“So tell me. About you,” he continued. “Quickly.”
Quickly! I knew he was being funny, and that he had other guests and a brand-new husband to attend to, but how could I fill him in quickly on the events of more than a decade? I hastily covered the essentials: my marriage, my new job, my volunteering, updates on college friends I still saw in New York . . .
Laughing, he cut me off and said, “Look at you. A married woman. With an office job.” And then, raising his eyebrows dramatically, with something like comic horror, he added, “And an expensive haircut. You have become a bourgeoise.”
Again, he was being funny. There was no malice in his tone, no harm intended, just honest surprise. Still, it stung. I didn’t know how to respond; it was just as well that he had to go talk to other people. To be fair, the last time he had seen me I was a disheveled if not unkempt vegetarian college freshman with unruly hair, wearing frayed green Converse high-tops and too many layers of long colorful skirts and no makeup, a self-proclaimed revolutionary and enemy of The Man in his many insidious guises. And there I was, a thirty-something in a sober black dress and, yes, my friend was right, a good haircut, mascara and lipstick touched up, working a stable job, married for nearly four years to an English professor.
Although my friend had given up the cello and didn’t write poetry as often as he had when we met, he had made a living for himself as an experimental vocalist and performance artist and teacher who traveled the world—the kind of work he’d been committed to all those years before. He was a real artist, living an artist’s life, and thriving at it. I’d long since given up my long-held dreams of being a full-time poet/activist. Such a life no longer felt attainable or realistic.
And now I could not help wondering: Had I failed? Had I betrayed my friend, myself, The People, Poetry, Revolution, Art, Beauty, Love—all the things we’d talked about during walks through the Vermont woods and over bottles of cheap wine in our dorm rooms, back when we were young, which now felt like so long ago, not only distant in time but in sensibility? I clearly hadn’t turned out as he had expected I would. Had I disappointed him? He was joking, but jokes are never just jokes. My hurt turned into defensive anger: Was there anything wrong with being a married, grown-up person—after all, he had just tied the knot, too—with earning a living, with having a life that was stable, maybe even normal? What was so bad about that? Nothing, I told myself. There was nothing wrong with any of that.
For a very long time, I hadn’t seen it coming, either. In high school, my enthusiasm for a multitude of bad habits—drinking more than I could handle, tripping, chain-smoking, shirking responsibility, hitchhiking, etc.—led more than one friend to predict I wouldn’t live to be twenty-five. Well, I’d managed to get there, plus a decade, so maybe I was ahead of the game. But I’d never been one of those girls who daydreamed about her someday wedding, who longed for domestic married life, or really even gave such a life any thought at all. I knew, however, that such an existence could be more than fulfilling: Many decades into their marriage, my maternal grandparents—despite ups and downs about which I’d gleaned a few details over the years—still seemed to me to be very much in love, still great friends, still sweet and lighthearted and often adoring in their interactions.
Inevitably, though, the marriage I’d observed most closely was my parents’. I have no memories of them being happy though I am sure, in their first years together, they must have been. I only remember them fighting viciously and, it felt to me, constantly, before my father left when I was seven. I knew more about their drawn-out and painful divorce proceedings than I probably should have. I do not regard myself as a cynic in any way, but I doubt that my parents’ history as a couple could not have influenced my perception and feelings about the institution of marriage. As for having children, I’d never been anything more than ambivalent—and, by my midthirties, my long ambivalence seemed like a good sign that parenting probably wasn’t for me. I loved Frank deeply, and our wedding day was one of the happiest of my life. We’d not only had lots of fun together, cooking and entertaining and going to concerts and traveling, we’d also seen our share of hard times—especially 9/11 and my father’s illness and death so soon after—and together we got through them. I don’t think I could have weathered them alone. We got engaged a month after my dad died. Marriage seemed like the right, sensible, grown-up response to all of it. There was no proposal; we had a discussion about the matter, agreed that after having been a couple for six years it was time, and before about 175 of our nearest and dearest, processed down the aisle to “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”
It also occurred to me that I was so affected by what my friend had said because he had, inadvertently, touched a very tender nerve. When Frank first took the job in Pennsylvania, I expected to be terribly lonely when I was in New York without him. We’d been together for so long. I’d become accustomed to being part of a couple. And at first, I was lonely and hardly knew what to do with myself. But to my surprise—and it really was a surprise, as I had not for a moment even considered the possibility that this might happen—I started to like being alone again. I felt miserably guilty about feeling that way.
