by Bill Clegg
I’ve been back for five days, have sixty-four days sober, and with ninety days almost in sight I don’t know how, on the other side of it, I’ll be able to hold things together, how I’ll stay in the city. Jack’s slogans and Asa’s assurances aren’t helping. There is no money coming in, it’s all going out, the bills are mounting, and I have to find an apartment in the next week before Dave throws me out. I feel like one of the street urchins Dickens describes in his books. Like little Jo in Bleak House, who dies of something bronchial and grim like consumption once his use to the world has expired. Mine has too. Like this ridiculous umbrella, whatever fantasy I had of being OK, of making my way back in a city of overachieving winners, is now quite obviously a figment, a pathetic shield against an overwhelming truth. It’s over. I’m a Dickensian speck in a city that no longer has use for me. I had my time here and in that time got lucky, played my cards well for a while, and then very badly.
I put the umbrella down, let the rain drench any remaining patches of dry clothing and skin, put my face to the sky and think, and then say, OK. The city disappears around me and there are only the elements. Wind and water, freezing and clean. OK, I say again, not really understanding what it is I am agreeing to, what it is precisely I am accepting. But I am accepting something. The truth of my circumstances? The reality I have until now avoided? It’s much worse than I imagined and also somehow better. Is this the bottom I hear people refer to in meetings? The grim despair that makes change possible?
I walk without any sense of direction. At this point I don’t care where I go. I’ll walk until five, get soaked until Dave has left the studio. There is no one on the sidewalks, no cars on the streets. The maze of the West Village is empty. Thunderclaps and wild sheets of rain slap against the asphalt. Had I ever heard thunder in New York? Was it like everything else that I took for granted—these streets, the cost of things, love—and can only now recognize?
Up ahead an awning sticks out over a dry patch of sidewalk and I quickly walk toward it and duck under. It’s a small real estate agency and in the window there are photographs of apartments. I remember when Noah and I would stand in front of windows like this one and gawk at the high-ceilinged, new-kitchened beauties. Looking at these shiny, meticulous spaces now only reminds me that I don’t have my own and the one I’ll end up in—should I end up in one at all—will not be like these.
The wind starts blowing the rain horizontally and the awning no longer provides protection. A sudden squall of rain explodes against the window, the awning, the drenched length of me, and in a panic I jump inside the real estate agency. Dripping wet, I close the door, and as I do four people sitting at desks look up and say hello in unison. I tell them I’m looking for an apartment to rent, which is true, though I have no plan to go through an agency and pay the outrageous broker’s fee that is usually at least two months’ rent. Still, the little place is warm and dry and I have time to kill. I tell them that I’m taking a sabbatical from work and looking for a cheaper place to rent. Computers flutter to life, images of apartments with rental statistics shine from screens, and one of the agents, a middle-aged bald man, says he knows of a great studio with a terrace that’s about to come on the market. Turns out it’s just a few blocks from here and he could get me in tomorrow at noon before anyone else sees it. Sure, I say, with no intention at all of showing up. We exchange numbers, he gives me the address where I am to meet him the next day, and after a round of good-byes I’m back on the street.
I keep the little slip of paper in my pocket through the meeting that night and miraculously it finds its way into my pants the next day. I pull it from my front pocket around 11:30 that morning and think of the bald guy showing up at the building and me nowhere to be found. It seems like something I might have done before and felt guilty about. Something I would have cringed over later as I downed vodka after vodka until I forgot it altogether. So I go meet the guy in front of the building at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. When I get there I realize this is the block where I lived when I first met Noah. The block where the apartment I owned when I was twenty-five is and where my girlfriend Nell and I lived for almost three years. I always felt more comfortable on this street than I did at One Fifth, and as I look down the block I see that it hasn’t changed much. It’s still a mix of rent-controlled mid-century apartment buildings, older tenements, hair salons, and renovated brownstones. I can’t remember the last time I was here. I sold the apartment—the second floor of a carriage house at the back of a courtyard—years ago so I’d have money once we started the literary agency, but after that I don’t think I ever came back.
