Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [47]
The meeting begins with the preamble and the introduction of the speaker, a white-haired man of about fifty, who smokes compulsively and whose right eye twitches. I wonder if Dart has noticed the man’s disturbing resemblance to his father.
Dart paws the ground like a colt. He seems terribly anxious. Well, why shouldn’t he be? Wasn’t I at my first meeting?
The speaker, who introduces himself as Lyle from New York, begins his monologue.
“If you really wanna know how I was drunk versus how I am sober, all I have to tell you is that I used to live on an island off the coast of Maine with my first wife and my seven kids. There was no way to get to the mainland but a little speedboat. My idea of fun was to take the speedboat and take off for weeks, leaving the family stranded. Whenever my first wife complained of this treatment, I would deck her. I’m not proud of it, but I’d come home, punch everybody out, and take off again. They were my prisoners—see?—and I figured they had to take it, because I paid the bills. I’m not proud of the fact that I treated them all like my property.”
Dart listens intently, but I can’t figure out what his response is.
Emmie whispers, “Stop trying to figure out what Dart is feeling—what are you feeling?”
“Angry,” I say. “Disgusted.”
Lyle goes on with his saga of wife abuse, child abuse, psychological abuse, mental abuse. The world is so full of abuse of all kinds. If I were God, I’d wipe ’em all out and start again. I am furious, listening to this drunkalogue. I can identify with nothing in it. The men in the Program are such thugs, I think. The women are victims and the men thugs. And what am I? A little of both?
Lyle’s story concludes with his sobering up at an expensive funny farm, his leaving his first family and starting a second, his ten years in the Program and how they made him into if not a better person then at least a rotten person who no longer gets drunk and hits women and children.
At the sharing, I am dumbfounded by the number of men who claim to identify with Lyle. I hate him, hate his violence, his self-righteousness. This hatred is an excruciating emotion in the nonjudgmental atmosphere of the meeting. But does confessing to rotten behavior make it all okay?
Dart raises his hand. “I’m Dart, a drug addict and an alcoholic,” he says, “and this is my first meeting. Your story made me think of the way my father once held my face under water and tried to drown me because I talked back to him. I’m full of conflicted feelings, but I’m glad to be here. I want to get sober with all my heart.” People look at Dart as if his confession has triggered something powerful in them. How many drunks in this room have struggled through drownings and beatings just to arrive here, at this church basement in rural Connecticut? I think of the odds against all of us, and my eyes fill with tears.
I hug Dart. “Darling, I’m so proud of you,” I say, suddenly revising my opinion of Lyle’s story. If it can bring out this response in Dart, it must be worthwhile. I even decide to reserve judgment on the human race and not kill them all off. Yet.
Apparently, I still think I’m God. And my sane mind, far off and barely audible, whispers: “Leila, you’re lovable, you really are. You don’t have to put up with this shit.”
Isadora: I don’t really like the chapters where you get into AA. AA is basically impossible to write about. What happens there sounds banal but really isn’t. Group process cannot be captured on paper.
Leila: Then what do you suggest we do? Leave our heroine drunk, despairing, hopeless? AA helped me.
Isadora: I know. After all, I sent you there. It’s only one of many roads to self-knowledge. As long as one learns that the answer is within . . . as long as one stops blaming other people . . .
Leila: