Chancers

by Susan Stellin

  Before this call, Graham had assured me that he’d been going to meetings “every day” since my party, at an institute in Manhattan that offered an alternative to AA. But when I looked up their website to learn more about their approach, I discovered they didn’t host daily meetings, like he’d said. Each time I caught Graham in a lie, it didn’t feel like I was dealing with an addict who couldn’t help covering up his habit. It felt like a personal betrayal.

  This is what I wrote down while we talked, along with the questions I asked:

  Why should I trust you?

  You’ve got to be able to trust me. I need you not to second-guess it or doubt it, because it’s really unfair.

  When did this start?

  Three or four weeks ago. I don’t know why. I had started using, being what everybody thinks I am. Shit and useless. I got scared that I was really going to relapse.

  So this isn’t a relapse?

  I didn’t f’ing relapse—relapsing is when you go back to where you were before.

  Did you think about telling me?

  Yeah, until I saw you and then I couldn’t. I’m sorry—I didn’t want to be a disappointment to you. I’m really scared that I’ll lose you.

  Why did you lie about going to meetings every day?

  I wanted you to think I was being good. I didn’t want you to know I was f’ing sitting around feeling sorry for myself. I went to one meeting but I left halfway through. On Sunday, when Liam was at his mom’s.

  What drugs have you been using?

  I smoked some crack. I used a little heroin.

  With who?

  Myself. Just me.

  How many times?

  Maybe a dozen. I was doing it to try and come down.

  When I was with you?

  I just did it when I was on my own. I never used at your house. It’s so fucking scary. Even when you haven’t used in two or three days, you’re getting that need.

  Did you ever share needles?

  No. Of course not.

  Were you using in Hawaii?

  No. I didn’t f’ing use when I was away—that’s hard you know.

  Was there some kind of trigger?

  After my birthday, we weren’t getting on. I was wanting too much and I wasn’t getting what I wanted. I just felt low and lonely.

  So did you see it coming?

  There’s no fucking knowing when it’s gonna happen. It’s way more complex than that.

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I read those notes, I was surprised at how dispassionate they make me seem—as if I were interviewing a source for an article, trying not to miss a good quote or an important fact. “It was like you weren’t even talking about a relationship that you were in,” Graham said. (I wrote that down as well.)

  In some sense, I was still reeling from the revelation that he’d been hiding his habit from me—experiencing a low-grade version of shock, sort of numb and detached. I had bottled up my reaction during the weekend I spent with my parents after the party; I didn’t want to tell them I’d found Graham with a crack pipe, so I just said we’d had a fight and they didn’t pry.

  By the time I went back to Graham’s house on Monday, I was too worried about him overdosing to really be angry. He looked so devastated and vulnerable—like the façade he’d been hiding behind had completely shattered. It was probably the moment I felt closest to him, even though we hardly spoke the whole time I was there. We just sat on the floor in his bedroom, crying and holding hands. It was like something bad had happened to both of us, and neither of us had any idea how to fix it.

  I knew he thought I’d gone over there to break up with him. Earlier in the day, he’d sent me an email saying, “What you probably want to say I understand, but if that’s the case can I just accept it and maybe you can do your bit in a day or two—when I’m a wee bit more able to look at you?” But the truth is, I hadn’t made up my mind about what I was going to do.

  “What I need most from you is to know what’s going on,” I wrote back. “And don’t assume you know how I’m going to react because I don’t know. I’m not coming over with an agenda, or a speech or a brick to throw at your head. I understand that you’re in a vulnerable place and I don’t intend to push you over the edge. You should know by now that I don’t do things rashly.”

  In the end, I decided not to leave him—mostly because I thought it was just a relapse, even though Graham resisted that word. He told me he’d started using after his birthday in March, and I accepted that because that’s when I first felt like something was wrong. Back then, I had a limited understanding of addiction and only a vague sense of the grip it had on Graham. I thought that this—like any problem—could be solved with a plan, and that faced with the prospect of losing me, surely Graham would be motivated to get clean.

  I had a harder time admitting that I didn’t want to face losing him. Even though I’d been single for years, and didn’t always mind being unattached, I knew it would be different after being with Graham. Maybe some of his passion was fueled by the excesses of a compulsive personality—or the influence of drugs—but I was sure that I’d never find anyone who loved me as intensely as he did. Graham was like a lightning rod for feelings, and when I was with him, the current flowed through me.

  —

  IN SOME WAYS, our relationship actually got better after Graham’s secret was out in the open. The stress of all that hiding and lying faded to the background for a while, and so did another source of tension between us—Graham’s insecurity about my love. He stopped worrying about that because I didn’t leave.

  “Susie, you’ve really shown me something quite extraordinary in you,” he wrote—one of many apologetic messages that filled my inbox. “I can never ever question your love for me as long as we live.”

  Another email arrived with the subject line “Your United Airlines Relationship Mending Trip.” Graham had forwarded a list of last-minute discounts on United, highlighting a cheap fare from New York to Osaka, Japan. He had edited the text to read, “Dear Graham MacIndoe and Susan Stellin, It’s about time you guys took a break and spent some quality time together about ½ way round the world. Do it now or forever kick yourself!”