I meet the bald guy in the small lobby and we go up to the seventeenth floor. As he unlocks the door to the apartment, I have a strong feeling of déjà vu, not unlike the feeling I had that first day at the Library meeting. We walk into the short hallway and before we’ve reached the one and only room, before I’ve seen the small terrace that looks out over the city, to the Empire State Building and beyond, before I see the little kitchen with space enough for a desk, and the simple black-and-white-tiled bathroom, and before I worry where I’ll find the money for the first and last months’ rent, the deposit, and the broker’s fee, before any of this, words come out of my mouth, and as I say them I know they’re true: This is it. I’m home.
Re-entry
Seventy-four days. Sixteen to go. First morning waking up in the apartment on 15th Street. I stay up until midnight the night before and, from my bed, watch the lights of the Empire State Building click off. I can almost hear the old skyscraper sigh as it goes dark, as if exhausted from the long day. I haven’t unpacked or set the place up yet, but I’ve moved my things in from One Fifth. Noah and I agree I should move out without him around, so three days before I move out of Dave’s (and with permission from Jack to cross into the trigger zone), I go. I ask my friend Cy if she’ll come with me and she agrees. I ask her for several reasons. One, she’s been up to White Plains a few times and has been supportive. Two, she’s worked as a counselor for people diagnosed with HIV, AIDS, and other fatal illnesses since the eighties and very little makes her blink. Three, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, unusually chic, and, well, the woman can enter a building. It comforts me somewhat that she will be at my side, like a glamorous force field, as I re-enter for the first time the building I left on a stretcher. She meets me in front of One Fifth, looking like she always does, thank God, hooks her arm in mine, and says, OK, kid, let’s get this over with. I practically hide behind her as we enter. Even though Noah arranges for keys to be left at the front desk, and even with Cy at my side, I’m afraid they won’t let me in. It’s been two months since I collapsed through these same doors, unable to stand up, begging for a key. Two months since the ambulance drove me away to Lenox Hill.
José, one of the doormen, is at the desk and the moment he sees me says, with exaggerated kindness and what I can’t help but suspect is sarcasm, Noah has left you keys. How many times did José buzz up one of my dealers or watch me come in the door with shady characters I’d picked up in Washington Square Park when Noah was away? He can be sarcastic all he wants, I think, and suddenly wonder how many other people in the building carried on the way I had. Anyone? Many? In rehab and in the meetings I’ve heard dozens of stories like mine—on-the-surface successful people carrying on what look like respectable lives in buildings like this one, who at night turned into drug-addled zombies, buzzing up drug-dealing-and-using vampires from their lobbies. Maybe I wasn’t the only one at One Fifth living such a messy life. Maybe I wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. As much as I want to believe this, the wary and pitying look in José’s eyes suggests otherwise.
Cy and I get in the elevator and get off on the sixth floor. The hallway is just as it was, just a hallway. Indifferent, a little stuffy with its green-and-gold-striped walls and beige corporate carpeting. The new locks in the door are still shiny, and as we enter the apartment, Benny is right away at our feet—meowing and purring and then, unli
ke her, immediately slinking away, out of sight. She disappears into the den and only later creeps to the edge of the bedroom while I’m packing my clothes into duffel bags. Join the club, I say to her as she eyes me doubtfully from across the room and keeps her distance.
It will take two and a half days to get all my stuff, including the cat, out of Noah’s and over to 15th Street. Cy doesn’t come back the next days but it’s OK. I race through the place taking clothes from drawers, jackets and shoes from closets, and pulling books off the shelves Noah and I had built when we first moved in. The ones we found the design for in a book called Living with Books. We bought a pile of similar books and over dinner one night at L’Acajou pored over the glossy pages until we found a simple design that fit the place. Did I get drunk that night? I wonder painfully. Pulling my books from the shelves and shoving them into cardboard boxes, I cringe with regret and wish that I could go back in time and do it all differently. But even if I could, would I be able to keep from drinking? Keep from sneaking into the bathroom and calling a dealer? Even within spitting distance of ninety days I’m not so sure.
