Conversation was near impossible, with them or anyone. The sad truth of things was so loud that I could barely speak and didn’t see why to bother. I was waiting now to see whether my next step would be to move back home to my mother’s basement or to check myself into a psych ward. Nothing worked anymore. Meetings seemed cultish and false. I stopped answering the painter’s calls, and eventually they petered out. I was too anxious to even get high. The prospect of going to the old neighborhood, of shooting up, was terrifying. Things that had made me feel powerful now made me cower. The city was filthy, people weaving through the subways, sick and broken. Everything was either too sad or too hideous to behold. At parties I swiveled between grandiosities, feeling either taxingly omniscient or like a disgusting man with shit smeared on his coat. Misery and fear rose off of me in fumes. I hid in our apartment watching awful television, not eating.
“Newlyweds again?” Autumn would ask, walking into her apartment after work to see me camped out on the couch with Reddog, as usual. She had cable, and hated being alone, so I spent more time downstairs in her studio than in mine. “How are you not bored with this yet? You hate reality TV.” She laughed, but I could feel her gaze on me, searching for an explanation of my radically changed behavior. We both had bad days in early recovery, but not like this, not for weeks at a stretch.
“What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask.
“I don’t know,” I’d say.
I couldn’t articulate what was wrong. It was in me, and it was in everything around me. Either I was going insane or the world had finally revealed itself as a miracle of suffering and ugliness.
Only in my very early days in AA was I green enough to think I could walk myself through Twelve Steps. I’d sponsored my own way this far without the help of a designated guide, I thought at first. And look where that got you, answered AA. My counterargument had quickly run out of steam, the painter’s studied nonchalance on the subject notwithstanding. I might have known a lot, about a lot of things, but I didn’t know how to stop getting high. My search for the perfect sponsor commenced a couple months before the depression hit. The cardinal rule for selecting a sponsor, everyone told me, was to find someone who “has what you want.” Many newly recovering souls had been sufficiently demoralized by the wreckage of their using to see sobriety as enough to fulfill that criterion; they just wanted the help of someone living significantly further from the cusp of death than themselves. They wanted someone who seemed happy some of the time. I envied these people for the gift of desperation, wishing I could also overlook the neuroticism and vanity in every eligible woman who spoke up in a meeting, who offered me her phone number. Most character flaws, or “defects”—as the parlance of AA went—I could accept in friends, people I admired and even accepted advice from, but not a mentor. I could not feel superior to a mentor; I knew that much. My search went on. At one point, I thought I had finally located her: a woman who was both cool and smart and sexy and tough and funny and warm and an artist, who made pulling it all off look effortless. Apparently, I was not the first person to think so. She kindly apologized for being unavailable for sponsorship right then. My search resumed. When the chairs of meetings asked if all the women in the meeting available for sponsorship could please raise their hands, I scoured every face and, finding a flicker of desperation, of neediness, in each, discarded them. I really did want to find the right one, I told Autumn, and everyone else who kept gently hounding me, but I couldn’t afford to be wrong. I had enough trouble breaking up with lovers.
Then one rainy afternoon, as we concluded the Serenity Prayer and dropped one another’s hands, a friend turned to me.
“Have you found a sponsor yet, Melissa?”
I rolled my eyes and turned to face her.
“No, Jen, I—”
“Because Greta here would be a really good fit for you, I think.” She grinned and leaned back to reveal the woman seated on her other side. No older than thirty, the woman wore a bright yellow rain slicker and had lank blond hair that fell around her delicate face. She leaned forward and offered me her hand.
“Hi. I’m Greta,” she said in a gravelly voice, and followed it with a gentle whinnying laugh, turning the awkwardness of the introduction into a joke between us. I took her hand, with its blunt fingernails—her grip surprisingly hard for such a pretty woman—and was a goner.
Greta and I strolled a few blocks from the meeting and sat on a bench outside St. Mark’s Church.
