A Drop of the Hard Stuff

couple of hangers in the closet. So I had clean socks and underwear to put on after my morning shower, and a clean shirt, and I left what I’d been wearing for her to wash.

“You’re coming up on a year,” she said at breakfast. “What is it, a month away?”

“Five, six weeks. Somewhere in there.”

I thought she’d have more to say about that, but if she did she decided to leave it unsaid.

That night I met Jim Faber at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. Neither of us had been there before, and we decided it was all right, but nothing special. I told him about my evening with Jan, and he took it in and thought about it, and then he reminded me that I was coming up on a year sober.

“She said the same thing,” I said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

He shrugged, waiting for me to answer my own question.

“ ‘Don’t make any major changes in the first year.’ Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?”

“It’s what they say.”

“In other words, I’ve got five or six weeks, whatever the hell it is, to decide what to do about my relationship with Jan.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You’ve got five or six weeks,” he said, “not to decide.”

“Oh.”

“You get the distinction?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t have to make a change when the year’s up. You don’t have to come to a decision. You’re under no obligation to do anything. The important thing is not to take any action before then.”

“Got it.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is your agenda. She may have one of her own. You’re sober a year, it’s time for you to shit or get off the pot. That sound about right?”

“Maybe.”

“You know,” he said, “that business about waiting a year, that’s just a general rule. Some people, they’re best advised not to make any major changes for the first five years.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Or even ten,” he said.

We took in a meeting at St. Clare’s Hospital. Most of those attending were from the detox ward, and their attendance was compulsory. It was hard to get them to stay awake, and almost impossible to get them to say anything. Jim and I had been there a few times; you rarely heard anything insightful, but it served as a good object lesson.

I walked him home, and at one point he said, “Something to bear in mind. Something Buddha said, as it happens. ‘It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the source of all your unhappiness.’ ”

I said, “Buddha said that?”

“So I’m told, though I have to admit I wasn’t there to hear him. You seem surprised.”

“Well,” I said, “I never thought he had that much depth to him.”

“Buddha.”

“That’s what everybody calls him. And what he calls himself, as far as that goes. Big guy, must stand six-six, shaves his head, belly out to here. He’s a regular at the midnight meeting at the Moravian church, but he turns up other places as well. I think he’s a former outlaw biker, and my guess is he’s done time, but—”

The look on his face stopped me. He shook his head and said, “The Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi tree? Waiting for enlightenment?”

“I thought it was an apple tree and he invented gravity.”

“That was Isaac Newton.”

“If it was Newton, it should have been a fig tree. Buddha, huh? Listen, it was a natural mistake. The only Buddha I know is the one at the Moravian church. Works the doors at one of those rough bars on West Street, if I’m not mistaken. You want to run that by me again? The source of all unhappiness?”

After I’d seen him home I went home myself. I’d stopped at the hotel earlier, surprised that there were no messages, and I didn’t see anything in my box this time, either. I asked the fellow behind the desk and he said that there’d been one person who’d called a couple of times but hadn’t given his name or left any kind of a message. All he could tell me was that the caller had been a man.

Jack, I thought, and he’d given up leaving messages because they didn’t do any good. I went upstairs, and I was hanging up my jacket when the phone rang.

A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Matt? This is Gregory Stillman.”

“I don’t think—”

“We met the other night at Sober Today. Jack Ellery introduced us.”

“I remember.” Jack’s sponsor, the jewelry designer, with one of his creations dangling from his ear. “I don’t think we got as far as last names.”

“No,” he said, and drew an audible breath. “Matt, I have some very bad news.”

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