The Dress (31 page)

The baby she had not known she had wanted, the baby that she had been going to get rid of, before Frank came along and rescued them both, was suddenly a reality. Until this point, six months into her pregnancy, she had still not considered the life growing inside her as any more than a catastrophic event, one that had pushed her and Frank into a shotgun marriage.

Now, as she could feel her own body scrabbling to release this tiny life, Honor realized that she wanted the baby more than anything, ‘Please God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry for all I have done,' she pleaded. ‘Don't do this...'

She ran to the toilet, but slipped on her own blood. As Honor collapsed on the floor, she felt the baby's head press against her cervix and her body push into the pain, until the foetus released itself, sliding on the end of the cord, across the polished tile. She cried out then reached down and gathered the tiny, bloody body up into her hands; it was a girl. The baby gave two short breaths, and then died. Honor cried out then and held it to her chest, enveloping it into the folds of her nightgown. When Frank came in and found her, Honor was in a sobbing heap on the floor, writhing and rocking in a pool of her own blood.

Frank roared, ‘What happened? Honor, Jesus...' He moved towards her, then seeing the bloodied lump in her hands, he got frightened and ran from the room, to get help.

He returned, moments later, with a Plaza housekeeper, whom he had flagged down in the corridor. The older woman took a scissors from her apron, cut Honor's cord, then wrestled the dead baby from her sobbing clutches, to dispose of it. As she did so, Frank tore a sheet from the hotel bed. He gathered Honor her up in his arms and carried her himself, in the lift downstairs, to the waiting ambulance, holding her firmly, keeping her body steady, while she cried out, ‘My baby, my baby, give me back my baby.'

The hospital staff were nice. Honor was given a sedative, cleaned up, fed tea and biscuits and told to go home and rest.

‘Try again,' the doctor said to Frank, ‘in a week or so, as soon as you can. She'll recover quickly from this, the female body is very strong.'

Over the following few weeks, Frank was kind and resolutely cheerful. He did not pressure Honor to try for another baby straight away.

‘There's time,' he said. ‘We're married now. We have all the time in the world.'

He moved his new wife back into the Fitzpatrick apartment on Fifth and Jones made the place perfect for her. Although he had eliminated all evidence of Joy from every room, Honor knew from the impeccably chosen furniture, the French imported Jean Prouvé pieces about which her friend had boasted so often, that she was a cuckoo in this nest. The child that had been conceived, through her callous passion for Joy's husband, had been taken from her and now Honor had to live with the guilt every day, living in the home of the woman whose husband she had stolen.

She went back to work, but her heart was not in design anymore. In truth, Honor could not find her heart; she seemed to have lost all feeling for Frank, even for her parents; she was numb. It was as though all the love in her had been disposed of, along with her dead child. Swept away into a hotel incinerator, like garbage.

Honor had no ill feeling towards the hotel worker who had wrenched the dead baby from her arms. It was as much as she deserved, after all the bad things she had done.

Joy knew that gate-crashing Frank and Honor's wedding had been a mistake – a horrible, humiliating mistake.

The doormen from the Plaza had thrown her to the ground harder than they needed to. As she fell on the sidewalk, Joy saw that Frank had followed them out; he stood over her with a look of such cold, cruel fury on his face that he did not even have to lower himself to speak to her, to get his point across. He looked ready to spit at her and, if he had been less of a gentleman or if the Plaza staff had not been watching, she was certain he would have done so.

But then, sometimes, even when things look really bad, they work out just as they are supposed to. If Joy had not found herself begging at her inflamed ex-husband's feet, if she had not felt so low that her greatest ambition was simply to get enough drink inside her to end it all, then she would not have managed to stagger as far as the bar of a small cheap hotel on West 58th, with the intention of drinking as much whisky as she could afford and blagging a bottle to take home with her. And if Joy had not walked into that bar, at that particular moment, she would not have bumped straight into a man, causing him to spill his coffee. ‘Oh my goodness me,' he said. ‘I am so sorry, ma'am.' Then, seeing she was not burnt or hurt, he smiled and added, ‘Well, hullo, remember me?'

He looked vaguely familiar, although Joy had no idea where they might have met before. He was certainly not a business associate of Frank's, or indeed, a fellow socialite's husband, not in such a shabby suit. He had a pleasant, but forgettable, face and was looking at her with a curious mixture of pleasure and concern. Joy suddenly realized it had been a long time since anyone had looked at her with anything other than pity, or anger.

‘Can I get you something?' the man said. ‘Please, come and sit down, you look shaken.'

In the face of his kindness, Joy remembered the way the man in the liquor store looked at her, his cold detachment, Jones's pity and disgust when he had entered her apartment, the fearful irritation on the face of the security men who evicted her from the Plaza, the abject horror on the faces of the hotel guests, Frank's fury. She briefly looked over the stranger's shoulder and saw her own face, reflected in the mirrored window, distorted, ugly, her eyes filled with immeasurable sadness, yet glinted back at her with a kind of demented fear.

‘Here,' the man said, holding the chair out. ‘Let me get you something. What would you like?'

She could have a double shot now, to obliterate the pain and yet, looking across at her own reflection, Joy realized that, despite all she had drunk up to this moment, the pain was still there. The pain had always been there, even in her beautiful youth, even if nobody could see it except her, the lousy pain, the aching in her heart, the white noise in her brain which told her she was never good enough, never beautiful enough, never lovable enough, was always, always there. Drink used to be her medicine, it used to make the pain go away, make her feel happy and clever and light. Drink used to be her friend, but seeing herself in that moment, in that bar, she wondered what kind of a friend drink was to her, really, anymore. She had drunk a half bottle of Scotch before getting herself into the Plaza that morning and it hadn't made things better, it had made things worse.

One's too many, a thousand is never enough.

The words came into her head from nowhere and she said to the stranger, ‘Coffee. I would like a cup of coffee, please.'

The man paused, the merest flicker of surprise in his eyes, then added, ‘I'm having a sandwich, would you like me to order you one?' and Joy shocked herself again, by saying, ‘Yes, that would be very nice.'

She sat at the table and, when the sandwich arrived, Joy, who had not eaten for as many days back as she could remember, toyed with it. Then, as she went to lift her coffee, her hand started to shake, sending a wave of the brown liquid splashing onto the saucer. She was mortified. This had been a mistake; she needed to get home, she needed a drink.

The stranger held out his hand and, putting it on top of hers, steadied the cup. Then he went up to the bar and came back carrying a drinking straw and a large glass tumbler.

He decanted the coffee into the glass, added a heaped spoon of sugar and the straw, then, gently placing it in front of her, said, ‘Drink it like this. I'm sorry, I don't even know your name?'

‘Joy,' she said. ‘My name is Joy.'

She easily sucked the warm sweet coffee through the straw, her hands clasping each other firmly under the table. It felt soothing, like proper medicine.

‘Your name suits you,' he said, then, as if pondering the meaning, smiled and said her name out loud, ‘Joy.'

There was kindness in his face, but not a shred of pity.

‘My name is Dan,' he said, ‘and I'm a recovered alcoholic.'

*

Dan knew how to drink coffee through a straw when you had the shakes and he knew how to blag that final top-up drink out of a barman to get you home. Dan knew just how much drink he could take, without getting caught out in his job driving people around as a car salesman, and he also knew just how many drinks it took for a guy to wrap a brand new Continental around a lamppost and end up in the slammer. Dan lost a wife, a job and ended up in a mission downtown, before he rolled up at an AA meeting, where he found God, sobriety and enough work selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door to earn him the shabby suit on his back. He stayed away from places that served drink, mostly, but sometimes he stopped into a hotel bar, for a coffee, just so he could remember what it was like.

Funny how he had met her, both times, in a hotel bar and it was when he said that that Joy recognized him as the man she had met in the Waldorf bar, on the night of her party.

