“Of course I’m different when I drink,” I say. “That’s the whole point of drinking. Why would I guzzle all those liquid calories if I wanted to stay the same?”
“What’s so bad about being who you are?” Helena says.
Despite my frequent complaint that Helena doesn’t go deep enough, when she does, I see now, I don’t like that, either.
I stroke her arm, lower my voice. “How can you feel alone? I’m right here.”
Helena shakes my hand off. “I don’t care what you do when you’re alone or with your friends. But from now on, you can either drink or you can spend time with me.”
I look longingly at my cocktail. A drop of condensation traces a trail down its contours, gathers, plops onto the dark wooden bar. And then I do something I’ve gotten good at doing since life took a turn on me: I adapt to current circumstances. I draw a new bright line.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay what?” Helena asks. I’m not surprised by her skepticism. Quick compliance is not exactly my groove.
“Okay, I won’t drink when we’re together.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I beckon to the bartender. “Can you bring me a boring-ass Perrier?” I say, pushing my cocktail toward him. He nods sympathetically and takes my happiness away.
—
A FEW NIGHTS LATER Helena and I are at a bar with friends, waiting for our table. Helena does not look happy. I follow her frown to the half-drunk martini in front of me. Of course I ordered it, and of course I drank half of it. But I didn’t do either of those things consciously. Without even realizing what I was doing, I broke a promise to Helena and to myself. That scares me.
It scares me enough to make me decide to stop drinking—not only when I’m with Helena, but all the time.
—
THE FIRST NIGHT without a drink is pure hell. I feel like I’m depriving myself of pleasure for no good reason. I channel my frustration into moving my booze from the kitchen to the storage room under the house. It helps a bit not to find myself eye to eye with a bottle of Bulleit every time I open the pantry door. But I’m still tense, edgy, angry. The second night is worse.
Jesus, I think on the third night, speed-spooning Ben & Jerry’s into my mouth in front of the open freezer, I really am addicted to drinking.
On the fourth night I have a prearranged date with Charlotte. She suggests happy hour, of course. I counterpropose a movie.
“I’m not drinking right now,” I say.
“That’s so great!” she exclaims.
“What’s so great about it?”
“I wish I could stop drinking.”
“Why?”
“It would be good for me. I wouldn’t be so . . . fuzzy at night. And maybe I’d lose some weight. And . . . I don’t know. It just seems wrong that I have a drink almost every night.”
“Why don’t you stop, then?” I ask.
After a long silence, Charlotte says, “I don’t know.”
—
EVERY MORNING I PROMISE MYSELF a Hendrick’s martini that night. And then I realize that I don’t want one martini; I want two or three or four. I want no limits. I want to dose myself with exactly as much oblivion as I choose. Knowing this makes it easier to live one more day and one more day without happy hour, without Hendrick’s, without that blessed nightly “I’ll think about it tomorrow” haze.
Not drinking stops sucking so badly after a couple of weeks. I actually start to enjoy the discipline of it, and the simplicity. It leaves me fewer choices to make. Instead of choosing between driving to meet a friend for happy hour and spending twenty bucks on an Uber, I’m driving. Simple. When I get there, I don’t have to choose from an irresistible list of cocktails; I’m having a cranberry and soda with lime. Simple.
Not so simple: I stopped drinking, ostensibly, to save my relationship with Helena. But absent the buzzed blur, I find it harder to ignore what’s missing between us. “Good enough” was good enough when I was drinking. Sober, I’m painfully aware of what I don’t feel.
EIGHTEEN
I have news,” Hannah greets me, standing in her doorway, watching me schlep my stuff up her driveway. I’m here for an impromptu Memorial Day writing weekend, inspired by the current heat wave—otherwise known as late spring in Los Angeles. It was 99 degrees when I left Silver Lake.
“Let me guess,” I say sarcastically. “You got AC.”
Hannah has lived in L.A. all her life, and she’s never lived in a house with air conditioning or heat. Until ten years ago, she says, she never missed them. Post–climate change, she has electric heaters going all winter and fans going all summer.
