The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  As I sit here giving them indelicate names

  they crowd around the edge of the porch

  raising their hands to be called on, rain

  streaming down their arms, then through them.

  These orphan children in the rain felt palpable, actual, as if we’d summoned them into being by loving each other so much, and then abandoned them by breaking up. So they had to stay outside the house—every house, on every thimble island—raising their hands, waiting to get called on, melting into the margins of What if.

  It was like falling in love again, that spring—the giddiness, the wondering, the fantasizing—except that all these feelings were happening on top of an entire compost heap of other ones rotting into mulch: expectations, righteousness, anger. Our breakup had seemed final: the broken lease, our tearful conversations with each other and with everyone we knew; and this resuming held an eager secrecy, a sense of feverish urgency. Everything was tea leaves—the pattern of light, or the time Dave happened to call, a sign telling me, This might work, or else saying, Give it up. Every text message was a tarot card, auguring.

  That summer, Dave went back to Iowa City—where many of our friends were still living—to teach. Over the distance I felt him disappearing into its patchwork of bar talks and whiskey nights on porches. It was like an old lover had found him in the phone book. I tried not to resent it, tried not to keep tallies—how much he’d been in touch, how much I’d been in touch—tried not to resent his distances, tried to tell myself I was ridiculous, I’d broken up with him, couldn’t I give him this freedom? What did I think I was entitled to?

  “I keep trying to fight myself to be a person who can be with D,” I wrote to the same friend who’d hosted me in her tiny apartment as we were breaking up, feeding me Rihanna videos like pain medication. Fighting myself to be a person who could be with Dave reminded me of fighting myself to be a person who could drink. It wasn’t that either Dave or booze was necessarily destructive—Dave wasn’t toxic, just human; and plenty of people could drink just fine—it was that I kept trying to rearrange myself to make it work with both, kept telling myself I ruined things by needing them too much.

  For Dave’s birthday in August, after he got back from Iowa, I pooled money with some of our friends to rent a house in a town in the Catskills called Fleischmanns, a yeast baron’s summer paradise full of Orthodox Jews from the city. The main bridge had been blown out by Hurricane Irene, and had a handwritten note tacked on its railing: WAYNE, PLEASE FIX THIS BRIDGE. The world was full of requests.

  As a birthday present, I’d spent months gathering letters and photographs from everyone in Dave’s life: friends, former teachers, his parents, his brothers. It was my attempt to resist the notion of love as a finite economy, where his love for others meant he had less of it for me. On that trip, I believed in us again. Our years together were not lost. My sobriety would save us. I hadn’t been to a meeting in weeks. It had been getting harder and harder to share in meetings, because I’d shared so much about our breakup. Now I didn’t know how to tell the story of our getting back together.

  On our drive home from the Catskills, we stopped to play paintball. We were thirty going on thirteen, in rented coveralls, pelting each other with adrenaline. I’d been told the pellets might hurt, but they just felt like hail. The only one that really stung, that left a bruise, was the one that hit my neck and wouldn’t break when it was supposed to.

  That fall, I presented my dissertation topic for the first time, sitting at a polished conference table in a looming Gothic tower, talking to a group of graduate students and faculty. I’d been worried about sounding like a prude, making my unsexy case for the relationship between sobriety and creativity, and so I was wearing darker lipstick than usual, hoping to suggest—with MAC’s diva-red Ruby Woo—that I still had a grip on things like risk and extremity. My Diet Coke stayed in my purse.

  “But what about the relationship between addiction and creativity?” one professor asked. “Don’t certain obsessions also produce experiment and variation?”

  The eyes of the room flicked back and forth between us. I dutifully copied his question in my notebook. Addiction = variation?

  “The generative aspects of obsession,” he continued. “Now that’s interesting to me.”

  I recognized his loaded that. It was standard academic protocol, pointing out hypothetical interest in a different question as a way of suggesting that the one you were asking wasn’t interesting at all. It was as if this professor had said: Tell yourself whatever you want, but nothing will ever yield as much as brokenness.

