Who You Know (30 page)

“Is it going to be any more awkward between us at work than it already is now?”

He had a point. Plus, if we gave this whole relationship thing a try, I wouldn't have to wonder anymore if there was a possibility for something to happen between us. What would his kiss be like—too cautious? Awkward? Fishy-lipped? If it was terrible, at least I'd know, at least I would have given it a try.

Les walked toward me, leaned in, touched his fingers lightly across the back of my neck, and pulled me toward him.

His kiss surprised me with its intensity, with its—there's no other way to put this—skill. It was the kiss of a man who knew what he wanted; there was nothing hesitant about it.

I stopped thinking, and let myself just feel, feel every sensation: the smell of his soap, the taste of his minty breath, the feel of his lips against mine.

Later, when I could think again, I'd think that it was like Sleeping Beauty's kiss—the kiss that finally woke me up. Was it really that Les didn't look like a movie star that had made me so afraid, or was it that I knew I could really love him and be loved by him, that this relationship could be something real and deep and, therefore, scary? Maybe I lived in my fairy tale world because there, I had nothing to lose.

 

 

W
e waited to go back to my place until just after midnight. When we kissed at the stroke of twelve, Jen and Rette cheered.
“Finally,”
Rette said.

We spent the rest of the night making love. Les's body was so different from Gideon's. His stomach was a little pudgy and his shoulders were so much broader, his legs were so much more muscular. In the embrace of his thick, strong arms, I felt safe—spiritually, emotionally, and physically. I felt like everything was going to be okay.

We slept most of New Year's Day and woke up famished late that afternoon. We made vegetable risotto and ate it picnic-style on a blanket we threw on the living room floor. We spent the evening giving each other back rubs and drinking cheap wine and watching old movies.

It wouldn't be for a few more weeks that I'd look at him sitting across the couch from me, a smile on his face, and realize that I loved him.

 

 

T
he wonderful, relaxing feeling I felt all New Year's Day vanished abruptly when I returned to work the next day. First thing in the morning, Morgan stopped by my office with a copy of the report on features customers wanted in refrigerators that I'd done for Expert.

“Did you write this?” he asked. I couldn't read his tone exactly, but it wasn't friendly. It seemed accusing.

“I wrote parts. The introduction and transitions. But most of it just pulls directly from what the clients said in the surveys.”

The cell phone he wore on a clip on his hip rang. He checked the number to see who was calling. As he answered the phone he gave me a nod and was on his way. I thought about his cryptic nod good-bye. It seemed like it was a “we'll talk more later” nod. But was it to talk about how I would be fired for wasting time rushing through my work and delivering a substandard product or to talk about what a good job I was doing and how he appreciated my attention to detail? I had the uneasy feeling it was the former.

JEN

T
om hadn't spoken to me since the holiday party, and you know what? I didn't miss him.

I broke up with Mike on New Year's Day. He took me out to a nice dinner, and I started to do what I do to make a dull baseball game go faster: I started working on getting a buzz. I told the waiter to bring me two martinis right away because I knew the first one would be gone before he stopped back. In fact, both were gone by the time he returned with our salads less than five minutes later. I was so embarrassed that when he asked if I wanted another, I said no even though I really did. That's when it finally hit me: Was going to nice restaurants worth dating a guy I had to be drunk with to stand being with?

I broke up with Mike after dinner. He didn't take it well—he bargained and pleaded and promised he'd change. There were mercifully no tears, at least.

I decided to take a break from dating for a while, at least until I caught up on my laundry and my sleep.

T
hese last few weeks, I'd been crying at every turn, for any excuse or no excuse at all. Frankly, I felt sorry for myself. I felt like I'd been diagnosed with some terrible disease. Which maybe I had.

I drank every night for the first two weeks of the New Year. I figured if I had to give it up forever, I might as well enjoy it while I could. But drinking so much was making me sick. I was exhausted and I could just feel the brain cells dying, my head hurt so bad. One morning I woke up and I felt so vile I vowed that I'd try an AA meeting, just to see what it was like.

I suffered through the day at work, not getting much accomplished. That night, I decided I was too tired to face going to a meeting, but I promised myself I'd definitely go the next day. I fell asleep on the couch before seven.

