by Ariel Levy
Actually, he knows that story: He has been reading some of my articles online. He says he likes the way I write.
I like the way that he writes, too: “One of my father’s better stories involved being woken up in the early hours of the morning and leaving in some haste as the house was burning. He remembers himself and his younger brother peering through the back window of the motorcar, still in their Victorian nightdresses, as the night sky lit up over the rapidly receding town of Barberton. The veracity of his account is suspect, but what is fact is that some very incriminating documents conveniently disappeared in the fire. My grandfather was an Irish lawyer of highly suspect morals, and the family is convinced that my grandmother took responsibility for clearing his tracks. She left him frequently, but remarried him on three separate occasions, so he obviously had some charm when not in jail.” His sentences are so jaunty! And so foreign. They sound like they were written in not just another place but another time. His stories transport me.
Dr. John tells me about his childhood in Zambia and Zimbabwe—Rhodesia, to him, at the time. Growing up, he didn’t question why, if they were Englishmen, as the people they socialized with considered themselves to be, they lived in a country where everyone else spoke Shona and Ndebele. He did not really contemplate what it meant that his father—also a doctor—and his grandfather before him were colonialists, until many years later, when he began to question everything he’d been taught about blackness, whiteness, and where he belonged. As a teenager, he just thought Africa was home.
He tells me about the time he flipped his brother’s car on the way back from the Chimanimani mountains when they were still in high school, and then they snuck into a hotel in Bulawayo, took a bath, and hitched home, clean and delighted with their ingenuity, arriving just before curfew. His brother, Greg, was his best friend growing up; they were only two years apart in age. Their mother died when they were toddlers. Greg died, too, in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-one. I can feel how haunted Dr. John Gasson was—is—by that loss from six thousand miles away. His mother, his brother, his father, his country, no longer exist, are part of the past.
When we converse in writing, everything feels complete, discrete. I don’t have to explain what just happened; he was there. Unlike the rest of the people in my life, he never knew Lucy, never knew me as half of a couple, so when we are communicating I feel that lack somewhat less. Within the confines of our epistolary friendship, I am not missing pieces of my life—except the one that came from my own body, the one that Dr. John alone has seen. Not a picture of the piece, the person.
I wonder sometimes if my grief is disproportionate, inappropriate. “I saw my father fall apart after my brother got killed,” Dr. John tells me. “But he had the consolation of knowing the adult that my brother briefly became. You don’t even know what your son would have been like as a little boy. I feel desperately sorry for you.”
Only Dr. John saw him, and only Dr. John saw me with him. Only Dr. John saw what feels so violently true to me I can’t stand that it is invisible to everybody else on earth: Here is a mother with her baby who has died.
And so, in one way, our friendship is a kind of fiction. We are two people on opposite ends of the earth, who do not know each other, who write each other emails as if we are familiars. (At first, we just exchange a few, here and there. But soon we are writing regularly. And the first thing I do when I wake up after I stop crying is check to see if he has sent me an email full of stories about places I have never seen, in a voice that is swashbuckling but somehow intimate.) In another way, these emails—and that picture—are the only things that are real to me.
23
Soon it is Christmastime. New York City is cold and elegant and the white lights on the stone buildings are like jewelry on a stately dame. Matt stays on my couch. I make my mother’s chicken cutlets, we watch Seinfeld reruns and pay-per-view, and I cry in the shower.
“Should I go get more wine?” Matt asks periodically.
“Sure,” I tell him. “I’m not an alcoholic. And I’m not pregnant, either.”
On Christmas Eve, I wear the only dress that fits and take Matt to a party at the writer Gay Talese’s townhouse. At least a hundred people have come, and they wear pearls and red lipstick or good suits; there are waiters in black bowties forking slices of pink steak onto plates. Talese is shaking hands with Mayor Bloomberg, two white-haired men pleased with their stations, satisfied with their New York lives.
At the previous year’s party, Lucy and I had talked to Nora Ephron, whom I’d once profiled for The New Yorker. “I have a huge number of friends who’ve managed to change their lives,” Ephron told me the first time I interviewed her. “Women way more than men. It’s sort of the silver lining of things not being quite fair: It’s not as big a deal if you say, ‘I’m going to take a salary cut and see if I can be something else…a nightclub singer.’ ” She had changed her own life, transforming herself from a journalist into perhaps the most successful female director in Hollywood, after Carl Bernstein notoriously cheated on her while she was pregnant and their marriage dissolved. (“Everything is copy,” she said.)
Ephron was opposed to whining. She told me she did not believe in it. “I don’t mean that you can’t sit at home and feel sorry for yourself—briefly,” she said one afternoon when we were sitting on her couch, watching the sun set behind the Chrysler Building out her living room window. “But then I think you have to just start typing and do the next thing.” She must have known she was dying when she said that. She passed away a few weeks before I got pregnant.
I notice her son and her widower coming in the Taleseses’ front door as Matt goes off to find Champagne. They look like I do: blown apart. I wonder if they whine about losing Nora now that she isn’t around to scold them for it.
