Ninety Days (10 page)

I go to the meeting in the East Village and the only one there I know is Pam. I raise my hand, announce my day count, and wonder if Polly doesn’t have the right idea. After the meeting I tell Pam what’s happened and she just shakes her head in her sanguine, maternal way and says,
Sometimes you have to let them go so that they can come back. In the meantime, you pray they don’t die.

After the East Village meeting I go home, fall asleep, and the next day can’t bear to go to the 12:30 meeting.
But what if Polly’s there?
I think, and rush out the door to get to The Library on time. Polly’s not there. I stay for the two o’clock and Polly doesn’t show. She doesn’t turn up at the Meeting House either. For the next few weeks I go to every meeting, hoping she’ll appear. I see her once, on the street. She’s coming up Fifth Avenue, walking Essie and smoking a cigarette. She’s in her sweatpants, all angles and jutting bones, moving at a snail’s pace. She looks like the Grim Reaper’s girlfriend. We cross each other on the sidewalk and when I say hi she puts her hand up to wave me away. I keep going.

Asa tells me to pull back and let Polly hit her bottom. Jack and Annie and Luke do, too. But what if her bottom is death? What if there is something I can do that could keep her from dying? At one point Asa recommends I go to an Al-Anon meeting.
I drive people into those meetings,
I joke.
I don’t actually go there myself.
Asa shakes his head.

Life goes on, my one day becomes a few days and then a few weeks. There is a night after dinner on Sixth Avenue when I say good-bye to Cy and look down toward Houston and wonder what Mark is up to. I walk down into the trigger zone and stand on the corner of Sixth and Houston and see that his lights are on. Shadows pass in front of the window and my heart races as I conjure scenarios of what is transpiring there. As if I have to imagine. The same thing is always transpiring there. I cross Sixth Avenue, cross down to the south side of Houston, and step toward the building.
Fuck it,
I think, like I always do at this moment, and head toward the door. But before I press the buzzer, I think of Polly. What if she calls me when I’m in there? What if she hears I’ve relapsed again? What if I don’t make it to the meeting tomorrow, stay up for a few days, and miss her when she comes back in? What if my picking up gives her another excuse to keep using? It’s narcissistic, I realize as I’m thinking it, but I can’t help but ask myself:
What if my picking up results in Polly dying?
The logic is suddenly so plausible, so powerful, and so likely that it stops me in my tracks. It stops me less than ten feet from the buzzer I’ve pressed countless times over too many years and with the same grim results. I’ve never been this close and not gone in.

I turn around and start walking north on Sixth Avenue, away from Mark’s, where I never set foot again. I call Jack and leave a message on his voice mail. I tell him I’ve gone into the trigger zone and come out clean.

Over the next few weeks there are a dozen or so times when the thought to call Happy or Rico or go to Mark’s happens in the way that it always has. The idea sparks and with it a craving to use and then the plans to figure out how I can. Each of these times I think of Polly or Lotto or someone in the rooms counting days who I’ve given my number to, and each of these times I stop long enough to call either Jack or Asa or Annie, and by the time I do the urge passes. And then, miraculously, the cravings disappear. The thoughts still come—I expect they always will—but the craving doesn’t follow. The desire to use or drink vanishes as stealthily as it used to arrive. I won’t even notice it go, just that it has.

It’s the Fourth of July and Elliot and I go for a hike on Bear Mountain. We hike and walk for a few hours and find our way to a ridge that looks south down the Hudson River to Manhattan.
It looks like Oz,
Elliot says as the ridge of buildings appears, floating on the horizon like a crown. I remember thinking the same thing in Dave’s car three months ago on the drive from White Plains. That car ride now seems a lifetime away.

Elliot and I return to the city just as it’s getting dark. The elevator man, the older of the two brothers, is smiling when we enter the lobby and we ask why.
The roof is open!
he says loudly, as if we should know why this is cause for celebration.
For the fireworks!
Of course, the fireworks, the Fourth of July. We get off the elevator on the twentieth floor and rush to the roof. The building is the last tall building on Seventh Avenue before the acres of town houses and low buildings of the West Village begin to spread south of 14th Street, so the view from the roof is breathtaking. We see the long lit riverbanks of New Jersey, the huddled buildings that make up what’s left of the financial district, the Met Life tower north of the Flatiron, and the tallest of all, the Empire State Building, celebrating in red, white, and blue lights. Never has the city looked so festive, so possible. Fireworks begin to explode up and down the Hudson River, south of Battery Park, and across town above the East River. I have never seen so many fireworks at once, and the two of us stand there, stunned. We kiss. Not for the first time since our affair several years ago and not for the first time that day, but in a way that makes it clear that something is beginning, or has begun and is now being acknowledged. It is one of the great kisses of my life. Jack warned me against getting involved romantically until I had ninety days, but it’s a suggestion I fail to take. The worry is that if there is heartbreak or romantic upset in those ninety days, one will relapse over it. Maybe because my heart was already broken, and Elliot came in like a friend and stayed as something more, it was different. I don’t know. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, but I also don’t regret it.