“Sorry. No.” Hannah follows me into the house and gestures at her newly recovered white couch. “Have a seat.”
A frisson of fear runs through me. That’s what my dad used to say when he was about to administer my latest punishment. Hannah sinks into the matching “chair and a half” across the coffee table from me, her shoulders squared, her eyes locked on mine.
“You’re not going to like this,” Hannah says. “But I promise it’s gonna be okay.”
Hannah and I are so different, I don’t know how we manage to be so close. If I were about to tell her something she didn’t want to hear, I’d be having a twitchy, codependent fit, all insecurity and guilt. Not Hannah. Once she’s decided she’s doing the right thing, she marches into battle fully fortified, sans doubt or remorse. I attribute at least some of our dissonance to the difference between New York Jews—real Jews like me, that is—and L.A. Jews like Hannah. The West Coast version seems to me a diluted, imitative, sweeter version of the original, like those hipster brands of cream soda or Noah’s “New York” Bagels. In New York, the city adapts to the Jews, which is probably why Lenny Bruce said, “If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.” In L.A., the Jews adapt to the city.
“Earth to Meredith?” Hannah says.
“I’m listening.”
“Michael and I are moving,” Hannah says.
My mouth goes dry. “To Silver Lake?” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “It’s about time you came over to the light side.”
Hannah hates L.A. She grew up here, got temporarily rich writing a sitcom, divorced her stand-up comedian husband, and married salt-of-the-earth Michael, an ER doc. She hates everything I love about the city: the heat, the sun, the density, the sheen of brash style. Hannah made me feel at home in Los Angeles when I arrived from Northern California, and she’s always dreamed of retiring to the place I left. I’ve coped with her threatened desertion by telling myself she’d change her mind, or she wouldn’t leave till after I die, or there would be a nuclear war before she could carry out her nefarious plan.
“Michael got a job in Santa Cruz. We’re buying a house there.”
As this information moves from my ears to my brain to my solar plexus, Hannah keeps talking. “It’s only a five-hour drive from here. Six at the most.”
“When are you—?” Leaving, I cannot say.
“In two weeks. The hospital wants Michael there ASAP.”
“Two weeks?”
“Don’t freak out. I’ll come to L.A. at least once a month,” Hannah says. “I’ll stay at your place. We’ll have our pajama parties there instead of here. You’ll hardly even know I’m gone.”
“I’m happy for you,” I say, meaning it. “I’m proud of you guys,” I add. At sixty, she and Michael derive much of their happiness from the rebar of routines that keep their lives in place. Now they’re throwing themselves, their two dogs, and their cat into the situation they normally do everything to avoid, dramatic change.
“Happy” is also the worst possible description of how I feel—for me.
Since I moved to L.A. two years ago, Hannah’s house, Hannah’s kitchen, Hannah’s guest room—and most of all, Hannah herself—have been my anchors, m
y solid ground. But right now it’s grown-up time at the O.K. Corral. My dear friend and her beloved husband are getting what they’ve always wanted. Mustering a mazel tov is the least I can do.
“You still talk to your Bay Area friends on the phone all the time,” Hannah points out. “We’ll stay connected the same way.”
We both know this won’t work. Hannah’s my age. She and I don’t do digital. We have an in-the-flesh, analog friendship. We’re a pair of bears, keeping each other and our cave warm. We eat her quiche or my cookies while bitching about publishing. We host writers’ brunches together. We meet up at our mutual friends’ book readings at Book Soup, halfway between her side of town and mine. We go shopping at the fancy furniture store she loves, and she teaches me about fabric as we browse. She arrives early for Bungalito parties so I can put tinted moisturizer on her face and mascara on her lashes. And we do what we’re supposed to be doing right now: spend a day or a weekend together, writing and cooking and talking and laughing.
