The Recovering Read online

  Years later, when a clinician described the classic addict temperament as stubbornly focused on the present moment, I was immediately convinced that this addict personality type didn’t have much to do with my addict personality type. What was I ever doing with my life, if I wasn’t stubbornly fixated on the past or daydreaming about the future? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was a way of describing what Dave’s two fingers had tried to resist: my conviction that there would never be an outside to the present moment.

  It was frustrating for Dave, I think, to have our days consumed by my ongoing dramas: first the slurred sadness of my drinking, then the grand epiphanies of getting sober. Some mornings he just wanted to pour a bowl of cereal and sit down at his desk to write, while I was pounding on his door incessantly with one intensity after another: I have to get an abortion! I have to get heart surgery! I have to get sober! That was the movie that played in my head: my desires like barbarians at his door. I wanted his constant reassurance that my needs weren’t too much for him—which was, of course, another need I laid at his feet.

  When the earthquake hit Haiti, in January 2010, we read about people holding shirts over their mouths to keep out the smell of the dead, and a woman calling her brother’s cell phone to see if she could hear it ringing in the rubble. We decided to host a fund-raiser to raise money for relief work—part of my desperate attempt to redeem the bereavement of sobriety with virtue. The bakery donated a hundred cookies and a cake, which I thought of decorating but didn’t. It would have been like making a vanity plate for a catastrophe. The whole enterprise was muddled by my cloying, frustrated desire to justify my sober life: Is this it? Doing good?

  I spent most of the party watching Dave talk to Destiny, following her body around the room, keenly aware of every moment they were standing together and laughing. I’d never felt so primal, like an animal tracking the movements of another animal—a mating rival. I’d never been so fully present in my own jealousy, without any numbing agent in sight. It was like waking up during a surgery I was supposed to stay unconscious for.

  After everyone had left, we threw away the ruins of the cake and counted how much money we’d raised for Doctors Without Borders. The whole time I was fuming, until I finally just broke down and asked Dave if he realized how openly he’d been flirting. From Doctors Without Borders to this: Few subject changes could be more embarrassing.

  “We’re honestly on this again?” He looked disappointed, and, more than anything, exhausted. We both kept cleaning—putting sticky cups in big white trash bags, sweeping crumbs into our hands—because it was easier not to look at each other when we fought.

  “It’s humiliating,” I said. “To see you standing there with her, especially after—”

  “After what?”

  “It’s just this feeling I get about the two of you,” I said. “An energy.”

  That’s when he turned and looked at me directly, his voice cold and probing: “Did you read my journal?”

  The molecules shifted in the room. I set down my trash bag and its mouth sagged open, showing red plastic Solo cups, crumpled napkins, cupcake sleeves still furred with crumbs.

  “I need you to be honest,” he said. “Did you?”

  My gut dropped. I didn’t even know he kept a journal. “What’s in it?” I asked, hating my own shrill panic. “Why are you asking?”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said.

  “I didn’t read it,” I told him. “I didn’t even know you kept one. But what were you afraid—”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  After the texts, I knew I had no right to blame him. If I’d known he had a journal, I probably would have tried to read it too. Learning about a new type of privacy just made me want to violate it. We went back and forth for almost an hour. I kept begging him to tell me what was in the journal; he kept telling me he didn’t know how to believe I hadn’t read it. If I were him, I wouldn’t have believed me either.

  “I’ve never even seen it!” I told him. But part of me dreaded knowing what the journal looked like—afraid that if I knew, I’d be obsessed with the possibility of reading it, the same way I’d grown obsessed with his phone, which I constantly imagined picking up, just like I constantly imagined picking up the bottle of Bombay Sapphire in our freezer.

  “It’s on my computer,” he said, and I could tell that maybe now he believed me, though I was already thinking, compulsively, about when and how I might read it: while he was in the shower, or at a bar. How would I cover my tracks, so it wouldn’t show up in the list of recently opened documents? Trying to know him entirely was like trying to pick up a thousand grains of rice scattered across the sidewalk.

