Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

But this summer, the talk was less about writing and more about BlackBerry reception. I might be on vacation, but the monkeys weren’t taking a holiday. Rumor had it that the principal’s husband had tossed her BlackBerry in the lake one summer, so frustrated was he by her constant emailing. I thought the story was apocryphal: it was hard to imagine her unrufflable husband—screenwriter and yoga master—tossing anything. Still, Jake found the story amusing, especially when my own work habits tested his patience. His mother was concerned: “You look exhausted,” she said to me. “Something about this job isn’t good for you.” I held her hand and told her it would be fine.

By fall, my loneliness was overwhelming. But like the unhappy couple who decides to have a baby to fix their marriage, I had started to work with a real estate agent to purchase a home. In the meantime, I moved into temporary digs on the executive floor of the new student residence. My peripatetic ways were raising alarm bells with the principal, and so they should have been. Most weekends, I was flying home to Toronto, BlackBerry in hand. During the week, I’d troop through a selection of condos and houses, rejecting them all. They looked like movie sets to me, backdrops for a life that had nothing to do with mine.

The frosh had arrived. Each night, gangs of fresh-faced kids would pour out of the residence, eager to down another heady gulp of Montreal nightlife. From where I sat, they seemed to have the city on a string. Me? I was up on the fifteenth floor, with a glass of white wine, checking out real estate listings, lost as lost could be. I had a big job, a life partner halfway across the country, and not a true friend in sight. My summer holiday with Jake was long over and I felt like my life was close to over as well.

All that fall, the residence rocked late into the night. Sometimes, all night. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” pulsing at 2 a.m. The gravelly voice of Leonard Cohen trailing down halls. Four years earlier, my own son had headed off to university himself, taking his guitar but leaving a CD on my pillow, with a note: “If you get lonely, play this music LOUD.”

This residence felt as close to home as it was ever going to get in Montreal. I liked wandering the corridors, listening to the Korean student play the grand piano in the foyer, watching young girls in bunny slippers giggle over pizza. One evening, when I was coming home late, the elevators opened to reveal three semi-nude guys, all dyed various shades of red, with matching towels tied around their waists, their heads encased in Molson Canadian boxes, with eye slits.

“Well, hello, miss! I take it you’re new in town?”

All three were weaving slightly.

“Not as new as you,” I said. “I’m one of the vice principals.”

One head case straightened up.

“Oh, sorry, ma’am!”

He wiped his hand on his towel, and gave my hand a good pumping.

“Nice to meet you!”

American, I thought. From the South.

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said as they drifted off into the night. The elevator doors closed. I thought: “I’m the oldest coed in this place.”

As midterms got closer, the music got a little softer, but the drinking never seemed to slow down. Girls sobbing in the front lobby, their eyes smudged black with mascara. Guys lying facedown on the sidewalk, passed out, their pals swigging beer beside them, texting. Once in a while, the elevators would smell of vomit.

My life was lonely beyond measure. There was the occasional visit from an out-of-town friend or a McGill parent in town for graduation, or someone checking on a troubled son or daughter. Once in a while, I would have a meal with Professor Dan Levitin, musician and producer turned neuroscientist, author of This Is Your Brain on Music. Dan lived alone with his dog Shadow. I liked hearing about his new pal Sting, his old pal Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Tom Waits. He was a moderate drinker, a lover of puns, and had great taste in restaurants. He was also single. After a while I felt awkward seeing him. With regret, I let our friendship wane.

One night before Christmas, François came up to me, looking concerned. “Madame, I think you are very, very lonely. I think you are the most lonely woman in the world.”

“No, François, I am not.”

François looked unconvinced.

“I am just very busy.” I picked up the pile of papers on the banquette.

“Oui, madame.”

The geographic cure was not working. I knew it, and others were beginning to suspect it as well. That New Year’s, Jake and I wrote out our resolutions for each other, as we always did, signing one another’s promises. This year he looked up from his own list and interjected as I wrote mine: “No more than two drinks on any one occasion,” he said. “And no drinking alone.” “Don’t you think three is more realistic if it’s an evening out?” I bargained. “Three over three hours,” said Jake. He didn’t look convinced. And so I wrote: “Given the genetic predisposition to alcoholism in our family, I do resolve to do the following: to limit my drinking to two drinks in social situations, three over three hours; no drinking alone, ever; nine drinks total a week. If I have broken any of these rules within six months, I promise to get help.” Jake and I signed each other’s sheets, and dated them: January 1, 2007.

Jake wasn’t the only one worried about my drinking. My son had noticed a big change, and was vocal about it. My sister was quiet, but I could read her silence. Our mother had had a serious drinking problem. Me? I was beyond worried. I decided to take action: I called an addiction doctor, and booked his earliest appointment. Sadly, it was March.

Most of all, I wanted to go home. This was not an option, or I didn’t see it as one. At Martlet House, we had closed a very successful year: a record year of fund-raising. I was proud of my association with McGill and with this achievement. In two weeks I was taking possession of a beautiful light-filled condo in an historic building. In nine months, the major fund-raising campaign was going public. I was in the middle of helping to recruit a cochair for the campaign. I was on deadline and I took it seriously.

So, I did the only thing I could think to do: I started a drinking diary. My sister suggested rewarding good behavior with stickers. I ducked into a toy store and bought the first ones that jumped out at me: monkeys. Perfect. I would get this damn monkey off my back.

