“Ten,” I spit back. We both knew it was 20.
He never asked me to quit drinking. He asked me to drink like a normal person. To moderate. To maintain. And I began a series of shell games to get back to the way we were. Atkins Diet. South Beach Diet. If I could lose weight, he would look at me with those besotted eyes again. But the less I ate, the more I fell. I bashed my knee so badly I had to visit an orthopedic physician. I started enlisting Lindsay’s help to keep me in check. Save me from myself.
“Don’t let me have more than three drinks,” I said as I got ready one night.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “If I see you with a fourth, I will karate-kick it out of your hands.”
But after two beers, I didn’t like our arrangement anymore. And I shot him a look like “If you take this fourth drink out of my hands, I will cut you.”
I woke up to his back a lot of mornings. I started hanging out more with the guys from work. They still laughed when I knocked over my martini.
If I had to guess the moment Lindsay knew we were in trouble, I would point to the night I was so wasted I couldn’t climb our back staircase, so he convinced me I was a kitty cat. I was in a blackout, and I crawled up the rickety steps on my hands and knees, meowing at the moon and trying to swish my nonexistent tail. But to Lindsay, this behavior was no longer cute, or funny, or endearing. It was pathetic.
I went to an alcohol therapist, my big display of I-mean-it-this-time. She had an office in the Dallas suburbs, in a home with too many cuckoo clocks.
“Men leave women who drink too much,” she told me, as I tugged at the fraying ends on her couch. “He will leave you.” I thought: How is that fair? Women stay with men who drink too much all the time. I thought: But if I stop drinking, what would we do together? I thought: What the fuck does this woman know?
A few months later, Lindsay turned to me after dinner in a shitty Greek restaurant, and he said, “I can’t do this anymore.” And I knew he did not mean the dinner in the shitty Greek restaurant.
I wasn’t devastated; I was furious. In our time together, his stock only climbed. He was better-looking, dressed less like a business nerd and more like the East Dallas musicians I had introduced him to. Meanwhile, I felt like the fat drunk he was ditching on the side of the road. But underneath my wounded pride, I knew our split was right. I’d spent two and a half years unsure of my love for him and hating myself more and more. What I had required was unfair. I wanted him to love me enough for both of us.
I needed to change. I needed to turn my life into something I didn’t need to drink to tolerate. The day after Lindsay broke up with me, I made a decision.
“I’m taking your cat,” I told him, “and I’m moving to New York.”
FIVE
THE STRANGER
A few months after moving to New York, I got the assignment that flew me to Paris. I was lying in my bedroom in Brooklyn at 11 am, giving sleep a second chance. I had a pillow over my face to block out the sunlight, and I must have looked so strange. Like someone trying to suffocate herself.
That’s when Zac called. “What are you doing on Friday? Do you want to go to Paris?”
I sat up so fast it startled the cat. “Are you fucking with me?” I asked, because fucking with people was one of his specialties.
“I can find someone else if you don’t want to go,” he said. All casual.
“No, of course I can go. Yes. I’m going.”
I thought moments like this only happened in the movies. One minute, you are languishing in Hangoverland. The next minute, the world’s greatest assignment is sitting in your lap.
Well, “world’s greatest assignment” might be a stretch. Zac was an editor for an in-flight magazine, so it’s not like I was being cold-called by Esquire. The story I wrote would end up in the mesh netting of an airline seat, nestled alongside SkyMall and laminated instructions on how to turn your chair into a flotation device.
And the story itself was kind of silly. I was to interview the host of a popular reality dating show, shooting its eighth season in Paris. It was odd that the magazine wanted to fly me across the Atlantic to meet a guy whose claim to fame was the phrase “This is your final rose.” But when someone offers to whisk you away to Europe on their dime, here is what you don’t do: Ask questions. I was a freelance writer trying to make a living in New York City, for God’s sake. I would have written a story for Downy Fabric Softener’s internal newsletter.
“I’m going to Paris,” I told the guys at the bodega where I bought cat food and smokes.
“Ooooh,” they said, which was exactly the right response.