One more day and I’d be a year sober.
I hadn’t even thought of it, not on this particular day, not until this moment, standing on the library steps between the two stone lions, weighed down by the encroaching darkness and by the greater and deeper darkness of what I’d been reading. Gordon Decker Raines, Marcia Anne Cantwell, John Joseph Ellery—all dead. And one man, S. or Steve or Even Steven, who’d put bullets in all three of them. And I was alive and sober, and in another day I’d have a year.
I knew I ought to go to a meeting. I’d been too busy to go at noon, but it’s a rare time of day when Manhattan doesn’t have a meeting on offer somewhere, and there were several in and around midtown in the hours between five and seven, designed to catch the office worker on his way home. I’d been to one called Happy Hour a couple of times, and there was Commuters Special, near Penn Station, and another around the corner from Grand Central. I was at Forty-second and Fifth, just a few blocks west of Grand Central, and there might be another even closer, but I didn’t have my meeting book with me. It’s always in my back pocket, but I’d evidently not transferred it to the pair of pants I had put on this morning, and I didn’t know where the meetings were or exactly what time they started.
I decided I could go home and shower and shave and maybe even go so far as to eat something. And I could put away the manila envelope, which now held some notes I’d made at the library, along with the clipping and Jack’s account of the twelve-year-old killing on Jane Street. And I’d be able to show up at my regular meeting at St. Paul’s, and I could raise my hand and announce that tomorrow would be my anniversary.
Or I could wait until tomorrow, and announce it then.
Either way, people would applaud. They’d clap for me, as if I’d done something remarkable. And maybe I had.
But not yet I hadn’t. The announcement could wait, I decided, until the year was complete.
I was tired, and was all set to hail a cab until I remembered that it was the heart of the rush hour, and the traffic would be impossible. I didn’t want to sit in an unmoving taxi while the lights changed and changed again, but neither was I ready to face the sardine-can crush of the rush-hour subway.
It had rained a little earlier. It felt as though it might rain some more. But maybe it would hold off, at least for as long as it took me to walk home.
I was four or five blocks from my hotel when the rain started. I was just passing a chain drugstore when I felt the first drops, and I thought about stopping for an umbrella, and decided it wasn’t coming down hard enough to justify spending the three or four dollars. I already had four or five of them in my room, and if I bought another I’d have five or six, and I never remembered to take one unless it was already pouring when I left my room.
I walked another block or two and the rain slackened, and I was congratulating myself on my good judgment when the skies opened up. I ducked into a shoe repair shop, and the only umbrellas he had cost ten bucks. I bought one, and by the time I got outside and opened it, the rain had stopped altogether, and not another drop fell all the rest of the way home.
There are days when that sort of thing gets a laugh out of me, or at least a chuckle, but this wasn’t one of those days. I wanted to smash something, perhaps the umbrella, perhaps the man who sold it to me. But I didn’t. I was, after all, a model of sobriety, one day away from my anniversary, and I reminded myself of this as I carried my umbrella into the hotel.
No messages. I went upstairs, walked down the hall to my room. I had my key out, and it seems to me that I felt something, had some sense of foreboding. And maybe I did, maybe I picked up a vibration, maybe without identifying it I caught some scent coming under the door or through the keyhole.
And maybe not. The memory tends to fill in the blanks, furnishing what seems fitting whether or not it ever happened. Maybe I sensed something and maybe I didn’t, but either way I stuck my key in the lock and opened my door.
XXXVIII
AT FIRST I didn’t recognize the smell. It was strong, it hit me in the face the minute I had the door open, and I’m sure it was as unmistakable in its own way as the stench that had permeated Greg Stillman’s apartment. I thought, That’s an awful smell, that’s unhealthy to breathe, I’d better open a window and clear the place. So I recognized the nature of it, but I couldn’t say what it was.
And then in an instant I could. It was booze, it was ethyl alcohol, it was more specifically bourbon.
The whole room reeked of it. Was it really there? Was my mind doing this, conjuring up a smell in response to the stress of my work and the anxiety that precedes an AA anniversary? It was as if the cleaning woman had broken a bottle in my room, but I didn’t keep whiskey in my room, so there was no bottle for her or anyone else to break. And it was Monday, and Saturday was the day she cleaned my room, and she’d have no reason to be there, and neither would anyone else, and I’d left the room locked, and it had been locked just now because I’d needed to turn my key to let myself in, and God, God in Heaven, what was going on?
Then I looked over at my desk. My chair was drawn up next to it, turned just enough toward the door so that it seemed to be inviting me to sit down. And on the desk there was a glass tumbler of the sort they used to call an old-fashioned glass, not because there was anything old-fashioned about it, but because it had been designed to hold that cocktail called an old-fashioned.
Did anybody order old-fashioneds anymore? Had I ever had one myself? It seemed to me that I had, that I must have. It seemed to me that, with just a little effort, I could remember what it tasted like.
