“Behrani?”

My wife stands in the doorway. Since moving, she has dressed each morning in lady’s cotton trousers and a loose pullover shirt in which she can work. Over the last few months she has lost too much weight. She wears a gold costume jewelry belt to hold her pants up and her hips look as slim as a boy’s. But she has applied cosmetics to her lips and eyes, and her thick hair is pulled up and back with a scarf.

“Yes, Nadi-jahn?”

“When must we move again?”

I take a breath. “Not too soon. Perhaps once we get a buyer we will tell them to wait until fall. Would you prefer that?”

She looks by me to the window, at the sun on our long grass, the road, the woodland beyond, her eyes becoming moist. “I will do as you wish, Massoud.”

I stand and hold my wife, and for a brief moment she allows this. I feel the softness of her chest against me. I smell her clean hair, the familiar scent of lavender and tea. But she steps away and walks quickly down the corridor to her work.

Nadi has always had more pride than a queen, and I am certain what just happened between us was an apology. But as I sit at my desk, I feel that caged heaviness in my belly that comes with a failure of courage, for it is I who should apologize; it is I who have helped to fly us so far off course.

 

I WAS ON CORONA BEACH, STILL WEARING THE SHORTS I’D WORKED IN, leaning back on an El Rancho Motel towel. The sky was clear and blue, no sign of the fog that can float in whenever it feels like it. The tide was low, and green waves curled in long and lazy, spreading out on the wet sand where four kids squatted building a hill for a red plastic truck.

My Monday job was a two-story duplex on the Colma River. The owner was a quiet CPA who had custody of his twelve-year-old daughter on the weekends. He had a beard and thick glasses and once he left me a typed note asking me out and I wrote in pencil on the bottom that I couldn’t, I was married, which was true, though Nick had already been gone for months. The CPA wrote an apology in a second note, and I’d felt like a liar and a chickenshit, and he never wrote any more notes, just left the check under a rainbow magnet on the fridge. After cleaning his small house, I drove straight to the motel and called Connie Walsh. It took her almost ten minutes to get to the phone and when she did she told me she was running late for court, she still hadn’t heard from the county, then she asked me to drop off my copy of the notarized tax statement. I told her I couldn’t find it. She said that wasn’t good news but keep your chin up; it’ll probably be in the records they’re sending. “And Kathy, I recommend you try and stay with friends. County bureaucrats are notorious for dragging their briefcases. This could take a few weeks to iron out.”

“A few weeks?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I was about to tell my lawyer that’s too long, I can’t afford it, but she hung up, and soon after the front desk lady buzzed my room and asked if I was checking out or staying another day. I didn’t know where else to go, but told her I was checking out. I packed my suitcase, then carried my TV across the street and locked it back in the storage shed. A trucker was backing his rig into the yard to turn around and as I crossed the street again he honked once, then stuck his head out the window, smiled hard, and said something to me I couldn’t hear over his engine. I should’ve given him the finger, but instead I went back into my room and packed two of the motel’s towels to take with me, revenge, I guess, for the broken TV, though I never told them it was broken.

Behind me an engine with no muffler started up and I turned to see an old Malibu pull out of the beach lot, a First Things First bumper sticker above its rusted tailpipe. Nick hated those twelve-step, Higher Power slogans, especially when they were on cars he’d see on his way to work or just running errands. “Big Brother ruling you from somebody’s fucking tailpipe,” he’d say.

“They’re not rules, they’re reminders.”

“They’re fucking reminders to obey the rules, Kath.”

But I didn’t feel that way. Every time I saw one—usually on a back bumper—I felt like when you’re in a crowded city street and you see a face you knew once and even if you don’t talk to that person you feel suddenly more tied to your past and present. When I was using I never liked seeing them. But after the program, whenever I saw one I felt a kind of sad attraction for whatever it had to say: Live and Let Live, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time, Take It Easy, Keep it Simple. Nick’s the one who got me to stop going to meetings. In the program they let you try both ways: AA, that says we’re powerless over our addiction and have to give it up to something higher, and RR, which is based on The Small Book, which has only been around a few years and says we’re not powerless, and thinking this just makes it easier to fail; all you have to do is recognize the Beast in you, the addict, the Enemy Voice that wants to use, accuse it of malice against you, remind yourself what a worthwhile person you are and that you treasure your sobriety, and then it’s not so hard to use all this against the Beast and not let it get what it wants. And they spelled B.E.A.S.T. in capital letters:

B=Boozing opportunity

E=Enemy Voice recognition

A=Accuse the voice of malice

S=Self-control reminders

T=Treasure your sobriety

This all left me cold, like a foreign language I’d never be able to learn. It’s where Nick went though, so I went too. But I missed the few AA meetings I’d been to, everyone sitting in a cloud of their own smoke, telling their stories and backing each other up, nobody any wiser or more together than anyone else.

Nick loved the part about Enemy Voice recognition. On that five-day drive west in our new car, hauling a tiny U-haul trailer, he drank thermos after thermos of coffee and he’d go on and on about how there’s a part of all of us that wants to kill ourselves, K, even when things are going well, especially when things are going well. And the only way to beat it is with reason and ratonality. Like a mother or father with a young kid. And he’d smile and slap the steering wheel with both hands, looking over at me, his cheeks and chin bluish with whiskers. He was so sure about it I wanted to believe it, too. But there was always that nagging pull inside me. I’d look back out at the rushing white lines of the highway, or else put the passenger seat back and close my eyes; it wasn’t a problem for me to hear an enemy voice in my head and accuse it of malice; it was the next part, drawing on all this self-love everybody’s supposed to have deep down, then telling yourself that life without getting high is better. That’s what I could never do. And after the program, as I sat next to Nick at our weekly Rational Recovery groups in Cambridge, no one talked about being powerless and living life one day at a time, which was really more how I felt. Instead, we were powerful and rational—powerful because we were rational—and we talked about living life one life at a time. A lot of RR people had even given up smoking that way, so there was hardly an ashtray in the room, though there was coffee and we all seemed to drink a lot of it.

I always left these meetings feeling like a fake. Nick didn’t though; we’d walk down the sidewalk across from the high brick walls of Harvard and he’d grab my hand and then kiss my neck, pulling me along, telling me there was a little voice in his pants he could only accuse of love. Sometimes we’d walk down to Harvard Square to eat or see a movie. I always wanted to do both, eat something heavy and delicious like lasagna or prime rib, then go to the small theater past the newsstand and all the teenagers in loose pants to snuggle down into the red seats in the dark with a large Coke and about ten chocolate peanut butter cups, just let the flickering light of the story shut up my rational, reasonable voice for a couple of hours. But then the lights would always come up and I’d blink to see Nick sitting beside me in a funk. Very few of the movie characters had control of any of their impulses and problems, and Nick said it was too depressing and exhausting for him to watch. So we stopped going to movies on RR nights. Soon we left the East Coast.