Girl Walks Out of a Bar (28 page)

I had taken several trips to Paris, but I'd spent very little of my time there even remotely sober. Why would anyone choose to stroll and eat and dance their way through Paris nights sober? On previous trips, I'd been on the Parisian Party Program: eat in world-class restaurants, drink fabulous wine, kiss French men, and troll for drugs in hip nightclubs. Don't worry about tours or galleries or learning the history—daytime was all about sleeping off what I'd done the night before. Headaches, dehydration, street noise, and a shortage of ice kept me complaining as I tried to sleep through the world's most beautiful city.

But this time I saw Paris, actually saw it. Up early each morning, I would buy a copy of the
International Tribune
and work the crossword puzzle at a café as I wired myself up on croissants and café au lait. This time I kept my eyes open and reveled in my time with Randi as well as my time alone. Many times I stopped and let myself enjoy a feeling of profound gratitude.

My Internet search turned up several English-speaking 12-step meetings in Paris, and I decided to try one at the American Church on the Quai d'Orsay. The next morning, I navigated the Metro from the Marais to the Invalides stop, and as
soon as I stepped outside the Metro station, I knew I was lost. At that early hour, there was almost no one around to ask for help, and anyway I wanted a break from seeing pained expressions on Parisian faces when I tripped over my clunky high school French. So I tried to find my own way to the church and ended up turning a five-minute walk into a forty-five minute labyrinth. Before long, as I stood on a corner trying not to look like a lost American, frustration and self-doubt joined the outing.
I'm not an adventurer. I'm not self-sufficient. I have no sense of direction. Where the hell is this church? Forget it, I don't need this meeting. Ugh, I look helpless. Why haven't I kept up with French? What the hell was the point of taking it if I was only going to abandon it? Why is everything so fucking hard for me??

And with feelings of insecurity came the need for a drink.
Does anybody drink in the morning around here? They have 12-step meetings—they must have morning drinkers
. What if I found a nice café and started by ordering a coffee? Then I could say something like, “Hey, I'm on vacation, let's make it a Café Calva, heavy on the brandy. What's that, barman? You're a master of the espresso martini? C'est magnifique! I'll try one!”

Wait. How the hell did I switch so quickly from gratitude to coffee boozing?
I had to get control of this head of mine. If I couldn't switch off the static altogether, at least I could try to change the channel, so I repeated that Gracie Square wall mantra: “Get up. Get dressed. Get with the program.” And I visualized the day room. The memory of that cold, barren cell lined with the smell of sweat, piss, and disinfectant offered a dramatic contrast to France's blooming spring trees and centuries-old architecture. So I reminded myself that on that lovely Paris morning, I'd gotten up and had gotten dressed. Now, I'd better get with le fucking programme.

I refocused on finding the meeting and feeling grateful again. It was during that walk that I realized something enlightening about gratitude: I could make myself feel it by thinking about what's good
or
by thinking about what isn't bad. Yes, I was aware that it was a stunning day and that I was walking along La Seine, the one and only river right in the heart of the city of a thousand dreams. And I was conscious of my good luck to feel healthy enough to walk it and to be well off enough to pay for the trip. But the flash of awareness that really perked my mood was actually about what I was missing.

On that morning, I
wasn't
face down in a pillow soaked in saliva groaning as I negotiated with my stomach to please hold back the vomit because I just couldn't bear to drag my wretched body to a toilet where I'd lie there, face on the seat, mouth breathing until another nausea wave passed. None of that was happening. I was lost in a foreign city, but I was standing up straight. Could I ever need anything more than that?

I found the church, a Gothic-style structure with a soaring green spire and joined my fellow sober folk under the high ceilings of the room inside. What could a 12-step meeting possibly be like in Paris? In fact, it looked like a 12-step meeting in New York. The big difference was the chic.
Man
, I thought looking around at my fellow group members.
Parisians roll out of bed looking more stylish than I do in my best black-tie dress
. But in the meeting we were all very much the same, sharing similar stories and repeating the familiar expressions that illustrate what we deal with in recovery: “I'm struggling today,” “I feel so fortunate to be alive,” and “My worst day sober is better than my best day on drugs.” I knew these people and they knew me. What a revelation: 12-step meetings were like McDonald's, you could find them just about anywhere in the world, and they always served just what you expected.

The night before we left France, Randi and I stood front row center at the intimate Olympia Theater. With nobody between us and Sting, he sang to us and no one else. Randi cried like a teenager watching the Beatles step off their plane in 1964. I cried because I couldn't believe that this could be my life.

After the Paris trip, I began attending Group twice a week and 12-step meetings every other day. I was no longer including the “if” in my thoughts about staying sober. It had become all about “how.” I heard story after story about people who had almost drunk themselves dead but who were now living fulfilling lives as long as they didn't pick up a drink. I wanted to be those people, decades deep into sobriety, my drunk days far behind, my time spent trying to help the next girl to shuffle in from Gracie Square. So I linked arms with Lexapro, and we put one foot in front of the other.