  “Please tell me what you wrote,” I begged him. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

  “The only reason I’m going to tell you,” he said finally, “is that whatever you’re imagining is so much worse than the truth.”

  We sat together on our orange couch and he told me there had been a night back in December, one of the nights I’d lain awake waiting for him, miserably sober, when he and Destiny had been sitting on a couch, just the two of them, at two or three in the morning, closing down a party. She’d been waiting for something to happen, he could tell.

  “Of course she was,” I said, thinking: If it’s three in the morning and you’re alone on a couch with a guy, and his girlfriend is at home, then something is probably going to happen. I remembered sitting on a couch with Dave, with my boyfriend at home.

  “I told her something could have happened in another world,” Dave said. “But not in this one.”

  “You told her what?”

  “I told her nothing was going to happen.”

  “That’s not what you said.”

  “The point is, I shut it down.”

  But that wasn’t the point to me: Why had he been there in the first place? Why had there been something to shut down? To him, the story was proof of his fidelity, but to me it was proof that life was happening just as I’d feared: on couches somewhere else, with bottles all around. While I was home alone, sober, jealous and nervous and afraid, he was testing the limits of possibility, seeking the near edges of transgression. It made me sick, thinking Dave and Destiny both knew about this moment—a secret between them—and I hadn’t.

  “Why didn’t you tell me after it happened?” I asked him.

  “Because I didn’t want this,” he said, meaning the three-hour fight we were in the middle of. At three in the morning, on our couch, we didn’t test the limits of what might be. We ran our scouring sponges over the surface of what was.

  Couldn’t he just pull back from his friendship with this woman, I asked him, because it was something I needed?

  “What about my needs?” he said. “We never talk about those.”

  His needs—to connect with other people, to share a life with someone who was not constantly accusing him of something—were real, but they were hard for me to hear above the volume of my fear, which turned so quickly to blame.

  At that point it was past four in the morning.

  “Your fear isn’t about me, or about this,” he said. “It runs deeper.”

  He was dead tired and wanted to go to bed. I wanted to keep talking until we worked it out. Never go to bed angry, I’d heard. It makes me smile now. As if you could avoid it. He went to bed angry, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It was the middle of winter, but I pulled on my coat and gloves and started walking the streets—past the sorority houses on Washington and Governor, past the shuttered Co-op, with its squashes on sale; down to the twenty-four-hour gas station on Burlington, where the sleepy college student behind the register blinked when I asked for Marlboro Reds. “Always thought they were nasty,” he said with a shrug, but for me, that night, they were just right, and I smoked them in the freezing cold—on the street, in the park, on our porch—until I was finally tired enough to climb into bed with Dave, too scared to touch him, though
I wanted to, very much.

  A few weeks later, I found myself on the phone with my mother—crouched in the closet of my office, where I was sure we couldn’t be heard—telling her I was convinced Dave was cheating on me. She said she couldn’t tell me if he was or not. But she also said this: Every time she thought my father had been having an affair, she’d been right.

  My paranoia about Destiny was a tangible, humiliating receptacle for a more nebulous set of fears about the opacity of other people, the possibility of wanting multiple people at once, the diminishment of love over time, and the lurking possibility of being left. Even on the days I believed Dave hadn’t slept with her, I was still haunted by the possibility of his desire—by the way his long nights held electricity I couldn’t offer anymore, certainly not with these claustrophobic arguments.

  We never got a carbonation cartridge for the seltzer maker he’d given me. It stood there magnificent and untouched, while I still craved the booze it was supposed to help me live without.

