That was the plan, anyway. What actually happened was a more dramatic version of the plan in reverse. When it became clear that no amount of money thrown at unconventional healers was going to stop me from continuing to break into shards, I quit drinking. In the weeks and months after I quit, I continued to fling money around (I didn’t stop being me, after all). But I spent it on smaller indulgences: a stack of fashion magazines to read in the backyard during the hours I used to spend drinking, or a film festival pass to put some structure around my dangerously open weekends. I bought myself flowers and mystery novels and other gifts suitable for someone recuperating from a long illness. Choosing these things, I sometimes felt as though I were shopping for a stranger I had a crush on. Which flowers? I’d ask myself at the farmers’ market. Do you want the peach ones? How about the coral? What do you like? Who are you?
Without wine to erase each day, it also became apparent within a few months that the Dalai Lama himself wouldn’t be able to tolerate the clusterfuck of conflicting goals, wildly careening priorities, and unrealistic expectations that constituted my work life. It’s not me, I thought one day. Or not just me, at any rate. There was bona fide madness all around me and I wanted out.
When I realized that my job was toxic to me, and that I wanted to stay sober, and wanted to be able to breathe and think and survey the new life I’d uncovered, I changed teams, moving to a role that gave me the space I needed. Still, I was sometimes haunted by the absence of panic in my life. If I wasn’t choking on work, I felt as if I weren’t doing my job, as though fear and paranoia were part of the description. One day I had coffee with a VP I’d known for years and confessed this to her. “I like my job,” I said, leaning across the table and lowering my voice just in case the Starbucks was bugged. “But it’s kind of easy and I feel bad about that.”
She raised an eyebrow and spoke in full voice, hidden mikes be damned. “Never feel guilty for taking an easy job now and then. It’s the only way to sustain a career in this place. You have to have times where you just coast.”
I still work for the company that proved such a friendly breeding place for my addiction. I’ve been around long enough to know which parts of it are hospitable to health and sanity and which are not. Even in the sane places, I see the usual types: the star performer who lives in terror of being fired; the perfectionist who promises his worried manager that he’s only working fifty hours a week when he’s secretly putting in seventy; the one who won’t stay home when she’s sick, setting off round-robins of illness across the team; the one who catches up on e-mail at 1:00 a.m. At some point the company realized it’s too hard to recruit and keep employees when you treat them like contestants on a Darwinian game show, and in the last couple of years measures have been put in place to make things better. But policies change faster than cultures. The most wild-eyed ones around me don’t yet know it’s safe to catch their breath. Or they’re chasing a fascinating idea or on a mission to make something crazy sounding that in ten years the world will think it can’t live without. Or they just can’t walk away from all that fucking money.
* * *
As the Barneys salesman rang up my fiftieth-day treat, I started to feel ashamed of myself for buying something so expensive on impulse, and for such an arbitrary milestone. I looked at the clerk, a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair. He was cheerful and friendly, but maybe he secretly hated me, I thought. Maybe he was inwardly shaking his head over the kind of crazy woman who gets giddy over a bag the color of an elephant. I wondered how much money Barneys paid him, and if he liked working there, and if it was what he’d expected to be doing with his life. Finally, to halt the shame spiral and break the silence, I said, “This is to celebrate my fiftieth day without a drink.”
He looked up from wrapping my bag, beamed, and stuck out his hand. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Congratulations. I have six years.” And we shook hands. I thought of him every time I carried the Belstaff bag. Eventually, I got tired of elephant gray. But I keep it around to remind me.
Happy Sometimes
I woke that day in Paris with a wine headache and the sense I’d lost something forever. My dog Abby, who had died three weeks earlier, had visited me in my sleep. There were smells; there were licks. There was sun on my head. She bounded off happily at the end and didn’t look back. It was comforting to sense that wherever she was, she didn’t need me anymore. But I also knew she was gone for good now.
I sat up in bed and cried for a few minutes, and then I went and stood by the floor-to-ceiling window. My room was on the eighteenth floor of the hotel, with views of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. It was a mild Saturday in June with peonies blooming everywhere. I had the whole weekend free for exploring.
God, I hate this city, I thought.
I didn’t find Parisians ruder than people in any other large, tourist-swamped city. They were fine—meaner than Romans, nicer than New Yorkers. I didn’t think Paris was particularly dirty or covered in dog poop, either. In fact, it was the most mathematically, precisely beautiful place I’d ever seen. But that kind of splendor seemed to have no room for an asymmetrical someone like me.
Even Parisian love left me in the margins. As I walked or jogged through the Tuileries, couples kissed passionately on either side of the path. I had been married for twelve years, happily, but the odds of ever being kissed like that in public again were slim; it just doesn’t happen to wives (or so I thought then). Intellectually, I knew that I’d had my day, had done my share of making out on park benches with someone who simply could not wait for a more dignified opportunity, but I could not for the life of me remember what it felt like. And that was enough to make me resent the whole city for reminding me my days of irresistibility were over.