Our discussion made an impression on me, but I didn’t stay mad at my newlywed friend. Now it was his wedding day, surely one of the happiest in his life. How could I be angry on such an occasion? I was still thrilled that we had reunited, still grateful to have been invited, still happy to have been there. And he had done well; his husband could not have been more gracious, more easy to be with.
After many hours of eating and drinking and dancing and toasting, I was tired but happy when I returned to my hotel room, and called Frank to check in.
“So,” he asked, “how was it?”
“Great,” I answered, which was true, but maybe not exactly the whole truth. I told him how beautiful Montreal was, how much I knew he’d love it, too. I told him about the food I’d eaten, the people I’d met, my walk up the mountain, the lovely wedding. I did not tell him about Else’s, or about the conversation with my friend. He had a conference paper to work on the next day and needed to sleep. We said good night. But I was restless. I had too much to think about.
Sunday morning was clear and sunny, and I walked once again to the Plateau for the post-wedding brunch, a cheery and chaotic affair, another chance to see the happy couple, another chance for more hugs, for more photos to be snapped and toasts to be made. Some of the wedding guests were going to Quebec City for the day and asked if I’d like to join them. It was tempting. But what I really wanted was to return to Else’s, only a few blocks away. Besides, I had dinner plans that night with a couple I’d never met, who’d gone to McGill in the sixties with a good friend of mine in New York, the poet and editor I’d met at Puffy’s when I was a graduate student.
After brunch I picked up a Sunday paper and repaired to the bar. In the early afternoon, light poured through the big windows and reminded me of happy afternoons spent at Liquor Store in TriBeCa years before. I saw a few familiar faces from my previous visits, and although I quickly busied myself with the crossword, a cigarette break outside led to a political conversation with a few regulars that we continued inside. By now, the bartender knew me by sight and greeted me warmly. I felt like I’d been going there forever.
A few hours later I returned to my hotel to get ready for another dinner out. I called my dining companions and they offered to pick me up and drive me to the restaurant, which turned out to be two blocks from Else’s. Daniel and Kathleen—a couple in their fifties—were wonderful, interesting people, and treated me to a luxurious French dinner. We ate and drank and talked, and I told them about my reunion with my old friend, the wedding, and about this great bar I’d found. They offered me a lift back to the hotel after dinner. “But I have a feeling you’re going back to Else’s,” Daniel said knowingly. He was right.
Sunday night at the bar was quiet and cozy. The bar
tender and I chatted for a while. From her, and from the few regulars seated near me at the bar, I found out more about Else, and quickly tried to put what I’d learned out of mind. Later, I met a couple from the Quebec hinterlands—by then, they were quite drunk and very friendly—who loudly sang an old folk song in French and filled me in on what Quebec life was like beyond the city, deep in the country. Sometime around midnight I bade them, the bartender, the regulars, and Else’s good night. My train left early the next morning—and I was in for another long ride, back to New York, to work, to Frank, to real life.
• • •
My last morning in Montreal, I checked out of my hotel and started somberly walking the few blocks to the station. And the closer I got, dragging my suitcase behind me, the more I wanted to turn around. The weekend had gone by too quickly, but it had also been so full. My old friend. The wedding. The mountain. The smoked meat and—it pains me to admit this—the better-than-New-York bagels.
And what I had enjoyed most was this: exploring a city that was new to me. Meeting new people. Drinking at a great bar. Being on my own. I could not say these things to my husband when we spoke on the phone. I wasn’t sure if I could say them to him at all. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting his feelings. Would I have to? Would it be worse to withhold these things? Would it be better?
