I USED TO THINK this was an awful story—shameful and dramatic and sad. I don’t think that anymore. Now I just think it’s human, which is why I decided to tell it. And for all the wise words about drinking heard and forgotten over the years, particularly that first blurred hour in Rich’s office, I’ve always remembered one thing he said that day, when I was buried in fear and shame at the idea that I had drunk my way into alcoholism. He asked me why I was so frightened, and I told him, weeping, the first thing that came into my mind: “I’m afraid that no one will ever love me again.” He leaned toward me with a smile of great kindness on his face, his hands clasped in front of him. “Don’t you know?” he asked gently. “The flaw is the thing we love.”
5.
SOME OF THE EFFECTS OF STOPPING DRINKING WERE immediate and dramatic. I cleaned the house, swam a mile every day, nursed my newfound craving for sugar. I went to scores of AA meetings and read stacks of novels at night when I couldn’t sleep. I got a job as an editor at a local literary review, where on the first day of work I met Matthew, a tall, gentle man with a timbre-rich voice who became a good friend, and who seemed to personify my life of second chances—with him, the world had turned from an obstacle course into an amusement park. Matthew and I would sit in the office late into the evening, smoking and reading the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts while the snow flew outside the windows overlooking Mass Ave. Six months later, The Boston Globe hired me as its underling book critic. The first day in the newsroom, my colleagues presented me with a bottle of champagne, a civility so unnerving that I carried it to the trunk of my car that night as though it were plutonium, then unloaded it at a friend’s house on the way home. In 1985, the reputation of the newsroom as a hard-drinking place was still well earned, and I was just learning the skill of meeting deadlines without a drink at the end of the day. One night I asked a fellow critic how he landed the plane after he had filed. “Oh, I just go home and have a few scotches and a couple of Librium,” he told me. “That pretty much does it for me.” I lit another cigarette, filed the review I was writing, and went to an AA meeting.
The self becoming: In my first year of sobriety, I heard a woman at an AA meeting describe the day in, day out pact with tedium and despair that alcoholism had meant for her. “I would go out and live my life,” she said, “and then come home at the end of the day and drink six beers to make it all go away. It was like covering a blackboard with writing every morning and then that night erasing everything you’d learned.”
This story stayed with me as a mantra and an explanation. What I couldn’t have known, in the drinking years, was that alcohol was my shortcut to the stars, and that there are no shortcuts, not without a price. The drink had salved, not solved the problems; it had blurred the lessons of a bad day or a celebration or any of the incremental turtle steps that constitute experience. To allow myself to drink all those years and not go mad with the psychic damage I was inflicting, I created a whiskey-tinged artifice that sweetened the myth. Now I had laid down the props, and as terrifying as this was, it was also a little like releasing a helium balloon. I had no idea the world could be so light, the flight so internally propelled.
Still, my walking through fire didn’t stop overnight. When I was a couple of months sober I had proposed an essay to the Globe Magazine about the seamier side of Atlantic City, and gone there and stayed up half the night playing blackjack, drinking club soda at the tables at three a.m. while waitresses plied the gamblers with free booze. My sponsor in AA had pointed out the foolishness of this maneuver, but I made it home unscathed, particularly after witnessing the predawn wreckage that prowled the casinos. But if the need for such mock heroics waned over the next few years, I was still horrified at the idea of people finding out I was an alcoholic. And on some level I still believed that people who could drink socially had access to a private club of risk-free, glistening highs from which I had been forever barred.
This is a dangerous myth for an alcoholic, though I suppose we all have some version of it, the old Gatsby spin in which the light through the windows is always more enchanting when viewed from the street outside. It’s the common equation of yearning, and God did I yearn: for bourbon, for the magazine ad life that attended it, for the golden, ever-elusive balm that had stoked the fires of addiction from the beginning. One night I had to go to a tony dinner party that epitomized these images: the elegant house, the bar in the library, the seemingly dazzling table talk and constant flow of wine. I was the only person not drinking, and after consuming great quantities of Perrier, I got in my car at midnight and collapsed. In tears, I called a friend who was a late-night DJ and always awake in the wee hours. “Those people don’t matter,” he said to me. “You’re stronger and better than all those people.” This was the same man who, with care and patience, had listened a year earlier when I was contemplating life without alcohol. “I’m afraid that if I stop drinking, I’ll be dreary, and anxious all the time, and dull,” I had told him. “Well, you might be,” he had said matter-of-factly. “The only thing you can know for sure is that you’ll be a whole lot less drunk.”
After a while, a whole lot less drunk was what I aspired to be. I learned to navigate the alcohol-sodden social terrain and sometimes avoid it altogether; what had once beckoned as a charmed life became less enviable over time, and even alien. I knew something fundamental had shifted one night in downtown Boston, where I was part of a welcoming group for a visiting luminary. We met at the Ritz-Carlton, and everyone else—all of them men—ordered two-fisted drinks of Polish vodkas and double scotches. I smiled at the waiter. “What sort of designer water do you have?” I asked, and after he’d taken our order, the luminary cast me a look of scorn. “You don’t drink?” he said. “How boring.”
