Sober Love
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” –Joseph Campbell
A paid messenger served the Order of Protection on the Sicilian. On the subway one morning I saw an ad for Jacoby and Myers offering seventy-five dollar divorces. When one of the partners died, The New York Times included this in her obituary: “Recognizing that the rich can afford lawyers and that the poor have access to free assistance programs, Jacoby and Meyers focused on serving average people who could often not afford to hire a lawyer at prevailing rates.”
I was one of those average people. For seventy-five dollars and a yearlong separation, you could obtain a legal divorce. However, no one would listen to you complain. When I started whining about my bad husband, I was informed that cheap divorces don’t include counseling. Since there were no children, property, or alimony to be discussed, filing the papers was painless. I went to an AA meeting every day. I had a grid drawn in the back of my meeting book with the days of the week and where I would be.
Because it was Manhattan AA there were famous musicians, actors, artists, the very rich and the very poor. I called Priscilla every day and followed her to her manicure appointments when I needed to talk, the Korean manicurists understanding every other word as I told her my latest news about looking for a job and getting divorced.
photo by Arisa Chattasa
One weekend, I was invited to a huge party at One Fifth Avenue in the apartment of my old high school friend, Julie Browder. Julie had been to rehab but was still shooting smack. I had gone on a drug run with her once to Harlem, where I sat outside the shooting gallery, wanting to go inside and drag her away but too terrified to enter what appeared to be a rat-infested entrance to hell.
Despite her addiction Julie was one of the funniest, smartest women I have ever known. She had a very wealthy grandfather who left her a fortune when she graduated from high school. As smart as she was, the money opened up an entire world of drugs and a lifestyle that did not include any spiritual or emotional growth. While her mother seemed like a nice person, she remarried a man who didn’t appreciate Julie’s behavior. College was no longer as attractive as hanging in clubs and bars with addicts. Julie was two-faced. One face was bright, beautiful, and kind; the other was cruel and self-destructive.
We had reconnected after she left rehab before she relapsed, and I was trying to stay alive after Catherine was killed. One afternoon, we lay in her backyard discussing how our lives had barely started, but we had still ended up in so much trouble. I had yet to meet the Sicilian, and she was clean, so there was a hopefulness we both expressed despite the fact we had each contemplated and planned suicides.
Although I was only six months sober and knew better, I decided I could attend this party being thrown by my junkie friend in her fancy apartment. I ignored all the advice I’d been given: to bring a friend, to eat well beforehand, to avoid people, places, and things. The place was packed with guests exuding coolness and meanness. I saw the kids from our private high school who had excluded me. You were scanned and passed over, no one said hello, and Julie was nowhere to be seen.
I craved obliteration and looked around for a likely target to seduce, telling myself it was no big deal if I took a drink or a drug, preferably both. Just as I reached the point of pouring myself a glass of wine, a man stumbled up to me. He was overweight and appeared on the verge of a mental breakdown.
“I think I’m an alcoholic,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I looked around.
“I’m a fucking alcoholic. I want to kill myself.” And then he stumbled off into a room filled with smoke. I walked across the room and opened a window and took a deep breath of cold air. It was time for me to leave the party.
When I reached the sidewalk, I went into a bodega and bought a pack of cigarettes, a Diet Coke, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and a chocolate bar. Walking home, there were clusters of NYU students going into bars and windows showing groups of people drinking at private parties. All of it reminded me of the truth of my alcoholism, which was a core feeling of loneliness and separation. Whether I was born that way or had learned by watching my father gradually disappear into a glass of whiskey, the desire to numb my sense of alienation and rage was very strong.
I passed a bar where I had a vicious fight with the Sicilian. We had both been very drunk yet I remember thinking he was nothing to me, but I had to keep up the charade of our marriage to create a barrier between myself and the rest of the world. Waking up the next morning I recall we ordered mimosas and then went to another bar to further discuss our problems.
As I headed uptown on Sixth Avenue, I looked up and saw the North Star. I sat down on a bench and tried to remember how to be happy or at least not filled with despair. Grief was a constant part of my life. It was exhausting to stay alive. But then I saw the night sky and allowed myself to feel gratitude for my life, for the courage it had taken to leave my husband. “Thank you,” I said.
