Alcohol

"Maybe you're the problem"

Ava Max

Content Warning:

Strong language/alcohol theme/threat

Transcript

Alcohol

Wallace was a recovering alcoholic. His girlfriend Teresa knew this about him, and had known about it from the very beginning. On their first date, he had informed her of this. Then, when the waitress came by, he had asked only for water, and she lemon Fanta, not wishing to be the only one drinking wine. This, Wallace told himself, was a charitable gesture, and a gesture from which tenderness had smoothly, swiftly ensued. He accorded her choice not to drink on their first date a good deal of significance, something that had engendered closeness and warmth, something that had been instrumental in bringing them together. Teresa didn’t view the memory of their first date in the same light as Wallace. Not that there was anything unpleasant or unhappy to remember. She simply didn’t think the choices she had made about what she wore and what she ate and what she drank were that important when all was said and done.

A few months into their relationship, about three weeks after Teresa had moved into Wallace’s flat, (she had been eager to leave her own property after a sour dispute with the next-door tenant), Teresa suggested Wallace meet her father. Her mother had been killed, to use her phrase, “in an accident”, the details of which Teresa never specified, when Teresa was fourteen. Her father had never remarried, though he’d had several relationships, the longest of about three months in duration. She dined with her father every couple of months, made an infrequent but habitual occasion of it. This time she extended an invitation to Wallace.

            She approached him about it one very wet, windy afternoon. He was sat at the dining table, preparing to eat an orange. He looked somehow very alone at that large deal dining table with its five unoccupied chairs, peeling the large market orange. The spherical shirt of peel came off the flesh gradually, in short rubbery shards. Then, with juice raining down upon the little pile of rind, Wallace began parting the segments between his fingers and popping them into his mouth. Teresa was about to speak when she suddenly found herself thinking about Wallace’s alcoholism. Not exactly “thinking about it”, what it was like for him when he was drinking, what it was like for him now he’d stopped- but picturing it, picturing the reality, viscerally. The hungry slurps of whatever it was he favoured sloshing about between his cheeks, his tongue in the liquid, and then the fateful first swallow sucking that harmful anodyne down, down, down his gullet and into his guts where it became a factor, a damaging, consequential presence in his life. Not something that disappeared, became irrelevant once sunk like apple juice, unconsidered once swallowed like potato but something that remained and harmed and acted out its harm through him, its drinker.

            Teresa focused in on the scrabbling fingers. The peel was peeled, but the fingers continued to work at the orange. She realised how little she knew about Wallace’s alcoholism. She knew nothing of the steady wines, beers, gin and vodka tonics, punctuated by the neat whiskey binges. She imagined all the bottle caps and tops and corks those fingers had pried open, with or without the aid of openers, the little gin and whiskey bottles his hands had unlidded, whose lids he had unscrewed right outside the off-licenses where they had been purchased. Whatever she imagined, whatever it was within her powers to envisage, wasn’t quite the truth but was somewhere near it. Wallace had been vague about it all. But she didn’t mind that, she respected that. She had been vague about her mother’s suicide, and would continue to be.  

            Teresa wasn’t a big drinker herself. In the time since she had moved in with Wallace, she’d had two glasses of wine with dinner, on two of the four occasions they’d eaten out. In the apartment, she’d drunk one bottle of rustic cider, good but very cheaply priced, which she’d bought from a farm shop. Wallace had told her very clearly that he didn’t mind her drinking. They both agreed that it wasn’t a good idea for her to keep large amounts of alcohol in the house, but it was her right to drink around him if that’s what she desired to do. It was part of the contract, he had said, that he accepted others drinking around him: their doing so was not a reason, nor a pretext to drink himself. In general, Teresa said, truthfully, that she didn’t wish to consume alcohol around Wallace. Drink, let alone getting drunk, had never played a part of any real significance in her life. In the time since she and Wallace had become an item, she had been to one birthday party. It was the twenty-eighth of a college friend with whom she was still close over the course of which she had had wine and a few shots of Captain Morgan but these events were rarities. 