  “I think that—” I paused, stuttered. “I think addiction often feels like the opposite of variation.”

  What I wanted to say: Addiction is just the same fucking thing over and over again. Thinking of addiction in terms of generative variation is the luxury of someone who hasn’t spent years telling the same lies to liquor-store clerks.

  But I couldn’t entirely dismiss what he’d said. Addiction wasn’t simply creative gasoline, but it wasn’t just blunt-force trauma either. I’d been so eager to dismiss the myths of whiskey and ink that it took me a while to stomach their truths: that yearning is our most powerful narrative engine, and addiction is one of its dialects; that addiction is a primal and compelling story, structured by irony and hinged by betrayal, the fantasy of escape colliding with the body in ruin. “Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain,” Randall Jarrell had written, but even his lines admitted their own deception: They were wisdom, and they’d come from pain.

  The possibility of writing from addiction was more than an alluring lie; it was also genuine alchemy. When I went looking for the end of a mythology, I’d found strategies of exportation: Raymond Carver brought his drunk days into his sober stories. Amy Winehouse spent a sober week at her producer’s condo in Miami, scribbling lyrics about booze that became the soundtrack to a million lives—a heartbroken professional, professionalizing her heartbreak. It was almost like measurements in a recipe: The right amount of pain could fuel the job without getting in the way of its execution. The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it.

  In James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” a jazz pianist tells his brother why he needs heroin: “It’s not so much to play,” Sonny tells him. “It’s to stand it.” But later Sonny recants his own assertion: “I don’t want you to think it had anything to do with me being a musician. It’s more than that. Or maybe less than that.” His theory is most useful in its declaration of uncertainty: Or maybe. The hinge of that “or” refuses the easy argument that addiction makes him an artist, but it also confesses that he can’t entirely dismiss the relationship either. The same pain drove him to find relief in both.

  For me, recovery wasn’t creative death; but it wasn’t instant propulsion. It didn’t deliver the New Creativity like a telegram. It was more like a series of generative formal constraints: finding stories in the world and trying to map their contours.

  That year—when I lived alone, trying to wrestle my dissertation into a proposal—I went to Texas to try to write another reported piece. I spent four days interviewing people who believed they had a strange disease that made inexplicable fibers, threads, crystals, and fluff emerge from under their skin. Most doctors didn’t believe them. At their annual conference, these patients used a microscope as large as an MRI scanner to search for fibers, traded stories of skeptical doctors, and swapped treatment tips: borax and root beer and antifungal creams. Their predicament didn’t seem inexplicable to me, but utterly intuitive: They knew there was something wrong with them, but it didn’t seem to be something anyone else could see. Everyone thought they were doing it to themselves. It made sense that they’d seek community as a way of understanding whatever was wrong with them, or fighting it.

  When I talked to these patients, standing with my little silver tape recorder in the dry Texas heat; or when I ate vending-machine potato chips
in a West Virginia prison; or sat on a picnic bench with weary long-distance runners; or strolled past community gardens in Harlem and asked a woman about relearning how to walk, I got to listen to voices that weren’t mine. During those days of pitched tents and gray rain and power bars and bugle taps, withered tomato plants and late frost by the Hudson, it was sobriety on a different stage: showing up and paying attention.

  Eventually I let myself give up on the Sandinista novel—understood that I was simply flinging myself against the wall of its ambitions, the literal wall of my office—and started seeking what the novel had been seeking all along: lives that weren’t my own. The essays I started writing manifested a version of Jackson’s ethos, out of myself, though they often held my own life as well: still a voice in the room, but not the only one. It was writing that was literally beyond me, insofar as it was often beyond my control: I couldn’t shape what people said, or how they said it. This made the world feel infinite, as if it had suddenly arrived—when of course it had been there the whole time.

