TWENTY-TWO
A Familiar Face
SOME DAYS AGNES ATTENDED AS many as three different AA meetings, increasingly desperate to find a group in which she could feel at home. She had not been prepared for their bewildering diversity, nor for the consummately polished turns of certain star presenters. Their testimonies were either chummy and confiding, or hortatory and messianic. She found both approaches equally repellent.
Of course she could not slip out of these meetings, no matter how histrionic or self-aggrandizing she thought these stalwart “friends of Bill.” She was the aspiring, fragile acolyte. Vigilant attention to the stories of seasoned AA veterans was essential to her induction. And so she listened dutifully, subduing any urge to squirm through squalid details of their respective falls; the scathingly frank accounts of loved ones alienated and solid careers destroyed; and finally, the degrading scenes of rock bottom with its hurtling peripeteia that led them to the clear light of reason and the vow to stay clean. Twenty-two years sober, they will say. Or forty-two. Or sixteen.
She wanted this happy result very badly. She wanted to be clean forever and to work again and walk with a light step primed by hope. It was only that none of the speakers she heard were compatible role models. They were so patently self-assured for one thing, and their long years of sobriety made her own hard-won achievement seem so puny. She had not had a drink for nine days. What troubled her most was the precariousness of her situation. She felt she was walking across a floor made of particularly brittle glass that an unthinking step would send her plunging through. She conceived of this misstep coming, not so much because she physically craved whisky, but because one day she might simply forget the terrible consequences and reach out for a bottle in a daze. Three times now she had awakened in a sour running sweat because she’d dreamt she had imbibed.
If she had absorbed anything from the witnesses at the meetings, it was the folly of believing you could get your drinking under control. She knew this in her bones. If she had one drink, it would all happen again. She would plunge down through the brittle floor, blood-streaked and doomed. Nevertheless, she was afraid her willpower was not up to the lifelong task. What would happen the first time she was sorely humiliated or rebuffed? Would she be able to control the urge to let the whisky obliterate the pain? She saw she was running into the old danger of overwhelming herself, looking too far ahead. The AA mantra of one day at a time was solid as a life buoy and she must hold to it hard. She had only to make it through this day. She could. Of course she could.
If only she could find a meeting where she saw her own vulnerability and self-doubt reflected back at her. She knew that when at last she had the courage to get up and tell her story (Hello, my name is Agnes and I am an alcoholic), her voice would quaver, her hands tremble. Wasn’t there someone like that in this massive city — a recovering alcoholic who had preserved a nervous humility no matter how many years’ abstinence he or she had managed?
Many of the meetings she attended were held in church basements and she had come to regard these subterranean warrens as AA’s netherworld of striving and bruised transformation. The corridors were almost always gloomy, despite efforts to brighten them with posters or felt hangings with the words “love” and “fellowship” in bold serrated caps.
In the basement hallway of one of the older Catholic churches, she had found herself confronted by a garish lithograph of Christ pointing to his exposed, violently red heart. She had automatically touched the recently healed-over hole at the base of her throat, with its little horizontal ridge of scar tissue. Here was proof of her own miraculous deliverance: the actual evidence she had escaped with her life through the intercession of an ultimately unfathomable otherworldly power. She knew she was not deluded in this belief. Her dog had been no alcoholic hallucination. He had appeared to save her and she had witnessed every minute detail of his intercession. She had felt the strength beneath the fur and his steady, consoling presence after her rescue. What she had not done was slip her arm around his chest to find the steady thump of the heart that had exerted itself on her behalf. And if she had done so? Wasn’t it likely there would have been nothing, no answering thump of pumping blood, no proof of corporeal life?
She believed still that the dark brown hound was a manifestation of spirit, or of some rootless, benevolent energy. If she lived to be as old as Nana was when she died, she would not be shaken in this conviction. He was there. He had saved her. His being was beyond her understanding, but not beyond her faith.
The mystery of Laelaps’s appearance was one reason Agnes did not run aground — as many newcomers did — on the injunction that AA neophytes get “in touch with a higher power.” She was glad the phrase was so elastic because she could not have anatomized the radiant ethereal world she believed lay parallel to this marred quotidian one. Spirits moved freely there — animal and human both. She returned again and again to the idea of “ensouling,” of a holy place where everything was always on the verge of becoming. Thus she would puzzle it out in her head, and only there.
She went regularly these days to gallery 607 of the Metropolitan Museum to absorb as fully as her new sobriety allowed Piero di Cosimo’s startling visual commentary on these truths. She was often lost in the eventful worlds of the two canvases hung side by side — one strident, one pacific — showing the hunters in the thick of the kill, and then their return home. She had a sketchbook with her and a pencil and a stick of red chalk so that her hours in front of the two canvases were readily justified to other gallery-goers and the guards. No one seemed to recognize her from her disgraceful prior episode and she was heartened by this distance from the drunk she had been. It was a question now of sticking to the last, as she must.