Michael wanders into the living room and waves in my general direction, averting his eyes. Michael is a savant at emergency medicine and a profoundly shy, socially awkward man. The three of us have been in the same house at the same time on many occasions, and not once before has he entered a room in which Hannah and I were having a conversation. I’m guessing he’s here to provide backup for his wife, which is so sweet in so many ways, it makes me even more determined to get over myself and give them my heartfelt blessing.
“Michael,” I say, imitating the witty, composed adult I wish I were, “you cannot possibly be serious about taking Hannah away from me.”
Michael regards me somberly. And then he nods. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, Meredith, I am.”
Hannah laughs nervously. Michael watches her watching me, his eyes moist with worry. I laugh, too, which beats the hell out of crying.
“Tell me everything,” I say around the lump in my throat and the panic fluttering in my chest.
It’s hard to concentrate as Hannah pulls out her phone and shows me the huge, Grey Gardens house on eight acres that she and Michael are buying, the renovations she’s planning, the fourth bedroom she’s calling mine. I’m trying to imagine my life in L.A. without Hannah’s kitchen, Hannah’s guest room. Without Hannah. We’re all at our best with people who like and admire us. I’m at my best with Hannah. So is Helena. Seeing Helena shining under Hannah’s light always makes me—made me—like Helena more. Now I won’t be seeing Helena or myself in Hannah’s beaming gaze anymore.
Just as Patricia’s encouragement kept me in my marriage, Hannah has been the biggest booster of my relationship with Helena. Hannah tells me that I’m too picky, that passion never lasts anyway, that Helena is a wonderful person who adores me, and I must be suffering from postmarital PTSD to do anything other than stay with her.
I know that Hannah can and probably will keep singing Helena’s praises from three hundred miles away. I also know that Hannah’s departure will change things between Helena and me, just as my wife’s prediction came true: although the shouting wasn’t over for months, our marriage ended the day Patricia died.
“Look at that view,” I say, pretending to study the pictures on Hannah’s screen, while wondering if I will ever lose anything again without body-slamming into the memory of losing everything.
—
A FEW DAYS LATER Helena and I are taking her niece to the beach, so I’m in the backseat when I get a text from my friend William telling me that his husband, Armando, had a stroke a few hours ago. Armando is in the ICU at San Francisco General. “It’s bad,” William writes.
“No!” I cry out.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Helena asks.
“Armando,” I begin, and then my lips freeze, because Helena doesn’t know who Armando is or what he means to me. She doesn’t know that Armando and William were our witnesses when my wife and I got married in the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder’s Office. She doesn’t see the pictures in my head right now: Armando’s brown eyes brimming with tears as the judge pronounced us “wife and wife.” Armando’s arms pulling my wife and William and my mother and me into a group hug. Armando wrapping himself in my wife’s white wedding feather boa, white teeth flashing against his brown face.
“A friend . . .” I mumble, hunched over my phone, texting William, asking if there’s anything I can do besides pray.
“Tell people,” William texts back. By “people,” he means our small circle of Bay Area friends, which includes my wife. My ex-wife, that is.
She and I haven’t communicated in more than a year. The last time I e-mailed her, she asked me never to contact her again. But I want to call her right now, even though I’m in my new girlfriend’s car, with my new girlfriend’s niece, in the middle of my new life.
Bright, bouncy Armando hooked up to tubes and machines in an ICU? I cannot bear this thought. I certainly can’t bear it alone. Ex-wife or not, she’s the one I need to talk to.
“Are you okay?” Helena asks, her eyes on me in the rearview mirror. Her niece, whom I first met a few hours ago, swivels around to stare at me.
Who are these strangers, these people I’ve known for five seconds, who don’t know Armando or my wife or anyone I really love? Where are the people who know my history, the people who are my history? Not in this car.
“I’m fine,” I say.
And then I text my wife—my ex-wife—because William asked me to.
“I have news about a friend of ours,” I write. “Please get back to me as soon as you can.”
Instantly, my phone pings. “Leaving right now!” my ex-wife replies. “Bringing food too.”
