Ghosts by Daylight (21 page)

God, thank you for keeping me straight today and help me stay straight tomorrow.

At the end of the diary, I found one written from someone called John:
Rich. This is your fourth rehab. You know what to do. If you don’t this will be your last, and you will be dead. Good luck. Your friend.

After Richard died, I called J., a writer friend in Paris who was heavily involved in AA, whom I had met at a dinner and who had explained to me his own voyage into addictions, drugs, alcohol, and how he had eventually woken up so ill in a hospital that there was nothing else to do but get sober.

I remember the night I met him, because Bruno had been with me at the dinner, sitting across from me, miserable, unhappiness etched on his face, drinking more and more wine and looking utterly alienated from the people around him.

Bruno went home early, and J. walked me home along the river. It was a hot night, July, and tourists passed us in their awkward shorts, holding maps. ‘I think,’ I told J., ‘that Bruno has a drinking problem.’

He was thoughtful. He said that he could help, but only when Bruno came to him, only when he was ready. ‘No one arrives at the point where they are sober,’ he said, ‘until they are ready.’

So, a few days after the motorcycle kick, and the police and the Seine and the Mexican restaurant and the tequila, I found J.’s number and rang him.

He did not seem surprised to hear from me. ‘I need – we need – help,’ I said.

‘I’m here,’ he answered.

Bruno went away again. He came back from a work trip to Spain gutted. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, crawling into bed, pulling the sheets over his head.

The second rehab was a place in the country with bars on the windows. It was more a detox centre than anything else: at night, Bruno went to the sitting room and Skyped me. His face was white, hollow and thin. He was not allowed visitors. I called his mother to tell her he was in the hospital, yet she did not seem aware of the gravity of the situation. Moineau did not, could not, understand. ‘Yes, he told me he was very tired. It’s a rest, isn’t it?’

I thought of my own mother, unable to see when her own son was drifting further out to sea. Perhaps we protect ourselves from ourselves.

My husband and I talked over the internet, and I placed my hand on the screen, trying to touch the harshness of his face. I felt unbearable sorrow at my inability to help him. How long had I been in love with him? And why, I wondered, had I fallen in love with someone who was so distinctly disturbed? So fragile?

‘
Ça va?
’ he said hollowly.

‘
Ça va
. And you? Are you sleeping? Eating?’

He looked away. He was smoking. He said there were bars on the window of his room.

When he came out a few weeks later, we went together to see a woman named Irene. She was French, but had lived in America for many years; she had a strange, Woody Allen-style New York–Jewish accent, but entwined with French inflections. She was in her sixties and beautiful: her grey hair was pulled back in a chignon and she wore no make-up on her strong face.

As far as I could see, Irene had five articles of clothing, all impeccably cut, which she alternated: a black straight skirt, a perfect white blouse, a black crew-neck cashmere sweater and a pair of plain fitted black trousers. She wore neat pumps in the winter, without socks, and a pair of Greek-fisherman sandals in the summer. Her feet were beautiful, her unadorned toenails shone like smooth rocks.

She was calm.

We sat in three chairs, like the three little bears, and she said little, but watched us. I cried, Bruno smoked, Bruno cried, I smoked. Irene would listen and then she would say, ‘We must stop.’

Outside, we climbed on the motorcycle and drove home, passing Trocadéro, passing the river, going by the Ferris wheel where he had carried me over the threshold in the millennium year. There’s a photograph of it somewhere: happy people, in love. Then we probably went and had a drink.

Bruno said one night over a glass in a café near Irene’s house: ‘I saw the Ferris wheel going up, and I thought, I have to take my wife there – it’s been so long since we did something fun.’

‘It’s OK. You’re not well.’

When we got home, he put his helmet on the shelf and went into a darkened room to sit and watch television. When I went in to say goodnight, he said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m lost. I’ve been lost for a very long time.’

13

New Identities

In time, I grew to alternately resent and hate AA because in some ways it stole my husband from me. He stopped going out at night or socializing with anyone who was not a member. He went to meetings at least once a day, sometimes twice. The only person he spoke to, aside from me, was his sponsor. I knew it was keeping him sober, but I was not sure, as someone had told me, that it was not one addiction replacing another.

I went to a meeting, and listened to people talk about their worst moments – hating themselves, waking up in gutters, pissing themselves, blowing up toilets, ruining marriages and lives. Grudgingly, I went to Al Anon – for family members of alcoholics – I did not think I needed it – and left halfway through when the members started arguing about who was making the tea. I read the twelve steps. I read books on co-dependency. I began, as best as I could, to detach.

But Bruno says he really stopped drinking because of Luca. One day, the two of them went to the shop across the road, a place run by Algerian immigrants, where we buy milk when we run out, and vegetables, or fruit. Luca looked at the high shelf, the bottles of dark wine, pointed and said, ‘Daddy.’ After that, Bruno had one more drink – on my birthday – lapsing from the sobriety about a year after he stopped drinking. He opened the bottle of wine that we had saved from our beautiful wedding in the Alps, the idyllic day during the canicule with Luca nestled in my belly, and me in a white dress, smiling at the sky, smiling at everyone.

We had married on the Feast of St Amour, 9 August, because we believed, and we told each other, ours was a love story blessed by fate: it was simply meant to be, no matter how hard we tried to run from it, it had caught us both. We were destined to be together. The wine we drank that day was a special Beaujolais, a gift from Bruno’s brother Patrick, also called St Amour. We had cases and cases in the
cave
, enough for a lifetime of opening a bottle on birthdays or Christmases, or our anniversary, and remembering, with the slightly woody taste of the wine, why we had married that day.

