I moved to Dallas to live with Lindsay and became the music critic at the Dallas Observer. Another stint on the good-times van. Club owners floated my tab, label owners bought me drinks. I was barely qualified for the job, and I faked my way through half my conversations, but the alcohol cushioned my mistakes. So did my boyfriend. Lindsay was a closet artist, who spent his evenings fiddling with song mixes and his days building databases. My new gig was an all-access pass to a world he’d only seen from a middle row. “I feel like the president’s wife,” he told me one night, after we spent the evening drinking with musicians. It didn’t even occur to me that might be a bad thing.
My stories were gaining traction. I began writing in a persona that was like me, only drunker, more of a comedic mess. I made jokes about never listening to albums sent by aspiring bands, which was neither that funny nor that much of a joke. But people told me I was a riot. Maybe they liked being reminded we were all screwed up, that behind every smile lurked a disaster story. I began contributing to a scrappy online literary magazine called The Morning News. And in this tucked-away corner of the Internet, where I could pretend no one was watching, I began to write stories that sounded an awful lot like the real me.
People were watching, though. An editor at the New York Times sent me an email out of nowhere. She wondered if I’d like to contribute a piece sometime. They were looking for writers with voice.
LINDSAY AND I made a good pair. He cooked elaborate dinners—lamb souvlaki, Thai lemongrass soup—as I dangled my feet from the kitchen counter, sipping wine from balloon glasses that were like fishbowls on a stick. He liked taking care of me, although we both liked not taking care of ourselves. Our lives felt like a Wilco song: The ashtray says you were up all night. Our lives felt like an Old 97’s song: Will you sober up and let me down? Those were the songs we listened to while chain-smoking out a window, songs assuring us if you’re hurting and hungover, then you’re doing it right.
On Saturdays, we would heal ourselves with a greasy Mexican breakfast. Eggs, cheese, chorizo. Sometimes we wondered aloud if ours was the right path. Weren’t we supposed to be building something of meaning? We were 29 years old, the same age my mother was when she had me. Lindsay talked about his father, who had moved all the way from Australia and started his own business. What had we done?
But then we’d go to the bar and just repeat what we’d done the night before. The bartender poured my Harp as soon I walked in the door. I had arrived.
Lindsay and I drank together, and we drank a lot. But I was the one with the bruises and bumps. I had a habit of slipping off sidewalk curbs while we stood there at the end of the night.
“I don’t get it,” I told Anna, on one of our regular phone dates. “He drinks as much as I do.”
“He’s a foot taller than you!” she said.
I still confided in Anna, but with more line-editing now. I told her enough to maintain our closeness but not enough to cause worry. The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.
Anna might not have been worried, but I was. Lindsay and I worked on paper, but I couldn’t lose the nagging suspicion we were missing an essential spark. I wanted more, but I also thought maybe I was being unrealistic. What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?
Lindsay would leave for his office job at 8:30 in the morning, a full two hours before me, and I would walk him to the door and then climb back under the covers, feeling toxic and pointless again. His big orange tabby would hop up on the bed and curl up on my stomach, and I fucking loved that cat. Somehow, he made me feel forgiven.
I stopped calling the cat by his given name, a small act of rebellion that spoke to a much greater ambivalence. But the cat had been named for a status car, which was clearly a mistake, so I tried out new names, changing them each season until one finally took. Bubba. A proper name for a big orange tabby.
I guess we’re stuck here, I’d say to Bubba as he curled up on my belly, although I knew it was only true for one of us. I felt stuck, though. Stuck in a life that was easy and indulgent and yet I could not get enough in my mouth.
If I had to guess the moment I knew Lindsay and I were in trouble, I would point to the night I stood up in the bathtub and he looked the other way. We used to slosh around after midnight in that claw-foot tub, naked and shameless, with our glasses chattering on the tile floor. But then one time I stood up, water rushing down my naked body, and he averted his eyes. He looked embarrassed for me. A betrayal contained in the tiniest flicker of a movement.
“Do you think I’ve gained weight?” I asked a few days later, with enough wine in my system to feel brave.
What could he possibly say: that I had not? He was an MBA who brought a protractor to every argument. He knew as well as I did my skirts didn’t fit anymore. But I wanted him to tell me otherwise. To lie, to be oblivious, to convince me I looked beautiful anyway. “I think you’ve gained weight, yes. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”