Two days after the Fourth of July, I arrange to meet Asa at Mary Ann’s, a Mexican restaurant in Chelsea. Oddly, it’s the restaurant my girlfriend Marie took me to on our first trip to New York together, the summer after I graduated from college. When I go to the bathroom I look in the mirror that could well be the same mirror I looked at all those years ago. Twenty-one then, thirty-four now; jobless then, jobless now, I think, and then say to my reflection,
Nothing’s changed.
I look closer and see the creep of wrinkles around my eyes and along my brow, and the more-than-a-few gray hairs above. Some things
have
changed, I think, and then again as I return to the table and see two glasses of tap water.

I’ve asked Asa to dinner to tell him about Elliot. I’m nervous because I know he has developed feelings for me. I know this because he told me so a few weeks earlier—after a meeting, in my apartment—before he kissed me. I kissed him right back and for a little while, we kissed. It was a mistake, I knew it, but it felt good, and as with all the other mistakes that felt good, I had no power to stop this one before the damage was done. Asa had become my life raft and I had clung too tightly. I called him all the time, followed him from meeting to meeting, talked his ear off, and only now had begun to listen. After the kiss, I told him I didn’t and never would have romantic feelings for him and that I was sorry if I’d led him to believe otherwise.
And let’s face it,
I pointed out, trying to make light of the event but also reminding him of the obvious,
I’m hardly a catch. Among other things, I have less than three weeks sober and I can’t stop relapsing.

What I said didn’t matter. Our relationship was never the same again. By then, Luke, Polly, Annie, and a few other people from the rooms had come into my life. Jack had, for weeks, perhaps expecting this very thing, encouraged me to spend time with and call people other than Asa.
Spread the neediness,
he said.
There’s plenty to go around.
And I did.

After the food arrives, I tell Asa about Elliot. The Fourth of July hike, the rooftop fireworks, the kiss, the whole shebang.
So you’re seeing him now? He’s your boyfriend? Is that what this is about?
he asks, gesturing to the burritos, the nachos, the restaurant. As I say yes, Asa pushes his chair back, crosses the dining room, and shoots out the door. I chase after him but he waves me away, shakes his head, and disappears down 16th Street. By this point I have lost a lot of people—clients, friends, colleagues, Noah—but watching Asa rush down the street away from me is one of the toughest losses. I didn’t, and still don’t, have anything to compare it to. How do you thank someone for saving your life? How do you apologize for needing him too much? For not being stronger when it mattered? If I had the words I would have said them. But that night I have only his name, which I shout uselessly as he hurries down 16th Street, his red hair and pale skin disappearing into the night like they had the first night we met.

Not long after, I get a phone call from Dave’s art dealer. There is an offer for the Eggleston photograph she is trying to sell for me, and it’s for what she’s asking. Even better, she thinks she has a buyer for two more, and even though their value is a bit less, the prospect of those two selling as well is like winning the lottery. With less than a thousand left in my bank account, and tens of thousands of dollars now piled up on credit cards, the timing of her phone call couldn’t be better. She eventually sells all three, and with that money I am able to stay in the 15th Street apartment.

Annie and I go to Coney Island. Neither of us has been there before, and it’s the day of the annual Mermaid Parade. We eat the creamiest, most delicious gelato imaginable and watch guys in drag and girls who look like guys in drag prance and jiggle on and alongside floats made of everything from macaroni to marshmallows. On the ride home we sit down next to a woman who moves, dramatically and with great sighing, to the end of the subway car bench. When she’s not looking, Annie mimics her gesture and it is, this little impromptu impersonation, the funniest thing I have ever seen. We laugh so hard the woman leaves the car at the next station and we howl all the way back to the city. Later that night it occurs to me that I haven’t thought about drinking or using in weeks. I open a journal I’ve been keeping since White Plains and write:
Coney Island with Annie today. No cravings for weeks. How did this happen?