  —

  VII —

  THIRST

  As winter turned to spring, I kept taking long drives past strip malls on my days off work, through cornfields where snow was thawing into smaller patches of crusted dirty white. But these drives seemed empty, my life unbeautiful. I was just a woman jamming my fingers into the heat vents of my car. Everything glossy or buzzed or hot-blush-drunk in my life was gone. Only strip malls and that big fucked Iowa sky remained. On one of my routes, I passed an indoor water park, with a single curve of waterslide protruding from its stucco wall, and I fantasized about that pocket of warmth and rushing water—that chlorinated speed, its oasis.

  When I was seven years old, I’d told my mom I was pretty sure I could make an apple crumble topping better than hers: a brown sugar crust baked with cinnamon and nutmeg. She gestured at the kitchen—unfazed, smiling—and said, “Go ahead.” I made a disgusting concoction with too much butter and, for whatever reason, raw macaroni, and then, too proud to admit I’d failed, I sat there eating the mixture in front of her, pretending that I loved it. Sobriety felt like that.

  Everything made me think about booze. Empty shower caddies for sale at the student store made me imagine the hypothetical undergrads who would someday use them to get ready for their sorority parties, and I envied all the drinking they’d get to do, still smelling faintly of vanilla body scrub. When I thought of my nephew in San Francisco, at the other end of I-80, I imagined all the drinking he’d get to do someday. He was just over a year old. One afternoon a stranger in my regular coffee shop, two tables away, sat with his beer half drunk in front of him for hours, and I thought, Come on already! The woman in front of me in line at the Co-op bought a split of wine, half of half a bottle, and I thought: Why would you do that? I watched Leaving Las Vegas and felt envious of Nicolas Cage because he got to drink as much as he wanted.

  Sobriety was shaping up to hold precisely the blankness I’d feared it would. I woke up every day without anything to look forward to, except the hour I spent craning my face to get closer to the small blue UV lamp that was supposed to combat my winter gloom. It was exhausting to be around anyone, because I didn’t have much inside—much energy or interest—so I had to portion it carefully across the day. Talking took effort. What was there to talk about? My family thought I might be clinically depressed, which wasn’t particularly interesting to talk about either.

  The question of producing interesting conversation in sobriety has always been tricky. In Junkie, William Burroughs describes the Narcotic Farm as full of patients who talk about nothing but drugs, “like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food.” In The Fantastic Lodge, an “autobiography” published in 1961, culled and edited from taped interviews, an addict named Janet arrives at the Narcotic Farm to find it full of patient-prisoners talking about the drugs they miss: “There’s just nothing to do, nothing—except talk about junk. All is junk, and that’s all, you know; that’s the way it is.” Even Janet’s grammar is saturated by obsession; she keeps saying the same thing over and over again—about how there’s nothing else, really, to say.

  By the end of The Fantastic Lodge, Janet has written a manuscript about her addiction and recovery, but it hasn’t done her any good. “She had come to put great hope in getting this book published,” says her psychiatrist in an afterword, and she “carried the manuscript with her wherever she went,” in a brown paper shopping bag that nearly split open from its weight.

  In meetings, I had been told that telling our stories would save us, but I wondered if this was always true. What if your story was just dead weight, a bundle of pages in a soggy paper grocery bag?

  When the Narcotic Farm’s annual reports classified discharged patients in terms of their suspected likelihood of relapse, the statistics did little more than suggest their own futility: “Cured, prognosis good (3) / Cured, prognosis guarded (27) / Cured, prognosis poor (10).” Another said: “good (23); guarded (61); poor (2).” The “guarded” category still loomed large: 61 out of 86, and 27 out of 40. Prognosis guarded essentially meant: We have no idea what will happen to him.

  I’d envisioned the logic of sobriety working like a recycling redemption center, where I’d bring all the booze I wasn’t drinking, and in return I’d get back my relationship as I’d known it in the beginning. This was the contract logic version of sobriety: If I get sober, I’ll get x in return.