Of course, as I learned much later, this is how the ending always starts.

You know you’re drinking too much, so you decide to keep a tally. And if you’re like most, you keep this tally hidden. In your wallet, or your underwear drawer. Last night you drank four. Or was it five? Tonight, for sure, you will do better.

This is how it begins. You set some rules.

Maybe you switch from red to white (less staining on the teeth).

Or maybe it’s no wine; only beer.

No brown liquids, only clear. (Vodka doesn’t smell, does it?)

Only on weekends.

Never on Sundays.

Never, ever alone.

The problem is: The rules continue to change. Your drinking doesn’t.

You take up running or swimming. (In my case, it was power-walking. People who power-walk can’t be alcoholics, can they?)

You start to wake at four in the morning. (Doesn’t everyone wake at four in the morning?)

You promise to do better tonight, to drink less.

Only you don’t.

In fact, the only commitment you seem able to keep is the diary. It tells a story, and the story is starting to look scary.

Worse still? This is only the beginning of the end.

Like many a drinking diary, mine started off well. For a few days, the monkey stickers began to accumulate: I had kept to my limits. Of course, I kept the diary hidden. (What vice principal pastes monkey stickers into a journal?) But it wasn’t long before those stickers petered out. Alcohol is a formidable enemy: once you name it, it digs in hard.

I said this to the addiction doctor in March. He nodded. “How do you feel about alcohol now?” he asked. “I love it.” He frowned. “And I hate it.” “Be careful,” he warned. “Alcohol is a trickster. And using alcohol to cope is maladaptive behavior.”

One spring evening, I had dinner with the eloquent dean of medicine, Rich Levin. He was newish to McGill, having moved with his wife from New York, and he had had a difficult day.

Rich was a martini drinker, and he ordered one, then another.

“Why did you come to Montreal, Rich?”

“I came here for the waters.”

I fell for it. “The waters?”

“Turns out I was misinformed.”

I looked puzzled.

“Casablanca.”

“Another drink, Rich?”

“Never, my dear. You know what Dorothy Parker says.”

The next time I saw him, Rich pulled a gently used cocktail napkin from his pocket and handed it to me. There were Parker’s words, emblazoned beside a martini glass: “I love a martini—but two at the most. Three I’m under the table, four, I’m under the host.”

That night, I pasted the napkin into my diary. Beside it I wrote: “I am bullied by alcohol. I am hiding behind it.” I knew the jig was up.

Days later, on Father’s Day morning, I learn that my cousin Doug—childhood confidant and best friend—had been killed by a drunk driver, on his way home from his mother’s eightieth-birthday celebration. His young daughter, the youngest of four, was in the front seat. She survived but was severely injured.

It was a sunny Sunday morning, and I remember thinking: “What else do you have to lose to alcohol before you give up?” I had already lost a big part of my childhood, now my cousin—and I was losing myself.

I pulled out a bulletin board and tacked a piece of paper with four handwritten words at the top: “The Wall of Why.” As in, why I needed to give up drinking. Or: why I needed to avoid dying. The diary was no longer working. In fact, it had never worked. For the first time, I was terrified this habit might kill me.

I spent an hour filling the board with images and words I loved. In that condo, I had very few photographs—one of Nicholas with his arm around me, after winning bronze at a rowing regatta; one of Jake casting a line off the houseboat deck; one of my dog Bo. There were so many faces missing. I took out my fountain pen and wrote the names of others on pieces of white paper, pinning them carefully to the board. Then, I added several pieces of prose—Annie Dillard, Simone Weil—and some poetry: “Love after Love,” by Derek Walcott.

Then I got down on my knees and said the only prayer I believed in, words from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith.

But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Within weeks, Jake and I would find our way to a recovery meeting in a church basement. He held my hand while tears rivered down my cheeks. For an hour I listened to a roomful of seemingly happy people share their stories, their faith, their gratitude. As they started to stack the chairs, a tall black stranger in a funky hat came up to comfort me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “believe me, whatever you did wrong, I did way, way worse.”

Every season has its own soundtrack: that summer, it was Keith Jarrett’s introspective Köln Concert wafting over pink-streaked granite, keeping us company as we drank cranberry juice and soda with our meals. Jake’s precious mother had just died a difficult death. When Jarrett felt too haunting, Jake would toss in a little Frank or Van to keep the tone romantic. “I’m making love to you with my playlist,” he’d call out from his computer, and I’d be enveloped, newly sober, in a fresh cocoon of sound.

But for the rest of the world, the summer of 2007 belonged to the defiant Amy Winehouse: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said No, no, no!” An earworm if ever there was one. The point wasn’t lost on me as I headed back to McGill, having tallied my first seventeen days of sobriety in the north woods of Ontario. Checking my BlackBerry as I cabbed in from the airport, I found myself humming along. “No, no, no!”

Little did I understand that it would be more than a year before I was able to secure any meaningful sobriety, to put alcohol somewhat solidly in my rearview mirror. It would be three years after that before I regained what could be called a true sense of equilibrium. And it would take all my journalistic skills to put what was killing me—and as it turns out, a growing number of women—into some profound and meaningful context.

In the meantime, I was about to lose many things I cared about: my livelihood, my heart, my gusto. And before things got better, they were going to get as tough as tough could be.

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