“Not to me, it isn’t,” I shot back. Rather than feeling exposed as the fragile woman with the club soda, I was instead stunned by the man’s rudeness. I had stopped caring what he, or maybe anyone, thought.
BY THE TIME Caroline and I became friends, we were each fairly well out of the corridors of isolation that went along with alcoholic drinking. She’d been sober a couple of years and was trying to maintain her footing, particularly given the exposure that Drinking: A Love Story had received. Some of this publicity had been as absurd as it was grueling: One TV news crew tried to arrange an interview in a bar, then asked her if she could cry on camera. I had more than a decade’s worth of meetings and sobriety behind me—we had both stopped drinking when we were thirty-three—and I could well remember those early, new-colt efforts at reorienting a life. But while Caroline had, in many ways, protected herself by going public, I had chosen the opposite path; the only people who knew what I’d been through were close friends and family. Because I hadn’t wanted her candor to dictate my own disclosures, I waited months into our friendship before I told her. I was sitting in her living room one autumn afternoon and said, “There’s something I need to tell you,” and she looked apprehensive—What have I done wrong?—and I smiled at her worry and said, “This probably won’t surprise you, but I haven’t had a drink in twelve years.”
The look on her face was of relief and happy surprise, the oh-my-God smile of connection. Months later, we were talking about the night we’d first met years before, when we had been foisted on each other at a party. Unbeknownst to her, I had been sober several years by then. “I remember how shy you were,” I said. She laughed at her memory of me, even though I had been holding a glass of club soda at the time. “I remember thinking,” she told me, “that here was a woman who could probably drink the way she wanted to and get away with it.”
So much for first impressions; that was one of the few times I saw Caroline’s instincts about people fail her. If our individual pasts with alcohol were familiar, the more intricate and lasting truth we shared was about the ability to change—the belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.
This was the melancholic’s version of hope, but a studied one, and we carried it with us whether confronted with real difficulties or the mundane fender benders of life. Caroline had rowed her way out of anorexia in her late twenties; I had crawled and then limped my way out of polio. That long climb had made me both determined and stubborn, traits that had been essential to my getting sober. Because Caroline and I recognized in each other this mode of survival, we gave each other wide berth—it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves. When Caroline insisted that she walk Lucille four miles, I assured her that two was plenty; when I insisted on trying to lift an unwieldy thirty-five-pound boat over my head on a downward ramp, she drove to the boathouse to help me carry it. We named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine, which took away the sting when I got beaten on the river or she wore out in the pool, and we invented the character of Sarah Tonin to personify our quasi-dramatic selves. Each gave the other permission to lower the bar—I would call her from the boathouse when the wind was fierce, and she would convince me not to row. This latitude extended to our self-doubts about the lives we had chosen, the ambivalence we shared about being moody introverts who often preferred the company of dogs. One night when Caroline was making tea in her kitchen alone, she was flooded with a sense of well-being. She reported this the next morning with a sort of confessional delight. “Oh my God, I’m the merry recluse!” she told me she had said aloud. “And Gail is the cheerful depressive!”
As usual, Caroline got a column out of that evening’s epiphany—the merry recluse became a character in her print chronicle of her own fears. “Is there a column in this?” she would ask in the middle of a conversation funny or profound, her ever-present omniscient narrator trolling for material. Like most friends of writers, I found this dual scrutiny by turns flattering, amusing, and irritating, even though Caroline went to great lengths to protect her subjects’ privacy. One of the worst fights we ever had happened after she had lent me her boat to row on an October morning. Pulling the scull out of the cold, murky Charles River, I had lost my footing, and the boat’s sliding seat had come off its tracks and gone flying into the river.
I was heartsick at my clumsiness, and Caroline had to talk me out of diving into the filthy river to search for the seat. “It’s not like you lost Lucille,” she consoled me, but she was still annoyed, and it took us both days to recover. She was exasperated that I had put the boat out of commission for a couple of weeks; I was upset that she was upset. But the later dissonance came in Caroline’s effort to disguise me. When she wrote about this tempest—an essay about intimacy and conflict for a women’s magazine—she turned the lost object into a pair of gold earrings. Now I was the one who was annoyed, even though no one in a million years would mistake me for an earring borrower. I was angry because I thought that in trying to grant the essay a wider appeal, she had traded down our tools. We didn’t borrow jewelry; we took it off or stopped wearing it altogether. Masters of our own universe, we were, a country small and self-determined.
For me the territory had been hard won, which is one reason I was so protective of it. The younger daughter of a warm-hearted Texas patriarch, I had adored my father and, in the classic Oedipal dance, had tried to find a romantic partner who measured up to him. Maybe such efforts always carry a hint of doom; as a firebrand who sought both to imitate her dad and defy him, I was bound to get equivocal results. Caroline too had been beholden to the commanding presence of her psychoanalyst father, and had been hurt in relationships with men. The exception was Morelli, who because of their separation I wouldn’t meet until more than a year into our friendship. The spring of the publication of Pack of Two, we threw a book party in the middle of the Fells. I looked over the rise to see a soft-eyed man with a gentle demeanor approaching with a camera slung over his shoulder. When Lucille ran toward him, he got down on one knee to greet her. “Oh my God, is that Morelli?” I asked, and Caroline nodded with a familiar wistful grin—one that translated into What do you think? “I think you should marry him,” I said, “and let him raise the kids.”