After we’ve eaten dinner, Matt suggests we take a taxi up to the Carlyle: “We’re dressed for it,” he says, shrugging. We do, and order Manhattans at Bemelmans Bar, where the ceiling is covered in gold leaf and the walls are painted with murals of French parks and Madeline lining up with her playmates in front of a smiling nun. We listen to the jazz trio (I think they’re really good; Matt says, “Tastes like chicken”) but also we talk and talk and make each other laugh the way we’ve been able to since we were fourteen years old—hard enough to beg the other person to shut up. There are jewel-like moments when I experience gratitude.
When we get back to the apartment, I beg Matt to put on some enormous pink pajamas with daisies all over them that my stepmother sent me for Hanukkah: “Come on—I’ve been through so much!” Eventually he gets into them, and then does the hora around my coffee table for a while. I feel less alone than I have in months.
For some reason, I still have Matt. I still have Emma. I still have New York, and I am still a writer.
And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.
24
I go to visit Lucy in rehab. We sit in an airless office with one of her counselors, who uses words strangely: Instead of “living with guilt,” she says “living in guilt”; instead of “drinking,” she says “using.” The woman urges me to go to Al-Anon—which sounds like something from Scientology, but also like Arabic. (And why do I have to go anywhere? I’m not the one with the problem.) The room we are in is very small; the window—which is sealed shut like they are in hotel rooms now—overlooks an empty parking lot.
Lucy is wearing the clothes that I sent her. She looks clean and a little tan and she smells like sunscreen and laundry soap. I want to touch her head, push her tawny hair behind her ears. Also I want to slap her.
I ask about times I suspected she was drinking, and she tells me that invariably yes, she was, and actually it was much worse than that. It was every day, sometimes starting at a bar in the morning before work. She describes a ruthless craving that was with her all the time. She would t
ry to placate it just enough, but not so much that anyone would notice. It was an exhausting and isolating task from which she had no respite.
I am unpleasantly surprised to feel not the anger or the sense of betrayal I’ve been cultivating, but an awful empathy: How lonely this must have been for her. While I was emailing the baby’s father about names, decorating the new apartment in my head, Lucy had been enslaved. And she couldn’t tell me.
I think of pictures of Lucy from her childhood: freckled, scampish, radiant. Standing in front of Mount Rushmore in black and white, five years old, wearing cowboy boots. A little older, attempting a plié in a ridiculous pink tutu, compromised but game. In the photograph that I always kept on my bedside until I stuffed it in the drawer after she left, she couldn’t have been more than one, she barely had hair. But it was already Lucy: that smile straight from the sun. I have an excruciating wish that she would age backward, into a baby, so that I could raise her now. So I could forgive her everything, anything, and love her with all the violence in my heart, and none of the need.
The counselor says that we are “at the beginning of a long, uphill journey.” She says, “Relapse is a part of recovery.”
I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I say, “Do I look like someone who’s ready for a long, uphill journey?” Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I love her much more than I want to.
But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I’m not coming with you.
25
For a while, she stops speaking to me and I don’t think that I can bear it. I feel severed and deprived, though I’m the one who said I wanted out.
But not like this! Wasn’t I still entitled to her friendship? Her love? After ten years? I call her old friend DJ and beg him for information about Lucy—how she’s doing, what she’s thinking. I plead my case: I warned her over and over again that eventually there would come a time when I would be unable to refill the tank of hope and credulity. She has made this happen, not me!
DJ thinks this is good for her. If she has to cut me out of her life in order to get well, then that’s exactly what she should be doing. He tells me I need to find a way to accept it, for my own sanity as much as hers.
He seems uncharacteristically sure of what he’s saying. But I do manage to make him cry.
—
IN DESPERATION, I GO to an Al-Anon meeting. It is on the second floor of a church rectory, in a room with green-and-white tiles on the floor and rectangular fluorescent lights vibrating on the ceiling. There is a table with leaflets and brochures; I take a bookmark that has a list of “Dos” on the front and “Don’ts” on the back. Then I join the dozen or so people sitting in a circle in the kind of chairs we had in school, the ones with imitation wood trays attached on the right side, in lieu of desks.
A guy in his thirties reads something procedural from a shabby binder to start the meeting—“We have no dues or fees but we do have expenses”—and then says it’s time for the “qualification.” It’s confusing: It becomes clear that a qualification is a speech, because now a woman named Mallory who could be twenty-nine or fifty-two is telling us about her experience growing up with an alcoholic mother, whom she identifies as her first “qualifier.” (If alcoholics are addicted to drinking, it seems clear that these people are addicted to repurposing the word qualify.) Mallory says she was raised never to speak about her feelings, never to express “the holy trinity of shame, anger, and fear.”
I’m in the wrong place. My parents never drank, and I’ve never stopped verbalizing my feelings. I have nothing in common with these people, and I dislike their awkward pidgin.
I look at the clock. I have been here for five minutes, tops. I wonder if there’s a way I could find anyone in the school-chair circle attractive. (There isn’t.) I read the list on the back of the bookmark.