  Of course, I had a different agenda for mending our relationship woes. If I was going to stick around and help Graham deal with his drug problem, I wanted him to commit to two things: an addiction support group for him and some kind of counseling for us. Reluctantly, he agreed to both conditions.

  I didn’t insist on rehab because he’d already done one of those programs, and it didn’t seem like another month away would help him stay clean once he got home. Besides, I thought this was a temporary setback, one many addicts experienced at some point. “Relapse is part of recovery,” addiction experts often warned. But I left it up to Graham to figure out what kind of support he’d embrace; he was resistant when I suggested AA.

  “I don’t believe in that whole God thing,” he told me, working himself up to a familiar rant. “That’s really a problem for me. I know they talk about your ‘higher power’ or ‘God as you understand him,’ but I want to be the one in control of my recovery. I don’t want to turn it over to a fictitious guy in the sky or some imaginary being I’ve invented.”

  “I get that,” I said. “But can’t you just take what’s useful to you from the meetings and ignore whatever isn’t helpful?”

  “Yeah, but people sit there talking about white light moments and thanking God for bringing them recovery and it just pisses me off. Why would God save some junkie who fucked over everyone in his life and ignore all the kids getting killed all over the world? God’s got a lot to answer for if he’s gonna save me and let some innocent kid die.”

  “So what do you want to do?” I countered. “You keep rejecting everything I suggest. You don’t think you need an outpatient program, you don’t want to see a therapist who specializes in addiction, you don’t want to go to AA….What does that leave, Graham?”

  “I don’t kn
ow, I have to think about it.”

  “Well you agreed to try something, so you’d better come up with an answer.”

  A couple of days later, Graham left me a note saying, “I have to consider the AA option.” I’m sure he relented mostly because he didn’t want to make the effort to find another support group—and AA was convenient and free.

  He was even less enthusiastic about seeing a couples counselor, telling me he’d “talked circles around all the counselors in rehab” and didn’t want to spend a fortune rehashing all of our fights. Even though therapy had been my idea, I had my own reservations about how much it would help.

  The only time I’d seen a shrink was when I lived in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, before the dot-com boom went bust. I was working for an Internet company that paid mostly with stock options, so I could only afford a grad student who charged clients a discounted rate. But all we ended up talking about was the latest drama at the office, so I quit and rejoined my colleagues at a local bar after work, where we all complained about our difficult bosses.

  In other words, that brush with therapy left me with mixed feelings about the process. It also left a lot of stones unturned.

  When I called David, a couples counselor a friend had recommended, he explained that he was an integrative therapist, mixing psychodynamic training with a cognitive behavioral approach. I had no idea what that meant, so I asked how much he talked during sessions. I figured Graham might steamroll anyone who was too passive.

  “I’m not silent,” David assured me. “I like to address each person’s way of doing things.”

  We booked an appointment for the following Monday, an impulsive decision for me. I had done more research when I bought a new printer.

  Our first session didn’t get off to a great start. Graham was late meeting me for our appointment in Manhattan, arriving sweaty and agitated as he locked up his bike. While we waited for the elevator, he reminded me that he was only doing this because I’d insisted, and he didn’t see how discussing our problems would accomplish anything except reopen fresh wounds.

  But I was convinced that he’d never truly be free of his habit if he didn’t address the emptiness he kept talking about, which he was clearly trying to fill with drugs—or love. If there was any upside for me, it was having a mediator who could weigh in on our fights. Graham was an addict—and he’d lied to me about it—so I assumed David would take my side. I had the moral high ground.

  As we took our places on David’s well-worn leather couch—not sitting too close together (that would seem clingy) or too far apart (that would seem cold)—I tried to break the ice with a joke. “We may be the first couple to see a therapist after only being together for four months!”

  David smiled as he jotted something down on his notepad. I wondered if he’d written “uses humor as a defense,” or just remembered an errand he needed to run.

  Despite his resistance, Graham was more open to the process than I expected, giving long, detailed responses to David’s questions about how we got together, what he liked about me, and when he first started using drugs. But there was definitely an edge to some of his answers—like when David asked, “Can you tell me about the first memory you have of your mother?”

  “You sound like that guy in Blade Runner,” Graham said, slightly aggressive. “You know, when he’s giving Leon the test to figure out if he’s human or a replicant and he asks him to describe his mother, to see if he can provoke some kind of emotional response. So Leon pulls out a gun and says, ‘I’ll tell you about my mother’—then shoots the guy giving the test.”

  I shrank back into the couch as I looked over at David, who was looking at Graham like he wanted to press some kind of hidden alarm.