My half-cocked remark held a lot of truth, and was less reckless than it sounded. Caroline had written about Morelli for years, in columns and in her memoir; even during their faux breakup, they had stayed connected in a way that most ex-partners can’t or won’t. So I already knew, given her history with men, that his generosity and caretaking both sustained and confused her. But I also knew that day by the way Lucille responded to him, and he to us, that Morelli was different from the men Caroline had been involved with, particularly the horrid character of Julian, the controlling lover she had portrayed in Drinking. We used to laugh with relief at the traps we’d avoided; in a typical incident from our parallel lives, it turned out that we’d even fled the same man years before. When the guy started describing the sunsets he planned to show me, I had rolled my eyes and broken our date; Caroline had gone out with him later that year and wound up chauffering him all over town at her expense. Our age difference, along with circumstance, had placed us on separate points along the same path. In the wake of her parents’ deaths and her stopping drinking, Caroline was at the start of a whole new realm of self-reliance; like me, she had found that a dog had elicited in her a sustenance and warmth she’d never imagined. In some ways Morelli’s very kindness and staying power got in the way of those discoveries—I suspect she needed him to go away for a while, but not too far, which is what he did.
WHEN I WAS IN the throes of leaving Sam, my version of Caroline’s Julian, he had looked at me across the dinner table one night, mired in his own drama of defeat, and said to me, “You know, sometimes the light of you is just a little too bright.” This was a charming spin on the old it’s-not-you-it’s-me routine, and it took me months after our breakup to sort out my wants from his finely scripted sorrows. The women’s movement had given me a leg up on all kinds of rough times, and yet, to my chagrin, I’d brought few of those resources into this relationship. The shards of my fallen-heroine myth were part of the problem: Playing on a gender theme throughout history, I’d confused need with love and love with sacrifice. Finding my way out of that crevasse, onto the solid ground of my own quiet life, had been as liberating and hope-filled as stopping drinking had been five years earlier. From the outside this may have looked like a decline, or at least a retreat: In the years since I’d left Sam, I’d given up downtown dinner parties (and Sisyphean efforts at being constantly divine) for nights at home with the dog; I cared now about work, and friendships, and the white creature in my living room, and none of these assets was subject any longer to negotiation.
These life lessons—about grace and autonomy, about how to love without giving away the farm—were crystallized for me in the woods with Caroline and the dogs. If the two of us had had our trust shaken in lousy relationships, it was being rebuilt here, with tools we hadn’t quite been aware we possessed. For us, dog training was a shared experience of such reward that the education was infused throughout the friendship. Much of training a dog is instinctive; it is also a complex effort of patience and observation and mutual respect. Caroline and I could spend hours discussing conditioning and the intricacies of attachment; only two women who had spent years in the revelatory light of therapy could have found such rich bounty in, say, the equivocal use of the word “no” in canine communication. We bolstered each other through miles and months of training and interpretation; what had been a private pleasure for each of us was now an ongoing dialogue.
A less conscious instruction was taking place alongside the articulated one. The woman I felt myself becoming, with Clementine beside me, appeared in part because I had something to protect. Now I understood how a woman could lift a Volkswagen off her child’s foot, or all the other adrenaline-soaked stories in the culture about power and love. I was learning firsthand that nurturance and strength were each the lesser without the other.
I had first encountered this truth during a vu
lnerable time in Clementine’s life, when I was trying to make her submit to what is commonly known as an “alpha roll”—a questionable practice often prescribed for unruly puppies, in which the human rolls the pup on her back and contains her until the dog stops struggling. Most puppies will acquiesce within one or two tries; Clementine, whose temperament was both dominant and gentle, was having none of it. I would roll her over and she would struggle relentlessly, then, once released, spring to her feet and bark in protest. Ever conscious of the need to establish my authority, I’d try again. The third time, in the middle of the struggle, I had a bird’s-eye view of what I was doing. Crouched there on the floor, I saw myself as my father, who had been flummoxed and enraged by his daughters’ adolescence. He couldn’t keep us from growing up and away, and so he yelled and threatened and tried to get us to back down, which had only made it worse.
My mother had asked me once after I was grown what my dad could have done differently, instead of bullying his way through my rebellion. “I wish he’d just told me how much he loved me,” I answered her. “I wish he could have just said, ‘You are precious to me; I won’t let you put yourself in danger.’” This exchange came back to me in a sorrowful flash when I had my small, intractable sled dog on the floor. Did she really need to be convinced that I was in charge? I was ten times her size; I had language, consciousness, and history behind me—my species had been domesticating hers for thousands of years. I was playing master sergeant when there was no need for any standing army.
Let's Take the Long Way Home Page 6
