Drink_The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

by Ann Dowsett Johnston

  But for the moment, I am determined to see the complexity of our arrangement as a gift, a perpetual romance. And so I transcribe the words of White, a talisman to ward off the curse of long-distance love:

  The spider, dropping down from twig,

  Unfolds a plan of her devising,

  A thin premeditated rig

  To use in rising.

  And all that journey down through space,

  In cool descent and loyal-hearted,

  She spins a ladder to the place

  From where she started.

  Thus I, gone forth as spiders do

  In spider’s web a truth discerning,

  Attach one silken thread to you

  For my returning.

  Summer of 2005

  The days are perpetually golden. Fresh-picked blueberries for breakfast. Frequent swims. Long, meandering conversations over meals at our little driftwood table, dinners of fresh pickerel—fish we caught ourselves. Each evening, as I chop the vegetables and sip my wine, Jake creates a playlist, calling out in his deep, gravelly voice: “Can you hear it, baby, or do we need it louder?”

  Before bed, sipping scotch under the stars, we watch the northern lights, listening to our favorites: Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Keith Jarrett. In the morning, we wake to the sound of otters raiding the minnow bucket. “Those little bandits!” says Jake, leaning over me to check out what’s going on. His arms are the color of mahogany. He lies back down and says what he always does: “Where were you all night? I kept trying to find you, and you kept trying to escape.” he rolls over to kiss me properly. Another day begins, heavenly.

  This is the last summer that the little houseboat will sit on the water: Jake has bought a piece of land, and the houseboat needs to be moved up the river to its new home. We wait for a calm evening to make the voyage, multiple boats towing our romantic hideaway to its new destination. Finally, the right evening comes. Slowly, we make the voyage upriver, pushing off from Virgin Island, around the corner into open water, and under the railway bridge. We toast this auspicious occasion by opening a bottle of white wine, then another and another: There is a large crew. Some are drinking gin and tonic. I am sitting with Jake’s daughter Caitlin and her friends, pouring wine, telling stories. There is a sense of foreboding that I cannot shake. That night, Jake and I hold each other very close, as we always do, spooned together, tight. Much remains unsaid.

  Within a week, we will be in Paris, where I am giving a keynote address at a major conference. Night after night, we sit in little French bistros, designing our new home on paper napkins—the houseboat as it transitions to a “landboat.” We decide to put a fireplace in our bedroom, to fashion a room just like the one we love at Kamalame Cay in the Bahamas. While I deliver my speech, Jake sources a favorite lamp to give me as a gift. We reunite in our tiny bedroom in our Left Bank hotel, he with his parcel, me fresh from the podium. Without speaking, he unzips my dress. The parcel sits unopened. Dinner can wait.

  Bahamas, Winter of 2006

  The marriage proposal. At sunset, sitting on a golf cart by a stream, we are scanning the water for the telltale signs of bonefish. I say yes. “Can we marry in the next two weeks?” he asks. “No,” I say, with deep regret. “Too much to do with the move to Montreal.” It seems like a small detail in the effusive flurry of joy. We head in for cocktails, to celebrate in the Great House at Kamalame Cay. Freeze this moment. I haven’t been this happy in years.

  Montreal, Winter of 2007

  Trudging home from a long day at the office. It’s a frigid January evening. I pass many couples heading home together, holding hands, chatting. I pass bistros with twosomes at window tables, communing over menus. It feels like a personal affront.

  I pass three small stores selling wine. No, I tell myself: do not stop. I pass a fourth. My willpower fails: I pick up an unremarkable bottle of white. I will not earn a monkey sticker tonight. I will read Sober for Good, or maybe Drinking: A Love Story. And I will have a glass of wine. After three, I will call Jake. I am lonely beyond measure. Nothing is turning out as it was supposed to.

  I have a problem, and it’s mushrooming fast. My shame is growing, too. There has been an incident, one where I embarrassed myself.

  I have started to see an addiction doctor, and I tell him in detail about the event. Too much to drink, blacking out at the end of the evening. I am shattered.

  He thinks for a minute. “Did you ever hear of the great basketball star who came back for a season past his prime? He flubbed the game. The crowd booed. Postgame, a reporter stuck a microphone in his face, asking him how he felt. ‘I learn—even from the boos.’”

  The point? I wonder.

