by Lori Carson
Late that summer, a girl at the office talks me into going to an AA meeting, and I follow her down two flights of stairs into a large basement under a Gothic church in SoHo. I spot Charlotte Winter sitting in the front row, in a room of about a hundred people. She waves and signals for me to take the seat beside her, so I do. I scan her expression to see if she’s making fun of me, or if there’s any condescension or malice in her smile, but she seems to be genuinely glad to see me.
At the head of the room, there’s a long table, with a folding chair behind it. A man speaks into a microphone. “Testing, testing,” he says. “Can you hear me?”
There’s joviality in the rush of responses.
“Yup.”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-huh, we can hear you.”
“Loud and clear.”
These people can’t be alcoholics, I think to myself. They’re too happy.
A speaker is introduced and proceeds to tell a story. I’ve never heard anything so honest in my life. He doesn’t hide the ugly parts, the way I’ve always thought you had to. He talks about how from the time he was a kid he always felt uncomfortable in his own skin. He describes getting into a car accident that put his best friend in a coma. He says he was a disappointment to everyone who loved him, and that everything he tried to do failed, or fell apart. But since he stopped drinking all that has changed.
“AA has given me a new life,” he says.
I don’t know if I have a drinking problem, but I like being in that room. I want to hear other stories. I have the sense that belonging to AA may help tether me to the world, and I’m desperate to be thrown a rope that summer. It seems like a long time since I’ve had anything to hold on to.
So I get sober. I break it off with Carl, and Charlotte becomes my sponsor. I tell her that I think I drink so much because I miss you, but she says that that’s just an excuse and the reason I drink so much is because I’m an alcoholic.
When you get home at the end of the summer, I take you with me to a meeting.
“I’m proud of you, Mom,” you say.
Sixty-nine
In the original 1998, I’ve been sober for about three years by this time. I’ve been coming to meetings, off and on, since the mid-eighties.
I walk up to the wooden podium at my favorite Chelsea meeting, adjust the microphone, and introduce myself to the group as an alcoholic.
“Hi, Lisa,” they say, all together.
The room is full of AA members I’ve come to know, some to love. Most of these people have heard part, or all, of my story before.
I’m tired, just back from another quick trip to Los Angeles, where I met with an agent who has agreed to represent me as a composer. Soon I’ll settle there, leave New York for good. But this evening I’m glad to be back among friends.
I tell the group that I first came to AA, many years ago, not because I thought I was an alcoholic but because I was heartbroken and desperate and couldn’t stop myself from doing stupid, irresponsible things. I always think of Gabriel when I tell this part. I’ll never forget how much it hurt to lose him, as if I’d been thrown back into a cold universe, my chance at happiness gone.
I say that drinking was my medicine, until it stopped working. Without it, I was lonely and uptight and a bitch. I couldn’t imagine surviving without something to numb myself.
But I’ve learned to accept that this is what it feels like to be a human being: happy, or lonely, or sad, or afraid; to go on living when things are hard, or scary good, or just kind of in the middle; to roll with life’s disappointments.
When I speak of disappointment, I feel the shadow of you, Minnow, though I keep you pretty well hidden from myself, buried deep. You are a part of the past that I don’t allow myself to dwell on.
I wrap things up with a few words about my career. It makes me feel better and gives my AA story a happy ending. The group applauds as I take my seat. We go to a secretary’s break before resuming with a show of hands.
Seventy
Gabriel loses the election in November.
“I’m pretty sure it was fixed,” he says. “But we’re not going to ask for a recount. It’s disappointing. Still, the numbers show there are people who want change, and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
“I so admire you for trying,” I tell him.
“Gracias, mi amor,” he says. “I appreciate it.”
After the election, Gabriel goes back to L.A. His new record wins a Grammy. He gets a supporting role in a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. In 2002, he returns to his country to run again, this time for a more modest position, and wins by a landslide.