  When Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, Dave and I holed up together in his sixth-floor apartment on Chapel Street as the wind wheezed and railed against his corner windows. After the storm was over, we wandered the quiet streets—cloaked by an eerie, dampened stillness—and found a huge oak tree uprooted in the downtown green, its roots exposed to the sky. By fall, we’d moved from the adrenaline rush of getting back together, the hotel bars and island orphans of our early renewal, back into the daily patterns of a relationship, irritated about who’d forgotten to buy toilet paper. Dave was making extra money by renting out his apartment on Airbnb and spending nights at my place. Our relationship had become a compromised version of itself, like a manuscript we were carrying around as loose-leaf papers in a shopping bag. When we fought, it was like both of us were more concerned with proving we were right—I’m right to need these kinds of daily commitment! I’m right to need these kinds of freedom!—than with figuring out how we might make it better.

  During a walk in Wooster Square, Dave told me that one of his friends had called me emotionally abusive. We were in our old neighborhood, near our old apartment, trees full of leaves the same rust-orange and scarlet they’d been when we saw them from our living room the previous fall. It caught me off guard, emotionally abusive, but I had to admit—looking at everything objectively—I couldn’t say it was wrong. All of our messy reversals felt like a function of how hard I’d wanted to try, proof of the fact that something in me couldn’t give up on us. But from the outside, or maybe even the inside, it just looked crazy and selfish.

  One night that fall I nearly fainted at a restaurant downtown, while I was having dinner with a friend. Everything went dark near the counter full of cakes. When I sank to the floor and put my head in my hands, my closed eyes were playing shooting streaks of light. As my friend took me to the health center, she kept calling Dave, and he kept not picking up. When he finally arrived at the doorway to my hospital examining room—hours later, explaining that his phone had died—there was a look on his face that wasn’t frustration, but it wasn’t exactly love. Years later, my friend told me that she’d known we were done, or hoped we were done, when she saw the look on his face that night. She said it didn’t look like someone who wanted to care for me. I knew he did, and that he had—but I also knew we were both tired.

  I started to fantasize about relapsing, putting a case of wine in the backseat of my Toyota and driving up I-91, just like the cars I watched each morning from my apartment window, to drink myself into oblivion in some Hartford hotel room. Sometimes the relapse fantasy involved sleeping with strangers, or smoking crack, even though I hadn’t been the kind of drunk (usually) who’d take home a stranger from a club, and I wouldn’t have the first idea how to get my hands on crack. Sometimes the fantasy involved calling Dave in the middle of the night to come rescue me, even though he didn’t have a car. Would he take the train? Would he have to transfer trains? It became an absurdly convoluted Cinderella complex. But I loved the cinematic melodrama of that screenshot: him bursting through a hotel door, telling me he’d do anything to help me get better. When in reality, I knew if I relapsed in a hotel room, I would probably just drink enough to splurge recklessly on pay-per-view and pass out halfway through the movie, or buy vending-machine chocolate bars and then get drunk enough to shove them into my mouth without guilt.

  I’d spent much of my first round of sobriety telling other people in recovery that maybe I had to binge on harder drugs just to get bad enough to never drink or use again. “That sounds like a great plan,” one woman said. Another shrugged, smiling, and said: “That sounds like something an addict would say.”

  Hartford seemed like the right landscape for these daydreams because of its grim skyscrapers and its unglamorous insurance companies, its resistance to redemption arcs. In online images, the downtown Hilton had a teal pool gleaming like a fruit lozenge—like something you could suck on, something my neighbors could turn into Technicolor jam—but it seemed too corporate and varnished, an imposing gray skyscraper. The Flamingo Inn was better, surrounded by yellow grass covered in dirty patches of snow, where a politician’s son would die of a fentanyl overdose a few years later. Even when the sky was blue and full of puffy clouds, this place looked like it was getting rained on. It was perfect.

  Relapse would be my revenge against sobriety, which hadn’t inoculated me against disappointment—especially, most recently, my sinking realization that this second relationship with Dave was falling into the same tense patterns as our first one. If I were going to relapse, I certainly wouldn’t do it on a single cocktail, like last time, trying to drink “better.” This time, I wanted to give myself license to drink endlessly.

