“That’s right, leave,” Lucky said. “Treat me like you treat everyone else when they don’t meet your exacting standards.”
“Ignore that,” said Chiti to Avery. “Where are you going? Don’t go.”
“I don’t know,” said Avery, launching herself toward the door. “Back to the office.”
“It’s a Sunday,” pleaded Chiti.
“So? I need to be anywhere but here.”
“We’re not done with this conversation,” said Chiti.
“You might not be,” said Avery. “But I am. I am so fucking done.”
“This is why you have no friends!” Lucky called after her as she left the room.
Avery slammed the front door and walked down the road. She waited to check that no one was following her, then she called him. He answered on the second ring.
“So we’re doing phone calls now?” he said.
“What are you doing? Want to smoke a cigarette?”
He laughed softly.
“I would, but I’m home.”
“Where’s that? I can drive.”
“You want to come to where I live?”
“I want to see you.”
A pause. Avery forgot to exhale.
“I’ll text you my address,” he said.
—
If Avery had not gone back to AA the previous week, if she had not chosen a sparsely populated meeting that she had never been to before, if he had not happened to be sitting in the back row when she snuck in late, he may never have become the rocks upon which she would dash her marriage and life. But she did and he was, and the rest was inevitable.
She’d been relieved that the meeting was at the same time as her former home group, so it was unlikely anyone she knew would be there. She didn’t want to be asked where she’d been for the past year or how she was, if she was maintaining her spiritual condition or living in her character defects. Because Avery, by her own estimations, was living in all of them: stealing, lying, judging, fearing, and resenting everything and everyone. To avoid the pre-meeting small talk or eager questions about whether she was a newcomer, she had waited on the corner until fifteen minutes after the meeting started, a hard act for someone like Avery, for whom punctuality was a kind of religion.
The speaker, a middle-aged woman with a heavy face of makeup, was already well into her story by the time Avery slipped in. She did a quick scan of the room; no one she recognized. She took a seat in the back next to the table of digestive biscuits and trays of lukewarm tea. The speaker was cataloging a seemingly never-ending list of abusive relationships with men, starting with her father (of course) and ending with an ex-husband who’d embezzled money from her, then left her for a friend’s daughter. Now, in her third year of sobriety, in addition to alcohol, she was abstaining from all her “triggers”: sugar, cigarettes, coffee, shopping, gossip magazines, and sex. Especially sex, she took care to reiterate.
“The other day I was dying to go out and pick up a man,” she said. “But then I had to ask myself, would that bring me closer to or further from a drink? Is that what my Higher Power really wants for me? So I turned it over and went to a meeting. And guess what? I picked up a sponsee instead!”
Indulgent chuckles from around the room. Avery involuntarily rolled her eyes. Somewhere during this rotation, they landed on the man next to her. He was writing with earnest concentration in his notebook. Could he seriously be taking notes on this? Then she remembered that she had done that herself when she was younger. She used to love meetings, love the stories, the depth of identification that could bubble up from nowhere like a hot spring in a desert. She could be listening to someone ostensibly nothing like her who would describe, with almost uncanny precision, her exact feelings and thoughts. That was the magic of the fellowship, when it worked: the realization that the parts of yourself that were the most hidden, most shameful, were what connected you most deeply to others. In AA, you were never an outsider, never alone. For years it had felt like she always had a golden lattice of sober people beneath and around her, ready to catch her if she fell. But she had been falling for a year now, and no one had caught her yet.
The truth is, she knew she was the problem. Relating to others was a muscle; a little over a year ago she would have loved this share too. What was it she’d been told the ism in alcoholism stood for? I separate myself. That was her, all right. Separating herself, then wondering why she felt apart. Avery let her eyes scan her neighbor’s page. He appeared to be writing poetry. She smiled to herself. A sober poet, just what the world needed. As she was thinking this, he glanced up. He could have been embarrassed, as she would have been, and closed the page, but he only smiled in collusion. They looked at each other. He was young, Black, and striking, though not exactly handsome. He had an unusual face: a straight, serious mouth and wide eyes the shape of two drawn bows. Avery was struck.
After the meeting, she found him outside smoking. He was alone, standing just a little away from the group that was discussing which Le Pain Quotidien to go to for fellowship. She sidled up alongside him.
“Could I bum one of those?” she asked.
Thank god for smoking, she thought, the universal conversation starter for shy, socially awkward, or self-destructive strangers the world over. He pulled one from his pack and leaned over to light hers with an old silver Zippo.
“I’m Charlie,” he said, as the flame shot up between them.
“Avery,” she said, inhaling. “So, you’re a poet?”
He had an irrepressible smile, as though in a constant and amusing dialogue with himself.
“Guilty,” he said. “And you’re an American.”
She smiled.
“Guilty too,” she said.
A moment of silence drifted down between them like a balloon losing helium.
“I didn’t know real poets still existed,” she said.
“I don’t know how real I am,” he said. “But I exist. Are you a real American?”
“I’m from New York,” she said.
“So no,” he said, and she laughed.
“And you can make a living? As a poet?”
