The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Maybe I need to tell a different story about lack. Maybe it wasn’t about my father’s life on airplanes so much as his wiring, the parts of his genetic code he passed along to me, the chromosomal variations we shared that made our neural systems more primed to coax dependencies. I imagine tracing our chromosomal inheritance back through generations—my father, his father, who knows how many fathers before him, all the way back through the whiskey-strung branches of our family tree. I can’t even count how many free shots of whiskey our surname has secured for me over the years, as if my alcoholic ancestors were raising a glass in my direction.

  Or maybe the lack is systemic: I was born into late capitalism, an economic system that sold me on the notion that I was insufficient so it could sell me on the notion that consumption was the answer to my insufficiency. It’s true that people loved getting fucked up long before capitalism, but it’s also true that one of the core promises of capitalism—transformation through consumption—is another version of the promise addiction makes. Make something of yourself: This is one of the secular articles of faith in the American gospel of productivity. So I spent years making as much as I could, as well as I could. But at the end of the day—more specifically, at the end of each day—I was exhausted by all that making, and wanted the chatter of these exhortations quieted. So, gin. So, wine.

  If we imagine the story of the lack as something encoded within us, an internal set of blueprints for a sense of absence, then it’s a story that is still being written. The Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism is an ongoing research project, running since 1989, that has interviewed and sampled blood from more than 17,000 members of over 2,200 families, trying to illuminate the specific genetic factors that put people at risk for alcoholism, trying to substantiate—in a broader sense—my father’s conviction that drinking was more dangerous for us.

  The COGA study has linked certain phenotypes (observable characteristics) to specific DNA regions on various chromosomes: the “low level of response” phenotype (i.e., you need to drink more to feel the same thing) and the “alcohol dependence” phenotype were both linked to the same region on chromosome 1, while the “maximum number of drinks… ever consumed in a 24-hour period” phenotype (usually 9 or more was a sign of trouble) was linked to a region on chromosome 4. The evidence supporting a genetic basis for alcoholism is pretty much indisputable.

  Which is to say: We’re all dependent, but some people are more dependent than others, and different forms of dependence deform our lives in different ways. My drinking had something to do with my family, and something to do with my brain, and something to do with the values I was raised to worship: excellence, enchantment, superlative everything. All these tales of why are true and also insufficient. A state of insufficiency is part of being human, and I responded to my particular state of insufficiency by drinking—because I was wired for it and groomed for it, because once I started doing it, it was so eloquent in its delivery of a particular bodily guarantee: With this, you will feel like enough.

  Drinking promised a version of consciousness that didn’t mean endless twisting and turning in the bedsheets of myself, tangled and restless, aching for dreams. Booze promised relief from the default state of needing something from men. It was an object I could always make available. But when it broke these promises, again and again, it also sharpened the need that made me crave it in the first place. It was a bait and switch: It promised bliss and offered shame. It promised self-sufficiency and offered dependence. It also felt really fucking good. But it was always just a temporary flight. When I returned to myself each morning, the groove of lack had just grown deeper, more stubbornly etched—like a skip, skip, skip in the song.

  The summer before we moved to Iowa, I turned twenty-six in a little town called Riomaggiore, on Italy’s Ligurian coast, where Dave and I were spending our final graduate-student stipend checks—impulsively, romantically, unwisely—on a little apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. Riomaggiore was arranged around a single steep road running from the hills down to the sea, where fishing boats bobbed around a wooden ramp jutting into the waves. Tall narrow houses crowded the road like crooked teeth, painted shades of fuchsia, buttercream, tangerine, mint, and rose. For some reason, all the window shutters were painted green. Dave and I sat on the rocks by the water, baking in the sun, and made up stories to explain why they’d all been painted the same color.

  “Well, it definitely had to do with a woman,” Dave said.

  “Maybe an affair?” I suggested. We imagined a woman with pistachio eyes and the mayor who couldn’t have her—so he made a rule that all the town’s shutters had to be painted the same shade as her eyes, as an oblique homage to his hidden love.

