Travels in Vermeer (9 page)

She's standing over the kitchen sink, washing, stripping, and clipping the roses with shears. I notice the small, white, electric stove behind me, which looks almost identical to the one I got rid of recently. But hers looks virtually unused—even the wrinkled foil that wraps the drip pans beneath the four coils shines immaculate.

“Three red, three white, six pink,” she says. Do you know what this means?”

“Means?” I say. “It means I wanted red, but they only had three left.”

She brings out a glass vase from beneath the sink, and begins to arrange the stems. “In the language of flowers, red roses signify passion, romance. Pink is for admiration. White is for reverence.”

“Well then,” I say, “I really admire you
so far
.”

She smiles, and shows me around. Her study, the spare bedroom, is simple, peaceful, well lit on two sides, and it fills me with envy. I tell her I once had a study almost exactly like this. It's now Sophia's room. I don't mind, don't miss it much. But I'm suddenly jealous.

“I want you to see something,” she says. She draws out a thin, cream-colored, letter-press journal from a low bookshelf. It's her high school literary magazine. It falls open to a poem of hers. “It's probably bad,” she says, “but it's a poem.”

I look it over: it's a slender, 1970s-style, free-verse lyric called “Thistle.” Competent, I think. “Hey, I like it,” I say.

2. Handbook

Five minutes later, she emerges from her bedroom, showered and changed into jeans and an ivory top. I'm standing in her living room, staring at the hulk of an antique radio that has been charred black—the humpbacked kind with two dials and a mesh sound hole.

“I used to collect those,” she says. “I went to auctions and flea markets, all my life. I had over fifty, if you can believe it. Two years ago I lost my house in a fire. I keep this one because it was all I was able to save.”

I stand quietly for a minute. “I'm not upset about it,” she adds. “It forced me into recovery.”

“You went out with a bang.”

“Yeah,” she says.

She says she'll drive. “You ready?”

Outside, the door of her immaculate white BMW coupe shuts with a thud, and we buckle up in black leather. “Sometimes, I feel like my father driving this big
thang
,” she says, “I always drove Miatas or motorcycles. That's the real me.”

Pulling away, she nails it, with a stab of her foot. Thrown back as the rear wheels chirp, I grab the door handle, half wondering if this is a joke—but she nails it again, at every stop, as if to prove her point.

On the freeway on-ramp, she pins my head back sideways— cheek pressed into the headrest—the silky V-8's snarl uncorked, and effortlessly blowing past everything in our path. Just as abruptly then, we level off around eighty. I realize we're loping along on the same freeway where I'd been wandering lost, an hour or so ago.

“You must get lots of tickets,” I say, adding hastily: “I mean,
I
do. I get lots of tickets.
Unfortunately
.”

“You should read the Driver's Handbook,” she murmurs. Swerving right for an off-ramp, she rips off a fluid heel-toe downshift, her left foot dabbing the clutch as her right hand bats the shifter into place. We wind down quickly to the posted speed.

I glance sideways at her face to see if she's smiling, but she's watching the road.

3. Tiramisu

She is honored at her favorite restaurant in all the familiar ways. Giovanni takes time out from his pasta press, I presume, to wait, to welcome, to chat her up. Her favorite table, in the sunset window, is cleared at the nod of his head for her. I would do the same, I would feel the same, if I had a checkered tablecloth, a bentwood chair I could scoot for her, a linen napkin I could pop in the air with a snap of the wrist, a snap of the wrist, like that, for her.

A cloth-covered basket of steaming focaccia appears without request or fanfare; then shaved prosciutto with melon balls and toasted pine nuts. Giovanni appears again; he flicks a wooden match on a thumbnail, and lights the candle between us. Disappears again. He knows better than to bring the wine list.

We're just getting comfortable.

“Do you remember the Four Horsemen in the Big Book?” she asks. The sun is in my eyes, dusk guttering behind her, haloing her sleek, golden head. She picks with the tiny fork, lifts a sliver of lucent ham to her lips—the sun igniting that, too.

“Terror, Bewilderment …” I say.