            But, approaching Wallace and the dismantled orange to extend an invitation to dinner with her and her father, something gave Teresa pause. Her father liked to drink a lot, he was a much heavier drinker than her. He was an entitled drinker, there was nothing even a bit dainty about the way he ordered, received, and imbibed his favourite cocktails, the best wines, ale, tequila and French brandy. He had even attended AA a couple of times, out of curiosity, no not curiosity…research: research, that was the word he had used. He handled his drink well, had an impressively high tolerance. He was a heavy drinker, one who drank too much but had never quite gone over the precipice, the many-unit cusp beyond which is alcoholism.

            “Wallace.” Teresa began. 

            Wallace looked up from the orange.

            “Do you want to meet dad? I thought we might all have dinner together.”

            “Sure,” he began. “I’d love that. When and where?”

            “We were thinking Thursday.”

            “Pizza?” 

            “No. Too much grease, and fat, dad says, no good for his…erm…” she struggled to name the afflicted region. “…for his gallbladder. We were thinking Spanish. There’s a nice place on…that…that street.”

            “Wyre street?”

            “Yes. Wyre street.”

            “That sounds great. But Spanish food is pretty fatty too, isn’t it?”

            “Not all of it. I’ve been there before. There are certain dishes which are very low in fat. Beans and things. And others he needs to steer clear of, of course.”

            “Thursday’s fine. That’ll be nice.” Wallace put a piece of orange in his mouth and seemed to relish in its destruction, the bursting of the translucent casing, the sweet eruption of juice from the punctured skin.

            Teresa didn’t say anything though she had more to say. For a brief moment, she felt the temptation to say nothing, nothing more than she had said already. But Wallace, finishing the last of the orange and sucking the vestigial fluid from his finger-points, noticed her hovering, and a look of business unfinished in her eyes.

            “You okay?” he asked.

            Teresa always felt awkward when she brought up the subject. She almost felt that to broach it were to push down hard on a painful, little lump, to irritate a wound. At any rate, that was her thinking. Reluctantly, she agitated what was there, made what was dully bearable smart.  

            “Erm…do you want me to ask him not to drink?”

            “Tess, we’ve talked about this,” he began. “I don’t mind people- you, or anyone else- drinking around me.”

“Are you sure?”

 “Tess, for the last time, yes. I’ve made my peace with it. Have one on me, have two on me. I don’t care about alcohol anymore. There’s no temptation because I’ve made the mental adjustment I need to make and that completely removes alcohol as an option for me. It doesn’t exist to me anymore. I don’t care what other people do, it doesn’t affect me.”

            He had a particular tone which he reserved for alcoholic matters. It had about it a kind of sincerity, an honesty, often a candour, but also a kind of bloated, somewhat pompous solemnity. It didn’t please Teresa to hear it. Still, she listened to it because she was curious, she wanted to understand. The litany of terrible acts, the base behaviour, the disgusting, liquid records he had set for himself didn’t interest her, but the insights he had and was able to convey, the illumination he was able to provide about what occurred, what might occur in body and mind should drink pass his lips, was a source of nearly maddening curiosity to her. As far as understanding, she felt no closer to it, and Wallace had counselled her from the start that this would probably be and remain so. Still, she had more to say.

            “The thing is Wallace, my dad’s quite a heavy drinker. And I just think it might be simpler if I just tell him not to drink.”

“Tess, for the last time, I’ve learned self-control. If you start walking on eggshells around me and treating me like…like I can’t control myself then you’re taking away something from me that’s of real value, something that really means a great deal to me and which I’ve worked hard to master. I’ve learned discipline. And because of that you are free, both you and your father, to drink as much as you like in my presence. Enjoy. End of story.”

            Teresa received his words and was grateful for them. In a way. They landed with some force, that she couldn’t deny. She even believed him. She felt convinced by his words. But while the words convinced her: something about his tone didn’t quite. The tone of voice in which he had spoken those words didn’t match the conviction, the unshakeable fortitude of the words themselves. There was the tiniest tiniest waver of self-doubt. She looked at Wallace for a verifying sign of reassurance in his face. He offered little, just a mild, muted smile, joined lips, no teeth.