  “But I get what you’re asking,” Graham continued, totally nonplussed. “So my first memory of my mother is probably when I was about three and she came and woke me up one night because a house across the street had caught fire. We watched it from the window—the chimney and the roof were on fire and there were sparks shooting everywhere and fire trucks trying to put it out. My dad was working the night shift so he wasn’t home. He worked in the coal mines then, alternating day shifts one week and night shifts the next week, so my mum was home alone a lot with me and my baby brother—my sister wasn’t born. So my mum would wake me up sometimes just to keep her company or watch the telly with her. I remember one time when she woke me up to watch Iggy Pop on the BBC’s late-night music program, The Old Grey Whistle Test, but that was later on when I was older….”

  While Graham was talking, all I could think about was my answer—and the fact that I couldn’t come up with one. I could picture lots of photos from my childhood, like one of my brother and sister and me sitting on the dock with our mom, all of us in bathing suits she had sewn. She was fashionably skinny in her red, white, and blue bikini, with big sunglasses à la Jackie O.

  But talking about a photo felt like failing the test. It wasn’t actually a memory of an event; it was a snapshot I’d looked at many times in an album. I broke out in a sweat, wondering why I couldn’t remember my childhood the way Graham did—with all these vivid details and emotions. Did this mean he was human and I was not? Flipping through a mental calendar, all my memories were linked to photos: first day of school…Halloween costumes…Christmas morning…Easter dresses….

  “I’ve got one,” I interrupted, as if I’d just beaten a game show buzzer. “In the spring, my mom would always point out when the crocuses she’d planted started popping up in front of our house. I’d come home from school and she’d show me the green leaves poking through the ground. She grew up on a farm so she liked to garden.”

  David looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something else. When I didn’t, he asked, “Did you help your mom with the garden?”

  “We always had chores so I remember pulling up weeds, but I think my mom mostly planted the flowers.”

  I shifted on the couch, uncomfortable about being put on the spot. Maybe I had passed the test, but my answer clearly would’ve gotten a lower grade than Graham’s richly evocative response.

  That’s why I never quite understood Graham’s resistance to therapy—I preferred staying in the background, observing other people’s lives, but he loved having an audience listen to him ramble on and on. In fact, at one point during our initial phone call with David, he had asked Graham, “Do you always talk this way?”

  Graham thought he meant the Scottish accent, but David corrected him: “No, I mean so fast and for so long that no one can interrupt you.”

  Yes, that was pretty much how Graham talked when he was engaged with a topic. Between his verbal onslaught and my guarded parrying, David clearly had his work cut out for him, but we did leave his office more optimistic than when we arrived. Graham’s mood had lifted and my curiosity was piqued; David was much sharper than the last therapist I’d seen.

  “We both felt good about this morning’s session,” I emailed David later that afternoon, when I wrote to schedule our next appointment. “That seems like a weird thing to say after discussing uncomfortable topics, but I think this is going to be helpful—for both of us.”

  —

  ONCE THE INITIAL crisis had passed, I felt like my life had split onto two parallel tracks. On one set of rails, I lived a normal existence—doing radio interviews for my book, talking to editors about assignments, going to yoga classes and dinners with friends. On the other set of rails, I was consumed by Graham’s struggle. It wasn’t always easy to jump between trains.

  I believed he really was trying to quit, but I was so naïve about the setbacks and challenges that are part of the process, my suggestions may have hurt more than they helped. I thought that getting clean was mostly a matter of willpower: You finally decided to quit because the negative consequences of using had become unavoidably, painfully clear. I didn’t understand that Graham wasn’t capable of that kind of rational thinking—at least not about drugs. In his mind, logic didn’t have the u
pper hand.

  I had little tolerance for anyone who offered a reality check on my expectations—opinions that weren’t always sensitively dispensed. But for the most part, I didn’t share many details about our situation with friends or family, except for Ethan. And even with him, I cherry-picked the advice I was willing to accept.

  “The time frame for getting better is long,” he cautioned. “It’s not weeks or months, Sus, it’s more like years.”

  Maybe for you, I thought. But Graham is different. His whole life has been about beating the odds.

  Graham’s rise out of the working class was an immigrant’s version of the American dream. He talked his way into art school, landed a New York gallery job, bought a brownstone, got approved for a green card. When he decided to become a commercial photographer, his success was practically instant. In British slang, people might call him a “chancer”—an opportunist or risk taker—although I preferred a more positive spin on that label.

  Yes, he was reckless and looked for any angle that might give him an advantage; sure, he relied on his Scottish charm to get him out of a scrape. But I always admired how Graham was willing to take a chance on things most people considered a long shot. In some sense, that was an attitude we shared: Neither of us thought the rules applied to us.

  So if anyone could kick heroin and crack, I thought Graham had the determination to do it—and compared to a lot of addicts, he was in a better position to succeed. He had money for treatment, an enviable career, and a girlfriend, son, and family who loved him. I thought he had everything he needed to win that fight.

  —

  TWO WEEKS AFTER I found Graham with the crack pipe, he gave me another CD he’d made, this one called “Over a Bump.” A few of the songs were clearly chosen for their romantic titles (“There’s No Me Without You” by the Manhattans, “Lucky Man” by the Verve), but I didn’t know what to make of some of his other choices—like “A Mistake” by Fiona Apple, or “Breaking the Habit” by Linkin Park.