WHEN MARGOT DIED a dark maw rose before me, a somber shaft into which I tramped wanting never to return. If ever I'd felt empty during the seven fragile drunken years we were married, I entered a consummate hollowness after she left me with my inheritance of bottles. Vodka was the legacy I embraced behind the drawn shades of our house, because vodka was the one thing I believed I truly understood about Margot, my nickname for Margaret, who hadn't a drop of French in her beyond a thousand sips of Château Margaux.
In the months that followed her death I became so saturated by my cure as I called it—I liked renaming the world—that there was no more a dawn to my drinking day than a dusk. Pints, fifths, quarts, gallons, I worked my way through them all like cancer does flesh. Our kitchen counter, not to mention the linoleum floor, was crowded with glass vessels, some yet unsiphoned but most sucked down to a lullaby of disregard. When I managed to sleep it was on that same linoleum, the sofa, the bathroom floor. Slumber was a rare guest that offered my sodden anatomy pause in the otherwise uninterrupted siege of boozing I wreaked upon myself. This bleak therapy, meant to tranquilize the memory of my alcoholic wife and maybe annihilate myself in the bargain, was so exhaustive that the few friends who still put up with me believed I was hot on her heels. Passingly successful in life, I'd be a permanent triumph in suicide. The way I chose to mourn her death, I would soon enough perish in a toxic seizure or else go as unceremoniously as she did. Maybe it was just as well she totaled our car beyond repair and that I didn't get around to replacing it that ugly winter. Our savings and her life insurance policy set me up so that I didn't have to drive anywhere. Before they could fire me I quit my job. The neighborhood bar was within walking distance, but I preferred the privacy of my home and, besides, rarely had the right legs for walking. The liquor store people took good care of me. Television was a solace. Groceries weren't of much concern since I had no appetite for food, but when I did get a craving for crackers, or frozen pizza, I knew the nearby convenience delivered to invalids and the elderly. Not forty, I was a crawling convalescent.
***
We never met before the day my life changed and hers ended. What a ruthless irony, that I was driving the florist van to the hospital to make deliveries of bouquets and huggy bears and mylar balloons with the greeting Get Well Soon and that all this florist's freight of cheer was heaved onto the road, flowers everywhere shredded and smashed. I remember how we stared at each other, two women in the snow, how we found each other’s gaze through the exploded glass of the wreckage and I remember the look of shock on her face, a look I understood without any words passing between us like she was saying I'm sorry I never meant for us to be lying here in the cold can you believe this is happening? and You gonna be okay over there you don't look that great but one of us should get up and find somebody to help us don't you think? while with all my strength I was trying to ask this woman trapped inside her demolished car the same questions. To this day I don't believe it was any more her fault than mine though the autopsy proved she was way under the influence. Just we each caught a patch of black ice at the same wrong moment and now here we were in the silence after the collision staring mute at each other across a chasm, a mortality gully, believing in our hearts that though we were badly fucked up bleeding on the new-fallen snow, we were both going to make it, were going to survive this, that yeah we'd have to go through some days and weeks of recovery but all would be well in this woman's life and in mine.
I think she smiled at me, blinking the blood out of her eyes, smiled encouragement at me since she could see I wasn't moving, was no more able than she to jump up and run to the nearest house for help. Looking back, I should have felt a lot colder than I did. It was blizzarding by the time the ambulance finally arrived. I remember looking over at her while the white blanketed us and this woman who in those few weird moments had become like a friend, maybe even a best friend, closed her eyes to rest her head on the pavement beside her overturned car, and thinking how very beautiful she must have been this morning when she got up and dressed for her day never once imagining it might end like this. Her coat was black caracul, her jeans were faded which gave me the false impression she was a woman who was casual and even comfortable living her life, and she wore a pair of knitted mittens.