            The rain continued to patter. Then it beat harder. By that time, the wind had acquired a voice and was moaning plaintive, chorded moans. 

She still felt worried about it. The issue oppressed her over the next several days, and despite all reassurances, she found herself regretting including Wallace at all in her and her father’s dinner. She had kept from Wallace the frivolous detail that her and her father’s dinners were a regular fixture in which, for the first time, he was being included. She left him believing it was an event arranged specially, in his honour. She wondered whether he’d care. 

Teresa wondered if she might ask her dad not to drink anyway. But then Wallace would know that she had put him up to it, that she had whispered in his ear. He would detect something inauthentic in his tone, the way he’d say “just a coke”, while clearly wanting a drink. Could she ask her father to have just one or two? No. He would get defensive. He’d feel criticised, bullied, he was so sensitive. He’d cancel, he’d make up some excuse not to participate. He’d stay at home and drink. Teresa knew that her father never drank before five PM. But when he drank at all, which was with some frequency, he drank, with avidity. 

They met at the Spanish restaurant on Wyre Street at eight PM sharp. They met outside, Teresa and Wallace having waited for the third member of their party to arrive before they went inside and announced their presence. At the table, they talked jauntily, flowingly. Teresa’s father ordered a cocktail. At first, he nursed it, patiently. He didn’t seem possessed by that typical hurried hunger Teresa had grown to expect. She had a little white wine at her father’s encouragement. Wallace’s sobriety was respected without fuss, and the reason for it was not coaxed out of him. Wallace wasn’t pushed to the point of spelling out his alcoholism as he sometimes was and for this he was grateful. Equally, it was clear that Teresa hadn’t mentioned it to her father beforehand and for that he was grateful too. He had blown up at her for that once before and she had learned the lesson that if his being an alcoholic was to come out at all, he wanted to be the one to tell people about it, not his girlfriend, behind his back, without his involvement. 

            It was after the cocktail disappeared and a bottle of wine was ordered and uncorked, the white Teresa had been sipping daintily, that the mood began to change. Something about the alcohol-fuelled, alcohol-tending eagerness Teresa’s father showed quite plainly, quite obviously and unabashedly, took Wallace by surprise. And then, halfway through dinner, it occurred to him that he hadn’t been around that kind of heavy drinking for a very long time. He was within touching distance of drunkenness. Teresa’s father didn’t change much, outwardly, but Wallace could sense the turbulent animation beneath the composed exterior. He liked Teresa’s father and Teresa’s father liked him. Beyond her first full glass, Teresa could not have tasted more than three fingers of the wine. The vast, vast majority was polished off by Teresa’s father with an efficiency that was almost alarming, but not quite. They had not quite finished the main course by that time. When the man ordered not just a little more wine by the glass but a whole further bottle, a moroseness took hold of Wallace which Teresa had never seen but instantly understood, and instantly feared.

            By the time it came to desert, Wallace didn’t even care about the balloon glass of cognac that was ordered. He felt so tested by that point, that his emotions were already to the ceiling and could go no higher. Teresa’s father didn’t even finish the second bottle of wine before taking a brandy. Teresa did drink a very small amount from the new bottle of wine, but it was her father’s bottle, there could be no doubt, his purchase on it was irrevocable, this tubular piece of territory, still nearly half-full of the nectar it promised by the meal’s end. He ended up taking it home with him. 

            Teresa’s father paid for everything. Half of Wallace was relieved at the softening this provided, this validation of his actions. And half of him was furious at this validation of Teresa’s father’s actions, meaning Wallace couldn’t be quite as outraged as he desired. It was his money he had drunk, and grow drunk on. Knowing from the beginning he’d pay, Teresa’s father was free to do as he pleased and had done as he pleased, and he walked away into the night, beaming, very pleased.

By the end of the experience, though there had been positives, Teresa was exhausted. The relationship between her new significant other and what remained of her immediate nuclear family had been set in motion nicely. Where boyfriends and lovers were concerned, her father was a keen judge of character but he wasn’t someone whose approval needed to be bought by way of the correct salary, or the right job sector, or perfectly compatible politics. Wallace and her father seemed to have gelled. 