When Gabriel and I were young, he once told me that he was different from other people. “They think because they hold a fork like I do that they’re the same as me. Not all people are created equal, Lisa. That’s a lie.”
Seventy-one
I’m never going to have children,” you say, pushing your arugula around with a fork. We’re at the French bistro across the street. You’ve decided it’s a contradiction to love animals and eat meat, and have declared yourself a vegetarian. You haven’t figured out what’s okay to eat yet, though, so have ordered only a green salad. I take a bite of my turkey club, hoping to tempt you. You reach across for my french fries and devour them one by one. “You probably would have been a famous musician if you didn’t have me.”
“Probably not. And where would you be? Besides, I don’t think being famous is what it’s cracked up to be.”
“Gabriel says it gives you a platform to help others. Plus, it makes you rich.”
“Being rich doesn’t necessarily make you happy,” I say, signaling our waitress for more coffee.
“Gabriel says that’s just what rich people tell poor people to keep them quiet.”
“Oh, does he? Well, Gabriel doesn’t know everything.”
“Anyway, there are too many people in the world already.” You’re at the age when young people discover the world is broken and jump to hasty and idealistic conclusions. And, of course, you probably will have children, Minnow. Most people do.
After lunch, we walk arm in arm back to the apartment. The song I’m working on has a pretty melody that gets stuck in my head. Its lyric sings:
Good-bye, good-bye,
Good-bye.
You’re a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston. You come home every other weekend at first. I meet your train at the station and see you from far away, smiling, dragging ten pounds of dirty laundry behind you, hair knotted into dreadlocks, wearing worn overalls with a hole in the knee.
At the end of the weekend, I help carry your bags back to Penn Station. We load them onto the train. When I lift your backpack to the overhead rack, you pull it down again to remove a book or a sweater. “Go, Mom,” you say, worried that I intend to ride with you all the way back to Boston.
Little by little, you’ll break away, fall in love again, spend a summer in Costa Rica, and decide you never want to come back.
With only moments to spare, I step off the train and stand waving to you from the platform. Through the darkened window I watch the shape of you becoming smaller and smaller as the train pulls slowly out of the station.
Part 3
The Original 2010
Seventy-two
All the way from JFK, I watch the skyline in the distance. It’s always bittersweet to come back. When my father was sick, I lived at The Surrey, near Lenox Hill Hospital, for almost a month, shared a room with my mother. For weeks, we sat at his bedside, my mother, my sister, and I, waiting for test results, questioning doctors, coaxing him to eat something, while he looked less and less like himself. Until finally, he was released to hospice care, and then he was gone.
I’ve been back a number of times since his death, for holiday visits with my family, or an occasion with Alan and his. Last year, we all gathered at the cemetery to see my father’s headstone unveiled.
Usually, as soon as I could, I returned to my life in Los Ange
les. But I’ve left my car in the long-term lot this time. All that relentless sunshine can be depressing when you’re already depressed.
“You need to just move,” Jules said. “Take a trip! Go to Europe.” Or New York, I thought. It occurred to me that Marta Lightman lived somewhere in the tristate area. I had just agreed to work on her score.
Traffic slows to a standstill approaching the Midtown Tunnel, and I curse myself for forgetting to tell the driver to take the Triborough. Not yet arrived and already reverting to New York ways. I shift and sigh while he pretends not to notice.
Eventually, we’re through and on the other side. “It’s okay I take First Avenue?” he asks.
“Maybe the FDR would be faster,” I say, leaning toward him. There’s Plexiglas between us. I notice his ID photo. I think he’s from Ghana, or someplace else in West Africa.
“Okay,” he says, and soon we’re speeding uptown along the East River.
It’s spring again in New York City. The earthy scent of it blows through the half-open taxi windows as we cut through Central Park at Ninety-seventh Street. The apple blossom trees are in bloom. It’s the best time of year to be here, if you don’t count the fall, when the leaves are turning. My eyes drink up the architecture, fashionable pedestrians, the tended trees of Central Park West, the museum, the elegant buildings on West Eighty-first Street. Then we make the left onto Columbus.