What exactly did I want, anyway?
I stopped at a corner and paused for a few minutes. Standing there, I really could imagine a whole new life for myself. Maybe I’d stay here, I thought. Forever. I’d already made some friends. And I’d found the best bar. And maybe that was all I’d ever need. I could find a little apartment in one of those pretty brick row houses on the Plateau. (The rent in Montreal was much cheaper than in New York.) I would perfect my French. I could get some kind of job—nothing too serious, maybe even go back to bartending. I’d start to write poems again. Maybe I’d let my hair grow. Maybe I’d get a lot of tattoos, like Else. Maybe I’d fall in love again.
What had I done, landed in a Leonard Cohen song? I thought about my kind, quirky, smart, thoughtful husband. It would be completely crazy just to stay in Montreal. To end my marriage, just like that. That was no way to say good-bye.
And I reflected on what I’d heard the previous night, about Else. She had died in a fire in her apartment that was started, according to some accounts, by a cigarette she had neglected to extinguish fully before she passed out, drunk—a tragic ending to the otherwise inspiring story of the bar’s founding. I was sorry I would never meet her. I reminded myself that no one’s death is a lesson; no one’s death is meant to teach us anything. It disgusted me to think even for a moment that anyone’s life is a fable with a dreadful moral at the end. But even as I hated thinking what I was thinking, and refused to believe it, I couldn’t shake the sickening feeling that maybe Else’s story was somehow cautionary, and that what it was telling me was this: Self-reinvention has a cost, and it is high, and it is terrible.
• • •
The morning after I returned to New York, I headed to Pennsylvania. Frank had to be there to tie up some end-of-the-semester business. He was busy when I arrived, but we went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner that night. I was anxious, and there was no way he couldn’t sense it. I drank a glass of Chianti too quickly and immediately ordered another. I poked at the Caesar salad we were sharing with my fork.
We usually spoke to each other so easily, so fluidly. The tension felt alien. I think we both knew that, since he’d started working in Pennsylvania, we had slowly started growing apart, even though we talked at least twice a day when we weren’t together. Distance has a way of creating distance. I tried to break the ice by asking him how his day had gone. He was too perceptive for that. He’d had a few boring meetings, he reported, but never mind that: He knew something else was on my mind.
“Something happened in Montreal,” I blurted out. As soon as I said it, I was sure that he thought I meant I had slept with someone else, or done something equally fleeting and dramatic. He said nothing, and I continued. “I don’t know what you’re thinking. But I don’t think it’s what you’re thinking.” What I needed to tell him was even harder to explain.
So I told him about the talk I’d had with my old friend at the wedding, and about how the conversation had made me feel: sad, then angry, then confused and no longer at all certain about what I wanted. I also told Frank that I loved him, and that none of this had anything to do with anything he had said, with anything he had or had not done. This was on me. But what I had learned, I told him, was that maybe I needed to be alone, at least for a little while. Maybe we should see a marriage counselor. Maybe we needed a break from each other. I waited for him to say something, and it felt like a very long time before he spoke.
“I am so hurt,” he finally said, “that I can’t talk about it.”
It took nearly a year until he was ready—a hard and tense year for both of us, but it could not be rushed. The following summer, we went into counseling.
Six months later, we separated.
• • •
I never did move to Montreal, but I returned for a week in the summer of 2009. It was as hospitable and appealing as I’d remembered, but as the site of such a difficult reckoning, I was frequently overcome by sadness. I rented a room around the corner from Else’s and spent many hours every night there. I loved the bar just as much as I had when I first stumbled upon it. Some of the same regulars and the same bartender I’d met in 2006 were still there, and I was glad to see them. Although her picture still hung on the wall, Else’s presence no longer loomed as large as it had three years earlier. Now I wanted to know more—not just about her, but about how the people in her community remembered and thought about her. Some of the regulars spoke of her with reverence and affection; others shrugged their shoulders and dismissed her as a drunk, as though her premature death had been inevitable. A candle is always lit for her in a candleholder bearing her name on the bar—reminding me, as if I needed to be reminded, of how the choices we make, our best decisions and our worst, change not only our own lives, but the lives of those who know and love us.