It was time I chose a sponsor—she should be another woman who had been sober longer than I had and who was living the kind of sobriety I wanted for myself. If she agreed to become my sponsor, she would be like a sober coach and guide me through the 12-steps. After some scouting, I chose Jennifer, a manufacturing executive with long blonde hair and perfectly painted nails. She looked so much like Natasha Richardson it seemed strange to me that when she opened her mouth, American English came out. Jennifer worked a stressful job, just as I did. She loved booze and coke, as I did. And she got sober when her self-poisoning began to threaten her career, as I did. Jennifer also had a marriage at stake, and she wasn't willing to trash it. Now she was the picture of calm in the midst of New York nuttiness and an endless wave of corporate shit storms. I could see us in each other and I liked it.

One Wednesday afternoon I called Jennifer from my office. “So I'm having dinner with my friends tonight, but I won't stay out late.”

“The friends you used to drink with?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought you were keeping it to breakfasts and lunches with them?”

“I have been. But it's been three months. I'm sure it'll be fine.” It was quiet for a moment.

“Have you ever, in the fifteen years you've been friends with these people, ever, not had a drink when you all went out to dinner?” she asked.

“No,” I said with a sigh, my eyes turning toward the ceiling.

“But after just three months of sobriety you're
sure
it'll be fine?” Ugh. She was a tough broad and dammit, she was right.

“I guess it could be hard,” I said.

“That's an understatement,” she said. “If you want to go, go. But I think you're putting yourself at risk without good reason.”

She was right. She was right. She was right. It had been only three months. I had a tremendous amount to lose, and I just didn't know if I was stronger than a 1999 Far Niente.

“Hey, it's me,” I said when Devon picked up her office phone a few minutes later.

“Hey, you.”

“Listen,” I said. “I'm not going to make it tonight.” I felt my throat choke up.

“What? Why?” she asked.

“I'm not ready. It's that simple. Fuck! I'm not ready. I'm afraid of drinking.”

“I completely understand. You have to do whatever's best for you. We'll miss you, though.”

Fuck me.

A few months later, some of my friends started turning forty. That meant parties. I'd gotten good at sidestepping out of weeknight hangs, and the occasional brunches were easy to manage—even normal people didn't always order booze to go with their eggs Benedict—but these milestones presented a much bigger hurdle. These were my people and my people were turning forty.

“Baby, you're still coming to the party, right?” Jerry had asked me early in the week.

“You know I wouldn't miss the night you step into real adulthood,” I said, as if I hadn't spent the past ten days trying to craft an excuse.

“I don't know about that,” he laughed. “You know it might get a little out of hand, so. . .”

“I know. But it's a big night. I want to be there.”

Jerry's fortieth party was held on a Saturday night at The Palm, a steakhouse in the Theater District. It was a classic party establishment with dark brown walls lined with color caricatures of the restaurant's most famous and biggest-spending customers. Everything at The Palm was thick and meaty, from the heavy wooden tables to the steaks to most of the patrons. As in so many other New York restaurants, Jerry had buddied up to the bartender, so the drinks flowed whenever we showed up. That night, twenty of us took over the private dining room, and all through the night, full bottles of wine were marched into the room as fast at the empty ones were marched out.

At the dinner, Jessica and Devon hovered around me as if I were a diabetic in a Godiva store.

“Does the seltzer have enough cranberry for you?” Jessica asked when my mocktail arrived.

Devon handed me a plate, “Here, Li, have a plate of fried calamari—all tentacles attached, just the way you like it.”

“It's cold out tonight. We want to call you a car when you're ready,” Jessica said.

By the time dessert was served, I had breathed in countless wine fumes, heard countless glasses clink, and heard countless happy old stories about Jerry and the gang. I had made it through my first post-rehab party, the kind of energetic drinking romp that had dominated almost all of my thirties. I was tired, sober, and happy to go home.

In clean pajamas, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror washing my face and thinking about the night. I'd left a party while it was still rumbling, and something about that made me feel left out. Someone in Group had said that it's helpful to “play the tape through,” to think about what the scene would look like if I'd said “yes” to alcohol after months of hard fought sobriety. That was an easy exercise. Even if I could have made my friends believe that I could drink “just one, maybe two and then call it a night,” in the best-case scenario I would have drunk more than anyone realized, passed out in my own bed, and awakened the next day dehydrated, aching, vomiting, and wanting to die of self-hatred. In the worst-case scenario, I would have blacked out somewhere dangerous or called Henry for a bunch of coke. That is, if I hadn't already stepped blindly in front of a speeding truck and been smeared across 50th Street.