  That week was full of play: pinning notes to each other on the clothesline outside our kitchen window, next to my salt-crusted bikini; and cooking a local dish called Octopus in Hell, which involved tomatoes, olive oil, and patience. The restaurants in town served wine in pitchers, the way restaurants back home served water, and being on vacation somewhere beautiful made it less awkward to get tipsy every night. I’d never told Dave I wasn’t supposed to drink on my heart medication, so he never bothered me about it. But every once in a while, lying in bed at night after too much booze, my heart went wild—hammering under my ribs.

  Dave loved a local cake called torta di riso, made from rice and orange rind, and convinced himself that the elderly woman who ran a bakery near the dock was going to teach him how to make it.

  “She’s not just going to invite a stranger back into her kitchen,” I told him.

  “We’ll see.” He shrugged, smiling, and the next thing I knew, he was standing over a flour-dusted butcher-block table in the woman’s ancient kitchen, learning how to simmer the rice in milk steeped with orange peels and a single, monstrous brown vanilla pod. Dave thought he could charm his way into everything. Most of the time, he could.

  One afternoon we were lying in bed after sex, talking about Milton’s Paradise Lost—one of the books I had to prepare for my oral exams that September—and I was busy defending Eve. She’d been framed.

  “Well,” he said, “you can’t really say Eve wasn’t responsible for the fall.”

  “If you were made from someone’s fucking rib,” I said, “you might want to eat from the tree of knowledge too.”

  “The serpent was preying on her vanity,” he said. Somehow our voices grew edgier. I didn’t like that I was naked, and pulled the sheets tighter around my body. It was less about the argument itself—Eve was guilty, Adam was guilty, the serpent was guilty; no one was clean, that was the whole point—and more that neither one of us could let go. Both of us needed to be right.

  For my birthday, Dave told me he was going to teach me how to ride a bike. From the moment he realized that I’d never learned, he’d been determined to teach me. “It’ll be amazing,” he said. “You’ll always remember this birthday as the one where you learned to ride a bike.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But in truth, I didn’t want to spend my birthday learning how to ride a bike. I wanted to lie on the rocks in the sun, and make up stories about window shutters, and drink red wine from ceramic pitchers.

  We rented a bike and took it to a dirt path running through the hills above the town. The sun beat down, and for hours I kept trying and tipping over, and trying and tipping over. Dave steadied the bike and pushed me from behind. “Just pedal!” he said. “Just trust it!” But I couldn’t trust. “Being afraid of falling is what makes you fall,” he said, which only made the whole thing seem like a verdict on my character.

  For an hour we tried: me pedaling, the bike tipping, him bewildered and amused. My nerves gave way to a brute physical frustration that eventually made me kick the bike, like a kid throwing a tantrum. I started crying. “Can we just stop?” I said.

  “It frustrates you to not be in control,” he said, dead calm.

  “I just want to stop,” I said.
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  “After a few more tries,” he said, the disappointment plain across his face.

  When I looked at it from his perspective, my reaction seemed absurd: He’d planned this whole afternoon to celebrate my birthday, and I’d ruined it by getting upset. But my fear of disappointing him was a raw panic in my gut—not something I could control. I just wished he could have said: You hate this. Let’s stop. So much of our play—the stories we made up, the notes we exchanged, our little fights about books—was about impressing each other. Sometimes it got exhausting.

  On our last night, we sat in rickety wooden chairs on our balcony and ate melon wrapped in fatty prosciutto, pocked with sea salt; drank wine from mugs; watched lightning crack in sharp sudden knife blades over the water. The bike lesson was just an absurdity in the rearview mirror. Why had I been crying? There was music coming from a church on the hill. We got up and danced, took off our clothes, felt the cool salt air and the warmth of each other’s bodies.

  In Milan—on our way home—we drank martinis by the green canals, strolling past antique stores selling junked gilded birdcages, and cafés where women smoked long cigarettes through frosted pink lips while Serge Gainsbourg played from secret speakers. Woozy and drunk—grateful for the world as stage set and soundtrack to our love—I was sure we’d get married someday, and our life would be made of nights like these.

