He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn't planned on saying any of that. I don't know where it came from."
I CALLED my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She'd had her class that night and wasn't back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.
We'd had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we'd rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn't, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don't know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.
I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn't feel that way, and when it got to be time to go to bed we did so on opposite sides of town. When we spoke the next day we didn't say anything about it, and we still hadn't, and it hung in the air between us whenever we talked, and even when we didn't.
She called me back around eleven-thirty. "I just got in," she said.
"A couple of us went out for a drink after class. How was your day?"
"All right," I said, and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then I asked if it was too late for me to drop over.
"Oh, gee," she said. "I'd like to see you, too."
"But it's too late."
"I think so, hon. I'm wiped out and I just want to take a quick shower and pass out. Is that okay?"
"Sure."
"Talk to you tomorrow?"
"Uh-huh. Sleep well."
I hung up and said, "I love you," speaking to the empty room, hearing the words bounce off the walls.
We had become quite adept at purging the phrase from our speech when we were together, and I listened to myself saying it now and wondered if it was true.
I felt something but couldn't work out what it was. I took a shower and got out and dried off, and standing there looking at my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink I realized what it was I felt.
There are two midnight meetings every night. The closest one was on West Forty-sixth Street and I got there just as they were beginning the meeting. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and sat down, and minutes later I was hearing a voice I recognized say, "My name is Peter and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Good, I thought. "And I have one day back," he said.
Not so good. Tuesday he'd had two days, today he had one. I thought about how difficult it must be, trying to get back in the lifeboat and not being able to get a grip on it. And then I stopped thinking about Peter Khoury because I was there for my own benefit, not for his.
I listened intently to the qualification, although I couldn't tell you what I heard, and when the speaker finished up and opened the meeting I got my hand up right away. I got called on and said, "My name's Matt and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober a couple of years and I've come a long way since I walked in the door and sometimes I forget that I'm still pretty fucked up. I'm going through a difficult phase in my relationship and I didn't even realize it until a little while ago. Before I came over here I felt uncomfortable and I had to stand under a shower for five minutes to dope out what it was I felt. And then I saw that it was fear, that I was afraid.
"I don't even know what I'm afraid of. I have a feeling if I let myself go I'll find out I'm afraid of every goddamned thing in the world.
I'm afraid to be in a relationship and I'm afraid to be out of it. I'm afraid I'll wake up one of these days and look in the mirror and see an old man staring back at me. That I'll die alone in that room some day and nobody'll find me until the smell starts coming through the walls.
"So I got dressed and came over here because I don't want to drink and I don't want to feel like this, and after all these years I still don't know why it helps to run off at the mouth like this, but it does. Thank you."
I figured I probably sounded like an emotional basket case, but you learn not to give a rat's ass what you sound like, and I didn't. It was particularly easy to spew it all in that room because I didn't know anybody there other than Peter Khoury, and if he only had a day he probably couldn't track complete sentences yet, let alone remember them five minutes later.
And maybe I didn't sound that bad after all. At the end we stood and said the Serenity Prayer, and afterward a man two rows in front of me came up to me and asked for my phone number. I gave him one of my cards. "I'm out a lot," I said, "but you can leave a message."
We chatted for a minute, and then I went looking for Peter Khoury, but he was gone. I didn't know if he'd left before the meeting ended or ducked out immediately after, but either way he was gone.
I had a hunch he didn't want to see me, and I could understand that.
I remembered the difficulties I'd had at the beginning, putting a few days together, then drinking, then starting all over again. He had the added disadvantage of having been sober for a stretch, and the humiliation of having lost what he'd had. With all of that going for him, it would probably take a while before he could work his way up to low self-esteem.
In the meantime he was sober. He only had a day, but in a sense that's all you've ever got.
* * *
SATURDAY afternoon I took a break from TV sports and called a telephone operator. I told her I'd lost the card telling me how to engage and disengage Call Forwarding. I envisioned her checking the records, determining that I'd never signed up for the service, and calling 911 to order the hotel ringed by squad cars. "Put that phone down, Scudder, and come out with your hands up!"
Before I could even finish the thought she had cued a recording, and a computer-generated voice was explaining what I had to do. I couldn't write it all down as fast as it came at me, so I had to call a second time and repeat the procedure.
Just before I left the house to go over to Elaine's, I followed the directions, arranging things so that any calls to my phone would be automatically transferred to her line. Or at least that was the theory. I didn't have a great deal of faith in the process.
She'd bought tickets to a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a murky and moody play by a Yugoslavian playwright. I had the feeling that some of it was lost in translation, but what came over the footlights still retained a lot of brooding intensity. It took me through dark passages in the self without troubling to turn the lights on.
The experience was even more of an ordeal than it might otherwise have been because they staged it without an intermission. That got us out of there by a quarter of ten, which was not a moment too soon, but it put us through the wringer in the process. The actors took their curtain calls, the house lights came up, and we shuffled out of there like zombies.
"Strong medicine," I said.
"Or strong poison. I'm sorry, I've been picking a lot of winners lately, haven't I? That movie that you hated and now this."
"I didn't hate this," I said. "I just feel as though I went ten rounds with it, and I got hit in the face a lot."
"What do you figure the message was?"
"It probably comes through best in Serbo-Croatian. The message? I don't know. That the world's a rotten place, I guess."
"You don't need to go to a play for that," she said. "You can just read the paper."
"Ah," I said. "Maybe it's different in Yugoslavia."
We had dinner near the theater, and the mood of the play cloaked us. Halfway through I said, "I want to say something. I want to apologize for the other night."