It surprised and delighted her how the act of copying, with the porous chalk in particular, helped her to inhabit the abundant sensuous detail so that she was sometimes inside the painting, looking out. She slipped easily inside the androgynous person, with the little wolf mask settled on her shoulders, whom she believed not to be a hunter at all. From the very beginning, she had seen this admittedly ambivalent figure as well-intentioned, gripping the small, sturdy grey bear around the midriff to stop its blind, doomed attack on the lion who had slain the bear’s mate. This angel figure on the bloody field was definitely trying to save the bear, not pull it away to murder it. As far as Agnes knew, this was solely her interpretation. She had never found such a view in any book or article by Renaissance art scholars from Panofsky onward.
Piero had positioned the figure to the left of centre. But the firmly planted naked feet were so near the bottom of the panel that, of all the human protagonists in the scene, this was the one closest to us. Agnes read this illusion of proximity as deliberate on Piero’s part. He wanted the viewer to study this figure and enter into her exertions, the way her strong thigh and knee flexed as she braced herself against the bear’s back, the steady lock of her arm as she tried to tug the creature away from its piteous attack on the deadly lion. She noted how Piero had given the intercessor’s face an ivory cast, in contrast to the shadow-striped, sunburned flesh of the hunters. Her brow is furrowed in determination. Her mouth is open as if she is gasping or crying out, for she is herself in a perilous situation as the grey bear turns its head around, so near her own face, to snarl at her and show its fangs and wide red tongue. Her fine profile shows clearly against the bear’s dark fur.
One morning, as Agnes sat sketching the straight nose and the whorled ear, it came to her how much the features resembled the philosophical hybrid boar’s in The Forest Fire — a human face that spoke of stoicism, yearning and hope in the midst of conflagration, the face she had always believed belonged to Piero di Cosimo himself.
He was here then, too, in gallery 607 of the Met.
She was so shaken by this discovery, she gave a little cry. The nearest guard and several visitors stared at her, and she bent down, under the pretense she had dropped her chalk. How she wished she could tell them
what she had found; explain to them that it was in this kindly androgynous figure the painter’s spirit lived; that this small painting was not a stomach-churning scene of Early Man’s savagery, but rather a painting with a moral centre. Its implicit instruction was as urgent and compelling as when he had set his brush to the horizontal panel six hundred years ago.
Stop their suffering!
Can’t you see it? she wanted to call out to anyone in the gallery who might listen. Look at the eyes of the little monkey high in the tree in the foreground. Can you see how his head turns to watch his companions and the other animals fleeing the clubs and cudgels, a great train of deer and ox and bears and capuchin monkeys leaping and racing up the hill? His poignant yearning and his hope, his very blessing of his fellow creatures in flight? And this person who grips the grey bear so solidly? That is the painter himself, Piero di Cosimo. He has painted himself trying to rescue the bear from the lion, who at any moment, will leap up and tear out its throat. Can you see this gesture of salvation and self-sacrifice at the painting’s heart? Can you?
How she yearned to take some sympathetic-looking person by the hand, the dark-haired woman in the cream and cinnabar patterned silk dress, perhaps, and lead her to the companion painting where the hunters return home. Do you see how sleekly the slain stag lies along the man’s naked shoulders, how reverently the hunter carries the dead creature, as if this very bearing is an act of love? And have you noticed the two animal masks fixed to the mast of the hunters’ rude boat? Do you not think those masks might be symbols of the people’s awe of the animals’ numinous power and a sign of their spiritual kinship? Have you heard what the shaman told the anthropologist Rasmussen, that by eating animals he and his people were living on a diet of souls?
Agnes, you’re hysterical. It was her father’s voice, with that nasty tone he reserved for reproofs of her “wooly thinking” and “gross sentimentalism.”
She flinched, out of long-ingrained habit at the caustic strike, even though he was not physically present.
You have to outgrow this foolishness, Agnes, the voice persisted. Animals don’t have consciousness in the sense we understand it. They don’t have rights and if you go on fighting for something that doesn’t exist, you’ll ruin your life. You’re impaling yourself on a falsehood, a childish notion that is woefully simple-minded.
Had he really said “impaled”? Wasn’t that a bit too brutal, and likely far too imagistic, for his ingrained pragmatism?
Listen to Daddy, honey. He has your best interests at heart. We both do. Her mother’s words came these days in the form of a mechanical chirping, although fortunately they were less and less frequent.
In fact, the power of both parental voices was dwindling day by day. She knew this had much to do with her family’s final blatant betrayal: their refusal to believe her when she’d told them she had not been present at the bullring in Arles. That they would not accept her word was the final stab that had at once killed off any remnant affection for them, and freed her forever from their debilitating influence. She had never before understood that being betrayed can sometimes result in a glorious liberation. And that was very much the case here. She certainly did not wish them ill. Nor did she feel guilt at her intense relief she need never see her parents or sister again.
So when it came to the AA step about making amends to the people you have offended or harmed as a result of your drinking, her family simply did not factor into it. As hard as she interrogated herself, she was unable to come up with anyone whom her alcoholism had seriously injured. It did cross her mind that she might owe the hotel management an apology for the ant invasion, and there was no doubt she had been abrasive with Ines, who after all, had only spoken the truth. After close self-examination, she determined that in both these situations, her faults were too minor to warrant any formal amends.