***
Like my wife, I never much liked not being high. It seemed to me a cruel waste of time not to be drinking. We'd got together on that premise in the first place, met for a drink, though at the time she had been dry for one brave month. That a lifelong romance would enter the scene, love at first sight we both confessed later, was an unexpected blessing; perhaps less so her freefall off the wagon. She left the city the year before, moved a couple of hours north, telling herself she would take the riverside train down often to visit galleries, or go to museums, things she seldom got around to when living right there in the midst of so much culture. New York, she said, exhausted her. She was too young for the silver that had begun to streak her chestnut hair, the oily skiffs under her gray eyes, the fidgety hands, night sweats, the ashen flesh which shrank on its already slim frame. Nothing and nobody held her, so she took the chance and rusticated up the Hudson, convinced it would offer a healthy alternative to the habits she worried were consuming her. Fresh air, birds, the changing seasons—these, Margaret hoped, would reawaken a lightness of heart, an enchantment with life that had come so easily when she was a girl, but got lost somehow. She would quit smoking. Would take long walks every day. Follow a dietary regime. Read one good book each week. Garden in summer and learn to crosscountry in winter. Above all, she'd stop this overdrinking business. As she told her mother, she needed to drain the swamp.
Margot did in fact memorize the names of birds that came to her feeder. Junco, goldfinch, black-capped chickadee. She stopped with the cigarettes, and after a tough, edgy, migrainous two weeks of hacking, began to breathe more evenly and notice subtle scents in the rural air, the rich aroma of the soil around her tiny rented house after a rainshower, the salt smell of butter on her bread and the rye itself. Middlemarch and Madame Bovary she read with confused pleasure. She planted a small patch of zucchini, Swiss chard, basil. Through a mutual friend of all things—we had few friends—she set the date to meet me, just a guy who worked at a small law firm mostly involved with real estate closings, divorces, and wills. Despite the reasonable argument she'd admit she made with herself against such a slip, she bought cigarettes on her way to the tavern where we agreed to rendezvous, a cozy dark wainscotted cocktail lounge in the nice historic local inn. No doubt chastising herself while making a silent promise she'd again quit the next morning, she smiled as I lit her up and we entered on a dialogue that transformed our night, all our nights from that one forward.
She would later tell me that not only did she think I was smart and frank and wryly funny—my deluded Margot—but were she asked to describe the face she would most love to look at for the rest of her life, mine was that face. She loved, she would later say, my brown hair which lapsed over my forehead when I laughed, and how I combed it back with strong but delicate fingers, fingers of a pianist—Eros again at his confectionery, given a less musical man never existed. My hazel eyes, she said, sweetly sad maybe. My furrowed brow and a mouth whose lips were maybe paler than those of any other man she'd met but sharply drawn. She even liked my name, James Chatham, and said it had an honest ring to it. How love colors everything.
When I ordered another tequila neat I wanted to know was she sure she wouldn't have something besides club soda. Well, she said, she hadn't been drinking much these days...but seeing me shrug in such an understanding, empathetic way, she thought why not. She'd have what I was having. Tomorrow would be a new day of abstinence. No smoking, no drinking, she'd been so good she had earned tonight.
I remember asking her about herself, what coaxed her away from the city, a place I professed to love though I never got down there much, in fact deeply feared it. The need for fresh air, she told me, a fresh perspective. Her favorite museum? The Met, of course. How was it possible I'd never been to the Met? She'd love to go through the Met with me sometime. The Egyptian gallery. The wing with the dugout canoes, painted masks, and shields from New Guinea. Sure, another, she answered the bartender and told me about how this fellow Michael Rockefeller, former governor Nelson's son, assembled the New Guinea collection before he disappeared, murdered and eaten apparently by the very tribe in Irian Jaya he'd been observing. I told her I thought of studying anthropology when I was in college, but maybe it's better I never pursued it. No, she laughed, her face gone nicely numb with that third drink, a nostalgic warmth I could see rising through her like sap in a spring tree. She hadn't felt so radiantly alive since she moved here, she told me as much, taking the hand I offered her on the varnished rail. The bartender stood us a round as it was an otherwise slow evening.