“So, what’s your story?” she asked me, half-smiling. Her gaze was direct, but I could tell she was nervous, too. It didn’t matter; I had already decided on her.
“What’s your story?” I asked her, more sheepishly than I normally would have returned a question I didn’t want to answer. She shrugged and then told it. I related to a lot, beyond the drug hijinks, especially her affection for the feeling that one could live on fumes, as she put it, deprived of most human sustenance, but not caring. I knew the comfort of emptiness, the safety of knowing you could just drift through anything like a mote suspended in a shaft of sunlight or whirling on the breath of an opened door—it didn’t matter, was all the same. I craved that feeling even as I sat on the bench beside her, mesmerized by the sound of her voice.
I trusted Greta, insofar as I trusted anyone. But I cared too much what she thought of me to ever be completely honest with her. I wanted what she had: effortless beauty, a one-bedroom, an unself-conscious indifference to people she didn’t care about, a dog. The only one I ever admitted to was the dog. Greta talked me out of it. I believed she could help me, but was more interested in seducing her than taking her suggestions. I knew better than to try my usual tricks but didn’t know of an alternative. So I just admired her, and felt awkward a lot of the time, caught between wanting to be her, wanting to sleep with her, and wanting to let her help me. The program was a system of vicarious reference: I had to trust in what she had done to stay sober enough to do it myself. I also had to tell the truth, AA doctrine said. But if I knew nothing else, I knew that neediness was not seductive. I couldn’t bear the thought of being seen that way. So, I spent a few afternoons a week a few blocks south of Union Square Park, curled on her couch with the warm weight of her doe-eyed pit bull in my lap, as we passed AA’s core text back and forth, reading a page aloud at a time. I gleaned what comfort I could from her—not an insignificant amount—without ever revealing the whole story, about my job, my desires, or my fear that I was one of those who could never stay clean, whom the AA literature referred to as “those unfortunates who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.”
When my psychic state began spiraling, I didn’t see what Greta could offer me, my problem not really being one of addiction. It seemed comically far-fetched that my problem had anything to do with accepting a false ninety-days-clean coin. I was an astute liar, a gifted liar. It worked for me, and I had been lying half of my life with an unwavering moral compass. The truth only needed to be spoken between me and God, I told myself, and whispered pleas before bed as if I believed in one. No, my problem had to do with the dismal state of the world, and possibly some irreparable psychic flaw of my own.
18
“NO, MISTRESS, the other paddle, the sorority paddle.” Jack’s plump hand strained against the rope that tied his ankles and wrists together, gesturing toward the pile of spanking implements. Glaring at his massive rear, I tottered over to the pile and selected the wooden oar with holes in it. “Yes, yes, that one.” He wheezed. I walked back behind him and rested a gloved hand on his lower back. Like the rest of his body, it was waxy and white, like sweating cheese, with wiry hairs sprouting from its surface. My glove slipped as I groped for a firmer purchase.
“So the other sisters and I have noticed what a fabulous slut you’ve been lately, Margaret,” I said. As Jack shifted his bulk, I tried to remember the details specified in the crumpled list he had handed me during our consultation. “And we have reached a consensus.”
“Oh
?” The breathy falsetto was three octaves higher than his paddle request had been.
“Yes. Whorish behavior demoralizes the reputation of the entire house, and we cannot tolerate it. You need to be punished, Margaret, and I have been elected to do it. I have de—”
“The purse, Mistress, the purse!” he whispered.
“Oh yes. First, I need to search your purse for, uh, evidence of your slatternly exploits.” I balanced the paddle on his back and picked up the grandma-style clutch from the floor. “Don’t let that paddle fall, Margaret,” I warned him. Tipping the purse upside down, I shook loose a dozen condoms, a pack of tissues, a porn magazine with the cover ripped off, a pair of giant panties, and a huge mushroom-shaped butt plug. Jack whimpered. “Well, well, well. What do we have here, Margie, you little pig? Is this what you like to keep hidden in your panties? Maybe we should pop this into that fat ass of yours right now.”
