by Sarah Hepola
I turned to my new boyfriend, to gauge his response. He was beaming. “You’re famous now,” he said, and squeezed my hand.
I moved to Dallas to live with Lindsay and became the music critic at the Dallas Observer. Another stint on the good-times van. Club owners floated my tab, label owners bought me drinks. I was barely qualified for the job, and I faked my way through half my conversations, but the alcohol cushioned my mistakes. So did my boyfriend. Lindsay was a closet artist, who spent his evenings fiddling with song mixes and his days building databases. My new gig was an all-access pass to a world he’d only seen from a middle row. “I feel like the president’s wife,” he told me one night, after we spent the evening drinking with musicians. It didn’t even occur to me that might be a bad thing.
My stories were gaining traction. I began writing in a persona that was like me, only drunker, more of a comedic mess. I made jokes about never listening to albums sent by aspiring bands, which was neither that funny nor that much of a joke. But people told me I was a riot. Maybe they liked being reminded we were all screwed up, that behind every smile lurked a disaster story. I began contributing to a scrappy online literary magazine called The Morning News. And in this tucked-away corner of the Internet, where I could pretend no one was watching, I began to write stories that sounded an awful lot like the real me.
People were watching, though. An editor at the New York Times sent me an email out of nowhere. She wondered if I’d like to contribute a piece sometime. They were looking for writers with voice.
LINDSAY AND I made a good pair. He cooked elaborate dinners—lamb souvlaki, Thai lemongrass soup—as I dangled my feet from the kitchen counter, sipping wine from balloon glasses that were like fishbowls on a stick. He liked taking care of me, although we both liked not taking care of ourselves. Our lives felt like a Wilco song: The ashtray says you were up all night. Our lives felt like an Old 97’s song: Will you sober up and let me down? Those were the songs we listened to while chain-smoking out a window, songs assuring us if you’re hurting and hungover, then you’re doing it right.
On Saturdays, we would heal ourselves with a greasy Mexican breakfast. Eggs, cheese, chorizo. Sometimes we wondered aloud if ours was the right path. Weren’t we supposed to be building something of meaning? We were 29 years old, the same age my mother was when she had me. Lindsay talked about his father, who had moved all the way from Australia and started his own business. What had we done?
But then we’d go to the bar and just repeat what we’d done the night before. The bartender poured my Harp as soon I walked in the door. I had arrived.
Lindsay and I drank together, and we drank a lot. But I was the one with the bruises and bumps. I had a habit of slipping off sidewalk curbs while we stood there at the end of the night.
“I don’t get it,” I told Anna, on one of our regular phone dates. “He drinks as much as I do.”
“He’s a foot taller than you!” she said.
I still confided in Anna, but with more line-editing now. I told her enough to maintain our closeness but not enough to cause worry. The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.
Anna might not have been worried, but I was. Lindsay and I worked on paper, but I couldn’t lose the nagging suspicion we were missing an essential spark. I wanted more, but I also thought maybe I was being unrealistic. What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?
Lindsay would leave for his office job at 8:30 in the morning, a full two hours before me, and I would walk him to the door and then climb back under the covers, feeling toxic and pointless again. His big orange tabby would hop up on the bed and curl up on my stomach, and I fucking loved that cat. Somehow, he made me feel forgiven.
I stopped calling the cat by his given name, a small act of rebellion that spoke to a much greater ambivalence. But the cat had been named for a status car, which was clearly a mistake, so I tried out new names, changing them each season until one finally took. Bubba. A proper name for a big orange tabby.
I guess we’re stuck here, I’d say to Bubba as he curled up on my belly, although I knew it was only true for one of us. I felt stuck, though. Stuck in a life that was easy and indulgent and yet I could not get enough in my mouth.
If I had to guess the moment I knew Lindsay and I were in trouble, I would point to the night I stood up in the bathtub and he looked the other way. We used to slosh around after midnight in that claw-foot tub, naked and shameless, with our glasses chattering on the tile floor. But then one time I stood up, water rushing down my naked body, and he averted his eyes. He looked embarrassed for me. A betrayal contained in the tiniest flicker of a movement.