That night, I got back to our place and Barbara was watching Saturday Night Live on her TV. Grabbing two spoons, I went into her room.
“How was the party?”
“Awful.”
“Did you see your friend?”
“No. I think she was in the drug room. She’s back on smack.”
“Never mind.”
We dug into the ice cream.
“Nothing feels the same,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t believe I lived through my life.”
“I know. But you did. And there’s so much more now.”
That night, lying on my pullout couch, I could hear the waiters in the Greek diner ordering pancakes and cheeseburgers, their voices drifting in from the airshaft. I was safe, I was sober, I was grateful. If I couldn’t sleep, I could walk downstairs to the diner with a coat thrown over my pajamas and order a plate of French fries and talk to the really cute waiter with the bedroom eyes who always left something off my check, winking so I’d know he did it on purpose. He was safe, with an adorable new baby and a wife who wasn’t pretty but looked like she could keep him in line.
A year later, my mother called me at my new job to tell me Julie had gone back to rehab and then burned to death smoking in her bed. I thought about the funny, beautiful girl I’d known in high school and felt guilty for my own survival, wishing I could have helped her stay alive. “Molls,” she always called me ‘Molls,’ You are lucky you want to be a writer. I don’t want to be anything. I don’t care about anything except getting high.”
I understood that then, and after nearly forty years of sobriety, I still understand the pull of the edge, the longing to let go, the wishing to allow water to enter your lungs until you can slowly float down to the depths. But the miracle of love has changed everything. Once, I believed loving anything or anybody guaranteed you would suffer and feel pain beyond anything imaginable. But the longer I remain sober, I realize there is nothing else.
I left the linen manufacturer and was hired as an assistant to two editors at Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House. Chris Cox was part of what was referred to then as the “literary gay mafia,” which included the writer Edmund White. Of the eight members of that group, White was the only one to survive the scourge of AIDS. Chris was short-tempered and funny, usually sending me out just before the day ended to buy him a six-pack of beer so he could hole up in his office, editing and making author phone calls.
Mary Ann Eccles was also an editor there, the opposite of Chris, soft-spoken, reticent, apologizing for requesting menial work, asking me what she could do to make my job more interesting. Honestly, I felt like I had entered the gates of paradise. Even though I understood my position to be low, I was grateful and content. Standing at the copier, waiting my turn to copy a three hundred page manuscript, my gratitude for being delivered from the humiliating cycle of my previous life was so immense I felt honored to be trusted with anything.
I went to a party and met two writers for Rolling Stone Magazine, Charles M. Young and David Felton. Charles, or Chuck, invited me to the MTV New Year’s Eve ball, and I agreed to go.
My early experiences of dating in sobriety had been mainly disastrous. I was gun shy and skittish and had left the table at several restaurants, never to return. I developed a massive crush on the guy who had stood outside my door the night Libbet had outed me as a recovering alcoholic. Although he insisted we should remain friends, I told him we needed to sleep together, invited him to dinner, and proceeded to burst into tears. “Why are you crying,” he asked me.
“I don’t want to anymore.”
He looked hurt.
“No, no, I want to. I even put it in my planner.”
I produced my very eighties Filofax, and there was a star on the day with “sleep with Bill” printed large. “I’ve never had sex sober,” I said. “It seems like such a big deal.”
He nodded. “Let’s not then. Even though it’s on your calendar.”
I was deeply relieved.
Another terrible, brief, sober relationship occurred with a handsome theater crew guy who invited me to Jersey City and then plied me with coffee. I drank close to seven cups, had some sort of breakdown caused by overdosing on caffeine, and fled from his condo, calling Priscilla from a pay phone for help navigating my way back to Manhattan.
I no longer knew how to hunt down men as I had in my drinking days, but slowly, I remembered how to flirt, which was basically smiling, flinging your hair around, and acting fascinated by whatever the other person talked about. Charles M. Young was obsessed with punk and specifically a band called the Butthole Surfers. This was familiar territory, pretending to like music my boyfriends liked and pretending to find their obsessions charming. He told me about the book deal he had with a famous editor, and I smiled and nodded and thus he asked me out.