My heart soars. So she knows about Armando, and she’s already headed for the hospital. How could I have doubted her? She is the woman I knew her to be: rushing to be there for our dear friends, the men we chose to witness our marriage. Bringing food.
“So, so happy to hear that,” I write back. “I knew you’d be a great help. Please give both boys a beso for me.”
Waiting for her reply, I glance out the window. What I see—a caricature of a cute beach town—is utterly unfamiliar.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Hermosa Beach,” Helena says.
Still waiting for the gray dots to appear on my phone’s screen, I map the distance between Hermosa Beach and LAX. Six miles. Helena could drop me at the airport. I could be in San Francisco in two hours.
“I’m on my way,” I text my ex-wife. “See you ASAP.”
I stare at my phone, waiting, my heart hammering in my chest. I wait. I wait. I ignore the chitchat between Helena and her niece, the sun blasting through the car window, the sweat running down my face. I have only one purpose: to wait for my wife’s answer.
The gray dots appear. “Oops,” my ex-wife writes. “That message wasn’t meant for you. Not about the boys either.”
I stare at my phone in disbelief. What just happened? For the first time in a year, with our dear friend in the ICU, my wife texted me by mistake?
Helena pulls into a parking lot carpeted with soft drifts of sand. Out the window a wide white beach is dotted with brightly colored umbrellas and blankets and towels and people throwing Frisbees. Between shoreline and horizon, surfers are poised on their boards, hands cupped and ready, heads craned around, looking to catch the next wave before it catches them.
“Overwhelmed,” William texts me. “Will keep you posted.”
Helena and her niece are rooting around in the trunk of the car. “Want your sweatshirt?” Helena calls to me. “It might get cold later.”
Translation: it might get down to 70 degrees. What does Helena, native Angeleno, know about cold? About suffering?
“Yes, please,” I say, and get out of the car.
—
AFTER WE’VE SHOWERED and taken Helena’s niece to a rubbery lobster dinner at an imitation Maine
lobster shack and dropped her at Helena’s mom’s house, Helena asks the usual question: whether I want us to spend the night at her place or mine.
“Neither,” I say. “I’m going to stay at my house. By myself. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” Helena says.
“Be your girlfriend.”
“That again.” Helena starts the car.
“You’ve been so good to me,” I say as we head east on the 110. “You believed in me so much, I started to believe in myself. But the way I love you—it’s not the way I love. I might never love anyone that way again, but . . .”
“You’re still in love with what’s her name. Your imaginary, perfect wife.”
Helena’s eyes gleam at me angrily. This, I know, is about as ugly as it’s going to get. If she were a person who cried or yelled or begged, or I was a person who didn’t, maybe I’d be in love with her. But she isn’t. And I’m not.
“It’s not fair,” I say. “Your love gave me the confidence to leave you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for you. You’re fantasizing about a ghost.”
I flash on the time early in our romance when I told my wife, “Being with you makes me act like a happier person than I actually am.” I was laughing when I said it, but it was true. Her relentless good cheer convinced me that if I just faked it till I made it, eventually my nature would change. I wanted that. I wanted to live in the meadow, not the cave. I wanted to be like my wife: upbeat, fearless, calm. Who wouldn’t choose that over being me?
I wouldn’t. Not anymore. It’s not the ghost of my wife I’ve been fantasizing about—it’s the me I thought I could only be with her. I am that person now, without her. I’m that person now without Helena. I’m that person now.
“I want us to be friends,” I say. “I know that sounds like bullshit. But I mean it.”
Helena doesn’t answer. We crawl in tense silence through the perpetual logjam on the 110, creep north on the 101. We pass the Rampart exit, which always makes me think about “the Rampart police scandal,” whatever that was, whenever that was. We pass the fountains shooting phallic plumes out of Echo Park Lake. We exit at Silver Lake Boulevard. We pass the Chilean-Italian-Mediterranean restaurant where Helena and I had a shitty makeup dinner after one of our shitty breakups.
The New Old Me Page 20