But Teresa hated that feeling she felt, this constant elephant in the room, all rooms, private and public, this elephant which didn’t inhabit its one depressing corner silently and un-invasively, but which had a way of sidling towards and amorphously becoming the very centre of attention. Her moderate alcoholic intake, her moderate measures had been the glassy centre of a war. And she felt, for the first time, Wallace’s pent, weighty, consequential sobriety, with its promise of spectacle and catastrophe hanging tantalisingly over it, as a kind of appetite, a kind of gnaw. She had been at the centre of warring appetites: on the one hand this heavy sobriety, and on the other her father’s nonchalant, rebellious drinking. 

Walking home alongside Wallace, not entirely wordlessly but just a little too quietly, their utterances just that bit too infrequent and terse, Teresa found herself admitting to herself how tired she was of this, these extremes of non-moderation between which she found herself: a womanly, stable centre. She was fed up with the worry and concern; the distracting consideration that something as supposedly small and as peripheral as booze was able to become in a human life: Wallace’s life, her life. He was guarded as they walked. Then, once he’d shut the door behind him, he began to confide his anger to her, he began to open the door to his inner ire.

            “Enjoy tonight?” Immediately his tone of voice panicked her.

            “What?” Teresa replied.

            “Enjoy your wine?”

            “It was alright.”

            “You dad certainly enjoyed himself.”

            “I did say.”

            “It’s an interesting way to spend one’s time, I’ll give you that. Having to sit there like a lemon, like a saint, while two people, both of them very close to you, stuff their faces with booze.”

            Teresa waited a moment before speaking. She opened her mouth but there were no words. She stood, on the verge of saying something, but silent. She took the time to acknowledge her hurt. She felt a pang of injustice shock and strike inside her. Then the pang subsided, and she spoke. 

            “That’s not fair. I hardly drank anything: I drank only a very small amount.”

            “Why do you sound drunk then? Why are you speaking in that breathy, tipsy tone of voice?”

            “I’m not. I’m not drunk. I’m not drunk because I only had a little. I told you my father likes to drink heavily, I warned you about it. You said you didn’t mind, you said you wouldn’t mind…in fact you practically reproached me for warning you about it at all.”

            “Oh don’t give me that bollocks.”

            “And you’re reproaching me now for doing precisely what you said to do.”

            “What did I say to do?”

            “You told us to drink as much as we liked.”

            “Bollocks.”

            “It’s not bollocks. That’s what you said.”

            “It’s bollocks.”

            “I’m not a big drinker, you know that. I don’t feel any desire to indulge, on my own or in front of you. I don’t wish to patronise you, or pander to you, but all the same it hurts me to drink while you can’t, each sip hurts me. But I do it because I think it helps you to practice…to know that you have that restraint, that self-control..”

            “I just think that you, everyone actually, your dad, that friend of yours who came over with that bottle of whatever-the-fuck, could treat me with a little more sensitivity. Even if I don’t ask for it. Just because I say Go ahead! Enjoy! Have one on me! it doesn’t mean you actually have to go the fuck ahead and do it. You can still extend the courtesy to me of not doing it. That way, I can feel good about not asking for it, but I can feel good that you’re doing it, only drinking a little…erm…all the same.”

            Teresa was amazed. The honesty she admired: what it articulated fascinated her, and appalled her a little too.

            “That’s really how you think?”

            “Yes.” He answered. “That’s the truth, the whole truth.”

            “It’s very complicated.”

            “Yes. It is complicated. It’s exhausting.”

            “So, what you’re saying is, essentially, is that…” she searched for the thought. It came gradually. “…is that you want to implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly guilt-trip people into not drinking around you, or only drinking very little.”

            “No. Bollocks. That’s not what I said.” 

            When he repeated himself, she feared him. She could tell by the way it kept bursting out that that “bollocks”, along with who knew what else, was looping in his mind. She took it upon herself to refine the thought, soften the impact.

            “You want people to feel, because of what you say to them, that they have the option to drink as much as they like. But you want them, out of consideration and compassion for you, to choose to drink only very little or not at all”.

