The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  In Rhys, I recognized a woman trying to write an origin myth for her own despair, trying to build a house in which it might live, a logic or a narrative by which it might be justified. But I also sensed her pain was older than Mr. Howard’s house, or that his house was just one way of pronouncing something less explicable—a sense of taint or doom.

  “I wish I could get it clearer this pain that has gone through all my life,” Rhys wrote. “Whenever I’ve tried to escape it has reached out and brought me back. Now I don’t try any longer.” It wasn’t easy, just living in it. “You’ve no idea darling,” she jotted in her diary, as if rehearsing for a letter, “how I’ve been drinking.”

  Rhys drank for a long time. She never forgave herself for drinking while her infant son was dying, and she kept the receipt from his burial for the rest of her life: 130 francs and 60 centimes for a carriage, tiny coffin, and temporary cross. She and Lenglet had another child, who survived—a daughter named Maryvonne—but Rhys couldn’t take care of her. Maryvonne lived in a convent and then mainly with her father, who spent time in prison but managed to parent more consistently than Rhys anyway. One time when Maryvonne came to stay with her, Rhys exploded at the woman who’d been taking care of the girl all day—angry that the two of them had come home at four in the afternoon. “You’re much too early!” Rhys yelled. Rhys wanted to be alone, to drink and to write.

  Rhys never understood herself as a rogue genius, like the drunk male writers of her generation. She was always forced to understand herself as a failed mother instead. The “traditional beliefs” that deemed her intoxication a badge of shame, a failure of control, might tell the story like this: When Rhys drank, she was taking. She was greedy for relief or escape. When she wrote or mothered, she was giving. She was creating art, or sustaining life. But the sadness that fueled her work often made her pull her care away. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be alone.

  One problem with living as if your sadness takes up the whole world is that it never does—and the people who live beyond its borders often have needs of their own. At six years old, Maryvonne told a friend: “My mother tries to be an artist and she is always crying.”

  I got sick of starving myself. It was tedious and cold, no matter how many cups of hot water I drank. I started seeing a psychologist, who leaned forward when I told her about my mother’s job. “Your mother’s a nutritionist?” she said, perking up. “Do you think you did this to get her attention?”

  My mother wasn’t that type of nutritionist, I explained. She’d written her doctoral dissertation on infant malnutrition in rural Brazil. She’d spent months weighing underweight babies in a village near Fortaleza. Her career in nutrition didn’t have anything to do with the self-indulgent angst of her anorexic daughter. Plus, I added, I already had my mother’s attention. My mother wasn’t the problem. In fact, I said, my eating disorder had been more like a pathetic betrayal of everything wonderful about my mother, especially her largely untroubled relationship to food and to her body; her selfless devotion to problems that actually merited it. I was so irritated by how obviously irrelevant my therapist’s question had been.

  That summer I was supposed to get jaw surgery to correct an injury I’d sustained several years before, which meant my mouth would be wired shut for two months. But I wouldn’t be able to have the operation if I didn’t weigh more than I weighed, so I allowed myself to gain weight temporarily, with the surgery as an insurance policy on the other side: I knew that I’d lose it again.

  For the first two months after the surgery, I squirted various flavors of Ensure through the small gap between my molars and the back of my mouth—with a dumbstruck, horrified awe at letting such concentrated calories into my body again. It was a relief that I couldn’t get anything more inside me. But I was afraid that once they unwired my mouth and I let myself start eating again, I wouldn’t know how to stop. The other self, the one I’d kept banished to my notebook of imagined meals, would keep eating forever. I came back for sophomore year ostensibly done with my eating disorder, but that other self—the one who always wanted more, the one I’d tried to starve away—wasn’t gone. She was ready to drink.