Jack cleared his throat.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“My pussy,” he whispered. “Call it my pussy.”
Hasids often topped from the bottom. When I first started working and heard that Orthodox Jews were among our most frequent clients, I felt a pang of satisfaction. Of course they were! Repressive societies had to be the most perverse. It was exactly the kind of anthropological curiosity I had hoped to discover working here. The novelty quickly waned. The first time one showed up, his bespectacled face framed by two long curls and the sort of black wool hat that is ubiquitous in certain parts of Williamsburg, I was nervously intrigued. And then it was just me and another naked man alone in a room for an hour. A very bossy naked man. Jack fit the stereotype. He appraised me when I walked into the room but never met my eyes. I was appraised every time I walked into a consultation, but this was different. He was picky and already knew exactly what he wanted. My intelligence mattered even less than usual. The scan of his eyes over my body was mechanical, assessing, unselfconscious. I might have been a cow. He lacked the romanticism of many of my clients: I didn’t hold a mystique that his wife lacked, and I wasn’t the girl whom he could never have. I was ineligible for anything other than a sexual device and so was un-considered. His gaze assumed that I already knew this.
Jack came with a typed list of instructions, but most didn’t. I knew by now to ask every client what words were important, what stockings, music, and makeup. Clients who topped from the bottom specified little before the session began. They pretended to be a different kind of client. “Schoolmistress,” they’d say, as if trusting that I would know all it entailed, which I did, just not down to the ordering of every last detail and inflection. I knew what “schoolmistress” meant and what kind of makeup and stockings and pain they required. But still I would spend an hour having every movement of my tyrannical role dictated to me. It was maddening, like being asked to run sprints in a straitjacket. I knew what to do, I was good at knowing what to do, but they still whispered the answers to me. I walked out of these sessions flushed with furious humiliation. I had signed up to be in control, I thought, to feel powerful. But still I saw these men. We all did. It was rare for anyone to turn down a session. They engaged a part of me that enjoyed persevering, which took pride in sticking out the painful ones. It was reminiscent of the state I entered while getting tattooed or waiting out a drug-induced sickness, or any kind of pure hell. It was an odd complacency, like when I was eleven and slept on a broken bed for a year, just because it seemed easier than requesting a new one. Either way, I was good at this, too; I could withstand.
As I became increasingly depressed, I increasingly avoided Greta. After that final weekend binge, I slipped even further from my daily phone-calling schedule than usual. I didn’t have the will to assume any false cheer and grew tired of hearing the same suggestions: go to a meeting, pray, help a newcomer with less clean time than me (the last would have been harder than Greta knew). Her and Autumn’s concern only seemed to drive me deeper in. The thought periodically occurred to me to confess my relapses, but I quickly dismissed it. Yes, I cringed at every reference to my clean time, but then I’d always known that secrecy could be lonely. I knew it wasn’t the source of my misery and the humiliation of confessing, in addition to that of counting days all over again, would surely be worse. More concerning was my waning ability to work, the evaporation of my interest in anything but the fleeting escape of television.
Only when I had reached such a nadir that my only future options seemed to be checking into Bellevue or returning to Cape Cod to live out the rest of my days a recluse in my mother’s basement did my resolve against telling Greta and Autumn the truth weaken. What did I have to lose? My life in New York couldn’t go on much longer. I finally called Greta and made a plan to meet at her apartment, with the intention of telling her about my using. Perhaps, I thought, her disgust in me would make giving up the life I had here easier. I must have had some fragment of hope left, to have made the decision to confess, but it didn’t feel that way.
I kept my eyes lowered on the L-train ride into the city; I hated the wild envy I felt when I looked at normal people, young and pretty and with a capacity for excitement about what might happen. What had changed in me?
