“She wants us both to be in the same place.” This was not Curtis-speak either, this “same place” talk. “Emily, listen, I don’t know why I’m defending her. This is crazy. I’m making you miserable with all this. I want to be with you—you’re my girl.” He grinned and shot her an embarrassed look. “I don’t want to be with Amy. I, I don’t even want to talk about Amy.” He moved his long hands around, formlessly, helplessly. “All this stuff with the band,” he said, his voice growing smaller. “I’m nervous.”
“But isn’t that normal?” Emily asked angrily. Suddenly, as though a camera inside her were shuffling its lens around, bringing everything into sharp focus, she understood what bothered her, what made her anxious about the way Curtis engaged with the world: he viewed every feeling, every fear, as aberrant, as necessitating a cure. Is this what came of having psychiatrists for parents? Or was this what he meant when he said he had an “addictive personality”: that he was always seeking to soften the edges of his emotions.
“Curtis,” she began. If she didn’t force herself to talk, she was, she was sure, going to start screaming. “You don’t have to do something just because she wants you to—” And then she stopped herself. Another thing she’d sworn: no negative words about Amy. They would only make Emily look bad and Amy wronged. Somehow, she saw, she and Amy had shifted positions. When she’d met Curtis, Amy had been the villain—she had cheated on Curtis; she had belittled him and abused him—and Emily his savior. Now, somehow, Emily had become the evil temptress who had seduced Curtis away from his wife. How had this happened?
“She’s just asking me to do this one thing,” he said firmly. “And it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing anyway. It’s the truth.”
Emily nodded. “Okay,” she said. “No drinking. For how long? Did she give you a time?”
“Three months.”
“Okay. Three months.”
All summer Curtis avoided drink, seemingly without any trouble. The guys had long stopped bringing beer to rehearsals anyway, now that they had a proper practice space in a nice, finished loft building a few blocks down on Bedford. She stopped drinking, too—at least when she was with him—and was delighted when she found that she’d lost a few pounds without even trying: the simple caloric difference between having a glass of wine with dinner each night and not. Each evening he went to a meeting at a church on North Eighth Street—two blocks from Emily’s apartment and she’d never taken note of it—and conferred with his sponsor, a thirty-year-old legal proofreader, whom he hated at first, then grew to like. “If we hadn’t met through AA, I bet we would have become friends anyway,” he told Emily. The sponsor was alarmed to hear that Curtis was about to start (or restart, as the case was) divorce proceedings. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to make major life changes when you were in “recovery.”
“It’s not a ‘major life change,’” Sadie cried when Emily explained this to her, over a much-needed glass of wine at Black Betty, back in May. “He and Amy haven’t lived together for two years. Getting back together with her would be a ‘major life change.’”
“I know,” said Emily. “I know.”
She came home from such outings with friends, hoping she didn’t smell like a bar, to find Curtis sitting on the couch tensely reading a paperback, resentful, it seemed to her, that she was not required—or willing—to participate in his experiment with abstention. But the nights she stayed in were no more comfortable: he arrived at her place reeking of smoke, his large, round eyes lowered with shame. What, she wondered, had he been talking about at the meeting? “How was it?” she’d asked the first night. But he’d just shrugged and flung himself down on the couch. “We’re not supposed to talk about it,” he mumbled, hours later, into her hair. “The meeting. It’s private.” “Okay,” Emily said, and thereafter tried, brightly, to talk around the subject, chatting about her day at the office or her friends, or silently crawling on top of him and burying her head in his neck, until the discomfort abated and he became her Curtis again. Still, she realized, she now had a fourth Curtis to contend with: the Curtis who went to meetings at a dingy, Italianate church and talked to strangers about deeply personal things—things he wouldn’t (okay, couldn’t) tell her. Three private selves was, she thought, verging on too many.
During the day, at work, she read about alcoholism and depression. There were, she found, hundreds of websites devoted to each and twice that many message boards where people conversed about their own struggles or those of their husbands, mothers, brothers, and so on. There was a large group, Al-Anon, for family and friends of alcoholics, which had meetings of its own all over the city. Briefly, she considered going, to show her support for Curtis’s endeavors—but then dismissed the idea as overzealous and more likely to annoy or embarrass Curtis than to impress him with the extent of her devotion. Instead, she kept reading, tracking the cycle of addiction—and depression, for the two seemed interlinked—from start to finish. She read about genetics—the importance of family history—in both diseases (“Alcoholism is a disease,” the AA sites shouted). She memorized the signs of alcoholism—Do you drink alone? In the mornings? Do you have blackouts? Do you frequently drink to excess?—and the signs of depression. Curtis, she decided, had none of the former, and some of the latter. She read about codependency—which seemed, clearly, to be what was going on with Curtis and Amy—and “addictive personality,” the existence of which, she discovered, was currently in debate among psychologists and neurobiologists, though it made a sort of sense to her, for she saw Clara in the profiles she read, and Curtis, too, and most troublingly, herself, the way she had to have her first cup of coffee—made precisely the way she liked it, in a tiny French press, with a half teaspoon of sugar—at precisely 8:00 a.m., and her first glass of wine at 7:00 p.m. Now that Curtis had given up his glass, she found herself, during her lonely Sundays, counting the minutes until she could allow herself this pleasure. On the good Sundays, when she was content with her own company, she sat, lazily drinking, through the evening, then fell into bed early, her head pleasantly fuzzed. On the bad Sundays, though, she tried to resist the urge, for wouldn’t it be slightly disloyal to Curtis to drink in his absence? Wouldn’t she somehow jinx their whole affair if she took so much as a sip of pinot noir?
But on this Sunday—this bad, bad Sunday, which should have been a good, better-than-good Sunday, for the next day was a holiday and they would be happy, they would be celebrating, they would be among their friends!—as she cooked her sad solo meal (spaghetti with jarred sauce), a spot of rage broke through and she brought out the bottle and the corkscrew, ensuring, in her private schema, that Curtis wouldn’t call that night—as he sometimes did on Sundays—just to say good night and that he loved her and was thinking of her.
“Fuck him,” she said aloud. “I’ll see him tomorrow. I don’t need to talk to him tonight.” At that, the pins of the top lock thunked heavily in their steel casings. Emily jumped and put down the bottle with a heavy thud, just as Curtis’s long head poked through the door.
“Hey,” he said, loping across the room and kissing her.
“Hey,” she said warily. He had never, ever broken their Sunday rule. “What are you doing here?”
Curtis shrugged. “I just thought I’d stop over and see you.” He looked at the bottle of wine on the counter. “Were you just about to have a glass of wine?” She nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll have one, too.”