  During the next few years, college shimmered into myth: I got initiated into a social club with a secret panel that unlocked the front door, like a magician’s lair. For my initiation, I had to bring cognac, wrangled with great courage and a terrible fake ID (V.S.O.P., which seemed like it should stand for something more glamorous than Very Superior Old Pale), and the upperclassmen drank it while I drank Beefeater gin in the dirt-floored basement, which had chicken-coop wiring everywhere. I had to smoke eight cigarettes at once—with skill, without coughing—and climb on top of a four-foot pillar while club members shone a spotlight in my face and heckled me when my answers to their questions weren’t witty enough. When I was asked to close-read a piece of erotic fiction in front of everyone, we all learned that my close-reading skills stuck around deep into intoxication, much longer than my hand-eye coordination or my common sense. I got home at five in the morning, smelling like half-curdled whipped cream from a food fight, and tried to finish a paper about Virginia Woolf that was due at noon. This was living.

  Drinking felt like the opposite of restriction. It was freedom. It was giving in to wanting, rather than refusing it. It was abandon. Abandon as in recklessness, but also sudden departure: leaving behind the starving self, its cold skeletal shell. Drinking let me live behind those lit windows I’d seen on my way to the law school gym.

  Late one night I danced with a boy I liked in the middle of the Advocate Sanctum, when I was so drunk I could barely stand. I was wearing a strapless dress that fell down to show my bra, in front of everyone, and he pulled it up, and then we kissed, and I woke up the next day giddy and nervous. What would happen next? Nothing happened next. All I had was the piecemeal memory of my dress falling down to the middle of my stomach, and him gently picking it up again.

  At the Advocate, I initiated other people just like I’d been initiated—made them hand-roll cigarettes for me using the college hazing codes as rolling papers. I was supposed to be terrible to them, but I was terrible at being terrible. “Get on your fucking knees and beg!” I’d yell. And then, softer: “If that makes you feel weird, or uncomfortable, you totally don’t have to.” I inherited the expired driver’s license of a woman named Theresa—who wore glasses, and looked nothing like me—and loved the minor thrill of wearing glasses out, just to make my false identity more convincing.

  Halloween of junior year, a friend of mine was dressing up as a hamburger and asked if I wanted to use his matching french fry costume. I said yes. He was a good friend; we’d been doing early-morning poster runs together for a year, taping up flyers for the magazine—Submit!—with our freezing hands. There’s a photograph of us, the hamburger and the french fry carton, sitting side by side on one of the Sanctum’s ratty couches, velvet splitting at the seams. In the photo, I’m determinedly smoking my cigarette through the armhole in my fry costume, plastic Solo cup at my side. I’m trying to look nonchalant, but you can tell I’m happy. He was my boyfriend for a year. He lived in a tall concrete tower overlooking the river. The whole building swayed when the wind got heavy. I loved coming back from a party and crawling into his bed drunk and breathing my gin breath into his shoulder. Getting drunk and spooning meant my body’s presence had been requested, another way to quiet the same stubborn unease I’d always felt in my own skin—the one that made me count calories, count my ribs, seek a way out.

  When I stepped into drinking, its buzz and glint, I felt like Wu Tao-tzu, the Chinese artist someone had once mentioned in the Sanctum. As legend had it, he’d painted the mouth of a cave onto a wall in the emperor’s palace, then stepped inside and disappeared for good.

  At a certain point in my drinking, passing out was no longer the price but the point. This was after a breakup during my second year in Iowa. Not Daniel. I’d already ended my relationship with Daniel—once it became more ord
inary, more stable, more secure, the things I’d told myself I wanted, but couldn’t actually stomach—and I’d found the same giddy headlong plunge with someone else, another poet. The relationship itself had been embroidered with drinking memories that were easy to get nostalgic about, especially when I was drunk. We’d driven to a covered bridge outside of town and drunk cold foamy PBRs, eaten a basket of fried cauliflower and dangled our feet over the water. We’d taken a bottle of wine into the cemetery one night and read poems to each other by the meager light of our flip phones. I started showing up in his poems, or wanted to believe I had: “I drink less since I met you,” he wrote in one, as if trumping booze was the ultimate compliment. We still drank. He loved when I was drunk, he told me once, because I got as stupid as everyone else. He liked when I said simple things.

  I had moved out of the clapboard house on Dodge—because I wanted a place of my own, and in Iowa could afford one. For just under four hundred dollars a month, I was renting a stuffy third-floor studio in an old wooden house: Apartment 7. It was dusty with layers of accumulated heart-swell and epiphany from the other writers who had lived there. It was also dusty because I never cleaned it. I sensed it was the type of place a very old person might die in. The windows were perfectly positioned to admit no cross-breeze during the summer. My oven dial had no numbers, which meant that every baking project was also an exercise in circular geometry and estimation: 325 is… right about there! I became an expert in banana cream pies, which required no baking at all. I watched movies alone on my black pleather futon, drinking plastic cups of wine. I wasn’t accountable to anyone. I loved that I could see a creek from my windows—one of them, anyway, though you had to press yourself against the wall to see it. But still. I loved that the creek had ducks in it. I wrote everyone I knew: I have ducks, as if they were mine.

  After a few weeks of seeing each other, the poet had started spending every night at my apartment. He put my extra key on his keychain, which I took as prelude to a proposal, telling myself I was a hopeless romantic, sleeping in a vintage Chevy Camaro T-shirt that said BUILT FOR SPEED. But he eventually started to stay out later drinking. The night he told me that he needed space, I excused myself from our conversation and went into my bathroom to pull out a razor and cut myself, three strokes swelling with the old familiar beads of red. He sat in my kitchen on the other side of the wall. Then I put a Band-Aid on my ankle and came back out and said “Fine.” He needed space. I was okay with that.

  One night I got so restless, waiting for him to come back to my apartment, that I drove to the truck stop at three in the morning. I left him a terse note like a country song: Couldn’t sleep, drove to truck stop. I was dead sober and nearly insane with anxiety that he was leaving and I couldn’t stop him. I wanted to drive for long enough to molt my urgent need. I drank my oil-spotted coffee above the hubcap store, but the drive didn’t feel like the old days, the old freedom, because it was so fully contoured by his refusal.

  When he finally broke up with me, it was on the stairs of my apartment building, a degraded mise-en-scène: He tried to leave as I buried my face in my arms and begged him to stay. I came up to my apartment and curled up on the floor and cried. The carpet was still filthy. In the middle of my weeping, I actually sneezed.

  My problem was simple but insoluble: I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. Then I saw the bottles on my fridge, clustered together like a little village—triple sec and Bacardi and Hawkeye Vodka and Midori. It wasn’t exactly God in the clouds, but it was something. It was pragmatic. I wondered: How much till I pass out?

  That winter I woke early most mornings and smoked on my fire escape, in the bitter cold. Sometimes I put my boom box in the kitchen window and blasted Tom Petty’s froggy voice singing “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” a song of banishing. I wanted to carve up my ex like cake, like Petty did in his video, slicing Alice in Wonderland into neatly frosted wedges. It was less that I wanted to hurt my ex, and more that I wanted to bring him into me again. We had our first snow and the creek froze solid. I wondered about my ducks: Where would they go?

  Each day I woke up and immediately started calculating when I’d start to feel better, knowing it wouldn’t be until five, or—maybe, actually—four-thirty, when I let myself open a bottle of wine. It helped that it was winter, and getting dark earlier. That felt like permission. I also liked giving myself a head start at home before I started drinking around other people. If I got a buzz on before I left, it helped me stay more serene at the bar, waiting patiently for everyone else to finish their first or second round, because I was already on my fourth or fifth.

  In the meantime I taught two sections of an introductory literature course. When we tried to discuss Jesus’ Son, I realized Johnson’s main character had no name. Because his friends called him Fuckhead, we called him Fuckhead too: Fuckhead’s character arc. Fuckhead’s crisis of conscience. My students loved how strange his world became when he was high. “What is he trying to escape from?” I asked them, then headed home for my evening ritual. I knew that drinking as much as I’d started to drink meant I was taking in hundreds of extra calories, often more than a thousand. So it made sense to compensate by restricting my calories. Eating less also made it easier to get drunk. Two birds, one stone. I wasn’t sure why anyone ate before drinking, honestly. It seemed like a waste of the empty-stomach buzz.