Before the summer is over, almost two months since that grim day in Dean & Deluca, Polly calls. It’s morning and I haven’t left for the gym yet. At first, I think I’m imagining her name on the screen of my cell phone—I have so many times. I pick up. She asks me to meet her at the dog run, and I say I’ll leave immediately. I peel out the door and run down 15th Street, past Sixth Avenue, past Fifth, all the way to Union Square. I manage to call Jack as I huff and puff toward the dog run and leave an excited message. And, like the last time I saw Polly and a few other times since, I pray. To whatever forces have kept me sober this long, I pray for the right words.
TELL ME WHAT TO SAY!
I yell as I run.
Please.

I arrive at the dog run and Polly is sitting on our usual bench. Essie is waddling nearby. I don’t need any words because she has the ones that matter.
I need help,
she says, not looking particularly hungover or strung out, just tired.
Will you take me to a meeting?
she asks.
Are you kidding?
I answer.
I’ve been waiting my whole life.
And though the words are lazy and said playfully, as I say them I know they’re true. I know in that instant that everything that has happened—every last lucky, lonely, destructive, delusional, selfish, wretched, insane, desperate second of it—has made this moment on the bench with Polly possible. I’m sober enough to show up, addict enough to be asked. I’m one of her kind and she’s one of mine and there is no one in the world who can help us but each other. I tell her about the night on Houston and Sixth Avenue in front of Mark’s apartment, how I stepped away and she was the reason.
Nah, Crackhead, it would take a hell of a lot more than me to keep you from the pipe.
We laugh, the way addicts laugh about the agony of their using in the only way that makes it bearable: with each other.

Soon after that morning, Polly and I move all of her belongings into a truck driven by a scruffy cute guy from the rooms, someone neither Polly nor I know. Polly shares in a meeting that she’s moving and that she needs a truck, and this guy materializes and offers not only his truck and his driving skills but his hands and back as well. He and I spend hours shoving boxes and chairs and bookcases into the small one-bedroom apartment in Astoria Polly finds on Craigslist.

Heather comes by while we are moving Polly out and without a word walks in and out of the apartment, around the truck, and alongside us as we haul bags and furniture down the hall and into the street. I worry she is going to let me have it before we’re finished, but just before the three of us pile into the truck, she turns to me and says without looking me in the eye,
Thank you.
Tailgate shut, Polly jammed in the front seat between me and the cute guy driving, we start to roll down St. Mark’s Place.
Wait!
Polly shouts.
I forgot something in the apartment.
Before the truck comes to a stop, she is nudging me to let her out. I hesitate, afraid she’s changed her mind, that once she gets out she’ll never get back in.
C’mon, it’s just gonna take a minute,
she says, more wistful than impatient. I let her out and watch as she keys the lock to the building door and disappears inside. Something unfamiliar plays on the radio and the stranger next to me taps the wheel. Minutes pass and my eyes are closed when Polly climbs in next to me. She’s shaking, her eyes are red from crying, and there is nothing in her hands retrieved from the apartment.
Go,
she croaks-more-than-speaks.
Before I change my mind, go.
And so we do. It takes most of the afternoon to move Polly into her new apartment. Neither of us ever sees the cute, generous guy again.

On the last night of summer, at the end of Labor Day weekend, Elliot and I play tennis. It’s a beautiful night—crisp, clear, and the sky is crowded with clouds that look like enormous waves crashing against a shore. After we play, we walk up the West Side Highway to the pier and collapse on the grass. The sky turns pink above us. The air is chilly and the green and red lights of New Jersey blink across the water. As the sun dips lower, the pink darkens against the clouds, and everything—the city, the river, the people around us—appears to shrink against the magnificent sky. Neither of us speaks. In a few minutes it will be dark. In the morning, summer will be over. I am happy, I think—for the first time in my life, happy. I’m sober, surrounded day and night by other sober people, the urge to drink and use has left, finally; I have just enough money in the bank to pay the rent and send tiny checks to the many people and places I owe, and I’m with someone I have no secrets from.
I wish I could stop time,
I tell Elliot.
If I could, I would stop it right now, under this great pink cloud.
We shiver in our damp tennis clothes and huddle into each other for warmth.
I know,
Elliot whispers into the darkening night.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful.