Knapp - Drinking: a love story

CONTENTS

For my parents, Jean and Peter Knapp, with love
For Rebecca and Morelli, with gratitude

AUTHORS NOTE

The names and other identifying details of some major and minor characters have been changed to protect individual privacy and anonymity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted beyond words to my agent, Colleen Mohyde of the Doe Coover Agency, and my editor, Susan Kamil of the Dial Press, for bringing this book into being with so much wisdom, enthusiasm, and support.

To Kathleen Jayes and Susan Schwartz of Dial Press, for moral and technical support.

To dear friends, lifelines through this project: Susan Birmingham, Sandra Shea, Beth Wolfensberger, Brucie Harvey, Maureen Dezell, Jane Bambery, Bill Regan, Mary Stavrakas, Glee Garard, Robbyn Issner, and Cary Barbor.

To my guide, David Herzog.

PROLOGUE

I t happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.

This didnt happen easily, or simply, but if I had to pinpoint it, Id say the relationship started to fall apart the night I nearly killed my oldest friends two daughters.

Id been visiting my friend Jennifer over Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago, and wed all gone for a walk after dinner, she and her husband and the two daughters and me. The kids were five and nine years old, beautiful little blue-eyed girls with freckles and wide grins, and Id been playing Rambunctious Friend of Moms. I chased them around, and hoisted them into the air, and then, in a blur of supremely bad judgment, I dreamed up the Double Marsupial Hold.

I put the older girl, Elizabeth, on my back, piggyback, and then I picked up the younger one, Julia, and held her facing me, so that her arms were around my neck and her legs around my waist. I was sandwiched between them, holding 130 pounds of kid. Then I started running across the street, shouting like a sportscaster: Its the Double Marsupial Hold! Theyve accomplished the Double Marsupial Hold! And then I lost my balance.

I flew forward and came crashing down and I still believe its a miracle that Julias tiny, five-year-old skull wasnt the first thing to hit the pavement. Somehow, I kept her in my arms and allowed my right leg to take the fall, and I remember hitting the ground and feeling something like a minor explosion in my knee. The kids were okay, but I ended up in the emergency room with a gash on my knee so deep the nurses could see my kneecap.

This is the truth: I was extremely drunk that night and I put those kids in serious jeopardy.

Three months later I quit drinking, beginning the long, slow process of disentangling myself from a deeply passionate, profoundly complex, twenty-year relationship with alcohol.

LOVE

I drank.

I drank Fum Blanc at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point. Toward the end I kept two bottles of Cognac in my house: the bottle for show, which I kept on the counter, and the real bottle, which I kept in the back of a cupboard beside an old toaster. The level of liquid in the show bottle was fairly consistent, decreasing by an inch or so, perhaps less, each week. The liquid in the real bottle disappeared quickly, sometimes within days. I was living alone at the time, when I did this, but I did it anyway and it didnt occur to me not to: it was always important to maintain appearances.

I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often. I started to raid my parents liquor cabinet the year my father was dying. Hed be in the back of their house in Cambridge, lying in the hospital bed in their bedroom, and Id steal into the front hall bathroom and pull out a bottle of Old Grand-dad that Id hidden behind the toilet. It tasted vilethe bottle must have been fifteen years oldbut my father was dying, dying very slowly and gradually from a brain tumor, so I drank it anyway and it helped.

My mother found that bottle, empty, that April, the day of my fathers funeral. Id thrown most of the others away but I must have forgotten that one, and shed discovered it stashed behind the toilet as she was cleaning the front bathroom for guests. I was sitting at the dining-room table and as she walked through the room, the bottle in her hand, she glared at me, a look of profound disappointment. So I lied.

That was before, I said, referring to a promise Id made her six months before my father died. Two drinks a day, Id said. No more than that. I promise Ill cut down.

Id made the promise on a Sunday the previous July, in the midst of a pounding hangover. Id been visiting my parents at their summerhouse on Marthas Vineyard and Id gotten so drunk the night before, I almost passed out on the sofa, sitting right there next to my mother. Id done the drinking in secret, of course, stealing off to my bedroom every thirty minutes or so to take a slug off a bottle of Scotch Id stashed in my bag, and I vaguely remember the end of the night, my words slurring when I tried to talk, my eyelids so droopy I had to strain to keep them open. I was usually more careful than that, careful to walk the line between being drunk enough and too drunk, careful to do most of the serious drinking at the very end of the night, after everyone else had gone to bed. But I slipped up that time and my mother caught me. The next day she asked me to take a walk with her on the beach, an unusual move for my mother, who requested a private audience only when she had something very serious to say. I remember it was a sunny morning, mid-July, with a stiff breeze and hot light, and I remember a feeling of dread and contrition; I was hoping she wouldnt be mad at me.

We made our way down the dirt path that led from our house to Menemsha Pond, a blue arc of water at the bottom of the hill, and then we walked for a while in silence. Finally she said, I need to talk to you. Im very worried about your drinking.

I said, I know. I walked beside her, keeping my eyes on my feet in the sand, afraid that if I looked up Id bump too abruptly into a truth I didnt really want to see. I added, softly, I am too. I could tell from her tone that she wasnt angry, just worried, and I had to admit to her: I was too. Sort of.

We walked some more. She said, This is very serious. Its more serious than smoking.

My mother was the sort of person who chose her words with the utmost care, and I understood that a wealth of meanings ran beneath that simple phrase: more serious than smoking. Smoking caused cancer, a disease that was killing my father, that had killed several women in her family, that would kill her just a few years later. She understood that drinking was more dangerous and she understood why: smoking could ruin my body; drinking could ruin my mind and my future. It could eat its way through my life in exactly the same way a physical cancer eats its way through bones and blood and tissue, destroying everything.

It really is serious, she said.

I kept my head lowered. I know.