  “Those who love you are giving you cues. Learn from the boos.”

  Georgian Bay, Summer of 2007

  Jake and I have vowed not to drink for our entire vacation. For seventeen days in the north woods, we have abstained. Chopping wood, sleeping well, swimming hard: we feel good. We are happy. We have been to my first meeting at a support group, together: holding hands, listening to the stories. I am not certain I am ready to quit forever, but I know I have to tone it down. And we have a new deal: if I ever drink more than two glasses on one occasion, I have to join Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Last night, at my own birthday celebration, I had more than two—many more than two. On waking, I need to gauge the temperature of Jake’s mood, since I can’t remember the end of the evening. Jake is staring at the ceiling. I might as well state the obvious. “I blew probation,” I say. “Yes, you did,” says Jake. I am silent. He continues. “Baby, it’s a problem.” “I know. I know.” I roll the other way, and start to cry. He continues. “You smell like Brendan Behan.” The jig is up.

  Winnipeg, Winter of 2008

  Jake has a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, something that was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic when he was in his teens. One in ten thousand has it, and Jake was one of the unlucky ones: he’s an adventurer with what he calls a “stiff back.” In other words, he can’t turn his head: his spine is fused from its base right up to his skull. The condition has also meant he has had multiple hip replacements and now there is a pelvic rebuild—a big operation with a big recovery, one that I am nursing him through. On day seventeen, post-op, we manage to make love, gingerly. I am in love. I love being here, in Winnipeg, together at last. Each night, I cook; we build large wood fires in the fireplace, light candles, and watch Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren; we sleep long sleeps in each other’s arms.

  One night, we watch Mirren—aka Chief Inspector Jane Tennison—confront her own drinking. Waking in her living room, a bruise on her head, in silk pajamas, wine and whiskey on the coffee table. The toilet seat is up in the bathroom. Someone who had been with her the previous night says: “You remember the pub? Me leaving?” “No,” she admits. “Remember anything?” “No.” “Jesus, Jane, you have to look after yourself.”

  This we watch in silence. After Jake goes to bed, I press rewind. Jane at her first AA meeting. A former nemesis is there. She sees him and heads for the door. He runs after her: “We can’t do it on our own, Jane.” I press rewind. I know this is my future, but I don’t know how in hell’s name I am going to get there. “We can’t do it on our own, Jane.” It echoes in my head.

  “Come to bed, baby,” calls Jake.

  “I will, in a while.”

  I am too worried for sleep. On a regular basis, I pull out my copy of Drinking: A Love Story and re-answer the twenty-six questions: “Have you ever tried to control your drinking by making a change of jobs, or moving to a new location?” Yes. “Have you often failed to keep the promises you have made to yourself about controlling or cutting down your drinking?” All the time.

  I stay up late, looking for rehabs in Mexico, Googling places in the southern United States, in the Bahamas. Faraway places, where I can heal out of sight. Jake wakes again: “Come to bed, baby.” I crawl in beside him and kiss the back of his precious neck. He takes my arm, holds it clo
se, wrapping it around him. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll figure this out.”

  The next morning, Jake is holding me. “You remind me of Lucy Westenra, the beautiful woman in Dracula. Each night, alcohol comes and steals your spirit, drop by drop.” I am speechless. He’s right: alcohol is stealing my spirit. “Or maybe alcohol is your pet grizzly bear.” Right again: it’s bigger than me.

  We both know there will be no more drinking: no more sharing a moonlight scotch, no wine with dinner, no champagne at our wedding. Privately, I vow: no wedding at all, until I have nailed this problem, been sober for a year.

  How can one write about drinking—or quitting drinking—without addressing wine and romance? Every woman brings it up, sooner or later. “I can give up drinking—but what about champagne at my wedding?”

  It’s always the champagne at the wedding. Or a dry martini on a date at an elegant bar—maybe the Oak Bar at the Plaza hotel. Romance and the glass: inextricable.

  Where did all this begin? For me it started at the movies. Sean Connery, ordering his martini in Goldfinger: “Shaken, not stirred.” Honor Blackman in the background—the infamous Pussy Galore. I was eleven, and I was smitten. Connery was my first crush. The hair on his chest, the curl of his lips, his Scottish burr, his five o’clock shadow, his crisp white shirts—all of it did me in. On a sleepover, I told Dilly Capstick that I wanted to run away with him, and I meant it, too. I imagined a hot-air balloon, over France, and lots of kissing. She liked the physical details. We stayed up all night devising my plans.