I did not own a glass like this. I owned a couple of water tumblers. One had a sort of bell shape to it, of the type in which drugstores sold Coca-Cola when drugstores still had soda fountains. The other wasn’t strictly speaking a glass at all, in that it was made out of plastic, so that it wouldn’t shatter when I dropped it on the bathroom floor.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the glass. I’d had glasses of that size and shape when I lived with Anita and the boys in Syosset. Like every proper suburbanite, I’d had a fully equipped bar in the den, with all the glasses one might be called upon to provide for one’s guests. And, while nobody had ever asked me to mix up a batch of old-fashioneds, that was the glass of choice for serving a drink on the rocks. This wasn’t one of the glasses from that set, which I could only presume were still in the finished basement of the Syosset house, but it was that type.
Yet I could swear I recognized the glass. It was just the sort in which Jimmy Armstrong served drinks on the rocks.
Or a double bourbon, straight up, no ice, if that was your pleasure.
This glass, this glass on my desk, was filled to within perhaps a half inch of its brim with a clear amber liquid. I was able to identify it as a bourbon called Maker’s Mark. There may be gifted human beings who could have made that identification on the basis of the color and aroma alone, but I am not one of them. I did not recognize the brand so much as I deduced it, and I based my deduction on the presence of the bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon that stood on my desk just a few inches from the glass.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look anywhere but where I was looking—at the desk, at the glass and the bottle.
Thoughts rushing at me, one after the other:
It was a hallucination. There was no bottle, no glass, no smell of whiskey.
It was a dream. I’d come home, I’d lain down for a nap, and now I was having an impossibly vivid drunk dream.
It was my sobriety that was the illusion, the hallucination. I’d been chipping around for months, having a drink here and a drink there, telling myself and everyone I knew that I didn’t drink anymore. But it was all a lie, a 364-day lie, and the proof lay before me, because I’d poured a drink before I left my room that morning and there it was, waiting for me on my return.
I blinked, and it was still there. I forced myself to look away, and then looked back, and it was still there. I felt myself drawn toward it. I wanted
to approach it, not to pick it up, God no, not to touch it, but to somehow make it go away. I had to make it go away. I couldn’t let it stay there.
I don’t know how long I stood there, neither approaching the desk nor walking away from it. Then finally I wrenched myself away, yanked the door open, slammed it shut, locked the whiskey away behind it. I rushed down the hall, didn’t even ring for the elevator. I dashed down the stairs and out into the street.
XXXIX
DURING MY DRINKING DAYS, there were worse things than hangovers. Blackouts were worse—coming to and realizing there were vast holes in one’s memory, hours when some other part of oneself was running things, steering the car and grinding the gears. Seizures were worse, and waking up in a hospital bed in restraints. And, more subtly, the day-by-day erosion of one’s whole life, that surely was worse than a hangover.
Hangovers were bad enough, however, and some of them were worse than others. But what I remember most vividly in that regard is not so much any particular hangover as the way one of them ended.
I was in my hotel room, and I felt terrible, and knew that the only thing that would ease my pain was a drink. And of course there was nothing in my room to drink. If there had been, I’d have drunk it the night before.
So I got myself dressed and downstairs and around the corner, and it must have been around eleven because Armstrong’s was open but the lunch crowd wasn’t there yet. In fact the place was empty, or the closest thing to it, and Billie Keegan was behind the stick, and he took one look at me and knew not to say a word. Instead he set a glass on the top of the bar, and filled it about halfway full, so that I wouldn’t spill it if my hands happened to shake a little.
I stood there while he poured, and I took a breath, and I felt better. I hadn’t had a chance to get the alcohol to my lips yet, let alone into my bloodstream, but its simple physical proximity made all the difference. It was there, and I was going to be able to drink it, and it would help me feel better again—and because I knew this I felt better already.
I thought of this when, finally, I heard Jim Faber’s voice.
First I had to find a phone that worked. Then I had to dial his number, and wait while it rang, and when his wife answered I had to ask to speak to Jim. She said, “He’s not here, Matt. He’s got a rush job keeping him at the shop. Do you need the number?”
“I have it,” I said. “And I’ve got plenty of quarters too.”
I don’t know what she might have made of that, because I broke the connection before I could find out. I spent one of those abundant quarters, and waited while it rang, and then he answered. And right away I felt better.
“I don’t think you had a hallucination,” he said. “I know that sort of thing can happen, but that’s not what this sounds like to me. I think you’ve got a real glass of bourbon on your desk, and a real bottle keeping it company. You said Maker’s Mark?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, if you’re determined to hallucinate, you might as well go straight to the top shelf. I only had it a couple of times myself, but it seems to me that Maker’s Mark was pretty decent sippin’ whiskey.”
“I used to know a woman who liked it.”
“You don’t suppose—”
“She’s dead,” I said. “She died a long time ago.”
Carolyn, from the Caroline. Another name for my Eighth Step list, I thought, if I stayed sober long enough to write one.
“You didn’t pour it for yourself, Matt, and you’re not in the middle of a drunk dream either. You went out this morning, and that was waiting for you when you got back. You know what happened.”
