Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [29]
After the divorce, I took a job at a parts store and went out with the guys after work. Prodigious drinkers, they ordered round after round. A few times, I woke up the next morning without knowing how I got home.
I quit the store when I was twenty-nine. I didn’t want to be thirty years old and working in parts. I stopped drinking. I started running seven to ten miles a day, applied to grad school. When I started drinking again, sometimes one beer made me drunk. Another time, I could drink half a quart of bourbon and not feel a thing. I got a DUI after just one drink. (Maybe I shouldn’t have sung the alphabet.) I was fined nine hundred dollars and sent to six AA meetings.
So, in the last two years I only drank on weekends or at social functions. Recently, because I took time off from school, I was drinking more often. No more than four, five drinks a night, though. I only got drunk once or twice a week, usually when I did editing for an expat Russian physicist—he’d always give me ice tea glasses of frozen vodka.
I don’t remember my last drink. I remember being at the Russian’s house and, less clearly, at a party in married student housing. Then I woke up in my underwear in the detox rubber room.
“That’s it.” Lewis folded his writing, set it on the desk, and looked at Red.
Red was sunk in thought. His index fingers pushed his lips up toward his nose. “What I want to know, Lewis …” he said, and focused slowly, “is how, after writing all that, you can have any doubt whatsoever that you’re an alcoholic?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Lewis was flattered that Red thought his paltry story measured up. Still, the diagnosis, delivered so unequivocally, felt like a punch in the chest. He’d drunk heavily at times, sure. But he never drowned any cats or committed vehicular manslaughter or had to glug alcohol in the middle of the night. He never even thought about alcohol all that much, and wasn’t alcoholism an obsession? “What makes you so sure?” he said.
“What normal drinker could write a document like that?”
Lewis drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Any guy he knew, any guy he went to school with, could produce a similar narrative, if asked. The misunderstanding, Lewis thought, was generated by the structure of Red’s assignment: the form alone pre-empted the content. “I can see that it sounds like I had a big long thing with alcohol,” Lewis said. “But if I’d written an essay concentrating only on all the times I’ve laughed you’d think I was a total laughing fool. Yet I’m not a big laugher.”
“And so?”
Lewis rested his forehead on his knees, breathing his own scent: tobacco, motor oil, almond-scented solvent, a whiff of goaty sweat.
“Sit with it for a few days,” Red said. “See how you feel.”
“Well, here.” Lewis tried to hand Red the written pages. “Don’t you want it?”
“Hang on to it for the time being. Might be useful later.”
Lewis was baffled: if the drinking history was so well written, and smacked so conclusively of bona-fide alcoholism, why didn’t Red snatch it up for one of his brochures?
AT 5:30 A.M., Libby Pollack Daw curled over her journal and listed everything she missed about Stockton, her ex-husband. The flood of divorce-inspired fury had finally subsided, and in its wake lay a most alarming nostalgia for: (1) That formal thank you kiss before he sat down to meals. (2) All his highbrow charm. (3) Good, smooth lips. (4) Well-shaved jaw. (5) The great pleasure of making him laugh in bed.
Libby regarded this list, then wrote: Am I turning into a Tennie? Tennie had been a next-door neighbor on Carondelet Street in New Orleans. When Libby first met her, Tennie was a bright, normal, divorced hospital technician, dating a Cajun shrimper, and moderately unhappy like everybody else. Tennie had two kids her ex-husband was good about seeing