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 love—forgetting God, forgetting divine love, forgetting everything but the blind need to be validated by the attention of a man. They look everywhere for a love object, in short, when the worthiest object of love is right there—in themselves.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say to Emmie.
“Soon,” says Emmie.
“After all my suicide attempts,” says Fleur, “I discovered that I could make my little girl’s death mean something only by staying on after her and giving my life to the service of other girls. And I have found in this work an enduring joy—and pain—that has transformed everything I thought I knew before. I don’t know why God chose to send me such a bitter lesson, but perhaps I drew it to myself with my extreme stubbornness. For I believe that we ourselves fashion our lessons according to our own needs.”
Stunned silence greets her speech. Then, slowly, the room begins to come to life. One by one, people stand up and applaud and hug Fleur.
There is a five-minute recess for coffee before the sharing begins.
“Are all the meetings like this?” I whisper.
Emmie laughs. “None are. This one was sent especially for you. The Program is like Mary Poppins’s elixir: it becomes the specific medicine for whatever ails you. You asked for a cure for sex addiction? You got it.”
“The last thing I want is to be cured,” I say.
“I know,” says Emmie. “Fighting being cured is the first step in being cured.”
“Do I have to talk?”
“Only if you want to feel better.”
During most of the sharing, I sniffle and study the steps.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God
as we understood Him,
praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
At the end, after a basket is passed and just before the meeting is adjourned, Fleur calls on me.
“The lady with the red hair,” she says, pointing at me.
I look at Emmie for guidance. Perhaps the speaker is really calling on her.
She shrugs.
“I’m Leila,” I say. “I haven’t had a drink in an hour.”
“Welcome,” says Fleur. “It works if you work it.” Nearly everyone in the room turns and begins to clap for me, as if I were a heroine.
After the meeting, people linger over coffee and cookies. Several women come up to me, proffering phone numbers. I take all the little slips of paper and tuck them into my Filofax, planning to throw them away when I get home. If I take them, at least I can get out of here.
Driving me back to my house in her old silver Volvo station wagon, Emmie says, “Do you know I didn’t speak at all at meetings for the first year? I just sat in the back and
lurked.
”
“I
had
to say something. I don’t even know why. Most of the time, I wasn’t listening. I was staring at ‘The Twelve Steps’ and thinking how much they resemble ‘The Rules of Love.’ ”
“What are ‘The Rules of Love’?”
“‘The Rules of Love’ of the Provençal poets are nothing less than a complete codification of love. They were written
centuries
ago. And nothing whatsoever has changed.”
“So what did you think of the meeting?” asks Emmie.
“Boring,” I say. “There should be a stronger word:
boringhissimo.
”
“I know what you mean. Some meetings seem so boring you think you could die. And the smoke gets to you. And the platitudes—an attitude of platitude, I call it. And yet it
works.
As they say, it works if you work it. I don’t even know
why
it works. Grace, I guess.”
“How long have you been doing this, Emmie? And why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“You never asked.”
“But you could have
told
me.”
“Why? If drinking and drugging were still fun for you, why would you
want
to know? You didn’t want to know, in fact, or
you
would have asked.”
“How long have you been a member?”
“About a decade. I got into it in Paris, when I lived on the Boulevard Raspail. You remember, my orgy period in Paris? Ah, the sixties turning seventies . . . before the drugs turned on us.”
Emmie had lived in Paris from 1969 to 1979, a good time to live in Paris. She had written her first book there—a book about sexual liberation for women, which was, in fact, about her own liberation. In Paris she had belonged to an orgy set that included everyone who was anyone in the intellectual and film worlds, doing drugs and sex and rock and roll to a fare-thee-well. The perfect way for a convent girl to spend the seventies. Since I was living another life at the time—first with Thom, then with Elmore, then with Elmore and the twins—I saw her only on my infrequent trips to Paris. I never knew she’d been addicted to anything but sex and chocolate. (Her emergency supply ran to ten-inch Toblerones.) She certainly did not fit my—or anyone else’s—description of an alcoholic.
“So you got sober without telling me. Did you know I had a problem?”
“I knew you thought you could control everything in your life. Which, in itself, is a problem, since we can’t.”
“Do you think I’m an alcoholic?”
“What
I
think doesn’t matter. Do
you
think you are? This is one of the few great diseases that’s self-diagnosed—like love. It doesn’t matter what I—or anyone else—think. Maybe you’re just a garden-variety love addict and you just drink with men.
I
don’t know. I do know the Program saved
my
life.”
“Oh, come on, Emmie, that’s a cop-out.”