Though the Café Miriam is now a Mexican restaurant with a different name, the sidewalks surrounding the Museum of Natural History are still made of cobblestone. Columbus Avenue is more crowded than ever with restaurants, shops, and bars. As we pass the Sheridan, the third-floor windows seem to call out to me. I half expect to see Gabriel’s head pop out, and behind him the girl I was, worried and young. She’d have given anything to know what the future held. What would she make of herself, thirty years later?
I think about something the record producer Will Dimitri once said to me. We were at a bar in Chelsea, and I was still drinking, or maybe I was drinking again, because there have been times when I struggled with sobriety. It was a long time ago.
“Will,” I asked, “why do you think we have the lives we do?”
He was very smart, drunk or sober. “Your life is just an extension of what you are,” he said. “It’s an illusion, this idea that we choose our lives. You are your life and there’s not much you can do about it.”
We come to a halt outside Alan’s building, a limestone prewar on West End Avenue, and I pay the taxi driver from Ghana. I’ll spend the night here until my sublet begins tomorrow. I remove my keyboard and a suitcase from the trunk. Years of touring have made me an efficient traveler. Rarely do I need more than a single bag. Again, I think of Gabriel. He’s the one who taught me, a million years ago: “You bring it, you carry it.”
I lean on the buzzer and hear the cacophony of children screaming and the dog barking as Alan says, “Come on up!”
Seventy-three
Once again I am his sous chef, chopping onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. He watches over my shoulder, says, “A little finer,” and I make the correction without comment. Alan’s gray hair reaches almost to his shoulders. He looks good. Happiness suits him.
Maeve is working late. She’s a poet, but also has a real job—one with a paycheck, which allows them to live well. Alan’s job has been mainly playing the guitar with me, but he’s got a regular Saturday-night gig now and says he’s picked up some other work, too.
I’m not performing anymore. It hit me one day that I was holding on to something that no longer made sense. I walked off the stage at the end of another tour, turned to Alan, and said, “That’s it. I’m done.” He didn’t believe me. I don’t think he believes it, one hundred percent, even now. It doesn’t mean I’ve stopped doing what I love. That’s what I tell him. I’ve just had to find other ways. That’s all.
Justin and Samantha, Alan’s six-year-old twins, sit coloring at the kitchen table. He separates them when the hitting starts.
“She’s bossy,” Justin says to me about his sister, “and she pinches.”
“He started it,” she says.
“Nobody’s pinching anybody,” Alan says calmly.
I sit down at the table, between them, and begin to draw. I don’t know how to talk to kids, but can usually get around it by joining them in creative activities. When I pick up a gold glitter pen, Samantha takes an interest. She snatches it from me to add her own gold glitter. She has Maeve’s wild red hair. Justin looks exactly like Alan and Alan’s parents.
By the time Maeve gets home, dinner is almost ready, and the kids and I are Wii bowling. Lola the beagle is the first to welcome her.
Maeve has a pretty Irish face, freckles, and an upturned nose.
“Hi, Mommy,” the kids say.
“Hi, guys.” She kisses my cheek. “How are you, Lisa? Good to see you. Thanks for keeping them entertained.”
Maeve saves her warmest greeting for Alan. I see their kiss out of the corner of my eye. The kids have gone back to the game and are arguing over whose turn it is.
“Mommy!” Justin says. “Tell Samantha to stop.”
“Play nice, Samantha.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Five minutes till dinner, everybody,” Alan says.
Loneliness is like being inside your own bubble.
Seventy-four
The brownstone off Lexington on the north side of Ninety-first Street has a worn facade and an ancient fire escape, but its oversize front door, painted matte black, gives it a certain elegance. Inside, there’s a curved banister and a carpeted stairway that leads to the apartment—a narrow floor-through, three flights up. It has a tiny foyer, a hallway to the right, leading to the bathroom and kitchen. On the left, there’s an archway you pass through to the living room, which is small but has high ceilings and a fireplace. Off the living room is the bedroom, big enough only for the full-size bed it contains, but that’s fine with me. I don’t expect to be sharing it.