“Do you think I’ve gained weight?” I asked a few days later, with enough wine in my system to feel brave.
What could he possibly say: that I had not? He was an MBA who brought a protractor to every argument. He knew as well as I did my skirts didn’t fit anymore. But I wanted him to tell me otherwise. To lie, to be oblivious, to convince me I looked beautiful anyway. “I think you’ve gained weight, yes. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”
“Ten,” I spit back. We both knew it was 20.
He never asked me to quit drinking. He asked me to drink like a normal person. To moderate. To maintain. And I began a series of shell games to get back to the way we were. Atkins Diet. South Beach Diet. If I could lose weight, he would look at me with those besotted eyes again. But the less I ate, the more I fell. I bashed my knee so badly I had to visit an orthopedic physician. I started enlisting Lindsay’s help to keep me in check. Save me from myself.
“Don’t let me have more than three drinks,” I said as I got ready one night.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “If I see you with a fourth, I will karate-kick it out of your hands.”
But after two beers, I didn’t like our arrangement anymore. And I shot him a look like “If you take this fourth drink out of my hands, I will cut you.”
I woke up to his back a lot of mornings. I started hanging out more with the guys from work. They still laughed when I knocked over my martini.
If I had to guess the moment Lindsay knew we were in trouble, I would point to the night I was so wasted I couldn’t climb our back staircase, so he convinced me I was a kitty cat. I was in a blackout, and I crawled up the rickety steps on my hands and knees, meowing at the moon and trying to swish my nonexistent tail. But to Lindsay, this behavior was no longer cute, or funny, or endearing. It was pathetic.
I went to an alcohol therapist, my big display of I-mean-it-this-time. She had an office in the Dallas suburbs, in a home with too many cuckoo clocks.
“Men leave women who drink too much,” she told me, as I tugged at the fraying ends on her couch. “He will leave you.” I thought: How is that fair? Women stay with men who drink too much all the time. I thought: But if I stop drinking, what would we do together? I thought: What the fuck does this woman know?
A few months later, Lindsay turned to me after dinner in a shitty Greek restaurant, and he said, “I can’t do this anymore.” And I knew he did not mean the dinner in the shitty Greek restaurant.
I wasn’t devastated; I was furious. In our time together, his stock only climbed. He was better-looking, dressed less like a business nerd and more like the East Dallas musicians I had introduced him to. Meanwhile, I felt like the fat drunk he was ditching on the side of the road. But underneath my wounded pride, I knew our split was right. I’d spent two and a half years unsure of my love for him and hating myself more and more. What I had required was unfair. I wanted him to love me enough for both of us.
I needed to change. I needed to turn my life into something I didn’t need to drink to tolerate. The day after Lindsay broke up with me, I made a decision.
“I’m taking your cat,” I told him, “and I’m moving to New York.”
FIVE
THE STRANGE
R
A few months after moving to New York, I got the assignment that flew me to Paris. I was lying in my bedroom in Brooklyn at 11 am, giving sleep a second chance. I had a pillow over my face to block out the sunlight, and I must have looked so strange. Like someone trying to suffocate herself.
That’s when Zac called. “What are you doing on Friday? Do you want to go to Paris?”
I sat up so fast it startled the cat. “Are you fucking with me?” I asked, because fucking with people was one of his specialties.
“I can find someone else if you don’t want to go,” he said. All casual.
“No, of course I can go. Yes. I’m going.”
I thought moments like this only happened in the movies. One minute, you are languishing in Hangoverland. The next minute, the world’s greatest assignment is sitting in your lap.
Well, “world’s greatest assignment” might be a stretch. Zac was an editor for an in-flight magazine, so it’s not like I was being cold-called by Esquire. The story I wrote would end up in the mesh netting of an airline seat, nestled alongside SkyMall and laminated instructions on how to turn your chair into a flotation device.