  This was what drinking felt like when it still felt good. It felt good to drink cloudy pastis in a pub that summer, playing cards with Dave and his brothers, staining our mouths crimson with cheap house red. It felt good to drive out to a friend’s cottage and pass a bottle of whiskey around a bonfire, toasting marshmallows over the flames and wrapping garlic bread in tinfoil to make it bubbling hot. It felt good to drink cold Red Stripes on the porch of our new apartment in Iowa, to drink white wine in the humid kitchen, our humid kitchen, while I garnished plates of risotto, the first meal I’d ever cooked for him, that night I’d sliced my thumb. These were the nights—on the balcony, in the pub, by the bonfire—I carried as proof, saying See, it can be perfect, wanting so badly to believe that the drinking could electrify everything without price.

  At first, life with Dave in Iowa was luminous: late-summer evenings on our wooden porch, eating sweet corn and zebra tomatoes tossed into crude, perfect salads with Amish goat cheese and ripped hunks of baguette. We spent afternoons playing pinball in dim bars, giving ourselves faint mustaches of beer foam as silver balls pinged through the sticky quiet hours. We went for brunch at a friend’s cottage by the river, found him frying bacon in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette over the stove. That morning smelled like coffee and smoke, tasted like the sizzling salt heat of the bacon; glinted like sun off the river.

  Dave loved the world of writers in Iowa City, the community and bohemian allure of it—the vaporlike quality of Iowa socializing, how it would expand to fill as much time as you wanted to give it—conversations spilling across the edges of hours, nights ending where you hadn’t expected them to end: walking the visiting poet back to where he was staying as dawn broke over Dodge Street, or riffing about parataxis on someone’s busted brown corduroy couch. Dave had left the dry, airless corridors of scholarship to live a more expansive life, to live another version of the early twenties he’d spent more domestically, in a four-year relationship with an older woman. But I was growing tired of home-pickled vegetables and drunken poetry recitations. These potlucks are ridiculous, I thought. Who could attend so many in a week? Part of me just felt excluded. The poets had their seminars by the river, and their bar nights after class—and I had early shifts at the bakery where I’d started working, three or four days a week, to pay my share of the rent. I woke at six in the morning and walked a mile to a little yellow house by the railroad tracks, owned and run by a woman named Jamie: funny, efficient, demanding; someone with no time for bullshit. When I came in to ask for a job and she asked if I had any bakery experience, I’d said, “Not really,” then “Not at all,” and she hired me anyway.

  In a cramped kitchen with an eight-foot double oven and a walk-in freezer stocked with frozen slabs of dough, we made chocolate-raspberry cakes and sticky buns and banana bread, all our bodies moving in a fluid choreography between the prep counters and the cake island. The floor mixer was as tall as a little man, and had four speeds and a gear transmission, like a car. “It’s a Hobart,” my boss told me, as if I was supposed to understand what that meant. My beat was sugar cookies in seasonal shapes—leaves and pumpkins during my first few months—as well as front of the house: running the register, busing tables, pulling espresso shots. I loved the job. Jamie intimidated me—around her, I felt timid and meek—but it was nice to have a place where I was needed, if not exactly skilled.

  The bakery was also introducing me to a different version of Iowa City than I’d known the first time around, when I hadn’t had a single number in my cell phone with a 319 prefix, the local area code, because everyone in my life was from somewhere else. Now I got texts from my boss asking me to pick up shifts, or from the head baker—a guy my own age with a massive unfinished tattoo on his biceps, a sense of humor perched between sarcasm and cheesiness, and two kids, a toddler and a baby—who texted me photos of his perfect meringues, to brag. When my boss brought her five-year-old daughter into the shop, I would pull over a stool and ask her to help me wash dishes in the industrial three-tub sink in the back; we’d both get our arms fully soaped.