I was a classic, low-bottom drunk, I tell her. I mean the usual peaks and valleys, helplessness, the plummeting downward spiral of blackouts and tail of the dog. Getting evicted, everything I owned—my furniture, misshapen and brown—put out on the street by a deputy with an order one afternoon. I wonder who that crap belonged to, I thought, happening to pass by the heap of my former possessions on my way to the pool hall.

“Frustration and Despair,” she replies. “That whole cycle, hitting bottom …” She tells me about failing the bar twice, falling back on her looks, taking up with much older men—“the buck with the biggest antlers” as she puts it—for protection. Then the divorce: the months of blackout, the fire, disgrace. What it felt like, bottoming out in suburbia, as “the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down” (as she quotes again from the Big Book). She plops another cantaloupe ball into her startling mouth.

“I remember it well. That's the part where they talk about seeking out ‘sordid places,'” I venture.

I mention the hotel bar and pool hall of my last few drinking years, most of the clientele like the walking dead—which anyone could see, at a glance, except me. We were the last stop, last watch— shivering, happy-hour dead-enders, going down with the ship.

“What turned
you
around?” she asks.

I tell her about the arrests that year, mostly for idiotic bar-room brawls, assault, resisting arrest, public intoxication, destruction of property, and so forth. Then the inevitable probation officer— whom I termed a “Nazi bitch.” In all fairness, even the cops didn't like her, thought she was way too tough, according to my brother Ben, a lifelong police officer with the Columbia Police Department. One day, making my afternoon call, she suspected I wasn't sober, and ordered me to come in immediately. The moment I showed up, she administered the breathalyzer, took a urine sample, then sent me off in a patrol car to lock-up for probation violation. After nine days, she came to visit. We sat at a steel table in a small, cinder-block interview room. She spread some papers between us, and asked me, smiling, whether I'd like to commit myself to treatment in state hospital, or rot where I was. And then, when I hesitated and fell silent, she gathered her papers quickly and rose without a word. I remember simply saying, “Wait,” as she turned to leave. She didn't. Another five days passed on the concrete. When she came back, she asked the same question again, in the same flat tone of voice. Her smile was gone; I could tell it was my last chance. “Where do I sign?” I asked.

“I really admire people like that,” Stephanie says. “We need them. Did you ever thank her?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. One day I ran into her downtown, on Ninth and Broadway. It was springtime. I was sober almost a year, and headed to graduate school. I went up to her, and thanked her. To her face. But I still hated her.”

Stephanie smiles a wan smile. “But you're grateful now.”

I think back, for a moment, on that first year in Alcoholics Anonymous, a quarter of a century ago. One of the most bizarre and incomprehensible terms I encountered floating about the rooms was “gratitude.” For I'd known only misery as long as I could remember; I wasn't grateful for anything. Yet I kept running into recovering drunks, like myself, who were eager to identify themselves as “grateful alcoholics.” My home group was even the “Gratitude Group.” (I didn't realize then that there are thousands of groups with that name around the world.) The First Part of the Big Book ends with the statement: “In return for a bottle and hangover, we have been given the Keys of the Kingdom.” It seemed perverse to me then, this crew of ravaged outcasts expressing gratitude for our affliction.

All that year, I worked at putting my program first. I worked the Steps with my first sponsor, Gene. He was wonderfully gruff and old-school, a professor of entomology who spent most of his time outside, in the fields, and looked it. One of the first things he did was teach me to pray. After that, I whispered the Serenity Prayer obsessively to myself, wherever I happened to be. In meetings, I learned to listen, especially to the quavering voices of the newcomers. One of my greatest fears was forgetting my own bottom—for then, I was pretty sure, I'd be doomed to repeat it. All that year, I washed dishes full-time during the day. At night, I rode to meetings in the back of Gene's truck. I could hardly stand such happiness.

I nod at Stephanie. “I'm grateful now.”

Two heaping plates of Sicilian mussels arrive—steaming, and snapping fresh, with olives and capers, ladled over linguine. I twirl a bite, and chew. For all the over-the-top dive atmosphere—the bustled curtains, tri-colored wallpaper, the framed prints of Naples, Pisa, and Capri—the food is as close to real as I've had outside of Italy.

