Lit (22 page)

Where, Toby finally asks, did she meet this guy?

Church, I say. At which everybody laughs.

You should write a memoir, the agent says, and across the table, she hands me her creamy card, which I resist pinning to my dress like a merit badge. No way is the card a ticket to ride. It is a chance, though.
For years I’ve circled Boston agents like a horsefly on the off chance they might drop a card.

On the way back to the hotel, Toby says, Don’t be disappointed if my agent doesn’t sign you. She’s never taken anybody I’ve recommended.

That worries me not at all, since I’m so unable to get a pen to traverse a white sheet, I doubt I’ll ever have a single page of anything to send her.

But a small part of me wonders if prayer wrought that whole series of wonders. Joan tells me without it that I’d never have gotten (a) sober, (b) the grant, and (c) the invitation to the table where the agent solicited me and not the other way round. Nor would I have d) dared tell Mother’s goofball story without Toby drawing it out of me, for I’d have been too busy trying to pass for an East Coast swell with an Ivy League hookup instead of the cracker I was.

That may be so, I tell Joan. But I’ve also prayed to write as well as Wallace Stevens, prayed to be five-ten, and not had those prayers answered. As Emile Zola once noted: The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

O
nly an alcoholic can so discombobulate her insides that she might weigh in her hands two choices—(a) get drunk and drive into stuff with more molecular density than she has, and (b) be a present and loving mother to her son—and, on picking the latter, plunge into despair.

Which explains why I don’t deplane in Boston, saying,
Lucky me, freed from paycheck work. Let’s settle down and raise a book
. Instead, I come back feeling alternately mite-sized and unworthy, panicked as a felon facing the electric chair thanks to that fat grant. The time I’d bitched for years about not having now falls in abundance. But each day becomes a gray tundra I wade across.

Notebooks from that time contain increasingly ornate doodles, designs and lines like (I kid you not)
I am sad, the end, by Mary Karr
. In the past, I’ve been able to learn poems or whole paragraphs by heart. Now lines pour through me like water.

Guilt shadows every underemployed breath. Maybe I steer clear
of Warren so much because while I do less, he slaves like a field hand—a forty-hour work week, classes three nights a week, with massive course work and a book-length master’s thesis on Robert Lowell to finish, plus Dev in the evenings and the magazine. Any night he’s home by six, I saunter out to a meeting. Our couples therapy has trailed off. The trips to his parents’ big house, I virtually stop going along on—Christmas being an exception—arguing that the abundant booze makes me nuts.

The more Warren does, the more lardassed I get, wallowing in my dusty psychic moonscape. I complete not one sit-up, squat-press no weight, trot not a block. Thrown into a pool, I’d have sunk to the bottom and drowned before flapping a stroke. My daddy’s phrases for the lazy sometimes flurry through me—
Wouldn’t say sooey if the hogs were eating her…Wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake reared back
…Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.

One day I might splay across the sofa staring at infomercials with the sound off, wondering whether the Abdominizer is the answer, or the Pocket Fisherman, or that glittering altar of knives.

My mental function drags. I walk out leaving the refrigerator open, lock keys in the car more than once. Warren and I sleep together on separate sides, and while for years my revved-up libido has amused me in private, now even that has puttered to a halt. At the halfway house, I develop an aficionado’s taste for Thai kickboxing. Or I languish on their porch among the disabled, pondering the design on a pack of smokes. Or I sit alone in a donut shop drinking coffee with shaking hands till it’s time to get Dev from daycare.

Still depressed, my shrink tells me, and she gives me pills that send color flushing back into the tips of leaves at least for a week or two, but I don’t know how to write about color. My only vocabulary belongs to feeling dark and dead. I go days without obsessing about a drink, then—pushing Dev’s stroller past the sour fumes of a beer joint’s door—have to restrain myself from running in and downing the first
Bud I can get my mitts on. These powerful urges are close to complete madness, the old drunk self so fully occupying my body, it’s like being possessed.

