Hurry.’ The fare was formidable and luckily he had it. He gave the driver an extra five ‘for saving my life.’ He saw a marquee and went in and upstairs and along a corridor until he heard gaiety behind a door, held his finger on the bell. Two men opened it. ‘I’m an FBI man and the Communists are after me. Can I come in and hide?’ The man on the right gave him a grin. Severance loved him. ‘Well, I don’t believe you’re an FBI agent, but come in and join the party.’ He did, and had a ball. Then he was lunging through the hot streets of Calcutta in the middle of the monsoon night, unable to remember his address and dying of thirst. Embassy party, maybe; got separated. Hours passed, nowhere to sit down. Dawn was already full on when a pimp picked him up and wafted him to a brothel. The madam brought Danish beer and two girls, one short and fat, one thin. He liked the iced dark beer better than the Hindus and liked the thin girl better than the fat girl. He drank. The madam brought him a pack of Craven A he must have demanded. The girls took off their saris and knickers, lay down on the carpet, watching him, and handled each other. Presently the fat one got from somewhere a long dildo, attached it to her brush, and inserted it with great lunges of her great tail in the almost hairless cunt of the delicate slim girl. She fucked her. The girl underneath waved her arms and legs. Alan, who had always felt rather turned on by phantasies of lesbians, was not much interested by this fucking, but despite his exhaustion and his skipping vision he grew excited by the thin girl. He would have liked to be on her himself. She simulated orgasm, grimacing, heaving. The madam came back and it was clear that he could have one of the girls. Unfortunately he was unable to speak—not much Hindi he had anyway, and no Bengali—and somehow he found himself alone with the dildo-wielder, screwing her. This sobered him so quickly that he remembered his address (Harrington Mansions, just off Theatre Road, third floor). Getting there, he slept until just barely time to leave for his 5 p.m. lecture at the Royal Asiatic Society.

  He came off his bed in Ward W sweating. It was eleven-ten.

  There was a gang in the Snack Room. Luriel was leaning into the refrigerator, her narrow back active. Jeree had gone to bed, Edith was gossiping with George and a new man, slight build, slack-faced, in a dressing-gown. Charley and Bill S were arguing across the table. Alan drew coffee and stood behind Charley, leaving the third chair for Luriel, who brought salami cheese mayonnaise butter bread to the table, paying no attention to anyone. Edith laughed her suburb terrace laugh. ‘Getting ready for a greedy night?’

  Luriel dropped her empty hands, looked at Edith, lowered her head, and rushed out.

  Now Severance could not bear Edith, a pretty, dark-haired, offhand housewife who had been more or less confided to his protection—‘Show her the ropes, she’s resistant and scared’—by a mutual friend who had just left the Ward. She seemed to him neither scared nor resistant; just not here at all. Most patients were for their first week or ten days monotonously glum. Edith acted as if she was on a tour of the Greek islands, minus the archeology and the Metaxa (seven-star no doubt). Help her? Moreover, she had been insolent about an old friend of his at lunch, Rochelle. He moved forward.

  ‘We don’t bait each other in here,’ he said savagely.

  She looked taken aback. ‘I—She—I’m sorry, I only—I had no idea.’

  ‘She must be incredibly sensitive, damn you. You were rude about Rochelle at noon, too. Rochelle is a close friend of mine, we were together in Group last Spring. You said she had the manners of a prostitute. Who do you think you are? I personally know various duchesses and princesses’ (one princess, anyway, that’s enough) ‘if we’re going in for that stuff: they are delighted to entertain me, and I consider Rochelle my social equal. I suppose you hobnob with duchesses,’ he snapped, and left.

  Arita, who had just come on duty, looked up Luriel’s room number and Alan went softly down the dark right corridor. He knocked, knocked again, heard a sound, turned the knob and pushed. She was sitting hunched over on the far side of the bed with her back to him, unmoving. He walked around the end and sat down tentatively in a straight chair. Her convulsed face, when she lifted it, was the colour of clay.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Everybody makes fun of me.’

  ‘Have I made fun of you, Luriel? She told us she was sorry, when I hit her.
What was the trouble exactly?’

  ‘I have to eat all the time. I can’t help it. I’m an addict.’

  ‘Eat?’ Severance was surprised. ‘Aren’t you an alcoholic?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Luriel earnestly, entering into something with him, ‘but the real trouble is my eating. I can’t stop. Night and day.’

  ‘But you eat practically nothing at meals,’ he said puzzled.

  ‘It’s not so bad then. It’s in between meals I have no control. All night long.’ The weird unattractive, even repellent young woman sounded desperate. She was confiding fear as well as resentment. ‘They have no right to laugh, it’s not my fault, it’s my body. I’m helpless.’

  Severance hurt with her. ‘Who laughs, for God’s sake? Edith is Bitch One but she certainly did not know about your trouble. Nobody else laughed, I can tell you. They felt bad.’

  ‘They all make fun of me. Even my doctor.’

  ‘Your doctor?’ The M.D. was scandalized. ‘That’s unprofessional! Who is he?’

  ‘Dr Walters.’

  ‘I don’t know him. He must be out of his mind. I have heard everything about psychiatrists, I’ve had four or five myself, but this is new to me. What the hell does he laugh at?’

  ‘My problem.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘My eating problem.’

  ‘It’s no joke. Obesity can be dangerous. Does he deny that?’

  ‘He says I have no eating problem.’

  ‘And you really do? When did it begin?’

  ‘Last week, up on Seven. I began to crave. At first I thought it would go away, but I began to hide food and I saw I was lost.’

  My God it’s just like bottles, he thought. But he said: ‘I never heard of addiction happening so suddenly. What drugs were you on?’

  ‘I forget.’