  Much later, a beautiful blond would displace Connery—Steve McQueen, to be specific: on his motorcycle in The Great Escape. I remember lining up at a pajama party, taking my turn kissing the screen—I kid you not. Later, I would love him swirling brandy in a snifter before a seductive game of chess with Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair.

  My crush on McQueen lasted several years, through my black-and-white phase, when I discovered the pleasures of The Thin Man movies, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Casablanca—a movie that romances the glass, romances the bar, romances Paris. Of all lovers, no one matches Ingrid Bergman, with her liquid eyes, her perfect skin, her broken heart.

  Best memory of all? Being fourteen, watching Two for the Road: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, tucked into their little MG, or cuddled up in bed with wine and grapes, feasting on each other, bickering with each other, embracing to a Henry Mancini score. As a young teenager, I could not get enough of this movie—or rather, the dialogue. I renewed Frederic Raphael’s script at our small-town library several times in a row. (No one else wanted it.) To this day, I can quote long passages from memory.

  But nothing romanticized drinking the way Fitzgerald and Hemingway did. A Moveable Feast had an indelible effect on me. For years, Tender Is the Night was my favorite novel. At eighteen, I toted Nancy Mitford’s Zelda and Calvin Tomkins’s Living Well Is the Best Revenge around campus. Drinking and romance and sophistication and writing—all entwined, with a little madness thrown in for good measure. It was a heady mix.

  And then there was the literal romancing of the glass: shopping as a newly engaged twenty-three-year-old, reviewing crystal patterns. Unwrapping gift boxes with care: tall etched flutes, fragile and full of promise. I remember tucking them into the cupboard, knowing they would only emerge on the best occasions in my life, the ones I would never forget. And they did: on birthdays, on anniversaries, on my son’s unforgettable christening Sunday. I always romanced the glass.

  I am not alone in all of this. At twenty-eight, Julia Ritz Toffoli is the founder of Women Who Whiskey, a Manhattan-based club peopled by eighty-seven young women between the ages of 26 and 32. Many are recent graduate students of Columbia University, where Ritz Toffoli just earned her master’s. Now working as a program coordinator with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Ritz Toffoli loves what she calls New York’s speakeasy revival, and considers herself part of a cocktail renaissance. The entrance to her favorite bar—Please Don’t Tell, in Greenwich Village—is within a vintage phone booth in a hot dog store. Clover Club, also high on her list, is where Women Who Whiskey celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, complete with vintage twenties décor and a jazz band. Personally, Ritz Toffoli loves her whiskey neat—either bourbon or Templeton rye—but at heart, she confesses, “I am still a Manhattan girl.” This fits: the cocktail is rumored to have been created at the Manhattan Club for a party hosted by Winston Churchill’s mother, the Brooklyn-born Jennie Jerome. “The tale has been debunked,” says Ritz Toffoli, “but I still like to think it’s true, for the time and place it suggests.”

  Ritz Toffoli comes by her love naturally: her mother is from the Champagne region of France. “Cases of champagne were de rigueur at every holiday and birthday—as an infant, I was even baptized with champagne, holding with a long-standing family tradition. So as long as I can remember, celebration and drinking have been inextricably linked. For me, alcohol is an accessory to joyful events—not an escape from social angst, as it often is for people who started drinking in their teens.”

  I will never taste a Manhattan, I think somewhat wistfully. This is what I am jotting in my journal as I wait for “Scout,” sitting in the Botanist in London, watching her cross the street: a slim, savvy mother of two negotiating her way through the morning crowd, toward this elegant Chelsea bistro. Sitting down, she announces she wants to be known as Scout. “Scout?” I ask. “This is your preferred name? As in To Kill a Mockingbird?” (Few women with a drinking problem are willing to be named: the stigma is too large. And if it’s a pseudonym they need, I let them choose their own.)

  “Yes, Scout,” she says. “Best name ever!”

  “Harper Lee would be proud,” I say.

  She grins. “Did you see this morning’s news about women and rising liver disease?”