***
Turns out we went to school together her husband and I, and though he's a year or two older I remember thinking he was such a nice guy, quiet and very gentle and unassuming which he still is despite what people say about him and his dead wife being sots. Martin drinks and my father used to disappear into the likable haze of his evening preprandial as he called it but I never held that against either of them, everybody has problems and faults and things they like to do that other people don't. Like Kim Novak said about William Holden in that movie Picnic, We don't love people because they're perfect. Look at how supportive Martin was after the accident, and I know that if dad were around he'd have been there for me too. Hard to believe it had been only a week before Martin and I were going to move to the city, where he could really have a chance with his career and I could apprentice with a Fifth Avenue florist, become expert in modern techniques of arrangement, move beyond all these crummy nosegay-style economy vases and dumb carnations and daisy poms and Red Rovers. Give me fresh orchids and phallic callalilies and heirloom bonsai a hundred years old! was what I thought when Martin first broached the subject last summer of moving, taking the leap, giving life our best shot. Even my mother was all for it, though naturally she mentioned we ought to go ahead and get married before leaving the old burgh for emerald city. I told her we'd try living together first and then if it worked—white long-stemmed roses for everyone! The world was looking up.
My mother knew his family, Margaret's husband's family. His father was prominent here she says, a member of the town council for many years, hardworking, a skilled stonemason and when season came around quite the deerslayer. They owned the blue Victorian downtown that had been in their family for years, everybody believed it was haunted and that bad luck befell them because the ship captain who built it for his wife and children was lost at sea in a whaler and their spirits still hovered at the upper story windows looking out toward the river awaiting his return from Cape Horn. I don't know much about ghosts but I do know that the Chathams never had an easy time despite their Presbyterianism and their reputable roots in the community and a work ethic that seemed part of the very fabric of the family. My mother said that while James's dad liked working with his hands he had the wits to make a good lawyer or anything else he'd have set his mind to, even served in the last year of the Second World War as an ambulance driver in Italy. James went to Albany and got his law degree but rather than clearing out of this little backwater of ours to make his killing in a city where the pockets run deeper, he set himself up with a local firm. After his parents passed, his sister married and moved to Philadelphia, and they sold the big house. End of an era.
***
We awoke the next morning not knowing how we wound up at her place, but in truth we didn't care. Margaret offered me coffee, which I drank, reluctant to ask if she had any Irish Mist or brandy in the house, something that might keep the buzz on. That night she told me that after I'd dressed and gone off to work, she sat with her head in her hands looking up now and then to see what bird might be at the feeder, thanking god she left her unfinished pack of cigarettes at the tavern. Otherwise it would have been impossible not to have just one with her coffee. She almost made it to noon before getting in her car—the same one that would double as her temporary crypt those years later—and drove to the liquor store in town she had formerly passed, averting her gaze, many times since moving up here. Besides talking about anthropology, Flaubert, perennials, sailing the Hudson which was an enthusiasm of mine, her work as a graphic designer, we engaged in an excited controversy about which were the best liqueurs, the most memorable wines, the craziest mixed drinks we ever tried. This was far and away a more candid almanac by which we might get to know each other, read one another's souls—a revelatory map of our personal geographies and histories, where we'd been and where we might be going.
The time I first tried retsina, Hyméttos, I remembered its name and the amazing bittersweet resinous stink of it, though I blacked out in Mykonos, then found myself robbed and more or less naked on the beach at Megáli Ámos. That once in her grandfather's house in Burlington, Vermont, when she was six or seven, Thanksgiving it was, she finished everybody's wine glasses, furtive in the kitchen after the dishes had been cleared and the family'd retired to the den to watch some game on the set. Yeah, yeah, I had one like that. The wedding trick all kids play, draining the flutes of flat bubbly the guests left behind, not giving a damn about the soggy butts you'd skim away first, if you happened to notice them. Her first Rob Roy. My brief infatuation with margueritas. Hers with Long Island ice tea. Pink squirrels, kamikazes, grasshoppers, Singapore slings, not to forget the sophomoric sophistication of dry Vermouth on the rocks with a lemon twist—god in heaven, the hideous gaudy swill children are willing to irrigate themselves with, before we discover the mature world of manhattans or a dry Bombay martini.