I put my fork down.
Turn the corner, give it a try
, I think.
Just lay it out there
.
Tell her everything
.

I look full into her eyes—it isn't easy—and I tell her how I met my first wife, Jackie, in Colorado, while I was fixing her toilet, in fact. I was a maintenance man that summer, my first full summer in sobriety. I try to tell her what that passion was like—that deep can't get-enough of her. Then I go on, tell her my whole story. It's a little like an A.A. story: what we were like, what happened, what we are like now, but it's about more than drinking. It's about love, about luck. A timeline of every significant passion I can think of along the way. I tell her about Jackie's cancer: two years at her side, her bravery, such an intense intimacy—almost as if we were each inside the other's body, at some great remove from the rest of the world. This was back in Columbia, Missouri, where we were both from, in those last months of hospice care.

How often is it we're called to really tell everything?

She wants to know what I wanted, how I changed, what do I want now, what do I have to offer? I realize I may never have an opportunity like this again. She looks straight into my eyes, and I go on through my life, my work—keeping it to the point—through my second marriage, ending with Vermeer.

“Yeah, I was going to ask about that,” she says. “
The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
right?”

I look at her, and look away. I wonder if she really wants to know about the hours in the galleries: the intense gaze that only begins to unravel what is there? But I try. I tell her about the Rijksmuseum, how I felt my knees buckle the first time I saw
The Milkmaid
. Another sort of conversion.

She listens intently. Later, she says, “I might as well tell you. I'm slow—I don't kiss anyone till I've known him at least six months,” she says. “I have a trust issue.”

“Pretty hard to find someone who doesn't.”

“I mean, I have good reason.”

She tells me about her one romance in sobriety. A law partner who split his time between a firm up north and the Raleigh office. A boyish marathon runner, a charmer. I'm getting a pretty clear picture. He was sober, too. It turned out that he talked a good game, and was clearly a great and ambitious attorney. She fell hard for him.

One day, she borrowed his cell phone, accidentally hit redial, a woman answered. That old story: Who's this?
His fiancée
. That can't be.
I'm his girlfriend.
Click.

But Stephanie went up north herself, to Philadelphia, found the other girl, and talked her into going for coffee. They got along. The other girl told her she'd been to his condo in Raleigh many times. Every other weekend, in fact. How could that be? They compare notes about the bedroom—
her
photo on the nightstand, on the dresser. It seems he changed the photos every weekend for two years—also the linen, the placemats, the vases, and of course, the toothbrush and cup in the bathroom.

“Well you know what they say,” I say. “What have you got when you sober up a horse thief?”

“A sober horse thief.” She nods, straight-faced.

So Stephanie has a trust issue. “I'm really sorry to hear that,” I say. “That's awful.”

“Anyway,” she says, “my work is my love life now.”

She tells me about an eighteen-year-old client of hers who is facing life. “He didn't do it,” she says.

“You're sure?” I say.

“He didn't do it. His problem is, he doesn't understand how much trouble he's in. It's my job to make him understand. That's how I spend my Saturdays.”

I think about this, a little amazed. I realize I have some prejudices about her profession.

“Really,” I ask, “you feel that way about the law?”

“It's the matrix,” she says. “It's what holds us together.” Then she adds, “I've been trying, though. At romance. You wouldn't believe the dates I've had.”

“Yeah, I would.”

“I'm going to write a book about it,” she says. “A tell-all about Match.com. I mean, after this. Depending on what happens.”

We're contemplating tiramisu. “I've never even ordered it in the States,” I say. “I always wanted to keep my memories pure.”

“Order it here,” she says. So I do.

I notice we're the last ones left. I had paid no attention as the restaurant was slowly filling—each table set and cleared and set and cleared, a handful of customers waiting in front more or less continuously—then gradually emptied again, the bentwood chairs turned upside down on the tables all around. The place is a tomb, our candlewick about to drown in a pool of wax.