And the story itself was kind of silly. I was to interview the host of a popular reality dating show, shooting its eighth season in Paris. It was odd that the magazine wanted to fly me across the Atlantic to meet a guy whose claim to fame was the phrase “This is your final rose.” But when someone offers to whisk you away to Europe on their dime, here is what you don’t do: Ask questions. I was a freelance writer trying to make a living in New York City, for God’s sake. I would have written a story for Downy Fabric Softener’s internal newsletter.
“I’m going to Paris,” I told the guys at the bodega where I bought cat food and smokes.
“Ooooh,” they said, which was exactly the right response.
After only three months in the city, I was dangerously low on funds. But the magazine had authorized $1,000 spending money—a thousand dollars for two days!—which made me feel like I was standing in one of those game-show booths where $20 bills swirl like a tornado around you.
I was nervous about the plane ride. I’m a clutcher of armrests, a spinner of catastrophes. I have terrible control issues when it comes to letting someone pilot me across a vast and churning ocean. A point arrives in every flight when I fight the urge to bolt into the aisle and scream, “We’re in the clouds, people! This can’t last!” But I popped my sleeping pill and drank two vials of wine. Drinking on a plane is a line-item veto in the “never drink alone” rule book. Everyone drinks alone on a plane. We drink alone, together.
MY FIRST DAY in Paris went off without a hitch. I was staying at a hotel in the 14th arrondissement, in a residential area on the Left Bank not far from Luxembourg Gardens. It was a nice place: a bright foyer with high ceilings and marbled columns strung up with Christmas lights. The arrangements had been made by the magazine. All I had to do was show up.
“Your key, mademoiselle,” said the man at the reception desk, handing me a plastic card.
I played tourist for the afternoon. Took the Metro to the Eiffel Tower, got my hands gooey with a chocolate crêpe, and walked across the park, feeling like a girl trailing ribbons in her wake. I found a cozy café tucked away on a quiet street and ordered a glass of bordeaux. It was cheaper than coffee. Two euros. Another one of the line-item vetoes in the “never drink alone” rule book is that you’re allowed to drink alone while traveling. Who else could possibly join you? I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.
The wine was good. Sustaining. I sometimes wonder if I’d grown up in a culture lacking the padlocks of Puritan restrictions, then maybe I wouldn’t have fetishized it so much. America, land of shot specials and beer bongs. No sense of moderation.
I read once that a famous magazine editor had a glass of champagne with every lunch. One glass. And I thought it was the classiest thing ever. I wanted that. The crystal flute, with its feminine curves and ding-ding-ding. The bubbles reaching up to kiss my nose as my lips approached the glass.
And so I sipped my one glass of red wine. Just one. And I let it roll along the sandpaper of my tongue. And the wine was better this way. Tiny sips. And it floated through my bloodstream like a warm front. And it would not be an overstatement to say this felt like the very point of existence. To savor each moment.
Then I ordered another glass.
I MET THE reality show host and his wife that night in a crowded square on the Right Bank. They had a toddler and an adorable baby, and they struggled to maneuver the stroller over the cobbled streets, even as we remarked how charming it was. The magazine profile was supposed to show how awesome it was to bring your kids to Paris, but I suspected the host and his wife would give an arm for a Babies “R” Us and a minivan.
The host was small and good-looking in a generic way. I expected to dislike him. In fact, I wanted to dislike him, because he was in charge of the world’s dumbest social experiment. But he and his wife were quite lovely. Years later, when the tabloids reported their split, I actually thought: But they seemed so happy. As if I knew anything.
We took a seat at an Italian restaurant, ordered a bottle of red wine, and began the interview. My questions were not what you would call probing.
“Why did you decide to film this season in Paris?”
He cleared his throat. He smiled.
They had chosen Paris because it is the world’s most romantic city. Anyone could fall in love in Paris. Everyone did! As the host spoke, I watched the season’s sizzle reel unfold in my mind: candlelit dinners along the Champs-Élysée, helicopters flying above the Arc de Triomphe set to the swelling sounds of a power ballad, the corny accordion music leading us to commercial break.