  Zestful but clearly tired, Scout has been up half the night. She barely sleeps. “Sometimes I functioned better with a hangover than without sleep,” she says with a wry smile, ordering her first of two Americanos.

  Scout has been sober—this time—for two and a half years. Like me, she has been a “high-functioning, high-bottom” alcoholic. And like me, she had a wistful feeling about champagne when she considered getting sober—champagne at her wedding, to be specific. For Scout, alcohol was always connected to romance: in fact, she used her very first drink to screw up the courage to kiss a boy: “I could only get it down in a competition—all because I wanted the courage to kiss him. I needed that courage because I felt ugly, fat. I was a very awkward teenager.”

  Scout was a once-a-week drinker. “Every time I drank, it was a disaster. I would only drink to get drunk. I would never eat—what was the point? It would line my stomach. I loved getting to oblivion: the giddiness, that crazy feeling of the third glass.” What triggered her quitting? “It was the blackouts, the shame.” Plus a book launch where she had too much to drink and said the following to her then boyfriend: “I would never have sex with you, even if you paid me a million pounds.”

  “When I first went to Alcoholics Anonymous, I couldn’t relate to anything until I read Caroline Knapp’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story,” she says. “I gave it to my best friend, and she said: ‘Did you used to do that? Take a swig when I went out of the room?’ Of course I did! It was the book that made me accept that I was an alcoholic, that I didn’t have to be lying in the gutter to qualify. I was working incredibly hard, had loads of boyfriends, never missed a day’s work. I was the lynchpin of my family, with a massive sense of duty. And I was definitely good fun—for the first ten years. I was quite shocked when I discovered that I had developed a problem with boring old alcohol.”

  Scout went to Alcoholics Anonymous for five and a half years. She didn’t get a sponsor or do the steps, but she stayed sober. She remembers this time as one of the happiest of her life. “Real contentment,” she says. “Calm.”

  Then she met her future husband—an active alcoholic. Within six
days, they were engaged. They had a picture-book three-day wedding in France. “All my life, I imagined my wedding day with champagne. On the day, I didn’t even think about it. It was the last thing on my mind.”

  Within weeks she was pregnant. “After my son was born, I thought my husband didn’t fancy me anymore,” says Scout. “I very consciously got pregnant again—I didn’t want my son to be an only child.” But after her daughter was born, “it was clear that the marriage was going wrong. My husband was an active addict. I wanted to connect with him. It started with an innocent glass of champagne. I remember being at an event and someone said, ‘Come on! Have one glass of champagne!’ I had one glass. Then one glass of wine. Then I decided to drink only wine. Soon I was blacking out on a regular basis. And this time—just as they tell you—it was a much quicker decline to rock bottom. It wasn’t long before I was in a real pickle.”

  Scout’s husband had an affair and the marriage soon ended. “I lost my job and my marriage all in the same year. I got a new job, and my boss would come up to me and say, ‘Do you want to know what you said to me last night?’

  “I had two children, but all I wanted to do was to have a breakdown: go to rehab. In my last five years of drinking, I really craved that feeling of peace. My brother asked me what I needed. Therapy? No, I need to go back to AA. I have always wanted a manual to life. If I do AA, it keeps me tethered to the ground.”

  Today, none of her family knows she goes to meetings, although she believes all of her siblings are genetically predisposed to the disease. She is fully accepting that she will never have another drink. “I don’t suit drinking,” she says. “Nor do I suit tomatoes. It’s as simple as that.” Does she miss it? “Sometimes,” she says, with a wistful grin. “But only at really happy times: sitting on a balcony, looking at a view.”

  Like Scout, I occasionally miss drinking at the happiest of times. I remember an awkward moment on my first sober birthday. Arriving at my favorite restaurant with my handsome twenty-three-year-old son, I was confronted with a difficult situation. The owner, who knew me all too well, delivered slim stems of champagne as we sat down, a red raspberry floating in each glass. I was only four months out of rehab. He might as well have placed a nuclear bomb on our table. Both Nicholas and I froze. “Get him to take them away,” whispered my son. “Let’s just give it a minute,” I whispered back, reluctant to cause a scene. With that my son stood up and exited the restaurant. It took twenty awkward minutes and a few tears before the evening resumed. There’s a beautiful photo of us at our table that night, one I still can’t look at without wincing.