  At the workshop, everyone was basically between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-five, stylish and sharp, but the people in my world at the bakery wore less black and smiled more. I got to know the couple in their fifties who came in every day at seven-thirty and ordered coffee and morning biscuits—like scones, with a dollop of strawberry jam—and asked how my book was going, and I lied and said “Great,” when in truth I hadn’t begun it.

  Back home, in our white farmhouse at the corner of Dodge and Washington, life with Dave wasn’t exactly unfolding as a parade of midnight train-station picnics. It was often spent arguing about something in the kitchen, like where to put the rolling dishwasher with only three wheels, the one Dave had insisted on bringing with us; or who should wash the pile of dishes in the sink, because the dishwasher was too much trouble to roll anywhere. (It only had three wheels!) Our life was spent scheduling the Internet guy, and scanning the right documents to get me enrolled as a domestic partner for health insurance. Life was the rent, and the fickle vacuum cleaner, and the slow creep of silence, a silence I wanted to understand as intimacy, but couldn’t help reading as decay, as we sat quietly at our kitchen table, over godly tomatoes: Have we run out of things to say? These changes were only ordinary, but I’d never stuck around to watch love become daily.

  I was afraid Dave would regret the life we’d made together, afraid I couldn’t constantly produce a version of myself that he’d like enough to choose over everyone else—which I believed was a requirement of love. Wasn’t that the difference between love and compromise? When I drank, my fears attached to objects of fixation that seemed petty when I spoke them out loud: Dave flirting with other girls; Dave making plans without me. Every time Dave stayed out late, or seemed distant or bored, or simply quiet, I got nervous. Was this a sign that he was slightly less invested than he’d been? Slightly less entertained? I was haunted by the words he’d used about his last relationship: Grooves of domesticity. Claustrophobic. The only person in my family who had never gotten divorced was one uncle who lived on a farm in New Mexico, where his wife trained sheepdogs and sunset fired their alfalfa bales with scarlet light. But they seemed superhuman. Dave was not a farmer and I was not a trainer of dogs. We could barely get the three-wheeled dishwasher across the kitchen to our sink faucet.

  We spent much of that first Iowa autumn flying to other people’s weddings, where we were inevitably asked when we were planning to get married ourselves—as if we’d entered hunting range during open season. We bought the cheapest plane tickets we could find and ended up in deserted m
idwestern airports at ungodly hours. I fell off the end of a moving sidewalk in St. Louis at four in the morning and Dave helped me up, both of us laughing. We were inside some pocket of time and space that was just ours, full of empty moving sidewalks—an odd dream we were building together.

  During that first autumn in Iowa, I watched Dave for signs that our relationship had been tarnished by proximity and tedium. I watched his poems, wondering if the she was always me. I watched his phone, wondering who was texting him. The workshop itself had become a rival, something he might love more than me.

  When he was in the shower one afternoon, I finally did what I’d been imagining doing for weeks: picked up his phone—palms sweating, afraid of what I’d find, or that he’d catch me finding it—and scrolled through his texts. All I wanted was the complete inventory of his heart and mind—that was it, nothing more. “I need a pipeline directly from my brain to yours,” he’d told me once. I wanted that, too, so I could convince myself that I’d never have to doubt anything—that uncertainty wasn’t native to love, and I wouldn’t ever have to reckon with it.

  I found a long swath of messages he’d exchanged, over the course of several weeks, with a girl in the workshop named Destiny. She was twenty-two, or something close, the same age I’d been at the workshop five years earlier, and when I saw a poem he’d texted to her line by line, I got sick to my stomach. It was one he’d just written—I knew, because he’d read it to me—but I thought I’d been the only one he’d shared it with. Their messages were daily and affectionate, and sometimes, I could tell, they’d been meeting up: At Java House now? And then: Will be there in 10 min! Or: See you at G’s tonight? With a little punctuation face at the end: Their aliveness, their daily-ness, their back-and-forth energy, came like a sudden slap, a confirmation of my fears: He would always crave the sharp tingling sensation of falling for someone, rather than having her.