Joan praises my prayer regimen—however minimalist—the one or two sentences morning and night. But she wonders why don’t I apply prayer to my other woes: floundering marriage, the work, insomnia?

Oh, please, I say on the phone. For me,
god
is a lowercase noun. God with skin on, as you said. You women keep me sober.

You haven’t let go yet.

People keep saying that. What’s it mean?

It’s like there’s some hook in your head. You’re still fueling your fears by intellectualizing them, thinking this way and that.

Everybody needs a hobby.

Unless it’s gonna lead them back to the bottle. You’re not even kneeling yet.

Sometimes I am.

Yeah, like twice, she says.

Why don’t I feel better? I say. I’ve doubled my Prozac.

You do feel better, she says.

The fuck you say, I shoot back.

You were sobbing uncontrollably the first day we talked. You had to check in to the infirmary. Now look at you.

The more I stall, the more Dev cranks up. In the park one day, he takes his best friend’s front tooth out with a stick. Another afternoon I’m collapsed on the sofa, and he pulls on my hands, trying to drag me upright. Get up, he says. The most cutting memory isn’t his fury as I recede from him, but his playing quietly, studying me with squiggles of worry around his mouth. I think our therapist has gone to France, or have we stopped seeing her after over a year of spinning our wheels? My focus is sobriety, not therapy.

Maybe that time is so blurry to me—more even than my drinking
time—because we remember through a filter of self, and of self I had little, having been flattened like a cartoon coyote by an inner anvil. With no self, experience streams past. Time lags until it’s sponged up. What I’ve forgotten from those sober months astonishes me.

I can’t even dredge up how Warren and I decide to separate for the summer. I pushed for it, I think, or did I only find the sublet? The marriage is an airless box. Outside it, I’ll spring into being—or so I believe.

I do recall confessing the decision to Joan. I’ve dreaded telling her because I think she might stop taking my calls. On the phone, I blurt out, Warren and I got the separate apartment. We’re gonna try it for a few months this summer. Dev will stay at home. We’ll go back and forth.

I don’t recommend—

—I know, that I make any changes before I’ve been sober awhile.

At least a year, Joan says. Before you make any major decision, take a year for a cold look at all
you’ve
done wrong in it. Just chronicle the resentments that are really chewing you up. Get it down on paper.

I’ve been looking at myself in therapy off and on since age nineteen, I say.

A lot of therapy is looking through a child’s eyes, she says. This is looking through an adult’s. You have some nutty ongoing resentments about loads of people.

Like about my writing group? I say, for I’d told her at some point I feared my writing group looked at me like I was stupid.

Any chance that’s from your head alone? Joan asks.

Maybe, I say, but it’s terrifying to think I might not be able to trust my instincts.

Joan sighs over the receiver. I can relieve your mind right now: You
can’t
trust your instincts. What makes you think they think you’re dumb?

Just how they look at me.

Aren’t these, like, the smartest people—in literary terms—on the planet?

They are. Doctors of this and that, translators from many languages.

Joan says, Let’s just assume, then, that you’re the dumbest person in the room—

Ouch, I inwardly say, for her sentence sang with truth, reverberating like the bronze of a bell.

—all things considered, that’s not so dumb. I mean, in terms of the general population.

Which is true. I actually feel relief at that.

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then—for me, anyway—a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There’s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking.

My weight drops back to the double digits. I’ll be walking down a street, and I suddenly feel panicked, as if the earth beneath me has caved in and I’m free-falling. My head buzzes constantly, as if an electric shaver’s running over it, some tugging metal teeth traveling over my scalp. I can hardly sit still.

Crazy. What I’ve always feared the most—that I’d go cuckoo, like my mother—seems to be happening. I don’t hallucinate. I lack any grandiose Napoleonic fantasy. But every aspect of my existence has canted me deeper in a dark space. The mind I thought would save me from the trailer-park existence I was born to is not—as I’ve been led to believe—my central advantage.