We went out on several dates prior to the MTV ball, and walking down Columbus. We ran into several of my AA friends who indiscreetly spoke of meetings, sponsors, and issues around AA. I valued my anonymity and hadn’t decided whether I would tell Chuck I was in recovery. When they left us, I felt embarrassed.
“Are you in a twelve step program?” he asked.
I nodded. “AA, I have a year.”
“I wish I was an alcoholic.” Chuck looked sad. “I need to go to meetings.”
The day of our first official date, a week before the ball, my sister Brigid called me. We hadn’t talked very much. We had never been close; to my knowledge, she loved my older sister much more than me. I owed her amends for a number of occasions I had behaved badly but she was so cold I avoided asking her if I could share those amends.
“Guess what Daddy did?” was the first thing she said. She didn’t even say “hello.”
“What?” I said, not wanting to know.
My father had recently returned from Europe where he had been at a Joyce seminar with the literary critic Richard Ellmann. He had brought me back a present, a very fetching hat, a cloche, that made me look stylish and pretty. Daddy had only given me books in the past except for one Christmas, the Christmas we’d lived in London when he gave me a beautiful doll, a Sasha doll designed by some famous Swedish dollmakers. She was the antithesis of the forbidden Barbie, sturdy and realistic but very pretty. Oddly, he named it the “last doll,” but I had never had a first one, preferring stuffed animals.
The hat present was possibly the most intimate moment we had ever had together. I didn’t know he ever thought of me when we were separated or that he saw me as someone who could wear a fetching cloche. He thought about books, my mom, Catherine, poor American children forced into Catholic orphanages, but not me. “I was thinking about you. I bought you a hat.”
So now my sister was making me guess what my father had done.
“You’ll never guess.” It sounded like she’d been crying, but also like she felt special for having a secret. “I can’t tell you because you’re the baby. It’s really, really bad. I think he might shoot himself in the head.”
This made no sense. We didn’t have any guns. I called my mother. She sounded terrible.
“Did she tell you?” Meaning my sister.
“No. What happened?”
“Let her tell you.” My mother hung up.
The phone rang. I didn’t want to know.
“Daddy had an affair,” Brigid sounded strange. “And there’s a baby.”
“A baby?”
“A girl. Her birthday was May sixteenth.”
My birthday was May fifteenth. Brigid’s May eighteenth. Now, there was an extra child, a girl, also born in May.
I was late for my date. We were going to a play at a theater near NYU. The play was a comedy about unhappy WASPs arguing about money and infidelity. During the second act, the husband tells the wife he’s been sleeping with their nanny, and I started to quietly sob. Charles was so uncomfortable he ignored me. The woman on my left handed me a tissue.
By the time the play ended, I was a tear-stained mess. “What’s wrong?” Charles looked slightly peeved.
I suspected emotional women were not his thing. “Nothing, I’m sorry. Apparently, my father had an affair with a friend of my parents’ and now there’s a baby.”
“Really? Do you know her? Are your parents splitting up? Who told you?”
I had forgotten he was a journalist. If nothing else, this was a story. A sordid, stupid story but contains all the elements of tragedy combined with sex. I shook my head. I couldn’t talk about any of it. “I have to go home. My mother sounds like she’s going insane.”
As we parted, I walked towards the corner and hailed a cab. In my other hand, I held the cloche my father had brought home from Europe and I let it fall and be quickly stepped on by another person trying to cross the street. As the cab pulled away, I saw my new hat lying in the gutter. “He didn’t see me,” I thought.
I’d guessed he was having an affair, but I didn’t allow myself to think about it. The previous summer, after a full year of discussing how much I wanted a closer relationship with my father in therapy, I took a risk, which resulted in rejection and, in retrospect, my understanding he was cheating on my mom. I went to Truro, our usual cottage on Cape Cod, and the day after I arrived I had an unusually close conversation with my mother, who actually asked me how therapy was going.
