Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [37]
“I woke up in a lot of beds without knowing how I got there, and I looked over at a lot of snoring men whose names I didn’t know,” says Fleur. “At first they were men I went to school with, men whose families I knew, men whose parents went to my church, but eventually they were men who hadn’t gone to school at all, who no longer had families or mothers, and had never even been to church.”
Is this where my life will take me—to a church basement, listening to platitudes? I’m an artist. My life has never been like other people’s. Even now I am in Dubrovnik with Dart, skidding down a cobbled street in the Zastava. It’s midnight. July. We can’t find a hotel. We have been drinking local wine by the bottleful all day—and when the car spins out of control on a nearly vertical street, we narrowly miss the massive wall of a fortress. I scream. “A miss is as good as a mile, baby,” says Dart.
“When the police came and found my little girl,” Fleur says, “I was passed out in the bedroom. . . .”
A child has died while I was in Dubrovnik with Dart. A little girl. I have two little girls. I try to listen but cannot actually focus on Fleur’s words.
Instead I look at the scroll titled “The Twelve Steps.”
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Perhaps “God” is really the sane mind, I think.
“My other child was taken from me and put in a foster home,” says Fleur. “I was sent to jail, where I tried three times to take my own life and was confined in a psychiatric prison hospital before I finally got sober and began to change my life.”
Give me a break, I think, the tears running down my face.
“Why me? I would cry out to God—and why my daughter? For years I could find no satisfactory answer. Drunk, I took strangers into my home. I could just as easily have killed my children and myself in an automobile accident or a fire or shot them by mistake with the gun I kept to repel intruders—intruders I invited into my own home with love as the excuse.”
I want to tune out Fleur’s story as much as I want to hear it. I am restless, raging—and oddly riveted. Between snatches of Fleur’s story and dreams of Dart, I’m trembling and fidgeting. I get up and grab a fistful of cookies, then go back to my folding chair.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
There follows a long, tedious account of the steps in Fleur’s recovery, a recovery that includes her fight to recover her remaining child—a son named, believe it or not, Donegal. Fleur has been “sober” for a decade now. The daughter she lost would now be nineteen. She works in a children’s hospital for minimum wage and takes “special pleasure” in caring for teenage girls. She reports having given up sex for at least seven of the ten years she has been sober—give me a break!—but recently she has “met a man who loves me for what I have endured and the peace I have found.” He has brought another daughter to her, in whom she sees a chance to “unwork her karma.”
Jesus, I hate Pollyannas. And the worst is yet to come.
“Because of the Program,” Fleur says, “I am glad to be alive. I begin every day asking God for guidance and go to sleep every night thanking Him. My special work at the hospital is to counsel adolescent girls. I try to help them see that love includes the power to love yourself, and that each of them has a garden inside her, that they do not have to have men in order to validate their existence. I feel that even in these supposedly feminist times, girls do not know this. They think they are nothing without a man, and they sacrifice themselves on the altar of romantic love, sexual