The place is sparsely furnished in the way of short-term rentals. It has the basics: a sofa, a table, two chairs, and a TV. Everything is dated but clean. I unpack my own pillow and make the bed. Place a plain glass vase of yellow tulips on the fireplace mantel, put the rest of my things away.
My first night in the apartment, unable to sleep, I lie awake listening to the traffic on Third Avenue. Through an open window, I can hear a group of young people go by, laughing and singing. A dog starts to bark. I find myself thinking about the last time I had sex—more than a year ago. As the man I loved reached for me, the feeling I had was one of relief. We’d been fighting all day, but maybe we’d get through it. I felt love, sadness, longing, defeat, desire, need, as I kissed his face and ran my hands over the rough growth of his nearly shaved head. He was a big man with a broad back. I could barely get my arms around his body, heavy over mine.
What if it was the last time I’ll ever be with someone I love? My mind begins to race through every regret and fear I have, every slight and resentment. Monkey mind, it’s called in Buddhism.
I’ve been learning to meditate this year and attempt it, breathing deeply and counting my breaths. I keep breathing and counting, and after a few minutes, I find I’m able to slow my thoughts down until finally they do stop coming, and it’s almost like floating in space. I feel very relaxed then and seem to be drifting off to sleep, when another thought breaks through to the surface. Somewhere I’ve read that human beings aren’t any good at predicting their own happiness. We are incapable of rightly knowing what will make us happy.
That’s the nature of my problem, I think. I’ve made choices that can never be rectified. I turn my pillow over to the cool side and roll onto my back. But there’s no cure for my monkey mind that night.
At some point, I know I do fall asleep, because when I wake up it’s almost noon, and I stumble into the kitchen, thankful for the drip coffeemaker I find there.
Seventy-five
Pushed up a
gainst the living room window, the table becomes my desk. It gives me a familiar view of rooftops and sky. Thirty years ago, I lived in another brownstone just twenty blocks from here.
I turn my computer on, check e-mail, and read the paper. Finally I reach for a manila envelope in my bag. Finding the DVD inside, I slip it into the disk drive of my laptop.
I Gave My Love is a documentary about a young single mother in a depressed Catskill Mountain town. I’m to meet with Marta Lightman, its director, later in the week and hope to have a better idea of what I’m doing by then.
In the opening scene, the camera follows a nurse into a bright hospital room where a young woman, Ashley, is screaming and crying as she gives birth to a daughter. Ashley is pretty and blond, even as she grows red-faced, her hair soaked in sweat. She’s screaming, “Oh, shit! Oh, my fuckin’ God!”
My song “Don’t Fall In” is playing in the background. Marta has filled her temp-score with songs from my second record, Room Inside, a collection of folk rock and ballads that Rolling Stone gave three and a half stars in 1992. I’m to replace all the music with a new score.
After her baby’s birth, Ashley is abandoned by her abusive boyfriend, moves back in with her crack-addicted mother, loses her job at Dunkin’ Donuts, fills out forms for public assistance. In the final scene, the baby’s first birthday is being celebrated in her grandmother’s double-wide with an angel food cake and a few unwholesome-looking relatives. She grins happily, her face and hands covered in cake.
“Still True” plays through the scene. Its lyric, written so long ago for Gabriel, is now a love song to a child.
Baby, all I’ve ever looked for is a safe place,
All I’ve ever longed for is your warm embrace …
The most moving scenes in the film are the ones between Ashley and her newborn. In one, she breast-feeds her daughter while being interviewed. “What does it feel like?” the unseen interviewer asks.
“I can’t describe it,” whispers Ashley. The way she says it tells you everything. The best part is when the baby reaches up to hold a piece of her mother’s hair. Such a touching, intimate gesture. It’s like a knife to the heart every time.