When does the idea of suicide become a secret relief, a pocketed worry stone I can rub a slight dip into?

It’s an old specter. As a kid, I watched Mother disappear into the occasional locked bathroom with a gun, and I’d alternately banged my
fists on the door, begging her to come out, then stood back and hollered she should go ahead, I was sick of her shit. My best friend from high school, Meredith of the leonine hair, tried after law school to cut her own plump throat and nearly bled to death—the first of ten or twelve attempts over ten years. I’d flown her to stay with me a few times, checked her in to the hospital a few times, more than once gone to a shrink with her. (She’d die of liver cancer fifteen years later after a brief but brilliant legal career, medicated into a stupor, weighing near—no exaggeration—four hundred pounds, which size kept her off the transplant list.)

Before I was twenty-two, I knew a spate of successful (is that the parlance?) suicides. On my childhood block, three fathers took the wrong end of a gun into their mouths. Of my six California roommates, I buried two as drug casualties. Quinn the Eskimo shot himself with the gun he’d brought to California to defend his old man’s honor.

But Forsythe went most crazy of us all. On the beach, he’d picked up and brought her home a girl with a baby, and after the girl passed out in his room; he dumped a bag of pot all over the infant in its portable bassinet. Forsythe’s roommates found the walls scrawled with toothpaste, the baby wallowing in marijuana, and an album going on the turntable with a framed photo of Forsythe’s father propped up and circling. Within the year, Forsythe died in the family garage of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Suicide as an idea seeps into your lungs like nerve gas. No precipitating event prompts my fixation on dying, just the dull racket of my head’s own Chihuahua-like bark—
death death death
. It becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be. Picking up a drink would betray everybody who’s poured effort into my sobriety—like my suicide wouldn’t? But death—now, there’s a one-stop-shopping idea. Over the months, I start to convince myself that Dev’ll be better off without me (a grotesquely self-indulgent notion no parent can afford).

One Saturday morning, after sitting up all night rewriting a sui
cide note whose maudlin, pathetic details are thankfully lost to time, I take a call from Deb in the halfway house. She offers to buy me lunch. I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note made me feel good enough to have lunch.

At some point, I confess that I have a garden hose and duct tape in my car trunk.

She signals for the bill and stands, saying, C’mon, I’m checking you in to the bin right now.

But I begin to backpedal and prevaricate. I’m joking, I say. She presses, and I press back. Warren could get custody of Dev if I go into the hospital. We may divorce, and he has all these lawyers in his family, and he’ll get custody….

Promise, she says, promise you’ll call or go to the hospital if you need to.

The next day, after a sleepless night when the dead space inside me spread like spilled ink, I drive off under the cobalt blue summer sky with the garden hose in the back of my car. But with every small click of the odometer, my doubt grows, for starting to glow inside my shadowy rib cage like a relentless sun is Dev’s face. I can’t leave him the legacy of suicide, I think. I just can’t. He’ll find out somehow. Flying past me are objects I might swerve into instead—telephone pole, tree, a ramp I could sail off the edge of into oblivion. I unclick my seat belt and try to imagine my face shattering the glass into exploding stars. But I’m a coward, and I also suspect it’s just my luck that I’ll only crush my body to live on wired up to a breathing machine.

Finally, I pull off the road into a gas station, where I bend my head to the steering wheel, sobbing, and suddenly flying through me comes a new image of Dev charging around my study with his red cape behind him. He’s coming for me, I think, like a superhero. He’s flying me out of myself.

A teenage girl taps the far side of my windshield to ask, Are you okay, lady? And I nod and wipe my eyes. I reattach the seat belt and
edge up to the road with my blinker on to turn around. Heading to the halfway house, I drive for the first time in my life under the speed limit, obeying every arcane law, slowing to let grandmothers cut in front of me. It’s a relief to place myself before the staff person on duty, asking him to call my doctor, because I’m fixing to off myself.