“Hi,” Greta greeted me at the door to her building, one eyebrow cocked. “Good to see you again.” She pulled me against her in a hug, and I felt the strength of her muscular little body, her hands pressed against my back as if she hoped to imbue me with something. I plodded behind her up the stairs to her apartment.
“You want some tea? I have that soy milk you like.”
“Sure.” I sat on her couch, hunched over to examine some invisible message on my phone. After she had carried two mugs over and placed them on the coffee table, Greta pulled the phone out of my hands and placed it beside them.
“What’s up?” She sought my gaze and held it stubbornly. She let the silence stretch on until I couldn’t bear it anymore.
“I didn’t really get ninety days,” I said, my gaze skittering away from hers, settling on a knot in the wood floor. “I relapsed. A couple times.” I swore I saw her frame relax slightly.
“Twice?”
“A few times. I’m not sure how many.” I waited for her eyes to harden and quickly wished for a lecture instead of straight-out dismissal. I hoped our relationship could end on a decent note, with her giving me the opportunity to apologize and explain myself, though I had no idea what such an explanation might entail. I told her about the night of speedballs, the brunch with my dad, and the wretched sock-drawer organization that followed. “There were a couple others before that weekend, too,” I glumly added, still inspecting the knot in the floor. “I figured I might as well tell you the truth, since I’m probably leaving town anyway. I know you can’t fix this. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me.” I looked up when I heard the familiar whinny of her laughter.
“Of course I can’t fix this!” She chuckled again. “But I can tell you what’s wrong with you.” She smiled. “You’re a fucking drug addict, Melissa. And congratulations; you’ve lost the ability to tell lies comfortably.”
I kept listening, my eyes on her now.
“Of course you feel this way,” she said. “Of course you relapsed and lied about it; you’re a junky! But you don’t have to do that anymore. And you don’t have to feel like this anymore.” She took my hand and stood, leading me to a clearing on her bedroom floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked skeptically, but I could feel a kernel of hope in me, swelling with every word she spoke that didn’t tell me to leave. Standing before her bedroom window, Greta sank to her knees, pulled me down beside her, and in her husky voice she asked her God to help me. She prayed that my “god-shaped hole” be filled, and when she spoke that phrase, “god-shaped hole,” something cracked open in me and that hope spilled out, threading through my body like some happy poison.
When I walked out of Greta’s apartment that night, a veil had lifted, and the city shone for me as it had since I was a little girl—em
anating its own sooty hopefulness, its promise that even if I stopped moving, got caught in some human inertia, it never would. Whatever dismal lens had slipped over my eyes lifted. I knew as soon as I’d heard Greta say that I had lost the ability to tell lies comfortably that it was true. At least about my sobriety. Something in the past months had magnetized my moral compass.
A lot of things changed after that night. Greta’s laughter, her relentless acceptance, had tenderized something in me, softened me enough to let help in, to admit that I could be wrong. The evidence was hard to ignore, this time. It remained mysterious to me what about her prayer had cracked me open, but I was starting to figure out that some things could remain mysterious, that you could not understand them and believe in them at the same time. This relieved me, though I also still bucked against it. So much of my life had been lived with an opposite dogma: to believe only in what I knew and live accordingly. The moment I allowed myself to doubt that way of living, I stopped drinking and drugging and stayed stopped. I stopped lying. I stopped feeling smarter than everyone at meetings. I stopped stealing, even the duffel bags of books from Barnes & Noble that had been a monthly routine of mine. B&N might have been the corporate dev il, but clearly I wasn’t the best candidate to be making moral judgment calls. I wasn’t Robin Hood; I stole because I didn’t want to pay, and because I liked getting over, not because of any principle. Rationalizations fell away like scales, crisp and translucent. It suddenly wasn’t enough to know, as I always had, that deep down at my core I was a good person, or to simply feel compassion for other creatures; I wanted to be good. Not good, but good. It was a huge relief. I had had no idea how burdensome it was to be a liar and a thief. The weight of my justifications wasn’t felt until it lifted.
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