What major harm she had done, she had done to herself. She had as good as plotted her own demise. She would never understand why she in particular had been saved from death, while Campbell and Zeke had not. It was all so bewildering and contingent. Why hadn’t the strung wire snapped or the bike stalled just before the fatal impact? Or in Zeke’s case, why hadn’t some primal prompt convinced him to stay in this world: a sunburst of primrose at his feet, for example, or the exalted cry of a bird ascending the blue sky above him?
Her new and widening clarity made her very aware the principal threat to her continuing sobriety was guilt. Its peculiarly destructive character, simultaneously corrosive and leaden, could easily blight her energy and will. If she let guilt eat at her or weigh her down, the urge to drink would spring up as fierce as ever. As she saw it, her guilt was rooted first in the fact she had survived the lamentable wreck of the Ark, while Campbell and Zeke had perished; and second in her failure to make a jot of difference in the lives of animals. How was she to impart the truth to others, persuasively and far afield, in order to keep her vow? Was there a way to make herself into a truth-bearing crusader like Jane Goodall, with her saintly works and serene face?
She grasped right away how foolish such an aspiration was in her case. She had neither the long-refined experience nor the charisma to be a universal-truth-bearer. Nevertheless, she still wanted desperately to do more than simply give money to other people’s campaigns on animals’ behalf. She wanted to act somehow; to manifestly bear witness for those who could not speak for themselves, except through their eyes and their visible marks of suffering. The demands of the sacred bond were so huge and so pressing, she must answer them in kind. But wasn’t that exactly the kind of hubristic attitude that had been the Ark’s undoing?
Once again, she had tied herself in knots, both ethical and pragmatic. In any event, she would be useless to any living creature unless she stuck with the paramount business of staying sober. I am still very vulnerable. She repeated this so often over the course of a day, the words had become as much a mantra as “One day at a time.”
One morning the smart phone revealed a category of meetings that had thus far eluded her. These were the “small and quiet gatherings,” many of them apparently also “gay-friendly.” She resolved to try one advertised for late that afternoon. It was in a basement meeting room of a Catholic church she could reach in two subway stops.
She had come to assume that all AA groups prided themselves on a culture of asperity, perhaps because they did not want inductees ever to lose sight of the difficulties of staying the course. When she found the signposted door in the basement of St. Anthony’s, she was therefore prepared for the usual brash affronts to her senses: the fetor of tarry coffee thickening in a glass pot on a hot plate; bleak, stuttering ceiling strip lighting; the screech of tubular metal chairs dragged over stained and pitted concrete. Once she stepped inside, she assumed she was in the wrong place. Instead of an acrid caffeine stench, there were the diffuse scents of various herbal teas, among which she identified jasmine and peppermint. The lighting was an ambient glow. Wooden chairs, with fan-shaped backs and cushions, were arranged in a circle in the centre of the room. Surely she had stumbled upon some other kind of group, dedicated to local environmental renewal or similar good deed?
“Are you here for the AA meeting?” The question came from a tiny elderly woman with a froth of white hair framing her face. She was seated, very erect, and her pale blue canvas deck shoes barely grazed the floor.
“Yes. Am I in the right place?”
“That’s us, dear. Come in and take a seat. My name is Ellie.”
“Agnes.”
“Lovely,” Ellie exclaimed. “One doesn’t meet many Agneses these days. It suits you. We’re just waiting for a few of the other members to arrive. Do make yourself a cup of tea in the meantime, if you wish. It’s a dollar a cup and you put the money in the glass jar.”
In the time it took Agnes to make her peppermint tea, several others had joined the circle. There were four more women, all older than Agnes. These included Joan, who had very high cheekbones, and her dark hair pulled ba
ck in a flawless bun; Mireille, who wore a heart-shaped locket and a smock of lace-edged pink gingham; Helen, whose deft hand movements, chiming with her speech, made Agnes wonder if she was a classical musician; and Clarisse, who kept winding strands of her long straw-blonde hair around her index finger and peering at it, as if hunting for split ends. When she smiled, Agnes noticed that one of Clarisse’s front teeth was missing. Her marked thinness and pallor made the midnight blue flesh beneath her eyes stand out even more tellingly. So caught up was Agnes in sympathetic speculation about the trials Clarisse had undergone that she missed some of the introductions of the men in the group. She did catch “Mark”: the name of the handsome black man in his thirties who looked like he could be a stockbroker and was the only person in the group with a briefcase. The man with the neatly razored grey hair and sailcloth shirt in vertical cobalt and cream stripes was Walt. Those whose names she missed included a man with a shaven head that had its own five o’clock shadow, an older gentleman with a massive bronze-tinged beard of corkscrew curls, and another man whose face she could not see because of her angle of vision. Only his narrow, elegant hands and wrists extending from deep cuffs of pale lavender were visible to her.
Agnes’s jaw muscles clenched in empathy when Ellie announced Clarisse would be the main speaker. Clarisse, who had stopped her compulsive hair-twisting, now repeatedly smoothed down the close-fitting long sleeves of her sage green top.
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