It didn’t help that my three trips to Paris had all been for work, and my company’s French headquarters was one of the least inspiring places on earth. The physical setting was aggressively unlovely, like a 1970s IBM office. The team I was working with had been so low on the totem pole for so long that it was baked into their very cells. Every day there was an endless stream of last-minute assignments and issues to untangle. In Tokyo, Seattle, or Munich, my constituency would embody the same polite sadness and resignation, only in Paris it was less polite, more baleful. They barely looked at me when I talked.
I stared out the hotel window, feeling sorry for myself for having to be in one of the world’s most romantic cities without any chance of feeling swoony or swooned over again, for having a non-immortal dog and a thankless job and a headache that I could only blame on myself. It was clear that if I didn’t get dressed and leave the hotel, I would end up lying on the bed all afternoon, watching CNN International and weeping.
There must be one thing you’d like to go see today, I told myself. On previous trips I’d visited Sainte-Chapelle and the Musée d’Orsay, in keeping with my preference for second-tier tourist sites with short lines. The only place I really wanted to go was home. Okay, I said to myself the way I’d spoken to Abby after I knew she was very sick but before I realized she might die. Then what would make Paris feel most like Seattle?
An hour later I was in the Village Voice bookshop in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Like any decent bookworm, I’d been to the more famous Shakespeare and Company before but found it too crowded with other people like me to be very browsable. The Village Voice wasn’t a tourist destination, just a store crammed with books in English. My eyes filled with tears when I walked in, though to be fair, my eyes had also filled with tears twice on the Metro ride over and once on my walk down Rue Princesse, just because.
I spent a few minutes at the new-book table, striving to establish myself as a normal woman rather than the kind who wandered around Paris crying. Then, suitably impressed with what I’d seen, I went to the fiction shelves and found the Cs for the litmus test I give every new bookstore: Does it stock Laurie Colwin novels? I firmly believe that without at least one Colwin novel or story collection on its shelves, a
bookstore can be good but not great. Most bookstores fail the Colwin Test. The Village Voice had all of her books. I pulled my favorite, Happy All the Time, off the shelf and opened to the first page: “Guido Morris and Vincent Cardworthy were third cousins.” Just seeing the words made my heart skip a beat and lose a little of its weight. I bought eight books at the Village Voice, and that was one of them.
Laurie Colwin published four novels, three story collections, and two books of cooking essays before her sudden death from a heart attack at age forty-eight. Many people know her best for her food writing—and it’s great—but I love her as the creator of a warm, sparkling fictional world where everyone is smart and funny, New York feels as cozy as a college town, and love causes just the right amount of pain. Colwin wrote mostly about young WASPs from old-money families. In classic old-money style her characters tend to be inconspicuous consumers; they dress shabbily and eat simple, bland food. But the signs of a vast safety net are all around them. They work industriously, but their jobs are at obscure academic journals or boutique publishers or other places where it is hard to earn an actual urban living. They live in small Village walk-ups, but their galley kitchens contain only gleaming copper cookware. I suspect most of them were taught how to sail as children. In Colwin’s world, wedding lunches and art openings happen, with tipsy misbehavior and family arguments and seasons of ennui, but rarely death or divorce and never violence or suicide or permanent estrangement. Not in Colwin Land. (I’m not sure punk ever happened in Colwin Land, either.) Her people are blithe and clueless about some things, like money and class. But they are also earnest and lovable, and such wrecks in their way, bumbling around Manhattan into friendships and marriages and extramarital entanglements and amorphous variations on all three. In Colwin Land, people tend to marry someone they’ve known since age five and then wander into love affairs that play themselves out and end on a wistful note, all without ruining anyone’s life.
I discovered Laurie Colwin at age sixteen, in my heavily lacquered Florida hometown where people wanted you to know exactly how much money they had and showed it off by wearing lots of gold and driving big white cars with white leather seats. My friends’ fathers wore Italian loafers and had deep golfers’ tans. My father was a tenured professor, which in a lot of towns would have counted as a prestigious and well-paying gig but in Boca Raton made us seem sort of poor. My sister and I had ballet classes and orthodontic work and hand-me-down cars and all the other middle-class accoutrements of American youth, but compared with the yachts and Gucci bags of my classmates, we looked kind of janky. Colwin Land is also a rich-person playground, of course, but one where being an academic and wearing the same shoes for years in a row is cool. And in Colwin Land, men fall hopelessly in love with women based on how they look while reading a newspaper, or the fact that they have odd skills such as wildflower identification or lamp repair. At sixteen I sometimes felt as if I had nothing but oddities to offer the opposite sex. Reading Colwin gave me a vision of the future where someone might love me for at least one of them.