It was the saddest birthday, the day of his last drink. Not because I grieved for the passing of his alcoholism, but because I knew, instinctively, that he would change and never again be the man I married. Because, in fact, part of that love was based on the passion, the drink, the fury, the rage, the anger, the drive, that made him so intense. Without it, there was a smaller person who looked sad and hardened by life.

He opened the wine. My mother-in-law brought out a lamb casserole she had baked in the oven all day, and the house smelled of beautiful spices from Provence. Bruno toasted, ‘To my wife,’ and gave me a long white silk dress that wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around my body with metres of soft gauze. Then he drank a glass of St Amour, said it was his last ever, and went to bed.

I sat up with my French family, drinking a home-made digestif brewed from herbs that came from the mountains not far from our home, but all of us were aware there was someone missing. When I went to our room, I saw Bruno curled in a ball, sleeping fitfully in the big wooden bed that had belonged to his great-grandfather.

He shouted in his sleep, he cracked his bones, he tossed, turned, like someone absolutely miserable in his own skin. He was, I decided, a wounded animal, a tiger or a lion. Eventually, he gave up trying to sleep at all. Near dawn, I heard someone outside, and I could see him, standing near the basin of spring water that came from the mountain above the house, staring into the grey light at nothing.

February has always been a hard month, a seemingly long month, a grey month. The exception was the year Luca was born. That year, one cold day passed into another so swiftly and I woke with my fears, but I woke joyfully, rushing to the baby’s crib to scoop him up. I was cocooned in happiness. That year, even February, with its impossibly dark mornings, its chill and fevers and hacking coughs and early, depressing dusk, had some joy.

Four years after our wedding and three years after Luca’s birth Bruno tried to go sober. The first February of Bruno’s recovery, when he went to an AA meeting every day and isolated himself from everyone and everything in an effort to reconstruct himself, something also happened to me. The cocoon of my family life opened a crack, and I walked into France for the first time.

In the early years in France, Bruno protected me from everything. He told me that Saint Bruno, after whom he was named, meant shield. He shielded me emotionally and physically, from his alcoholism, from bad things happening, but he also protected me from the complexities of French bureaucracy: the dossiers; the long lines at the
mairie
to present various folders of papers; the telephone company; the complicated social security. Even the army of Polish builders at our new apartment were off-limits to me. ‘I can do it,’ he’d say when I would show up to help.

It was true that he was, as he described himself, a control freak, but it was also true that I had willingly given away all of my power. I had wanted to. I arrived in France fragile, pregnant, somewhat broken. It was the first time in my life, since I was very small, that someone else took care of me.

I thought briefly of my Italian grandmother, Antoinette, who arrived in America when she was forty with four children. My grandfather, Costantino, was authoritarian and stubborn: he spoke English, and had his own business, but she must have been terrified enrolling her children in school and shopping for food in a language that was not her own. He wrote the cheques and paid the bills. She stayed in the kitchen, or saw her enormous extended family, all of whom also spoke Italian.

Even though a similar arrangement could be made in Paris for me – there is a parallel world that exists for Anglophones that includes schools, doctors, tax services and lawyers – I suddenly realized that I was going to stay in Paris, and I had to become a part of it. My tiny world of my husband and my son, keeping us insular and safe, had to open.

I had stubbornly, for some time, tried to hold on to my identity because I had fought so hard to create one – was I an American of Italian origin, as Bruno described me, was I British, which was my nationality and described the place I had passed all of my adult life, or was I now French, which meant I belonged, in some ways, to my husband and his culture, and not my own?

One day, I dreamed in French which was the beginning, really, of my life in France. Luca’s school was a French one, and there was also Alice who helped me. Alice wore leather trousers and silver necklaces with tiny jangly butterflies, had a small dog named Clive and a cat named Louis. She lived in a garret in the 7th, off the rue de Sèvres, six flights up, no elevator. She spoke English like a character out of Agatha Christie, but she was French born and bred, as were her parents. Her grandparents had been British bohemians who arrived in Paris in the 1920s, lived in Montparnasse and collected art, but she had not really learned English properly until she went to a British boarding school. She was obsessed with grammar, in any language.

I went to Alice to learn how to write properly in French – to master the impossible tenses like the
passé simple
and the
futur antérieur
that I had learned in college and then promptly forgotten, because soon I would be doing my son’s homework with him. And Alice loved tenses. She thrived on precision, she cringed if I used the
passé composé
instead of the
imparfait
. She told me the thing she hated more than anything was when people used the subjunctive badly. She hated hearing people speak French and make mistakes. She also hated it when English was not used properly, and she used grammatical terms I had not heard since the third grade, when the nuns had used pointers to break down sentences. She winced if I used slang I had picked up from Bruno.

She loved punctuation and homework and exercise drills. She said my French, which had served me fine for five years, had horrific grammatical mistakes. She said miserably, ‘I wish you were a
débutante
. Now I’m going to have to undo all of your bad habits.’

Bruno had told me the mistakes were endearing, my accent was sexy, and not to worry about grammar. His English was fluent – learned from Clint Eastwood movies and working in Anglophone countries. When I asked him about the
passé simple
, he shrugged: ‘Don’t worry about it.’

When I explained this to Alice, she frowned. She looked slightly wobbly. ‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘Grammar is
so
important.’ She produced an enormous book of grammar, the kind I had studied when I was fourteen, and said that I had to memorize every noun and its gender. ‘There are more than three thousand,’ she said solemnly. ‘And there is no way around it other than to memorize every one and know which is masculine and which is feminine. That’s the way it’s done in French schools, and that’s the way your son is going to do it.’