“I’m going to get fired,” I told my boss one afternoon, freaking out over a late deadline.
“Look at me,” she said. “You are not going to lose your job.” And she was right.
But she lost hers. The second layoff came a few weeks later, in August of 2009, and when the list of the damned was read, my boss’s name was on it, along with half the New York office. I couldn’t believe it. All those months I was convinced I’d be axed, and I was one of the only survivors.
Why did they keep me? I’ll never know. Maybe I was cheap. Maybe I was agreeable. Maybe my name never got pulled from the hat. I suspected my boss never let them see how much I was floundering. She protected me, and she got the pink slip. I was left with my job, my fear, and my guilt.
After work, I went straight to the bar. I had built up a week of sobriety at that point. But no way I was staying sober for this bullshit.
STEPHANIE WAS THE one who finally confronted me. She took me to dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant in Park Slope. She adjusted the napkin in her lap with pretty hands that displayed a gargantuan diamond.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. The bugle call for a horrible conversation. She needed to talk to me because, at a gathering at her place, I burst into tears talking about the layoffs while we all smoked on the balcony. “You kind of freaked people out,” she said, which stung, because I thought everyone had bonded that night.
She needed to talk to me because, at a recent dinner, I told the story of a hideous romantic breakup with such heart-wrenching detail that one of Stephanie’s friends held my hand on the way back in the cab. That’s how moved she’d been. Meanwhile, Stephanie diverted her sigh into her hair. She’d heard the story three times before.
For the past few months, I had been hearing about girls’ dinners and group trips taken without me, and I thought, well, they probably knew I couldn’t afford it. I tried not to get my feelings hurt. No biggie, it was cool.
But sitting across from Stephanie, I began to realize it was not cool. Something was badly wrong between us. And it wasn’t some minor incident on the balcony, or a cab, but the long string of incidents that came before it. Discord is often an accumulation. A confrontation is like a cold bucket of water splashed on you at once, but what you might not realize is how long the bucket of water was building. Five drops, a hundred drops, each of them adding to the next, until one day—the bucket tips.
“I don’t know what you want,” she said. The words scraped her throat, which spooked me, because she was not a person whose composure faltered. “What do you want?”
And I thought: I want fancy trips and a house in the Hamptons and long delicate hands that show off a gargantuan diamond.
I thought: I want to not be having this conversation.
I thought: I want to not be abandoned by the people I love.
I thought: I want a fucking drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. She took my hand, and she did not let go for a long time. I wish I could say this was the end of my drinking. Instead, Stephanie and I didn’t see each other for about a year.
What I told her at dinner was true, though. I did not know what I wanted. Or rather, I knew exactly what I wanted, which was to never have to face a day without alcohol and to never have to face the consequences of keeping it in my life. I wanted the impossible. This is the place of pinch and bargaining that greets you as you approach the end. You can’t live with booze, and you can’t live without it.
ONE MORE LAST great idea: I should move to Manhattan. Brooklyn was for kids, but the city was for adults. I moved in the middle of an ice storm, on December 31, 2009, just in time for a fresh start.
My studio was 250 square feet. I misjudged its size, having first seen the place without furniture. Living in a space that small was like stacking my belongings on the middle seat of an airplane. There was nowhere to sit but my bed, so I stayed under the covers and drank with the lights out and the door chained, like a blackout curtain drawn over my entire life. I stayed home most nights, because it kept me out of trouble. Sometimes I watched soft-core porn for no other reason than I was given free Showtime. I was down to mostly beer now. Beer was good to me. I have always relied on the kindness of Stella Artois.