Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [57]
Impossible. I switch on the light, get dressed, flip through my AA booklet, and go out in search of an all-night meeting. My loins girded in denim, I venture out, searching for a refuge from my pain. As I walk, indifferent to danger, I seem to see the book of my life riffling before my eyes. How many years do I have left to paint? I could die tonight on these streets, or I could have one, two, ten, twenty, thirty years. My life is more than half over. Already the small print swims on the page when I try to read. Already my periods are either too long or too short. Already my knees ache and my elbow joints pain me in the rain. I have no time to suffer over Dart. I have work to do.
I find the meeting (in a shabby church a few blocks from the loft) and meet my people—the bums, the street people, the homeless.
The all-night meeting is as much a shelter as it is a place of prayer and guidance. Old men and women who have nothing to eat but these sugary cookies, nothing to drink but this tepid coffee or tea.
What a shabby, ragtag bunch they are! Some of the men have no teeth, and one talks to himself in the back row of the battered little wooden chairs. The women could be hookers, homeless maniacs, the sick, the half dead. New York has increasingly become a city of poverty and great wealth. Here in Hogarth’s London, the great lady in her designer dress disdains the beggar who importunes her from the street. But in the Program we are all leveled.
The meeting has not yet started, and people mill about, drinking coffee and greeting one another. All strangers, but bound together by kindness and an agreement to try to be honest. I love AA’s reprieve from the standards that hold sway in the rest of our society. Elsewhere greed and falsehood and egotism are the rule. Here, generosity, truth, humility. I am nervous because I drank tonight and I will have to say so, but there is something healing about just being here in this room. The love in the room is palpable. Somewhere, here, my same mind is waiting.
Someone comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder.
At first I recoil. It seems to be a bag lady, face swimming in fat, eyes buried in wrinkles. On her head she wears a red knitted cap with dangling sequins, on her body a tent of red polyester.
“Louise?” she says tentatively. “Louise?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Rivka Landesman, remember? Music and Art?”
I look at her in disbelief. This huge wallowing-in-fat bag lady is a classmate of mine from high school—a talented painter, someone who had a gallery before I did, someone I was once envious of because she seemed to have it made, when I was still struggling for my first recognition as a painter. Rivka was a prodigy even in high school. She used to hang out with Andy Warhol, did movies with him, sold her work to important collectors, was written up everywhere—then vanished. I hadn’t heard of her in years.
“How are you?” I asked. The question was ridiculous. I could see how she was. Worse off than I.
My kindness released something in her: a flood of self-pity.
“Well,” she said, “when my fourth marriage—to the Italian—broke up and he absconded with my entire life savings, I really hit bottom. You won’t believe this, but in the last year I’ve lost everything. My daughter’s left for college, my boyfriend vanished to Italy with a million dollars of mine and three of Andy’s paintings, I’ve had a partial hysterectomy, my hormones are all fucked up, I’ve gained eighty pounds, my mother died. . . . I’m hoping AA can help me. I don’t know where else to go. I’m as close to suicide as I’ve ever been.”
Something in me recoils at the self-pity. I feel that Rivka is about to get her hooks into me and not let go. I feel trapped, claustrophobic. But when somebody reaches out for help, you have to help.
“Louise,” she says, “what gallery are you with now? Do you think they’d look at my work?”
“I don’t know,” I say, suddenly feeling my pocket being picked. “I’m not here to be your agent. I’m here because I’m a drunk.”
“Of course,