“No it’s not. The truth is that I never have
seen
you falling-down drunk, and the truth is that you stumble through your life reasonably enough, taking care of everyone—including me—but you seem not to be having much fun. Here you are with those beautiful twins, the meteoric career, all that intelligence and wit and vitality—and you’re ready to throw in the towel because of a very damaged young man.”
“A what?”
“A Dart.”
“But I
love
Dart. I’ve never felt—”
“I know how much you love Dart. How much do you love
Leila?
”
Stung by the question, I answer it.
“Not much.”
“Then something is drastically wrong. Because Leila is lovable.”
“
Is
she?” I ask, leaking tears. “Is she
really?
”
“Oh, darling, why on earth do you think I’ve been here all this time—because you’re not lovable? Even with all your craziness, what you call your
mishegoss,
you’re the best person I know. You give and give and give. To everyone. Except Leila. Now it’s her turn.”
“But am I an
alcoholic?
”
“I don’t know,” says Emmie. “Ask yourself, don’t ask me.”
We ramble through green Connecticut, buying things. Bunches of flowers. Tomatoes. Garlic. Pasta. Then we go back to my house and start cooking.
We make fresh tomato sauce for the pasta, and grill swordfish steaks and ears of corn. Puttering in the kitchen and at the outdoor grill, we are absurdly happy.
“At five o’clock,” Emmie says, “we’ll have muffins and tea with honey.”
“I’m going to get fat as a pig.”
“I doubt it,” says Emmie.
For an hour or so, sitting with Emmie and the dog in the early summer green of sweet Connecticut, I am at peace. After lunch, we lie on my hillside and watch the clouds go by, naming them according to the animals and birds they resemble. Something seems drastically wrong, missing.
“Dart—I wonder when I’ll hear from Dart.”
“Never, I hope. But I doubt he can stay away.”
“How can you say that?”
“Leila, you need Dart like a fish needs a bicycle. Dart needs you far more than you need him.”
“If he needs me so much, where
is
he?”
“Off provoking you. If you stopped being provoked,
he’d
be the one going crazy. It’s a dance you’re doing. You need to be on the hook, and he needs to hook you.”
“What about sex?”
“What
about
it?”
“I never had sex that good with anyone. The truth is, if I start feeling this good about myself, I won’t let Dart knock me around anymore, and if I don’t let Dart knock me around, he won’t fuck me. . . .”
“You said it—I didn’t.”
“I don’t think it’s
possible
to have great sex without domination and abuse—it’s built
in
somehow. When we adore them, we give it all away. All my intellect rebels against this notion, but my
kishkes
know it’s true. When Dart fucks me I feel
alive.
When he doesn’t, I wither.”
“Did it ever occur to you that feelings are not facts?”
“I’ve never lived without a man. I need sex to power my creativity. I need that skinlessness to get in touch with the muse.”
“You need
you
to power your creativity. Dart takes you away from you. From the twins. From your work. If you make yourself the center of your life, if you stop giving away your power, other kinds of men will be drawn to you—equals, not dominators or wimps.”
“Like who? Thom was a wimp. Elmore, for all his bravado about equality, was both a dominator
and
a wimp. Even the twins know it. Ed said to me when I took them to the airport, ‘Why do we have to go to Daddy’s, Mom? Daddy’s a big baby. You support us. You take care of us. He just bosses us around.’ I said, ‘He’s your dad, and you love him,’ and Mike said, ‘Are you
sure
he’s our dad?’ ‘Absolutely sure,’ I said. ‘Okay, Mom,’ said Ed, ‘we take your word for it.’
“
They
know he’s a wimp and a weakling. They know who they can depend upon and who they can’t. I try to tell them how great Elmore is, and they laugh at me. Ten years old, and they know everything. They even asked me once if I’d ever done it on a plane. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Wet or dry?’ I thought for a minute and then said, ‘Dry.’ ‘Oh,’ said Ed, ‘that doesn’t count, Mom. We were wondering about the Mile High Club.’ ‘How do you little
pishers
know about the Mile High Club?’ I asked. ‘We read,’ said Mike. ‘And watch those videos you have,’ said Ed. This was a shock, but I pretended to be cool. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if there’s ever anything you want to know about sex, please ask your mom. Don’t go to strangers, okay?’ ‘Okay, Mom,’ said Ed, ‘but we know about
every
thing.’ ‘Even pantric sex,’ said Mike. ‘You mean tantric,’ I said, glad for some little corner of expertise. ‘I told you it wasn’t pantric,’ said Ed to Mike. And off they ran, to play with their Barbies.”