“A few weeks?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
I was about to tell my lawyer that’s too long, I can’t afford it, but she hung up, and soon after the front desk lady buzzed my room and asked if I was checking out or staying another day. I didn’t know where else to go, but told her I was checking out. I packed my suitcase, then carried my TV across the street and locked it back in the storage shed. A trucker was backing his rig into the yard to turn around and as I crossed the street again he honked once, then stuck his head out the window, smiled hard, and said something to me I couldn’t hear over his engine. I should’ve given him the finger, but instead I went back into my room and packed two of the motel’s towels to take with me, revenge, I guess, for the broken TV, though I never told them it was broken.
Behind me an engine with no muffler started up and I turned to see an old Malibu pull out of the beach lot, a First Things First bumper sticker above its rusted tailpipe. Nick hated those twelve-step, Higher Power slogans, especially when they were on cars he’d see on his way to work or just running errands. “Big Brother ruling you from somebody’s fucking tailpipe,” he’d say.
“They’re not rules, they’re reminders.”
“They’re fucking reminders to obey the rules, Kath.”
But I didn’t feel that way. Every time I saw one—usually on a back bumper—I felt like when you’re in a crowded city street and you see a face you knew once and even if you don’t talk to that person you feel suddenly more tied to your past and present. When I was using I never liked seeing them. But after the program, whenever I saw one I felt a kind of sad attraction for whatever it had to say: Live and Let Live, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time, Take It Easy, Keep it Simple. Nick’s the one who got me to stop going to meetings. In the program they let you try both ways: AA, that says we’re powerless over our addiction and have to give it up to something higher, and RR, which is based on The Small Book, which has only been around a few years and says we’re notpowerless, and thinking this just makes it easier to fail; all you have to do is recognize the Beast in you, the addict, the Enemy Voice that wants to use, accuse it of malice against you, remind yourself what a worthwhile person you are and that you treasure your sobriety, and then it’s not so hard to use all this against the Beast and not let it get what it wants. And they spelled B.E.A.S.T. in capital letters:
B=Boozing opportunity
E=Enemy Voice recognition
A=Accuse the voice of malice
S=Self-control reminders
T=Treasure your sobriety
This all left me cold, like a foreign language I’d never be able to learn. It’s where Nick went though, so I went too. But I missed the few AA meetings I’d been to, everyone sitting in a cloud of their own smoke, telling their stories and backing each other up, nobody any wiser or more together than anyone else.
Nick loved the part about Enemy Voice recognition. On that five-day drive west in our new car, hauling a tiny U-haul trailer, he drank thermos after thermos of coffee and he’d go on and on about how there’s a part of all of us that wants to kill ourselves, K, even when things are going well, especially when things are going well. And the only way to beat it is with reason and ratonality. Like a mother or father with a young kid. And he’d smile and slap the steering wheel with both hands, looking over at me, his cheeks and chin bluish with whiskers. He was so sure about it I wanted to believe it, too. But there was always that nagging pull inside me. I’d look back out at the rushing white lines of the highway, or else put the passenger seat back and close my eyes; it wasn’t a problem for me to hear an enemy voice in my head and accuse it of malice; it was the next part, drawing on all this self-love everybody’s supposed to have deep down, then telling yourself that life without getting high is better. That’s what I could never do. And after the program, as I sat next to Nick at our weekly Rational Recovery groups in Cambridge, no one talked about being powerless and living life one day at a time, which was really more how I felt. Instead, we were powerful and rational—powerful becausewe were rational—and we talked about living life one lifeat a time. A lot of RR people had even given up smoking that way, so there was hardly an ashtray in the room, though there was coffee and we all seemed to drink a lot of it.
I always left these meetings feeling like a fake. Nick didn’t though; we’d walk down the sidewalk across from the high brick walls of Harvard and he’d grab my hand and then kiss my neck, pulling me along, telling me there was a little voice in his pants he could only accuse of love. Sometimes we’d walk down to Harvard Square to eat or see a movie. I always wanted to do both, eat something heavy and delicious like lasagna or prime rib, then go to the small theater past the newsstand and all the teenagers in loose pants to snuggle down into the red seats in the dark with a large Coke and about ten chocolate peanut butter cups, just let the flickering light of the story shut up my rational, reasonable voice for a couple of hours. But then the lights would always come up and I’d blink to see Nick sitting beside me in a funk. Very few of the movie characters had control of any of their impulses and problems, and Nick said it was too depressing and exhausting for him to watch. So we stopped going to movies on RR nights. Soon we left the East Coast.
So many nights after Nick left I’d just get into the Bonneville and drive. I’d drive up the coast and down the coast and I was always looking for that gray Honda. Most of the time I knew he was far away, though sometimes I pictured him living in a neighborhood less than ten miles from Bisgrove Street, playing bass in a band maybe, living alone or with a twenty-year-old girl who had no intention of saddling him with kids, saddling him with anything. I’d still feel a little sick whenever I thought of him with somebody else, but I was sure if he was with anybody, she had to be young enough he could mold her into what he wanted. He was such a chickenshit. And I didn’t even know this until he’d been gone almost two months. I got the insight while I watched a rented movie. That’s what I did almost every night, right up until Deputy Lester Burdon showed up to evict me. I’d rent two or three movies and watch them back to back. Sometimes I’d even start in the late afternoon. Including weekends I averaged close to twenty a week. I knew how addictive this might look to anyone back in the program, or in RR, but I wasn’t putting anything into my body, not even cigarettes then, so I rationalized there was no real Enemy Voice to accuse of malice, was there?
It was a porno I grabbed from the adult section and slipped in with two PG-13s. I read once that over ninety-five percent of men masturbate while only forty-six percent of women do, and I’d always thought I was somewhere on the borderline; I did it once every few months, not enough to ever miss. But when I put in the videocassette and heard the electric moan of the recorder pulling the tape along I was already wet and there was still daylight outside, so I went around and pulled all the shades, turned off the light in the kitchen, then sat on the floor as the credits came up yellow with names like Fiona Lace and John Rod and before they were over a young blond girl was on her knees sucking off a tanned Italian in a shirt, tie, and suspenders. I had seen skin flicks before, but not many, usually at parties where I was too loaded to see, so I was a little surprised when they started to fuck and I didn’t feel like unzipping my jeans. Instead I sat back against the couch with my ankles and arms crossed and watched as the man directed the blonde to do this and to do that, to bend over his desk so he could spread her cheeks and enter her from behind. Then I pictured my husband jerking off to this and I felt my stomach and insides get pulled down a second, and I jabbed the eject button and flung the tape behind me without looking.