Her intention at the liquor store was simply to stock a kitchen cabinet with some things for me to drink, when I came by next. For her part, she had to stay dry now, having had her little holiday from abstinence. None of the bottles she bought, however, remained capped or corked for long, partly because I dropped over that same night, as excited to carry on with our dialogue as she was, and partly because after I called in the afternoon to tell her how much I loved our night together and asked if I could see her, she needed something to calm her nerves. By the time I arrived with a quaint bouquet of fresh tulips in hand, Margaret was well along in her cups. I noticed, even though I had a few stiff courage-builders at a roadside on the way over myself. We were too fatigued from the night before to match the extravagant buoyancy of that first encounter, but this evening brought another kind of gift. Yes, we drank and drank, the chardonnay first, then on to cognac which had always been one of Margaret's Achilles heels, but even more than simply wanting to drink, we wanted to drink together. Sworn solitary boozers, forever before preferring that no one stand in judgment of our innocent habit, this was new for both of us. What a breakthrough, we both thought to ourselves. Later, after our love affair fully blossomed, in the depths one night of a liquory confession, we'd disclose this fact and only fall more deeply in love in the aftermath. We were seldom found apart the rest of August and into autumn. I took my beer out into Margot's narrow shaded yard, and helped her weed the unyielding garden. She packed Rose's lime juice and Absolut in an ice chest to mix gimlets out on the water, sailing the Hudson in my old catboat, a single-masted wooden affair, my pride and joy. To toast her first visit to my apartment over a gatehouse garage where I drydocked the sailboat, I brought out a sixteen-year-old Laphroaig which we finished as the harvest moon poured pale grenadine light through the window. I tried to teach her how to pronounce the name, an old Saxon carbuncle of a word. Lah-fragge, I said. Accent's on the second syllable. But there aren't any syllables, or else way too many, she laughed, then tried, Lap-fro-age? No, Lah-fragge, I said. Lah-prfo-agge?
***
They say your fate is hidden in your name and while that probably isn't true for everyone it happens to be so for me. My last name Mattie never meant much other than it sometimes gave friends fodder to tease me (Mattie was supposed to be a first name, they said not a last) but I always liked my real first name Ivy because ivy is such a magical plant. Oh the poison ivy jokes were inevitable but ivy is like a green flower and can grow in the shade and poor soil and climb trees and endure climates as different as those of Africa and the Azores, Japan and Russia, and can live as Lord Byron wrote in one of his poems for two thousand years—well, three hundred anyway, discounting poetic license. Birds like ivy for nesting in and butterflies lay their eggs there. The Greeks believed that ivy was a preventative for drunkenness and the best cure for a hangover. It's in Pliny, trust me.
So being Ivy it made some sense that I always wanted to be a florist and loved flowers from as far back as kindergarden when we planted a drift of yellow daffodils in the schoolyard. None of us kids believed in our hearts that the bleak little brown bulbs we'd buried in the October ground would survive the winter and burst into bloom next spring. When they did, that was it for me, and to this day a daffodil bulb is more bewitching and baffling than just about anything in this world. Fly to the big bright moon, map the human genome, do what you will, there is no greater miracle than a drab bulb stuck in the dirt and buried under winter snow which blossoms out of the mud year after year. I remember how after I saw those daffodils bloom in the mucky grounds at school, I told my mother I wanted to plant ivy in our yard and so we did back by the toolshed and it grows there even now. I could see it from the window where I sat day in and out during the first months of my recovery. I know it's just a wall of vines with fluttering green leaves, my namesake, but it gave me moments of comfort just the same, especially after I agreed with Martin that maybe he ought to go ahead to the city and find us an apartment, get things set up so that I could follow as soon as I was ready. He promised to phone every day and visit every weekend.