  If I was eating alone, dinner was always the same. Using one of my four plates, I took two circles of lunch meat (each one thirty calories) and eight Saltines (each one twelve calories) and sliced the circles into four quarters each. Then I placed each of the eight quarters onto one of the eight crackers: open-faced sandwiches. Ever since I’d gone into therapy for my eating disorder, and gained back most of the weight, I’d hovered right around what I thought of as my blood line, the weight that meant I’d get my period. Sometimes I dipped back under it, just to prove to myself that I could. It was like a secret conversation I was having with my own life. Drinking gave me another way to pronounce how bad I felt, to organize the emotion into a set of actions.

  One night I sat in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, asking him to tell me I was better-looking than my ex. It was 6 p.m., and I was already drunk. He told me exactly what I wanted to hear, and who can blame him, because how else was he going to get me out of his car? I went upstairs and passed out around sunset.

  I told myself the drinking was about my ex, but his absence was just the reason I gave myself. I demanded intensity from everything in my life, even the ducks beyond my window. Their survival carried the weight of epic. By spring, they were back in the creek below, same as ever—no different or better for having survived the winter.

  After her first lover left, Rhys said, “I’m finding out what a useful thing drink is.” This seemed right to me. Heartbreak wasn’t the reason you drank, but it could be an occasion to discover what drinking might do for you.

  Rhys’s first lover, a man named Lancelot, had called her his kitten. “Kitten,” he’d written, “you make my heart ache sometimes.” When Rhys got pregnant—by another man, after Lancelot had broken her heart—Lancelot didn’t take her back, but he paid for her abortion. He gave her a rose plant and a long-haired Persian cat. Rhys went to the seaside for a week. She put the Persian in a home on Euston Road, and when she came back they told her it was dead. She wept on the top deck of a London bus. She started sleeping fifteen hours a day. “And then it became part of me, so I would have missed it if it had gone,” she wrote. “I am talking about sadness.” Things had been lost—a man, a kitten, the possibility of a child—but something else was granted: a new vision of her oldest tenant, sadness, something she would have missed if it had gone. The conditional tense was full of weary prophecy. It never had; it never would.

  “The whole earth had become inhospitable to her,” her friend Francis Wyndham wrote, “after the shock of that humdrum betrayal.” Rhys was always getting accused—by other people, by critics, by readers—of making too
much of her humdrum hardships. She knew the charge of self-pity, and alternately loathed herself for it and proudly owned it. She once wrote to a friend: “You see I like emotion. I approve of it—in fact am capable of wallowing in it.” She was the Scheherazade of wallowing. She spun her stories from its excess. She barely survived it. Her novels got so much right about alcoholic drinking: the shut-in quality, the bait and switch, how booze promised freedom but eventually just left her on her knees, retching.

  After Lancelot left, Rhys toured with a musical variety show making a circuit through the dreary towns of the Midlands and the north: Wigan, Derby, Wolverhampton, Grimsby. Even their names were predatory, apt. One of the boys in the company drew a sketch of tour life—the gloomy alleys, the lamp-lit rooms—captioned simply “Why We Drink.”

  But Rhys never needed a why, or else she had too many. Lancelot was only the first of many pretexts. “On an extended canvas,” said one review of her work, “one becomes more than ever conscious of the unsatisfactoriness of getting drunk as a remedy for every trial and trouble.”

  Rhys ended up turning her heartbreak into a career. She took the shame of getting dumped by Lancelot—and the ways she wrecked herself in the aftermath—and made these things the subject of her first manuscript, Voyage in the Dark. Her heroine, Anna, is mistress to a man named Walter until he doesn’t want her anymore. Even then, Anna can’t bring herself to hate him. “I’m not miserable,” she says. “Only I’d like a drink.” The landlady scolds her for leaving her silk eiderdown comforter covered in wine stains.

  Anna’s life after Walter is full of stained comforters and withered curls of uneaten bacon. It’s full of men slipping five quid, ten quid, perhaps a little more into her purse in the middle of the night, after they fuck her, then writing her so they can fuck again, or not writing—it always comes to that, eventually, the not-writing.