“Good, I mean, it’s hard and sad.”
“Why would it be sad? You had a happy childhood.”
I poured more coffee and refused to bite.
“Didn’t you?”
“Mom, no. But it doesn’t matter. Anyway, she thinks I should talk to daddy more, ask him to do things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Like walks. Maybe go for walks.”
At that moment, as if on cue, my father came in the back door and said he was going to go get the mail, a walk of about a half-mile to the center of town.
“I’ll come with you,” I stood and started to get my bag.
“No,” my father said.
“Julian!” My mother looked at me. “Molly wants to take a walk with you.”
“No, no,” I sat down again. “It’s fine. Never mind.”
My feelings were hurt, but what else was new?
“I need to think,” my father looked angry.
“Julian,” my mother looked pained. “Her therapist…“
“Mom!” I stood up. “I didn’t really want to go.”
After my father left, I went to my room and changed into my bathing suit. I decided I’d walk to the beach.
“He doesn’t mean it,” she looked up from The New York Times puzzle.
“I don’t care.”
I had almost reached the final curve before Truro Center when I saw them. He was bent over a patch of raspberries, she was holding a hat which he was putting berries in. I tried to find a place to hide, but there was nothing but road and grass. He looked up and saw me and I saw the sadness and shame in his face. “Molser.”
I recognized her. She was the younger friend of our Dutch friends, the ones my ex-husband had once worked with. I didn’t dislike her but had sometimes wondered why she spent so much time with my parents. Sometimes, it felt like she was acting like another daughter, replacing Catherine. My father came towards me, holding the hat full of berries.
“These are for you,” he said.
“No, those aren’t for me.”
I passed them silently and went to the beach.
“Did you know?” my mother sounded frantic.
“Of course not. I would have told you if I knew.” This wasn’t true.
“She ingratiated herself into our lives. All she wanted was a baby.”
”And he gave it to her,” I thought.
In therapy that Monday, I cried over my father’s treachery.
“What are you angry about?” Hazel asked me.
We had established I cried when I was angry.
“If he needed someone to talk to, he could have talked to me,” I wailed.
“I don’t think they did much talking,” Hazel’s lips were twitching, and I started to laugh.
“Molly, if your mother asks you to come home, you are not to go.”
“I have to go,” I said. “He’s having a breakdown. She wants to commit him.”
“Yes,” Hazel leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “You can’t do that. You can’t commit your father. They will crush you.”
I didn’t go. Brigid went immediately like a good daughter and was crushed. I finally went and was greeted by my father in something called “an agitated depression,” begging my forgiveness. “For what,” I thought. “He did the best he could, and when he didn’t, well, so what?” I was sober and alive, and he had helped me to do that. Yes, he told me love didn’t exist but I knew he was lying. He had loved me and Catherine and Brigid and my mother. He loved his grandchildren and his mother. He had loved Dickens and Yeats and swimming and parts of his life.
It took a long time for Beckman to allow me to have Henry stay on his own for a weekend in New York with his Aunt Molly. He was hyper-vigilant, keeping Henry close to himself whenever possible. I had asked a male friend to take us to a Yankee game.
“I want to be alone with him after that,” I said. “Okay?”
My friend understood. Henry was six, and I loved him so much it was hard not to act stupid and mushy around him, but I understood the dignity of children, and instead we talked about his teacher and what television shows he liked best. We went to see a children’s movie called Willow, and halfway through, he held my hand.
When I tucked him into my bed that night I kissed him, and we smiled at each other. “Did you know my mother?” he asked.
“Yes, Henry. She was my sister.”
“She died when I was three.”
”She loved you so much, Henry.” I touched the side of his face. His skin had the slight olive tint she had, and his eyes were the same as Catherine’s. “Did you have a good day?” I asked.
“The best,” he snuggled down in the blanket and smiled.
I sat and watched him sleep, his breath even and deep. When I was little I imagined myself as Cleopatra, being a movie star, writing a bestselling book. But this moment, this boy safe and asleep in my bed, this part of Catherine, it was enough. More than enough.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach