The Uninnocent (30 page)

The drinking had taken Margot and me to a precipice, and we had no choice but to back away into sobriety or jump. A warm May breeze flowed through the room with its promise of summer. In the sane morning light, undecorated by alcohol, we glimpsed for a brief moment just how ravaged, how unexpectedly destroyed, how diminished, how cheated by booze we were. This had to stop. Margot proposed a contract, binding as our marriage vows, in which we would solemnly agree not to partake anymore, until such time as we both felt we could do so with restraint like normal human beings. In complete accord, I typed the agreement and both of us signed and dated it, then had one last eulogizing drink before we walked through the house pouring every last bottle down the drain. Afterward we made love and in our exuberance planned a Vermont trip to see her mother and the family homestead, which I still had not visited. Other itineraries came to mind, too. Philadelphia, Atlanta, the Met again. Why not Europe? When I was there I was always too smashed to see anything. From Montmartre to the Bridge of Sighs, from Valladolid's
Ferias Mayores
to the windy Acropolis, all was a perfect tabula rasa cycled into oblivion by Armagnac, grappa, and Macedonian
Náoussa
. Maybe the moment had come for me to revisit all those places with my bride—after five years of marriage we were still newly wedded so far as we were concerned—and have the honeymoon we talked about but never got around to sharing. See what had lurked beyond the hazy veil.

That first week of sobriety was far harder for Margot than me, not because I wasn't supposed to mix alcohol with the antibiotics—that had never been an impediment—but because of the prescriptions for pain management and the sedatives I'd been given, which nicely blunted the edge of my withdrawal. Seeing the tortured, enervated glaze that complicated her already nervous eyes, I naturally shared both pills with my wife, figuring what was fair for the gander, and so forth, imagining these would help her decompress a little, ease her back from that cliff we'd articulated and decided to defeat. The turnabout was as immediate as it was shocking. What for Margot was a reminder of that month when she tried this before, was to me pure revelation. The universe of fragrances, for godsake. I never knew my catboat had such a brackish fish-tangy smell. I'd forgotten that the sheets on our bed, after being washed, would have a scent. The wallpaper in Margot's small study stank: mildew. Our clothes reeked of smoke and of something else, despondency perhaps. Food had taste beyond hot or cold. The bloated travesty I'd grown used to seeing in the mirror whenever I made the mistake of looking had mutated into a familiar face, one my parents, were they alive, might have recognized, even acknowledged. I jokingly told Margot one evening, I remember you, to which she replied, Oh, no you don't, you were too drunk. We both regarded it as some kind of miracle that, sober, we loved each other the same as when we were plastered.

As I healed and ran out of the masking drugs, my old craving resurfaced, and with it the terror that it had never receded or withdrawn its deadlock on me for a moment. I was naked again. I was suddenly dying out here. It was a matter not of hour by hour, but instant by instant that I quashed the impulse to return to the bottle. I crammed chocolate, spooned sugar from the canister in the kitchen, chased it with Coke. Knowing in my heart I was going to flunk this experiment—maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow—I could only look to Margot as a beacon of hope and strength. She might survive where it was my fate to fail. She was doing so well. Clients loved her again. She spoke often on the phone with her mother. She'd taken to reading at night rather than staring at the television or into space.

The afternoon I came home an hour early to discover her lying on the sofa, delirious, clutching an empty quart bottle of Stoli to her chest, was as exhilarating for me as it was devastating. I had every right to yell the way I did and justly accused her of breaking our contract. I wouldn't have felt a more passionate rage, such an excited fury, if she'd been caught embracing my best friend—though, of course, I realized she was doing just that. We slept apart that night, Margot in bed, humiliated, and me on the couch, mortified by the inevitable. For weeks we drank in secret until our need to be together flushed us out of hiding. Life returned to normal as we began to appreciate once more that gift we'd cherished in times past. The gift that two recluses might somehow find a path from their individual hermitages to one they could share, like monks brought together to worship a wrathful, turned-on god.

How strange of Martin to phone the night before James was going to take me out on the river, Martin telling me how much he missed me and how things weren't going so great without his good-luck charm, as he always called me, despite the fact I never brought him or anybody else much luck and didn't appreciate the sentiment nor that he asked at the dead end of the conversation how my face was doing, as if my face was ever going to do anything other than be a living topographic map of this surgeon's success and that one's failure. Stranger yet was James picking me up in a cab since he didn't drive anymore and taking me to the jetty where his sailboat was moored and helping me step aboard, then getting us out into the surging Hudson, into the pristine winds that wafted and breathed as if right through me, reminding me what it was to be in the world again, forgetting I had a face. I never meant to like him as much as I did that day, to feel such an intimacy toward him, and resisted what I saw in myself, knowing that people sometimes tend to identify irrationally with others who have been through a kindred crisis. Not that James saw or felt or thought the same things I did. In fact I had to wonder how he thought or felt at all given how much he was drinking while we sailed downwind past the Kingston–Rhinecliff Bridge and the lighthouse and pretty mansions set back on their grassy rises beyond where the train ran along the rock-strewn shore. He offered me something to drink, too, and I accepted a plastic glassful of white wine so as not to look the prude but emptied it overboard when he was tending to the sail, tacking with the unearthly agility of a specter on the deck, thin as the proverbial rail he was though my friends said that before the accident he'd been different, fleshy and flaccid, which I found impossible to believe looking at the man who now sailed me through the pelting wake of an oil barge with such easy skill you'd never know he'd ever had a single drink in his life. He cast anchor and we had lunch, some sandwiches I'd brought along, and as the boat rose and fell gently in the dull brown water we talked about this and that and the other until it came around to her, to Margot, as he called her, Margaret whom I associated with Marguerite, the oxeye daisy, the “day's eye” so-called because the flower opens its petals in the morning to reveal its center then closes them against the night. He asked if I could tell him whether she said anything to me when we were alone that day lying there, and I said he could ask anything but I wasn't sure I could answer in any way that would make much sense but that I'd try. And I did try. I told him we said nothing and everything, that odd as it might sound we made a covenant, became sisters who sensed we were in the midst of knowing something few would have or get to know in their lives, and that I'd hold the memory in myself as long as I could remember my name or hers. He sat quietly for a time and I said nothing either, wondering whether I hadn't already said too much, had misspoken, opened a wound without meaning to do more than help to close it, and he began to cry and I wept with him. It was then he did the strangest rightest thing, he chucked his bottle over the side of the catboat and held me in his arms never kissing me but holding me like a strong wind holds a sail
.