‘I never forget a face,' he said, blushing, ‘especially...' He trailed off and Joy knew that he had been going to tell her she was beautiful, then realized that she was glad he hadn't. Joy didn't want to be beautiful to anyone, anymore; she didn't want to be anything to anyone.

Joy did not know what to make of this man. She had let herself be picked up by him because she thought he would buy her drink, but instead, she was drinking coffee and listening to his life story.

By the time Dan had finished, Joy found she was feeling so settled, after the sandwich and the coffee, that she was ready for a drink. However, it didn't seem right, after all he had said, asking Dan to buy her whisky.

‘Matter of fact, I am off to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting now,' Dan said, ‘if you want to come along...'

She looked at him, scandalized at the suggestion she was an alcoholic, but he stayed firm.

‘The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking,' he said, ‘and if you'll pardon me saying, ma'am, it looks like you might be just about ready to stop.'

Joy did not know that she was ready. However, she didn't want to go home to drink alone, in her small, unkempt flat, so she said yes.

There were twenty other people packed into the small room, in a mission hall. The air was thick with smoke and, as soon as she entered the door, she was embraced warmly by several people and invited to sit and listen.

A man called Simon and a woman called Dolores sat at a long table, while a man, called John, introduced them and read from a big blue book that looked something like a bible.

As the two speakers told their stories, Joy felt herself open up. Although one was a carpet salesman and the other a barmaid, Joy felt as if they were talking about her.

‘I always felt as if I was never enough.'

‘Drink gave me confidence, it made me feel like I was a whole person.'

‘Alcohol was the medicine I needed to help me cope with my feelings.'

‘Everyone thought I had a drink problem, except me.'

As the meeting went on, she heard people confessing to things she did alone: hiding drink, not eating for days, waking up and not knowing how she had got home. Her secret thoughts seemed commonplace among these people.
I blamed my messy life, my bad marriage for my drinking; it never occurred to me that my life was messy and my marriage was bad, because I drank.

It was as if, in that one hour, Joy heard the truth of who she was and who she had become, for the first time. She had given up drink before, but never really with any genuine intent; it had only ever been to keep Frank happy, she had never really believed that drink was a problem. Life was the problem, Frank was the problem, Honor was the problem. Of course, they still were, but looking around the room, at these cheerful ‘recovered drunks', as they called themselves, Joy realized that she was not alone. If these people had stopped, maybe she could, too.

After the meeting, most of the twenty people sat about, chain-smoking. Someone handed her a cup of coffee, just how she liked it – black and strong and as sweet as sherry.

Dan introduced her to the speaker, Dolores, and said, ‘If you want to hang around and get sober, Joy, Dolly here will be your sponsor.'

Dolly explained, ‘It's just a sharing partner, we call ourselves, someone you can call every day who can help you work through this thing we call the programme.'

‘It's the only way,' Dan said. ‘Most of us were hopeless alcoholics, but we all work through these twelve steps...' He nodded to a large poster on the wall. ‘...and that causes what we call a complete psychic change or spiritual awakening. My compulsion to drink was removed after my first meeting.'

‘I had three weeks, craving a drink,' Dolores said, ‘but after a month God removed my need to drink and I haven't looked back.'

‘Are you ready for a change, Joy?' Dolores asked. ‘Are you ready to start a new life?'

Joy looked into the face of this plain woman, who seemed to be in her fifties. Dolores was far from beautiful, but her lipstick had been neatly applied with a steady hand and that, Joy realized, was more than hers had been today. There was a certainty and a sense of peace around her new ‘sharing friend' that seemed to her, in that moment, impossibly unattainable and yet Joy was being offered the chance to reach for it.

Not drinking alcohol ever again seemed, in itself, a ridiculous task and yet Joy knew she could not go back to the way things had been.

The poster of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous loomed over her.

Step 1: Admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.

Joy's life was a mess and she was an alcoholic. Was that it after all? Had Frank been right all along?