 

 

I
t's amazing how easy it was to vow that I'd never drink again when I was hung over and feeling like a steaming pile of dog shit. But the next day, right about the end of the day at five, I was really, really craving a beer. I knew a beer wouldn't get me buzzed though, and I couldn't afford the calories of a whole six-pack, so I decided I'd pick up a half of a pint of something to accompany the beer.

I pulled into the liquor store parking lot, put the car in park, and then just sat there in the driver's seat. I really wanted a beer, something to make the tension go away, make the night alone easier to face, but I didn't want to be hung over tomorrow.

I sat in my car for several more minutes, arguing with myself about which I wanted more, a beer or to feel okay tomorrow.

Fuck it, maybe I'd go to one meeting, and then I could stop at the liquor store. That was fair. I'd keep my vow about going to a meeting, but nobody ever said you had to stop drinking right after your very first AA meeting. I'd probably have to stop drinking someday, but that didn't mean it had to be today. I went home without buying any alcohol first. I could pick up anything I wanted after the meeting. I looked at the printouts that Rette had given me. There was a meeting half an hour from now close to my house.

I was expecting the people in the meeting to look like they were teleported directly from a Montel Williams set—all mullet haircuts and Kmart clothes and from-a-box-blond hairdos. There were a couple of trailer trash types, but out of the ten people there, the majority looked completely normal.

I sat in one of the metal folding chairs arranged in a circle and listened without saying a word as people talked about what was going on in their lives and shared horror stories from their drinking days. One of the guys was a well-dressed, good-looking middle-aged man. The deal was that he used to be a doctor, but because of his drinking he lost his job, his wife, and his kid. He'd been trying to get his kid to talk to him, but the kid didn't believe he was sober, and could he blame her? After what she'd been through?

There was a middle-aged woman who was dressed like a successful business woman—no-nonsense hairdo and expensive clothes—a biker guy with thick tattooed arms, a young mother with pockmarked skin and eyes that hinted that maybe she hadn't had the easiest life, and a cute guy who looked like he was in his mid- to late-twenties.

Nobody made me talk, which I appreciated. If I spoke, I was afraid I'd start crying and never stop. If I said the words out loud, if I admitted I had a problem, that I couldn't seem to stop drinking, there would never be any going back. It would be a fact, not just a possibility.

At the end of it all, we grabbed hands and said that “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .” prayer. I was sitting between the biker and the young mother. I expected to be grossed out by holding their hands, but when I reached out and took their hands, it turned out I wasn't grossed out at all. Their hands were warm, and strangely comforting, the soft, small hands of the mother, the gruff hands of the biker, and me in the middle, feeling like maybe I wasn't so different from them after all.

But the meeting was a bunch of bullshit because I was still stressed and feeling crappy, and I still wanted to go home and drink something.

Metal folding chairs scraped the concrete floors of the church basement as people stood and folded their chairs to put them away. My chair was stuck or something because I couldn't get it to fold.

“Can I help?”

“Please.” I looked up. It was the cute younger guy.

“This is the first time I've seen you here.”

“It was my first meeting.”
First,
as if there would be more, which there would not, since this was a great big fat waste of time.

“My name is John. It's really good to have you here. I hope I see you again sometime.” He walked over to the wall and stacked my chair against the others. As I was leaving, I heard him say, “Hey!”

I turned to look at him.

“Just so you know, it's not like you come to one meeting and poof! that's it, you'll never want a sip of alcohol again. But the meetings, they can help, I promise.”

I nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

I stopped at the liquor store, went home, got tanked, and cried myself to sleep.

 

 

W
hen I woke up, I felt nauseated and I thought, this is probably what it feels like to be pregnant. Then I thought, when exactly was the last time I had my period? Wasn't it around Thanksgiving? That was seven weeks ago.

I thought about that condomless romp Tom and I had shortly after that. But he'd pulled out. I just felt crappy from drinking. Right? I'd skipped periods before. My freshman year, when I was dieting pretty heavily, I only got two periods that whole year. I never understood women who got all concerned when their periods were a few days late. My period had always been inconsistent and flaky, kind of like me. I probably just hadn't been eating as much as I should, that was all.

 

 

I
went to meetings off and on during the next couple of weeks, though I was still drinking regularly. The only requirement for attending the meetings was a desire to stop drinking. I didn't really want to stop drinking, I just wanted to stop drinking so much, but from what I was learning at the meetings and from the literature they gave out, it seemed like maybe finding a way to just drink less wasn't an option. My efforts to stop after two drinks certainly never seemed to work, that was for sure.