And he did so throughout the winter, bringing me brochures from various florist shops and other little presents from time to time. He even got a gig downtown playing backup in some club. My lung and the half dozen ribs that had punctured it were healing more quickly than the doctors predicted, as were my broken leg and wrist. What wasn't going as well as they'd hoped was, to use their lingo, the series of surgical reconstructive procedures on my face. I'd flown into the windshield hard, and hadn't fastened the seatbelt which was an insane oversight but there it was and I paid for it with a long gash on my forehead and another on my cheek, as well as a shattered chin. A surgeon in Cooperstown did most of the work and while I usually loved it when Martin was around, during the months they kept regrafting and revising, and my face went from scarred to swollen-and-scarred to misshapen-and-scarred, I was just as happy when he called saying this weekend or that wasn't good for him to get upstate, he had a crucial stint here or was obligated to finish a five-nighter there, that he loved me and missed me and would come next week for sure. God knows I wasn't used to what I saw in the mirror, and even when girlfriends I'd known since the days of those daffodil plantings came over to keep the invalid company I felt ashamed not merely because my face was a devastated distortion, at least in my eyes, but because this didn't need to have happened. Margaret need not have been drunk, sure, but her responsibility was hers to govern and I had no say in the matter and she already paid for her lack of judgment. For me, my head was a kaleidoscope of moving plans and thoughts of marriage and jostling flowers and wondering if I could get off early to see Martin about some damn thing I've forgotten what possibly it could have been that mattered so much I got distracted, blew through a stop sign and hit that sheet of heartless ice. She was plastered; I was in a rush. Now I live with my mother, and Margaret's husband lives by himself. As for Martin and me, I knew where we were headed by the time April showers brought inevitable May flowers.
***
I proposed on Christmas, the same day Margot discovered she was pregnant. To celebrate both blessings we had corned beef sandwiches and Dom Perignon. When she called her mother to tell her our news, the woman asked her daughter how went it with the freelancing? —though her graphic design commissions were slowed by the move, she had a few faithful clients and lived modestly on savings between jobs—when would she finally get to meet the famous James? and how was the not-drinking going? My fiancée said work was fine, promised we'd drive to Vermont sometime soon for a long weekend, but failed to answer the last question. Still, Margot knew she would have to cut back because of the baby. I poured her from a second, cheaper bottle of champagne and phoned my sister in Philadelphia. Both my parents were dead, one of stomach cancer, the other of heart disease, so there wasn't really anybody else for me to share the news with. Margot seldom mentioned her dad except to say she didn't like him, and if she didn't neither did I. I'd always remember thinking that day how my willowy future bride and I had grown inseparable, like the espaliered pears that grew together, latticelike, over at the inn where we first met. We set the wedding for Valentine's Day so the baby, due late April, wouldn't be born out of wedlock.
Sobriety wasn't Margot's calling but with my moral support, I who reminded her it was only a matter of a few lousy dry months, she disciplined herself to stay off the hard stuff, drinking wine and the occasional port. I guess I took up the slack by drinking for both of us, but seldom in her presence. Some good souls I'd known over the years, whenever I bothered to venture out into local bars before I met my wife, became happy hour companions— companions in so far as we drank in the same room. From my stool at the far end of the bar I assumed they no more wanted to chat, pontificate, emote, argue, or in any real way engage than I did. Truth was I missed drinking with Margot, but now that she and I had moved in together—my place because of the catboat—I felt it important not to bedevil my poor darling by hammering right under her nose. When she worried she was becoming fat because of the pregnancy, and that I would meet some beauty at the bar, I could only scoff. She knew as well as I did that bars were for one thing only, especially now that I was living with the mother of my child-to-be.
Her miscarriage in January brought these concerns to an end, and together we went on our first extended bender. When I phoned into work with the tragic news they generously gave me the week off, which I spent behind locked doors with Margot in a fluctuating state of alcoholic philosophizing and comatose despair. Her mother pled to come help see us through our grieving but her daughter told her truthfully we were in no condition to see anyone. My sister sent a magnificent blooming amaryllis which Margot dropped on the floor, breaking the clay pot and scattering soil and bulbs. We never got around to opening the envelope with her sympathy card. Instead of waiting for Valentine's Day, we pulled ourselves together toward the end of that black week and flew to Reno. We'd later have a good laugh when my sister said Reno was where you went for the quick divorce, not a wedding, but the knot was tied and we were again, after our own fashion, happy.
