Chancers

by Susan Stellin

  If Graham was so focused on getting over a bump, why did he give me a CD with lyrics like “I’m gonna fuck it up again” and “I’ll never be alright”? I wondered why he was sending such a pessimistic message, doubting whether he really could stay clean. But I didn’t ask him about it—that’s how denial works. You’re complicit because sometimes you just don’t want to know. It already felt like our relationship revolved around Graham’s recovery, and that was starting to weigh me down.

  At first I wanted to know everything about what he was going through: what withdrawal felt like, how often he thought about using, and whether it was stressful to pass by the places he used to cop.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” he’d say, and I didn’t push him. I didn’t want to make him dwell on anything that might make him want to use, and by that point, I was tired of talking about drugs. Then once he started embracing AA—not just pretending to go to meetings—there was a different distance between us, something separate about his experience that I couldn’t share.

  He’d tell me stories about the other addicts he met, elaborate tales of self-destruction that made his own transgressions seem tame. I was glad he was making the effort, and focusing on what was useful to him—an abridged version of AA’s twelve-step program.

  “I think this could all be condensed into three or four steps,” he told me. “If you admit your life is unmanageable, recognize how you’ve fucked up, and make amends to the people you’ve hurt, you’ve pretty much got it covered. The rest seems sort of redundant.”

  Looking at the brochure he showed me, I couldn’t really disagree. AA had helped Ethan and many other people I knew—which is why I’d encouraged Graham to try it—but there were things about the program that bothered me as well. It didn’t seem to get at the underlying reasons why people drank or used drugs, and a lot of the slogans struck me as a bit superficial.

  After one meeting, Graham sent me an email someone at AA had suggested he write, which sounded like it was plagiarized from a pamphlet. I asked him to try again—this time using his own words. The second draft he emailed me seemed a little more sincere.

  Well after a lot of thinking i realise that i really have to get my act together so that you and i can have the oportunity of a brilliant life together. i cant lie or deny - it doesn’t fool anyone and is somewhat pathetic - which is a way worse way to be seen than my fear of feeling weak if i say i’ve slipped. i’m not one for making excuses or blaming others - not parents, friends, timing, surroundings, or fate. i know how lucky i’ve been and when i think of your love and that i can have it in my life - if I allow it - i realize now that i was being selfish. you’ve given me this chance to prove myself - which i truely appreciate. i don’t want to change into a boring aa person - but i’m feeling pretty ok at the meetings!

  To be honest, I didn’t want Graham to turn into a boring AA person, either. Our sober social life already seemed more middle-aged than I would’ve liked. Sometimes I envied other couples who could split a bottle of wine at dinner, or hang out at a bar on a Saturday night. I was trying to drink less around Graham—just the occasional beer or glass of wine—but drinking alone always felt awkward. Graham and I had to find other ways to unwind.

  We went bowling, took Liam to Chinatown, watched movies, did some gardening. I planted petunias in neat rows under Graham’s overgrown bushes; he bought a little fountain because he thought the sound of running water was calming. We were making progress with David, my book was getting good reviews, and Graham was finally getting serious about looking for work. All in all, things were moving in a positive direction.

  Then in May, just as the flowers I’d planted were beginning to bloom, things took a darker turn. Graham started acting secretive and moody again—which put me on high alert. I guessed that he hadn’t quit entirely, and became obsessed with confirming or disproving that suspicion.

  I looked for the brightly colored bits of plastic used to package small amounts of crack, glassine heroin envelopes, anything resembling a belt. Burned spoons, lighters, syringes, packets of sterile water, nubs of metal mesh—all evidence I searched for relentlessly, even digging through his pockets in the middle of the night when I’d wake up in a panic.

  We had vicious fights and teary reconciliations and occasional quiet moments when we were too exhausted to do anything but lie next to each other, a temporary truce in our ongoing battle. At a club listening to a band after an argument, we just stood there holding hands, all the energy in the room running along the V linking my shoulder with his.

  “I’m not going to leave you,” Graham said at one point. “You’re going to have to leave me.”

  I knew that, but I couldn’t make myself take that step. Despite everything, I needed him. He filled my own empty places with his constant attention, calmed my anxieties with his reassuring words and capable hands, showed me possibilities where I only saw limits, lit up my nerve endings, challenged me to take risks.

  I also thought he was making progress, and I couldn’t let go of the hope that he’d eventually get better. If I could just find the right thing to say or do, I was sure I could nudge him along that path.

  —

  THAT FANTASY WAS shattered a week before Memorial Day, not entirely out of the blue. We had gone to an opening for Graham’s friend at a gallery in Manhattan, then spent the night at my apartment uptown. The next morning, while I was in the shower, a feeling came over me that I still can’t explain.

  As if I were a puppet and someone else had control over my movements, I turned off the water, pulled the plastic curtain aside, and stepped up onto the side of the tub. At that height, my eyes were level with the top of the medicine cabinet, which I hadn’t looked at or cleaned in years. Lying in the dust, there was something wrapped up in a wad of toilet paper. I reached across and grabbed it, carefully unrolling the tissue. I already knew what I’d find inside.