  But now that I was sober, the main difference seemed to be that it was much harder for me to fall asleep after Dave and I fought. Our fights left me with so much restless energy—a vinegar tonic of anger and guilt—that I’d often leave the house at three or four in the morning and go walking like that first time, often to the same gas station on Burlington. It was strange to be out late without being drunk, strolling into the gas station utterly sober at four in the morning, as if I needed to explain myself to the clerk: I’m not partying, just awake. At a certain point, my mom—apologizing for even saying it at all—wrote at the bottom of an email: “If it were possible for me and you to have a conversation sometime about yours and Dave’s relationship when it wasn’t in response to an immediate crisis, I would really like that.”

  That winter, after months spent in a dull, zombie dream, I eventually went back home to Los Angeles and sat in a chair in the middle of a psychiatrist’s office. He asked me if I ever felt like I was seeing everything through shit-colored glasses. I said: Always. He gave me a prescription for an antidepressant and said I should dose up slowly and watch for a rash. My mother and I drove to a convent where the trimmed grass was sliced into pieces by the gray ribbons of concrete pathways. We wrote our wishes for the year and burned them to make them come true. But when I tried to pray, nothing happened. It was like I was trying to edge my way into a conversation that had already begun without me.

  Back in Iowa, on the days I didn’t work at the bakery, I trudged into my office at home—the room where I used to drink alone—and tried to work on the novel I wanted to be writing about the Sandinista revolution. Sobriety was supposed to mean you got beyond yourself, and I was drawn to the premise of the novel as a way to hurl myself as far away from my own life as possible. The novel itself was actually about the desire to give yourself to something bigger than your particular life: a revolution.

  I started researching with frantic propulsion, from the subtleties of the Sandinistas’ hybrid-Marxist doctrinal debates to the jars of blood thrown in protest against the white fortresses of Somoza’s for-profit blood banks. I covered one wall of my office with grainy photocopied photographs: black-and-red FSLN flags waving above a crowded plaza; men in berets riding buses to Managua with their guns pointed against the sky. I wrote heated debate scenes that took place in cobblestone courtyards. Did the revolution depend on mobilizing the rural peasants or gaining the support of the urban elite? At least I had the courtyard down: candles tucked in the crevices between stones; their fluted, flickering light; the sweet stink of piss and flowers; the faint shushing of palm fron
ds in the wind overhead. Minor sensory details were all my imagination could muster, a sublimated nostalgia for my drinking days in Nicaragua. But the prose sagged under the weight of all my desperate research. We must not forget the middle classes in Managua! It was terrible. I gave my characters plenty of rum to drink, the same rum I’d drunk years before, to ease the burden of all the soapbox lecturing I was foisting upon them. I imagined all that rum running in tender spicy streaks down their throats. I could have described that rum for paragraphs, for pages.

  Every once in a while, I would creep into my bathroom, get on my knees, and ask God to help me write the book. Then I’d correct myself, ask Him to help me do His will, and secretly hope that His will would be for me to write the best novel ever written about the Sandinista revolution.

  In those days, I prayed grudgingly. My faith was skeptical and contractual. I wasn’t sure God existed, but if He did exist, there were definitely a couple things He could do for me. It felt fraudulent to get on my knees in front of my own futon—right next to where I’d stashed the whiskey bottle under the frame—as if, by kneeling, I was pretending to have a faith I couldn’t actually summon.

  In order to convince myself that sobriety was worth it, I tried to write day and night. But most evenings I broke down and watched hours of reality television instead. I got especially attached to The Gauntlet, a reality-TV show where former cast members from better reality-TV shows went to beautiful parts of the developing world and competed in absurd gladiatorial contests. They dunked themselves in ice water and buried themselves in coffins. They ended up eating ice cream mixed with their own vomit. I was glad to see Trishelle get into a bike accident because I still hadn’t forgiven her for choosing Steven over Frank back on Real World: Las Vegas, though she’d eventually hooked up with both of them. (“Everyone’s cute after twelve cocktails,” she said, and I couldn’t disagree.) Sometimes I glanced up at my Sandinista wall and thought the revolutionaries must be gazing down at me, judging.