Honoring her with a halfhearted final double shot of who knows what, I swore off the stuff, swore on my mother and father's souls, vowed I was done forever with the nightmare, pledged that Margot wouldn't remain a martyr for nothing, that her spirit's better half, so to speak, would learn from her tragedy, move on toward the life she might have wanted for herself and her husband. I spent two months in rehab, flinching and trembling like a newborn during the first weeks before slowly, incrementally getting an upper hand on what they told me was a disease. Some days I seemed so full of strength I doubted that I ever had a problem in the first place; then an ogre would rise in place of the sun the next morning and I would find myself in a cauldron of craving, of aching, simply lusting for liquor. Worse yet were the long days of plateauing—speechless hours spent staring out the window across the lawn or listlessly attending my housemates' testimonial “qualifications” at the noon group meetings. My sister and mother-in-law and Ivy supported me, visiting me at the facility, writing letters of encouragement, and when the time came for me to return home all three were there to help me move into the new place, a studio apartment not far from where I grew up in that great blue Victorian house. It would not be wrong to say I was a new man. Yet it'd be terribly wrong to presume that despite everything I didn't still want to drink, because I did and will always want to retreat into that dreamier, more fluid life.

Ivy was back at the florist shop, managing it, in fact, and while too much bad blood had passed between me and the old law firm, I was hired into another outfit and found myself taking on whatever anyone else didn't want to handle. I threw myself into work and, as well, the inevitably blossoming romance with Ivy. Who would have thought horticultural shows, botanical gardens, or even the modest pleasure of having fresh-cut flowers given to you every other day with a note from your affectionate girlfriend could be so sustaining? Who'd have guessed that, sober, I had no stomach for sailing, got seasick as a landlubber and had to sell the catboat? Who might have believed it was possible for me to reemerge from that infernal maw into which I'd descended after Margot died, leaving me to bury her, I who wanted nothing more than to climb into the fresh-dug pit in the cemetery and lie there until snow and gravediggers' soil blanketed us both?

Some months after my small triumph, my return to life, Ivy and I went to Paris and we had a fine time of it as unabashed tourists impatient to visit every monument and museum. We took the train to Berlin, then down to Florence and Rome, and, on our last day, walking the ancient dirt paths of the Forum beside the invaluable clutter of tumbled columns and broken statuary, I asked her to marry me and she agreed. The bittersweetness of these itineraries, once meant to be toured together with Margot, was somewhat allayed by Ivy's own deep connection with her. But rather than casting a pall on our marriage, which Margot would, we both believed, not have wanted, we took her memory to be affirmative. We bought an eyebrow colonial farmhouse outside town, which had a view of the Catskills beyond the river, and fixed it up with our own hands. A year after we were married, Ivy gave birth to our twin daughters. A barn cat adopted us, so we called him Paw both because of his fatherly mien and outsized furry feet. I was made a partner in the firm. Three years elapsed without a drop.

Down in New York on a late November evening I attended a dinner with one of our more important clients, a wealthy weekender whose upstate properties we managed. I'd spent a long day in his midtown offices going over books and records with his accountant and another attorney, reconciling the numbers and discussing an acquisition he was considering—an annual consultation followed by the requisite dinner at a nice French restaurant just off Madison Avenue. We'd had a particularly strong year with him, and all of us were in a festive mood. Although I had a hotel reservation in case things ran late, I still had every hope of catching the last train out of Penn and sleeping in my own bed that night. For all my hard-won sobriety, it was always tough to sit with others who were there to enjoy themselves, have wine with dinner like people do, but I never anticipated how uneasy I would feel—stunned is the word—when our host ordered a bottle of Château Margaux for the table. The disease was near me, as palpable and alive as the waiter himself, who poured the vintage into crystal stemware set before each of us. Even the crisp, starched white of his sommelier's linen was dangerous.

I forced myself to concentrate on the vast bouquet of flowers that centerpieced our table, and thought of excusing myself and rushing to a telephone so I could hear Ivy's reassuring voice, but didn't. While normally I would have turned my glass upside down on the tablecloth long before the wine pourer reached me, tonight I failed to do so, allowing him to fill mine in my turn, knowing it was not for me to drink. Yes, I would lift it during the toast and clink my glass against the others'. Yes, I knew it was insulting not to partake after the salutation. But yes, all the same I would have no choice other than to set the untasted wine back on the table and leave it there to decant for the rest of the long evening ahead, unless I believed that just for once in my life, given all I'd been through and learned, I could join my friends in this most simple, convivial act.