  Still dripping from the shower, I put on a robe and stormed into the bedroom. Graham was sleeping so I had to shake him awake. “Get out!” I screamed. “NOW! Get dressed!” I threw his clothes at him, not even bothering to search the pockets.

  “What the fuck…?” he protested, deflecting his shirt from his face. Then he noticed what I was holding in my hand: a syringe, a blackened pipe, and a lighter. His expression shifted from confusion to fear.

  “Don’t…say…a fucking…word,” I spit out. “Just leave!”

  He didn’t even try to defend himself. Before heading for the door, all he said was “Can I have my kit back?”

  “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!” I shrieked.

  —

  “I FEEL LIKE I can’t breathe,” I wrote in my notebook later that night. “I feel panicky and trapped. I have to be able to flee. But to where? No word from G. Picture him shooting up, lying half comatose, not feeling the pain I have to feel and it makes me angry. I hate that he has an escape, even though I know it’s destroying him. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem fair. I took half an Ambien—how is that different? It’s already seeping through me, pulling me toward sleep.”

  —

  AFTER I THREW Graham out of my apartment, I reached out to just about everybody I knew. Unlike the first time I found out that he was still using, there wasn’t any reason to protect him. Our relationship was over—I didn’t care what anyone thought of him anymore.

  “Need break-up coping advice,” I emailed a friend who had recently been through a split. “Still in that very shattered period—you know, focusing on the essentials like breathing and eating and not crying during work calls or meetings. With the added bonus that I get to worry whether G. has gone off the deep end and OD’d!”

  Although I cast a wide net, desperate for any kind of connection, Ethan was the main person I turned to for support. This time he was blunt about what he thought I should do.

  “Graham shouldn’t be in a relationship until he deals with his addiction,” he told me.

  On some level, I knew that was true, but there was
something about it that still felt wrong. Was there any other disease—besides leprosy—that basically condemned people to suffer through it alone?

  “The best thing you can do for him is offer to help get him into some kind of treatment program,” Ethan said. “But you can’t take this on all by yourself. You have to insist that other people are involved.”

  “I know….It’s just that there isn’t anyone else he’s close to in New York—at least not that I’ve met—and his family is on the other side of the Atlantic. I don’t know them so I’m not sure how they’d react if I called.”

  “What about his ex-wife?”

  “I don’t think it’s my place to decide how much to tell her. Graham would go ballistic if he found out. And if I call her she might not let Liam stay with Graham anymore. I don’t think a custody battle would be good for anyone right now.”

  But I did feel bad that Liam was the only other person Graham saw regularly, so I sent him a text saying he could call me if he wanted to talk. Liam didn’t answer—which didn’t surprise me—but I felt a little better after opening that door.

  When I told my sister what had happened, she offered to cash in some of her frequent flier miles and fly me out to Los Angeles for Memorial Day weekend, saying she was holding a reservation for a flight leaving in two days. I said I appreciated the offer but needed to think about it. I hadn’t heard from Graham since I’d thrown him out of my apartment that morning, so as my anger subsided, I was getting more and more worried. I didn’t want to leave town without knowing he hadn’t OD’d.

  That’s the thing about heroin—what makes it different from other drugs: Every time you stick that needle in your vein, there’s a chance that one hit could kill you.

  —

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I finally heard from Graham. He left me a long voicemail, but from the way he was talking, I couldn’t tell if he’d meant to dial my number or if he’d bumped his phone and let me eavesdrop on his downward spiral.

  “Grammy, Grammy, Grammy—what the fuck are you going to do with yourself?

  “My, my, my. So exhausted and tired.”

  It sounded like he opened the fridge.

  “No bread, noth-ing.

  “Oh man, what the fuck am I going to do?”

  He made a couple of calls on his other line.

  “Hey Marcus. Graham here. Give me a call.

  “Hi Caroline—It’s Graham. I know I need to deal with my taxes. I had a glitch with my computer. My life is a disaster right now. Thank you for being patient.”

  He burped.

  “Excuse me. Excusez-moi.”

  There was a rustling, like he’d opened a bag, then he recited a list he was trying to make.

  “Patricia. Ellen. Angus. Javier.

  “Fuck—where’s my list?

  “I’ve got to call HIP. Cancel my bank card.

  “Fuck it—I’m getting a cat. I’ve always loved them.”

  In spite of my funk, that made me smile. I was more of a dog person, so I’d always protested whenever Graham talked about adopting a cat.

  “Fuck—I left Susan a message. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  After the voicemail ended, I must’ve replayed it half a dozen times. It was a relief to know that Graham wasn’t stretched out cold with a needle in his arm, but the beep that cut off his message left me with a hollow sensation—like the emptiness he often described. Except what I felt was more like I couldn’t stand to be home alone, feeling powerless, lost, and betrayed.

  An hour later, Graham sent a text asking, “I’m assuming that you and/or i are not going to our meeting with david tonite?” I wrote back saying I wanted to go by myself—and that in the morning, I was flying out to L.A.

  He texted back: “Ask David if I can come and see him on my own.” That made my heart ache. It seemed like such a big step for Graham to admit that he needed help, but I wanted David to help me.

  During most of that appointment, I just cried. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about, other than some treatment options I could suggest to Graham, but I can still picture the look on David’s face. It was sort of like waking up in a hospital bed and not having any sense of how badly you’ve been injured, except for the concern your doctor didn’t try to hide.

  While I was having dinner with a friend, Graham left me several messages. “I just want to hear your voice before you go,” he pleaded. “Please call me back.”

  But when I did, late that night, neither of us knew what to say. I felt like he had split into two people—the man I loved, and the addict I hated—so I kept cycling between sadness and rage.

  “I’m going to hang up now,” Graham kept repeating, but then he didn’t—and I couldn’t. I listened to him sniffling, waiting for him to finally end the call.

  Later, I sent him an email telling him some of the things I hadn’t been able to say.

  You can do this, Graham. I still believe in you and still believe you can be the brilliant person you have inside you. You’re smart, generous, funny, loving, giving, supportive, wise, playful, devoted and at heart optimistic about life. Sometimes I think that’s what brings you down—that you expect people to be as good and kind as you can be, and it’s crushing when you feel let down. (That’s one thing we have in common.)

  But you have to find healthier ways to deal with disappointment, or anxiety or pain, because there will always be some of that—you can’t avoid it by isolating yourself. And if you keep everyone at bay, you miss out on all the love and support and wonderful things that happen when you connect with other people.

  I still love you and I mean it when I say I’ll do whatever I can to help.

  I did mean that. Just because I didn’t think I could be with him didn’t mean I stopped loving him, and that realization was devastating to me. Because I didn’t know how else to help Graham get clean.

  Part Two

  OURSELVES

  “All the very best of us

  string ourselves up for love.”

  —Matt Berninger, The National

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  May 2006

  Los Angeles, California

  On the flight to L.A., I woke up disoriented from a nightmare: I’d dreamed I was wandering around a crack house looking for Graham. Everyone told me it was futile—he was gone, I’d never find him—but I kept searching the rooms, scanning the faces of all the people I came across. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him if he looked anything like these slumped-over junkies.

  But when I got to a room that was more open, like a warehouse, someone caught my eye: a skinny guy in a white T-shirt with a wool hat pulled down over his head. In the darkness, I could just make out that on the front of his shirt there was a screen-printed photo of Graham.

  All the tension I’d been holding tight relaxed into relief. He was alive. I’d found him. He hadn’t OD’d. But I was even more reassured by what that photo meant. The dream version of me decided that he’d printed up that T-shirt because he thought no one would recognize him if they came looking for him. He hadn’t given up—he wanted help getting out of that place.

  —

  ARRIVING IN LOS Angeles felt like landing in an even more foreign world. After my sister picked me up from the airport, we drove to the house she was buying, passing taco joints and dry cleaners and gas stations and nail salons, all surrounded by billboards demanding attention. Whenever I visited, I found driving around L.A. overstimulating; I wasn’t used to moving faster than a walking pace above ground.

  My sister had given me the plane ticket partly because she was dealing with her own source of stress: This was her first home purchase, and she was nervous about the price. My role was to reassure her that she wasn’t crazy to be buying in the middle of a real estate bubble; hers was to distract me from obsessing about Graham. We both kept up our end of the deal.

  As she gave me the tour, I nodded in agreement with her plans for the kitchen, admired the bedrooms, and gushed about the spacious backyard. It had a pool and a
hot tub, an outdoor fireplace and koi ponds, and it was landscaped with palm trees and bougainvillea in bloom. I was happy that she’d found a house she loved, after losing a couple of bidding wars, but the contrast between my life and hers was stark.

  She’s five years younger than me, but was doing better than me in many ways: earning a steady paycheck, dating a guy who wasn’t a drug addict, and asking about the price of a gardener and someone to take care of her pool. Both a bargain, the real estate agent promised, making me cringe with his comment about all the immigrant labor around.

  I stretched out in a lounge chair while he described the dermatology appointment he’d just come from, explaining how microdermabrasion treatments counteracted the damage from frowning in his sleep. My sister escaped to see how things were going with the inspector; I tuned out the skin care lecture and tried not to think about the things causing my wrinkles—not Graham or my mortgage or my own disturbing dreams.

  The rest of the weekend was a blur of car rides and activities, busyness as an antidote for despair. We went to a birthday party, but I wasn’t in the mood to mingle; we sat by a friend’s pool, but I couldn’t focus on the magazines I tried to read. I thought a drive up to Malibu might lift my spirits—seeing the ocean always did—but the happy beachgoers just made me more depressed. I checked my messages often, hoping for a text or email from Graham, but he had warned me that he wasn’t going to write while I was away.

  My last night in L.A., my sister invited a few people over for a Memorial Day barbecue. She made guacamole, her boyfriend grilled burgers, and I drank too many strong margaritas. Once the guests left and her boyfriend went inside to watch TV—no doubt tired of all the real estate and breakup talk—my sister asked the question that had been on my mind for days: “So what would you do if Graham actually got clean?”