What seemed newest of all about Laurie Colwin back then, and still feels radical now, was her obsession with the pursuit of happiness. Ensconced in their comfortable lives, her characters have the time and psychic space to think about it—what it means, and how to get it. When I found her, I was up to my ears in the neon nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. I was tired of misery, at least in books. (I was tired of my own misery, too, but I also knew there wasn’t a lot a teenager stuck at the wrong school in the wrong town in the wrong state could do about that, so I bided my time and tried to play off depression as glamour.) I respected Colwin for taking happiness seriously, which I thought was probably harder than giving your characters cocaine nosebleeds.
As I grew out of my parents’ home and into the world, had boyfriends and apartments and travels, her novels became a constant in my life, both as a comfort and as an aesthetic: the sense that tight-stretched sheets and a perfectly roasted chicken were things worth caring about, because they alchemized into something like happiness. When I was lonely and snowed in at graduate school, I read about the solitude-loving Holly Sturgis in Happy All the Time and thought how she would have relished the thick quiet of a blizzard and the impossibility of leaving home. When a boy situation ended badly and I was sure I’d never fall in love again, I would reread Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object and realize that if its twenty-seven-year-old widow heroine could rebound with her own brother-in-law, surely I could find someone to replace whatever sad-sack indie-rock guy had broken my heart. Colwin taught me to pay attention to the everyday things around me. I bought anemones for my kitchen table and a Wedgwood saucer for my house keys and an oval platter for my perfectly roasted chickens. And sure enough, over time these details added up to, if not happiness, at least the sense that I could quietly define my own life and taste based on small domestic pleasures.
By the time of my trip to Paris, I was almost forty and still reread my favorite Colwin books often, but they had started to make me sad. Like her people, I now lived in a big city and had witty and urbane friends. I had no trust fund to relax into, but I’d made enough money on my own to surround myself with beautiful art and clothes and food. But I also lived in a constant state of low-level panic over work and the creeping sense that my time on earth was flying by and I had no lasting accomplishments or even passions to show for it. To soothe that panic, I drank wine, a lot of it. Colwin’s characters certainly know their way around a glass of cold, dry white wine, and when I’d first started drinking regularly, I felt like one of them, having wide-ranging conversations with friends at sidewalk cafés. But once I’d worked up to a bottle a night in my living room, alone, I could no longer pretend the sparkling people of Colwin Land and I had much in common, and reading about them felt like a way to punish myself for slipping so far.
I left the Village Voice and wandered down to a café where I had coffee and a ham tartine. I congratulated myself for not ordering wine. The congratulations were dubiously earned, because I didn’t actually enjoy daylight drinking and hardly ever did it. One day drink just made me groggy. Two made me feel good, but then I had to keep topping up the tank or risk the dreaded 3:00 p.m. comedown: too sober for euphoria, too tipsy to get anything done. The only help for it was to keep drinking into the night, and even at my worst I wasn’t in the habit of doing that. Still, at this point I was looking for any opportunity to praise myself for drinking behavior that normal people would take for granted. If that meant giving myself brownie points for not doing something I didn’t want to do, so be it.
I read the first chapter of Happy All the Time, in which the muddled romantics Vincent and Guido are trying to escape the Cambridge summer heat and “found themselves perusing an exhibition of Greek vases at the Fogg Museum.” What would it be like to be a person who just found herself in museums or who had opinions about vases? I wondered. What would it be like to be a person who knew her third cousins, or spent time with any of her relatives? I was so wrapped up both in the novel and in comparing myself negatively to it that some time passed before I noticed that Rue Princesse had become still and quiet, with occasional bursts of frantic male sounds. I looked around for the source of the noise and saw the backs of maybe thirty men crammed into the open-air bar across the street, staring at two big televisions. Many of them had on soccer scarves or were festooned with bits of red streamers, the kind that fly out of Roman candles. The men would stare intently at the match and then yell en masse at the TVs. I tried to remember the last time I had yelled in public. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing I would do, but then, neither did hating Paris. Though I wasn’t sure I hated Paris quite so much anymore.
The walk back to the Saint-Germain Metro stop was similar: silence/yelling/silence/yelling. The platform was unusually empty for a Saturday, and the train car, too. I had no destination in mind; I only knew I wasn’t ready to return to my hotel, which looked like a long-abandoned Dynasty set, with e
mployees wandering around the lobby in elaborate tasseled uniforms that had possibly not been cleaned in years. So, for several stops I sat and read about the morning following Guido’s first night with his beloved, the cool and unflappable Holly. He sits at her kitchen table, dazzled and panicked—flapped—watching her read the newspaper as though it were any other day.
Poor Guido is fucked. Of course, I knew that Holly is just trying to maintain a facade of normality because strong feelings terrify her. But my sympathies lay mainly with him, maybe because while I’d long wanted to be a serene Holly, I was in fact a total Guido. I was contemplating this when the doors opened at Saint-Michel and ten preteen boys in matching soccer scarves burst onto the train singing a fight song. If they had been a few years older, their rowdiness might have been annoying or even unnerving. But they were still children, and they delighted and mystified me. Where had they come from? What would it be like to be someone who sang in public? To be a boy in a boy pack, owning the subway? I didn’t feel that free in my own car.
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