Don’t:
Be self-righteous.
Try to dominate, nag, scold, or complain.
Lose your temper.
Try to push anyone but yourself.
Keep bringing up the past.
Keep checking up on the alcoholic.
Wallow in self-pity.
Make threats you don’t intend to carry out.
Be overprotective.
Be a doormat.
It is, I think, too bad that’s not the “Do” list, because then I would score a perfect ten.
Mallory has been feeling “very triggered” this week. Her ex-husband—her “second qualifier”—has been inconsistent in their negotiations about who should get to spend midwinter vacation with their daughter, and inconsistent is one of “the four I’s.” The other three are irrational, isolating, and in denial, and apparently if an addict is exhibiting these I’s routinely, it means he or she is “active” (which is to say “using,” which is to say—as we do in America—drinking). “And do you know what ‘denial’ stands for?” Mallory adopts a knowing smirk, and pauses for effect. “ ‘Don’t Even Know I Am Lying.’ ” Several people issue world-weary grunts of acknowledgment. I resist the urge to point out that this kind of “know” doesn’t start with n.
Mallory smiles even more sagely and tells us that “in the rooms,” she’s learned to “keep the focus on myself,” and not to obsess about her ex-husband’s drinking. She has learned to take it one day at a time, and to have faith that “wherever I am today is exactly where I need to be,” because of a “program called Al-Anon.”
My head is about to explode. Why did Mallory not just say “Al-Anon”? We all know it’s “a program”—we’re fucking here, right now. Why the phrase “in the rooms,” when the perfectly normal “at meetings” already exists in English? Why all this mysterious, ridiculous qualifying, and why this reluctance to say “drinking” when we’re all here because of it?
“Hi, I’m Jason, and I’m grateful to be here,” says a man to my left, who still has on his overcoat; he is probably on his lunch break from an office job in the area.
“Hi, Jason.”
Jason thanks Mallory for her qualification and tells her that he appreciates her serenity and that he can relate to her experience. “The thing about denial,” he says, “is that it’s like sleeping: You don’t know you’re doing it when you’re doing it.”
There is an extravagantly loud, knowing grunt in response, and I am aghast to realize that I am its source. Beer cans crumpled between the sink and the radiator. Why did I ask for an explanation when I saw them there, instead of just recognizing what they were: proof? It seems so preposterous—so funny, really—to think that I was forever worried that Lucy had a brain tumor, Lyme disease, a thyroid problem, a vitamin deficiency. Exactly how deluded would you have to be to live with someone, to sleep with her every night, and convince yourself that she was sober when she was drinking, using, whatever, every single day?
A younger woman goes next. She is in her early twenties, her hair is a streaky, mousy blond, she wears a skirt and tights and a fuzzy white sweater. There is a trace of something Eastern European in her voice, but it’s hard to pin down because she starts to cry almost as soon as she speaks. She moved here with her boyfriend several years ago; at first it was wonderful, like no home she’d ever known. Now she comes home from work expecting to see him, looking forward to his company, but instead drunk him is there, and as soon as she sees who it is, she’s furious, and somehow shocked, even though it’s a regular occurrence. Invariably, he denies that he’s been drinking; he tells her he feels harassed and monitored—that her accusations make him feel like he might as well drink, because he’s getting so much grief about it.
She worries he will get fired. She misses his attention. She gets her hopes up that things will change, and they do for a while, but then drunk him comes back, just when she’s starting to forget he exists.
“I’m not a mean person,” she says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. But she is mean to her boyfriend when she thinks he’s dru
nk. Sometimes she insults him, calls him pathetic. (You’re the worst, I said. And I remember the look on Lucy’s face.) She worries she’s not a loving person. She feels bewildered and angry and guilty, but most of all she feels insane.
When she finishes, several people say, “Keep coming back,” in unison. But that’s it. They don’t give her advice or respond to what she’s just said, even though her face is mottled pink and her breathing is jagged.
“I’m grateful to be here,” Gavin, an older black man who is wearing a sweater vest, tells the group. I realize that I am grateful to be here, too. I’m grateful not to be yelling at Sophisticated Lucy, or to be feeling like a bad person for having just yelled at her. I’m grateful I’m not tormented by whether I’m crazy or whether I’m right. I’m grateful to the possibly Slavic girl for describing something I have experienced—because if this is a pattern, if there is a way that alcoholics from all over the world behave, maybe it wasn’t that Lucy didn’t love me enough to quit. Maybe all of this was not really her choice (which is to say not really her fault).
Gavin says he’s been in the program for almost twenty years; he started coming after his brother drank himself to death. He was demolished by the loss. At the first meeting Gavin attended, someone read something that gave him a flash of solace: “Just for today, I will adjust myself and not try to manipulate the situation.” He had spent years trying to persuade his family that there was something wrong. But his brother was gone now, and that could not be changed, no matter what Gavin did or said. He opened his mind to the possibility that, really, it had never mattered. The situation, his brother’s drinking, their parents’ response, had all always been beyond his control.