***
The first time he came over to see me I'd been three weeks out of my fifth reconstructive and was for a change not feeling all that bad about myself. I'd taken to gardening in the back yard, wearing a huge floppy straw hat because the sun was apparently detrimental to the healing scars, and was tilling soil for a bed of peonies when my mother came out and told me James Chatham was on the line asking if he could visit. Always protective, especially now that Martin and I were no more, she came out back and shook her head No while covering the receiver of the cordless with her palm, as if he could hear her gesture somehow. I told her he was more than welcome. Time had come for us to meet face-to-face and talk. After all, who suffered the most from the accident (his wife aside, whose suffering was over forever) than he and I? It was right that we finally meet, or meet again really since during my months of nights I'd had an abundance of time to think about things, everything imaginable, and during the hours spent wandering the often frustratingly vague halls of memory I remembered him, recalled having known him better than I initially thought in those first confusing days after the collision when I was nothing more than an anaesthetized dreamer who kept herself alive by picturing different roses and assigning them their names, Coral Creeper and Applejack and Marie Bugnet with its pure white tousled petals and a fragrance that would make the cloven-hoofed devil himself swoon.
***
Whiskey sours and daiquiris, mint juleps and sloe gin fizzes, the flagrant highball days and even the dull ones of dry Bordeaux having receded into the mist, we settled that spring and summer into the spirits that worked best for us. Margot drank gin on the rocks, her preference being Tanqueray; I became a Scotch man, and while I liked fancy single malts— Oban, Glenfiddich, so forth— my poison of choice was Johnny Walker. Johnny walked me where I needed to go, I said, a fatuous joke that never failed to make Margot smile. Johnny be good. We had things under control. Back at her computer Margot was someone to watch in the graphic design world—uneven, yes, but when she was on her game just brilliant. As for myself, I was reliable, got the job done, worked slow and steady as Aesop's dusty turtle. Binges were masqueraded as the flu, a leveling allergy attack, a sudden family emergency that called us away for a few days.
After we sank our catboat in shallow water, a heavy October wind having pushed the wide-beamed oak and cedar craft into a rock wading distance from the shore, I quit drinking Scotch. The debacle was without question my fault and I'd been through a fifth of Johnny when I lost control of the Margot, as I'd rechristened her the year we were married. To Margaret's respectful bewilderment, I seemed to get away not just from the whisky but all booze for a few weird months after the accident—that I only drank beer she found both inspiring and frightening. We even managed during this period of remission to take the train down to visit the Met and indulge in hotdogs and beer in Central Park. Margot pointed out a little flock of birds chirping crazily and flailing about in the top of a cherry tree, telling me they were drunk which made me laugh. No, really, she said, she'd read about this in one of her bird behavior books—they loved consuming berries fermented by the sun in the highest branches. Soused sparrows, go figure. Soon after that I came over to Tanqueray if only because it made shopping for the liquor much easier and saved money since we bought by the case.
Evenings eventually witnessed a new routine in which rather than always drinking together we spent some quality time alone, me retiring with a bottle downstairs where the catboat was drydocked, to work on repairing its ruined hull; Margot curled up on the sofa with a magazine, smoking in front of the television. We spoke about having another try at parenthood, and although our lovemaking was sporadic, Margot did get pregnant again, and once more miscarried. As depressing as she found her prior failure to carry our child—I already had names in mind, Margaret if it was a girl, Dylan if a boy—she descended into an inconsolable depression of weeping day and night, bingeing until her speech was too garbled to understand, though I knew the gist of what she might be trying to say. Third time was not going to be the charm in the years that winged by, day by blurry day, since our love evolved into a sibling companionship rather than what in the beginning was something else. I remained beautiful in my wife's eyes despite my puffiness and bloating, while Margot grew gaunt and angular, her skin transparent and long hair now shimmeringly more white than brown, which I frankly adored. We leaned on each other more and more, reflecting one another like the facing mirrors in a García Lorca poem Margaret memorized when she first moved up here, and sometimes recited. Woodcutter, chop down my shadow.
Rarely did we argue but when we did the fireworks blinded all measure of reason. The precipitating problem was always some little thing which, fueled by the gin, turned incendiary. Why couldn't she vacuum once in a blue moon? Instead of pretending to work on my ridiculous boat which was never going to sail again, why didn't I fix the lock on the front door so someone wouldn't murder us in our sleep? Why was this chicken burnt? Did I keep coming home so late because I was having an affair? How was it she always accused me of having the affair when she was the one home alone all day, drinking herself blind? How dare I raise my voice about her drinking when I was going through two quarts a night? Violence would follow these words, never visited by one of us on the other, but as inevitable as our morning-after apologies. Margaret smashed crockery and threw books. I punched the wall and stumbled over furniture, breaking my toe and cutting my hands on sharp edges as well as dull. Ordinarily soft-spoken, we thundered and wailed and wept. Usually tender, we spat and raged. Chairs were overturned, bottles flew. I slammed the door screaming I never wanted to see her again. She barricaded herself in the bathroom threatening to slit her wrists. It wasn't until I tripped and fell into the old French doors that separated the living room from our bedroom, and opened up my forehead and cheek with the splintering glass, sending me in an ambulance to the hospital for surgery to remove fragments and getting stitches which would leave me scarred, that we finally sat down to talk.
***
Scars, I thought. His face was nothing like mine but his flesh had known the same kind of pain. And yes, I was right. I suspected we met before, back when we were young optimistic kids going to school thinking that the world was a place in which reversals of fortune happen to the oldsters but never to us, which in a way wasn't wrong since now we were people we'd have thought of as very old back then. Still, isn't it crazy how stupid young people are and how inevitable is the downfall, the comeuppance, how when we're young we know we're smart and when we're older we know we're not, and how there must be an instant when the transition takes place and how seldom any of us knows just when that moment was or why it happened. My curse and my blessing is that I do know, of course. But when my mother let James Chatham in and he and I shook hands and even tentatively gave each other a victims' hug, I remembered that hand and that same hesitant hug because years ago when we weren't such damaged goods we'd made this same gesture, kissed each other just like a girl and boy who don't know what they're doing do. It was the first time I was ever drunk, the ground whirling and sky spinning and my feet freezing cold, fireworks if I remember right so possibly the Fourth of July, I couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen but understood it was a rite of passage, which meant you had to suffer for a higher cause or something idiotic in that vein, but he did kiss me, my first kiss, and I never told a soul pretty much including myself since I erased the moment (it was under a tree, an oak or maple) from my mind until now. Crazy. We sat and talked about my injuries for a while and I asked him how he was getting along and though he said he was doing fine, as good as could be expected, I saw that his eyes were swimming, their rims red as wild poppy petals. I was sorry to see him go and when he asked if he could come back to visit from time to time I told him I wished he would, and he gave me his phone number. My mother and my friends didn't like him and thought it was unhealthy for me to spend any time with him given, as they saw it, his alkie spouse maimed me for life, nearly killed me. What they didn't know and even James would never really know was the ineffable nature of the gaze his wife and I exchanged as we lay there not ten feet from each other in the snow that winter day, a contact so pure and even sublime I will never achieve it again, something so unspeakably marvelous it makes me feel only gratitude that I had it, held it, held her in my eyes, just as she held me in hers, dying. That James must have gazed into her eyes with a similar depth of compassion obsessed me for days after he came by to see me, and when my mother was out one afternoon I took the chance of calling him at work and asked if he'd like to get together again maybe away from my house somewhere. He took to the idea as if it had been his own and when I mentioned I was still shy about being seen in public he asked me if I'd ever been out on the river, and said my scars meant nothing to him if his meant nothing to me. To this day I find it hard to believe he can't remember that time we were kids drinking god knows what and kissed under a tree with not a flaw on either of our bodies nor many strikes against us yet. I suppose it's all just booze under the bridge.
***
The drinking had taken Margot and me to a precipice and we had no choice but either to back away into sobriety or jump. A warm May breeze gentled 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 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 Armangnac, grappa, amontillado, 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 newlywedded so far as we were concerned—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, ennervated 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 stare at the television or into amber 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 flowing 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 Kingston Bridge and the lighthouse and pretty mansions set back on their grassy rises beyond where the train ran along the rockstrewn shore. He offered me something to drink, too, and I accepted a plastic glassful of white wine so 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 weighed 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 ox-eye 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 he could ask whether she said anything to me when we were alone that day lying there, and I told him 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 half-hearted 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 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 whom I adored. Who would have thought horticultural shows, botanical gardens, or even the modest pleasure of having freshcut 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 aside 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 not, we both believed, have wanted, we took her memory to be affirmative. We bought an eyebrow colonial farmhouse outside town, which had a view of the mountains 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 felt—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 which 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.