10.
DRINKING WITH MEN
Good World Bar and Grill, New York City
Good World Bar and Grill existed on the fringe of the respectable world, at the bottom of Orchard Street where it backs into Division Street. In 2005, this may have been one of the last authentically seedy stretches of Manhattan: nowhere, a gray crossroads where the Devil himself may just be waiting to strike a deal. It is a nameless borderland between the discount fabric shops and handbag hawkers and old-lady lingerie emporia and other vestigial outposts of Yiddishkeit and the newer hipster hangouts of the Lower East Side and the noisy restaurants, fetid gambling parlors, and storefronts full of cheap dry goods of Chinatown. And from the fall of 2005 until April 1, 2009, this was my drinking territory. Two or three or maybe four evenings a week—plus, religiously, Sunday afternoons—I’d get off the F train at the East Broadway stop, get on the escalator (when it was working), exit near Seward Park, turn the corner, and walk just a little more than a block to Good World.
The place, owned and operated by a Swedish woman and her English husband, had been around since 1999, but before I became a regular, I’d only gone there once or twice. It was a good-looking place: spare and handsome, all washed-out wood and tall windows and iron, with a little patch of yard out back, little more than an alley, really, but with some trees here and flowers there, a few picnic tables and benches. Inside, there was little adornment save for a massive caribou head mounted above the bar, but not centered, off-center, like pretty much everything else in the place. The barstools were notoriously and precariously high; the wooden floors pocked and scuffed but with jagged apertures here and there, like little mouths of hell, wounded and patched then rewounded and repatched, in which a heel might catch and make a visiting Eastern European glamou
r girl in stilettos let out a high-pitched squeal of terror—or a regular crack a predictable joke about filing a lawsuit.
For a time, Good World had plenty of downtown cachet—designers and art-world darlings and would-be rock stars and long blond Scandinavians wanting fixes of herring and meatballs and aquavit, and glittery European types who only appeared, in accordance with their custom, late late at night or early early in the morning. In its first several years of existence, it had buzz. It was trendy. Which is probably why it never struck me as the kind of place I’d turn into a second home.
But in 2005, when my husband started a tenure-track teaching job in Pennsylvania, I was ready to be a regular somewhere again. Something internal had overtaken me: With Frank living and teaching in Amish country, I quickly reverted to the way I’d lived when we had started dating, without having made anything that felt like a conscious decision about the matter. I’d even started smoking again. He and I had quit together, but I figured it might be okay to smoke a few cigs now and then. And I’d never stopped drinking, but I’d slowed it down—wine with dinner was more my speed than whiskey after whiskey. I was older. I was married; less and less of my social life happened in bars. I was working as an editor for a magazine with a feel-good, quasi-religious mission, but a better job description—and the one I always used when people I’d just met asked me that tiresome question, What do you do?—was Inspirational Ghostwriter.
My daily work consisted largely of rewriting stories of spiritual uplift. The turning points in these stories almost always came when the narrator had hit rock bottom: a spouse had died, a wayward child’s addiction had taken hold, a marriage was in crisis, a business had fallen apart, a family farm had been eaten whole by a twister. And then something—something—came into the narrator’s life that turned it all around: a sickly foster dog, a tattered old heirloom Bible that had long been lost, some small sign or wonder. I liked my work; it was just kooky enough, like a combination of reportage and pastoral counseling. I liked my office; it was civilized and, at least compared to other places I’d worked, efficient. I liked my colleagues, who were kind and interesting. But for better or worse, the wholesomeness of my work, and the relative stability of my life, felt a little incongruous, like I was not quite myself. I wanted to feel like myself again. And even if I wasn’t sure exactly what that might mean, I knew it would involve a bar.
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