I loved to rant about that show back when it debuted in 2002. Those brainless women with their dripping bikini bodies and their Stepford smiles, scheming to marry a man they’d only just met. What kind of self-loathing idiot would watch this tripe?
The answer, it turned out, was me. Because a few years later, I flipped it on one evening and realized such vapid entertainment was a great way to unplug my mind. Anna started watching it, too, and we called each other afterward to complain. Untangling the mysteries of desire can be a terrific past time. Why did he choose her? What was she thinking? We might have talked more about those dopey bachelors than Anna’s actual boyfriend, who became her husband that year.
After the interview, the TV host invited me back to their apartment. They had a bottle of wine they’d been meaning to open, and he and I drained it as his wife put the kids to bed. How many nights had I spent like this, sinking into some conversation with a man who was not my husband while his wife washed the dinner dishes, tended to the kids, and shushed us when our voices got too loud?
His wife plopped herself down beside us and yawned.
“Is there another bottle?” he asked, and she stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. She nodded slowly.
“I should go,” I said, and she agreed with me a bit too quickly.
I hopped in a cab at 10 pm, and I was in that happy place where you feel impenetrable to harm. I loved talking to cabdrivers when I was like this; those impromptu conversations were one of my favorite parts of living in New York. I would hop in their Yellow Cab and perch myself up by the clear plastic divider, and I would scrutinize their names, their faces, trying to divine the landscapes that had shaped them.
“You’re from Senegal,” I would say, and the guy would laugh. No way. Not Senegal. Totally wrong.
“You’re from the Ukraine,” I would say, and the guy would gasp with recognition. How did I know that? Why was I so good at this?
My Paris cabbie didn’t know much English. But he let me smoke in his cab, so I loved him. I was watching the cherry of my cigarette leave tracers across my line of vision. We zipped past tall white buildings that looked like wedding cakes in the peripheral blur. When he slammed on the brakes, I went hurtling onto the f
loorboard, my shin slamming against a piece of hard plastic.
He whipped around. “You OK?”
Later, I would find a throbbing bruise on my shin. But in the cab, I couldn’t feel much at all. “I’m fine,” I told him, hoisting myself back up and crossing my legs in the seat. “I’m great.”
THE NEXT DAY I woke up early, full of possibility. I made a short appearance at the reality host’s photo shoot near the Sacré-Cœur. His family posed on the butte Montmartre trying to look like they weren’t freezing.
“I was paying for that last bottle this morning,” he told me.
“Oh, I know,” I said. I didn’t feel that bad, but I liked the camaraderie of the hangover.
“Did you do anything else last night?”
“Nah,” I said, omitting the two glasses of wine I had at the hotel bar.
I left them on the frigid hill, feeling nearly guilty for how easy this assignment had been. I had an entire day to myself in Paris. Should I go to the Louvre? Walk along the Seine? Instead I went back to my hotel, curled up in the fluffy white bed that felt so safe, and took a nap.
IT WAS DARK when I woke up. This was my last night in Paris, and I had dinner plans with a friend and a hefty per diem burning a hole in my pocket. I made myself extra-glamorous that night. I straight-ironed my hair and wore the black corset top that erased 15 of my extra 30 pounds.
My friend Meredith lived in an apartment a few blocks from my hotel. I met her when she worked at the New York Times, but she had since moved to Paris to work for the International Herald Tribune.
“I’m having a cognac,” Meredith said as we stood in her kitchen. Cognac was an after-dinner drink, she conceded, but it was one of those days when 9 pm needed to arrive sooner. “Would you like one?”
I’d never had cognac before. But I was trying to be more refined. I’d started ordering high-end vodkas in Manhattan clubs where labels mattered. I’d been drinking Patrón tequila, and I liked to inform anyone who would listen how tequila was intended to be enjoyed slowly, not knocked back in one gulp.