  It’s enough! Berryman had written, in his own Hartford motel room. I can’t BEAR ANY MORE. It wasn’t suicide I wanted but another bottom, an explosion whose rubble I could emerge from, ash-dusted and glittering with shards of glass. The fantasy of crisis—or explosion—was an alternative to the hard, ordinary work of living through uncertainty; and sobriety had given me fewer explosions to recover from.

  That fall, Dave and I told each other we either needed to get married or break up for good. Those seemed like our only choices. When one of my best friends told me about another woman’s relationship—“She says they either need to get married or break up, and you know those relationships are in trouble”—I just nodded, mute. Yep. But our day-to-day felt like purgatory, and I craved an impossible certainty; as if a relationship were ever anything besides waking up each morning and doing the best you could, not knowing where it would go next.

  It had always been easier to imagine a future with Dave—on one of the Thimble Islands, maybe—than to live inside our present tense. We lived well in the cinematic epic mode, and not so well in the mundane realities of daily life. It was like jamming a jigsaw piece somewhere it wouldn’t fit. I kept telling myself that I’d been wrong two years before, two weeks before—that I’d been trying the piece from the wrong angle. It would work now. In meetings, I’d heard: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  At a meeting that fall, at a sober house in the suburbs, a woman spoke about wanting to be willing to stand with both her hands empty until something came to fill them. I wanted to be brave enough to do that, to let my hands stay empty for a while—and worried that perhaps I’d tried again with Dave because I hadn’t been willing to stand with empty hands. But the truth was that I hadn’t known how to stand with empty hands when I was with him, either. “Things don’t always get better,” someone had once told me at an Iowa meeting, “but they always get different.”

  Dave and I finally broke up the second time, for good, in a meatball restaurant in January, seven months after we’d gotten back together. We had to end twice, just like the drinking did; and like the end of the drinking, it was less like an explosion than plain depletion. We didn’t have anything left. We had one last cigarette on
his fire escape.

  Walking away from his building, I remembered a woman I’d known in my early twenties, petite and dark-haired and beautiful as a witch, describing the aftermath of a difficult breakup: sitting on her bare hardwood floor and drinking red wine and listening to records. But that night, my despair was nothing glamorous. It was a late-night cookie as large as my palm, and chocolate smeared on my lips. Once I was home, I noticed a dead leaf stuck to the wool of my leg warmers, from a walk I’d taken with Dave a few days earlier, and I turned to the trash can, ready to throw it away—then took it off carefully and put it in a drawer instead. There was something in Dave I’d never find in anyone else. I might get other things, things I couldn’t even imagine, but I would never get him. That felt unbearable.

  —

  XIV —

  HOMECOMING

  I’ve had two different lives,” Raymond Carver once said, meaning he’d lived one drunk, the other sober. “The past really is a foreign country, and they do do things differently there.” His first life was spent largely with his first wife, Maryann, whom he’d met as a teenager when she was working behind the counter of a Spudnut Shop. She got pregnant at seventeen. They both had big dreams. They both drank. “Eventually,” Carver wrote later, “we realized that hard work and dreams were not enough.” Maryann packed fruit and waited tables to give her husband time to write. He drank himself bloated and silly. At a cocktail party in 1975, he hit her over the head with a wine bottle after she flirted with another man, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. Still, they loved each other deeply. Even after their marriage ended both said that repeatedly. But their life was “chaotic,” he wrote, “without much light showing through.”

  Carver spent most of his second life, the decade after he got sober, with the poet Tess Gallagher, living in a town called Port Angeles—on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, overlooking the Pacific—fishing in the ocean and in strong clear rivers. In the early years of his sobriety, he was writing so much he decided to buy himself a new typewriter to better handle his output. It was a Smith Corona Coronamatic 2500. “It sounds like a cigar,” he told friends, “but it’s my first electric typewriter.” At one party he hid in the bushes because he was afraid of getting drunk. He looked back on the drama of his first life and understood his writing as something that had happened despite this chaos, rather than something fueled by it. “I was trying to learn my craft as a writer,” he said, “how to be as subtle as a river current when very little else in my life was subtle.”