“I left the door locked.”
“So?”
“It wouldn’t be that hard to swipe a key from behind the desk. Or to open the door without one.”
“And?”
“And somebody came into my room,” I said, “and brought a bottle with him.”
“And a glass from Armstrong’s.”
“It could have been from anyplace. Half the bars in the city have that kind of rocks glass.”
“So he brought a bottle and a glass.”
“And set the stage,” I said. “Poured a drink. Left the bottle there, with the cap off.”
“Just the one glass. Inconsiderate bastard, wasn’t he? Suppose you had company?”
I said, “Jim, he wanted me to drink.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“You didn’t even want to, did you?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said, “I didn’t. But at the same time I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I felt like a bird hypnotized by a snake.”
“Stands to reason.”
“I found the thought of drinking it terrifying. As if it might jump off the desk and pour itself down my throat. As if it had that power.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was magnetic,” I said. “I didn’t want it, but I was drawn to it anyway.”
“You’re an alcoholic,” he said.
“Well, we knew that.”
“Yeah, and we just got some more evidence, in case we entertained the slightest doubt.”
“I wanted to pour it down the sink,” I said.
“Better than keeping it around.”
“But I was afraid to go near it. I didn’t want to take a step in that direction, let alone pick it up.”
“You were right.”
“I was? Isn’t it crazy, giving the shit that kind of power?”
“It’s already got the power.”
“I guess.”
“The way you give it more power,” he said, “is by picking it up and drinking it. And the first step in picking it up and drinking it is picking it up at all.”
“So I left it there.”
“And locked the door on it. What time is it? Shit.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This isn’t something for you to do all by yourself,” he said. “I’d go with you after the meeting, assuming I can wrap this up in time to go to the meeting, but I don’t like the idea of letting it sit there for the next few hours. Or letting you sit somewhere between now and meeting time, locked out of your room and with no place to go. I’d come over now, but—”
“No, you’ve got work to do.”
“It would be really inconvenient to leave now. You’ve got phone numbers, right? People in the program, people who live nearby?”
“Sure.”
“And you’ve got quarters.”
“And subway tokens,” I said, “though I can’t see how one of those will come in handy right now.”
“You never know. You’re where? Down the block from your hotel?”
“Five blocks away. It took me that long to find a working phone without somebody already using it.”
“Make some calls. Get somebody to keep you company, and call me as soon as you pour out the booze. Will you do that?”
“Sure.”
“Call me from your room. And if you can’t find somebody, don’t go back to your room alone.”
“I won’t.”
“Call me instead. And we’ll figure out something. Matt?”
“What?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Sometimes things get a little crazy right before a person’s anniversary.”
There were a couple of phone numbers I didn’t have to look up. Two of them were Jim’s, of course, at home and at his place of business, and another was Jan’s. I’d already spoken to Jim and I wasn’t about to call Jan.
I’d have called her if I had to. When I was just starting to string sober days together, before we’d begun to become a couple, she’d made me promise to call her before I picked up a drink. In the world we shared, sobriety trumped everything, so even if we had ceased keeping company, either of us could call the other in order to stay sober.
But not now. There were plenty of other people I could call, and they were a lot closer than Lispenard Street.
I was limited, though, to the ones
whose numbers were in my wallet. Now and then someone will hand me a card, or a slip of paper, and I’ll find room for it in my wallet until I get a chance to copy it into my book. I have a little memo book, itself about the size of a business card, that I use for AA phone numbers, and that’s where they wind up. I keep the book in my room, next to the phone, so that it’s handy if I want to call someone. I almost never do, the only AA calls I make with any frequency are to Jim, but it’s good to have the book, if only because I can periodically copy down new phone numbers and clear out my wallet.
The point of this is that I now needed to call someone, and I had plenty of phone numbers, but they were all in the book. If I wanted to have someone with me when I returned to my room, I was largely limited to whatever numbers were still in my wallet. There were a few of those, and the first one I came to was Motorcycle Mark. I caught him on his way out the door, and he said that was no problem, he didn’t have anything to do that wouldn’t keep. Where should he meet me?
I said I’d meet him at my hotel, and by the time I’d walked the four or five blocks he was already there, with his bike parked out front. On our way through the lobby he said he’d noticed the hotel hundreds of times, and often wondered what it was like inside. It seemed all right, he said, and I agreed that it wasn’t bad.
The door to my room was locked, as I’d left it, and as I was fitting the key in the lock I had this sudden image of finding the room not as I remembered it but as I’d left it that morning, with no bottle and no glass and no smell of whiskey. And Mark, in his boots and leather jacket and with his helmet under his arm, would nod his head knowingly and talk gently to me in that tone you use with ambulatory psychotics. Calming me down, talking me off the ledge.
The image was so vivid it made me reluctant to open the door. But I did, of course, and it was all still there, the uncapped bottle of Maker’s Mark, the glass filled almost to the brim, the chair positioned to welcome me, and the raw smell of bourbon suffusing the room.