I snoop for signs of a new love. I’m queasy with jealousy, even though I ended our relationship at the strong recommendation of my counselor in rehab, my sister, and several close friends who all urged me to get sober on my own, away from what each described in one way or another as a codependent dynamic of addict and enabler that Noah and I had, it seems, perfected. My desperation and need of their support were and are so great that I didn’t question them and agreed. Noah is angry with me at first, but a counselor from the rehab calls and explains and asks him to give me the space I need to get healthy. I have not seen him for over two months, and our only contact has been crisp and spare and specific to the details of my moving out. Rarely does an hour go by when I don’t question the decision to break up, doubt that it’s the right choice. But something more than the advice of others keeps me from changing my mind, something beyond logic or want that keeps me from calling Noah and running back into his arms.
In between packing boxes and duffel bags, I check the caller ID box for unfamiliar and frequently appearing phone numbers (too many to form any conclusions); sift through the bedside table drawers for evidence of sex—lubricant, condoms—and find nothing; frisk Noah’s gray Helmut Lang blazer and the pockets of his gray snap-front jacket and, again, nothing. Just lighters and cigarettes, which it’s clear he’s now taken up again, openly. I’d been a tyrant about smoking when we were together, which now seems just as ironic and hypocritical as it was.
On the last day, once everything is packed and ready to go, I sit in the corner window of the living room and finger the beige and brown animal print fabric on the window seat. There is a small square pillow made with the same fabric leaning against the window and I wonder if I should take it with me. The fabric came from a store in Islington, in London, where we spent four or five weekends in an apartment I split the rent on in my twenties. Buying that fabric, having that window seat cushion and pillow made, seemed, at twenty-seven, like the most adult, most worldly thing one could do. I laugh out loud at my younger, now faraway self and am amused for a brief flash before the tight fist of grief returns. I watch the early evening lights blink on up lower Fifth Avenue and the white headlights rush toward me. How many times had I sat here? And in what states—furious, ashamed, worried, high, hopeful, hating, drunk, arrogant, panicked, exhausted, in love? I sit for a few more minutes and remember as much as I can before I go. I leave the pillow behind.
Several nights later, Dave organizes tickets to go to the opera. I think but am not sure we see Aida that night. I remember it was long and one of the older Zeffirelli productions at the Met. We eat dinner in the overpriced, still glamorous restaurant on the Grand Tier level of the building. Starters and main course during the first intermission and dessert and coffee during the second. Dave’s seats at the opera are good ones—center Grand Tier, which is the second balcony, second row, in the middle—and the people seated around us all look like longtime operagoers, dressed nicely, not extravagantly like the tourists in the orchestra section. I can’t help but think everyone here has been sitting in these seats since they were teenagers, have seen these operas hundreds of times, and are quite alert to the polluting presence of anyone who has not. Having spent the day at the 12:30 and two o’clock Library meetings, and the afternoon sitting in Union Square with Asa, telling him about some of the grittier details of the double life I lived as an addict, I find that this refined eveningscape does not feel comfortable.
Over dinner, Dave keeps talk within the firm boundaries of opera, his family, and popular culture. Only once does he ask how things are going and I am careful not to sound too positive or too discouraged. I don’t actually say, One day at a time, but I might as well. I am like a careful apprentice with a benevolent but stern mentor. Aware at every second that I am lucky to be given any time at all in light of his many kindnesses—the pickup and drop-off at rehab, the use of the writing studio on Charles Street, all the phone calls and e-mails he’s had to field from concerned and angry people who became aware that he was in contact with me after I disappeared months ago. I tread carefully and wonder if we’ll ever be at ease with each other again.
Once the opera is over we take a cab downtown. I’m grateful he directs the driver to my address first and then his own, as I know my days of paying for cab rides are over. We say our good-byes and I head into my building for what will be my second night there. I get into the elevator, which—despite the fact that the apartment is relatively cheap and the building is all rentals—has an elevator man. The one on duty now is not one I’ve seen before, so I tell him to go to seventeen. He says, OK, boss, in an accent that I think must be either Croatian or Georgian. I get to my apartment and notice two large paper shopping bags hanging from the doorknob. When I see the quiche boxes from Eli’s bakery jutting out from one of the bags, I know they’re from Jean. There is a card taped to a handle and on it my name is scrawled in Jean’s inimitably looping and jagged cursive. Inside it reads, Welcome to your new home and your new life. With so much love, Jean. I open the door and unpack the bags, which are filled with quiches and salads and roasted meats. Some of the food is from Eli’s bakery, some from Zabar’s, and some made by Jean’s chef, Paul. There are even delicate Austrian chocolates from the Neue Gallerie. After I put the food away, I stand in front of the now full refrigerator and shout, THANK YOU, JEAN! I realize, with relief and a little gust of confidence, that I don’t have to buy food for at least a week.
I go out to the terrace. It’s a crisp spring night and the lights of the city are dancing. It’s after midnight, so I can make out only the ghosty outline of the now dark Empire State Building. I’m relieved to be away from Dave, away from what I imagine to be his nervous scrutiny. I think about his writing studio on Charles Street—the creaky steps, the downstairs neighbor poised to pounce at the slightest hint of nefarious activity. I think of the entire precarious time there and remember how during the first afternoon, within minutes of Dave’s leaving, I’d been consumed with the desire to get high. How lucky I didn’t, I think. What a miracle the craving passed. The city blinks its light, police sirens sound, faint music from another apartment comes and goes with the breeze. And then, just as it had that afternoon, the old craving returns. How do I describe it? It’s like skin that feels perfectly fine one moment and then is ablaze with an itch the next. It looks the same: skin—harmless, unfettered skin. But all at once it’s screaming to be ravaged with fingernails and rubbed raw.
I look back into the apartment through the small square window in the door and think, There is nothing and no one to stop me. I can get high in this apartment, which is mine alone, and no one is coming home or arriving in the morning. I then look down at the scattered traffic on Seventh Avenue and think, If all else fails there are seventeen floors and a hard sidewalk. I know I should call Jack. Or Asa. Or one of the dozen numbers that are now in my phone from people at The L
ibrary and other meetings. CALL SOMEONE! I say out loud, but even as I say the words I know it’s too late. My mind whizzes with ways to get drugs. Since Jack made me get a new cell phone, I don’t have Happy’s or Rico’s numbers. And I can’t remember them. Then it occurs to me: Mark’s place on Houston and Sixth. He’s always using and always up. It’s midweek and before 1:00 a.m. If he doesn’t already have drugs in the apartment he can easily get some. Better to go there than to call Happy or Rico anyway, since I owe them each a thousand dollars.
I go. Out the door, down the elevator, and onto Seventh Avenue, where I quickly duck into a bodega and head to the cash machine. I have less than two hundred dollars in my checking account, but I also have three credit cards with separate limits for cash advances. I dimly remember being asked to set a PIN code for at least one. I am practically dancing as I scour my wallet for credit cards. I try one and use the PIN for my regular cash card and it doesn’t work. I try another and get the same result. I try the third, and again no luck. So I go back to the first and play around with a few combinations of the PIN code for my cash card. I replace the last two numbers with zeros and BINGO!!!—it works. I advance four hundred dollars and am electric with the anticipation of getting high. It’s been so long. I rush out onto Seventh Avenue and a cab immediately pulls up. I step in and realize that at some point, either on the terrace or just after, I have left the world I had been living in and entered another—or rather re-entered the one that had been waiting.