Through it all, I felt really low, maybe even worse than after Dave and I broke up. All I could think was,
This is not how my life is supposed to go, this is not how my life is supposed to go.

At the meetings and in the stories of people in books I read, I heard some truly incredible stories. Stories about losing jobs and millions of dollars and loved ones. But some of these people, they seemed so happy. This one guy actually said that he was so happy with his life now, he was glad he'd become an alcoholic because AA had helped him get in touch with his feelings, which improved his relationship with his wife and kids, and he was living a life more fully and deeply than he had ever imagined possible. Maybe that was what kept me coming back. I wanted that, too. I wanted to live life fully, to be able to have good relationships and generally go through life with my shit together instead of the alcoholic, bulimic, debt-getting-into ways I normally dealt with my problems. I really, really wanted to believe that a different life was possible.

I admit, too, that I did like seeing John. He was cute and always friendly to me. I didn't flirt with him at all, though; I felt so vulnerable, so exposed, I didn't feel confident enough to flirt.

 

Freshman year. Jill Sandy's house. Peach schnapps and orange juice—a fuzzy navel. Probably like point zero two percent alcohol, a laughable amount these days, but back then after a drink or two, all was right with my world. Everything seemed funner, funnier, better, including me.

I'd spent thirteen years trying to get that feeling back, one drink at a time. It had been a long, long time since alcohol had been fun. A long time of me thinking, “I think I'll have a drink,” as if it were me making the choice, and not my addiction, this messed-up chemical imbalance of my body that made every part of me scream for another drink, just one more sip, craving to capture that moment of peace and happiness and self-acceptance I'd felt at Jill's house, just for a second, one single instant, just one more time.

 

 

A
fter one meeting, John asked me if I'd go for a cup of coffee with him.

“Um,” my voice came out in a quiet, husky squeak. I was crying all the time—in the car, at home alone, at nearly every meeting—and the constant crying was making my voice raspy. My old confidence had disappeared entirely. “Yeah, okay.”

We went to Penny Lane. I ordered a chai with skim milk; he ordered a green tea. We sat in a table in the corner, quiet and out of the way. I wanted to hide from everyone, including myself.

“How long have you been going to meetings?” I asked him.

“Six years.”

“Six years! How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“So you've been going since you were twenty-two? God, am I going to have to go to these stupid meetings for six years?”

“A lot of people go for the rest of their lives on and off. I've been going fairly often lately because I've been going through a hard time.”

“Why?”

“It's the second anniversary of my fiancée's death. Car accident.”

“Drunk driver?”

“Icy road.”

“God, I'm so sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I. I've been really bummed lately. I've been thinking stuff like, I'm going to spend the rest of my life alone so what does it matter if I start drinking again, that kind of thing.”

I sipped my tea, feeling awkward, wishing it were a cosmopolitan.

“I've wanted to get to know you better since the first time I saw you,” he said. “You never say anything in the meetings.”

“I'm not someone you want to get to know better, trust me.”

“You're so funny, so pretty. You're a little shy . . .”

“Ha! Shy, that's a good one,” I laughed. “I guess it's possible, who knows.” This conversation was not making me comfortable. “So, what do you do for a living?” Ack! God, would I ever stop fishing for economic information to determine if I could comfortably raise his kids?

“I'm a photojournalist for the
Denver Post
. I do some freelance work for magazines as well. How about you?”

“I work in marketing.”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh my god no . . .” I told him what a cesspool my company was, and how poorly managed it was. I told him about how I dealt with my frustration by depicting salespeople and executives with hideous diseases, and soon John was cracking up.

“So what's it like at your office?” I asked.

“It's like any job. I have some great friends there and some people I'd be completely content to never see again. Isn't every office like the dysfunctional, Jerry Springer side of the family?”

I laughed. “I guess so.”

“But who would we sleep with and gossip about if it weren't for our coworkers?”

I laughed again and it felt good, really good. I almost felt like my old self and it was so nice, sitting here, laughing with a cute guy. There wasn't a trace of alcohol anywhere in sight.

We talked for a few hours until they were closing the place up, and John walked me to my car and asked if we could do this again sometime.