            Wallace thought for a moment, and searched for the trigger that would allow him to be outraged. He didn’t find it.

            “Yes. Yes, that’s about right, I suppose.”

            “Wallace, I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s part of the deal.”

            “Sorry?”

            She knew he had heard her. She felt herself step back a few paces.

            “You don’t think it’s fair? You don’t think it’s part of the deal?” he echoed. “No? Well, what the fuck do you know about it. Do you have any idea what I’ve been through, of the torment I’m expected to politely and smilingly endure every single day? I thought you understood- and by the way your dad is so obviously an alcoholic. Except unlike me he’s lucky enough to be the sort of alcoholic whom everyone likes being around and who gets to booze the years away without ever getting into real trouble. You should tell him to speak to a GP or attend an AA meeting. He’s probably drinking right this moment- you should tell him to think about quitting.”

            “I have.” Wallace didn’t hear.

            “You remember when we first went out? When we first had dinner together on our first date? You remember how I asked you out in the elevator, just after that away day, and you said you’d think about it and then you did and you agreed to come? You remember when we first began to hear each other’s stories, the things we kept from each other at work but could share over dinner?”

“Yes.”

“I was so touched that you didn’t drink anything that night. It was such a meaningful gesture. It was so compassionate. And it was from there that my feelings of tenderness towards you grew and I began to have a sense of what might be possible, what might develop between us. And now, here we are.” He said it again, not quite sure what he meant by it, even less so the second time. “Here we are.”

Teresa was quite blank. Then a dead, mirthless laugh broke upon her features and then was still.  

“What?”

“That’s really what you thought? That’s what you think?” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t want to get raped, Wallace. I hardly knew who you were. I didn’t want to let down my guard while yours was up and get raped. It wasn’t for you Wallace. It wasn’t for you that I didn’t drink.” 

It wasn’t for you. The phrase lingered like a booming dissonance in the air. She went on:

“Wallace, I’ve tried to show you love. I’ve tried to give you approval for the sacrifices you’ve had to make.” She was searching as she spoke. She stopped and wondered, studying the ominous non-reaction in Wallace’s face, if she’d already said too much. And then she found what she had been searching for come alive within her and grow in clarity and speak for itself, through her. “I don’t really see it as…a cross, Wallace. I think you use it as a crutch, I think you use it to justify some of your behaviours towards me. You’re bullying me at this moment, you’re making me feel guilty and unloving and callous. You’re making me think I didn’t say things that I know I said. You’re gaslighting me and I’m expected to take it because of this problem you have. Outwardly you act sort of nobly, the way you bear your problem. You act like it’s not a big deal, you’re quite blasé, quite sort of…cool in way you talk about it, but what you actually do is you inflate and make it this big thing which sits in my life, this big elephant in the room. I suppose what I feel is…I feel curiosity about it. That’s what I feel most of the time…since we’re being honest…what I feel, most of the time Wallace, is curiosity. I want to know what it’s like for you when you drink, I want to understand what it is to inhabit that state of mind. I’m not cruel Wallace. I don’t mean to sound flippant. But it’s mostly curiosity I feel. Little else.” The face before her remained unchanged. “Wallace? How does that make you feel Wallace…” She realised she was taunting him: she continued. “Wallace? Does that make you angry Wallace?”

            Wallace pouted and shook his head. 

            “I’d like an orange. Do we have any of those market oranges left?”

            Teresa looked at the empty bowl.

            “There aren’t any in the bowl.”

            “Do we have any?”

            “If you don’t see any oranges in the bowl then you can assume there aren’t any oranges. I’m not the…keeper of foodstuffs, Wallace.”

            “Really? Are you not?” He said nothing for a moment. “I’d like one. I’d like one this instant.”

            “Why don’t you go to the market and buy some. Tomorrow.”

            “There are three things that I want, Tess. Three things I want, right now. Just three things in the whole world. I’d like a market orange. Then I’d like sex of some sort. Then I’d like you to tell me how your mother died. You see? Alcohol doesn’t come into it. It has vanished from my list of desires.”   

            She had seen her mother’s body, tidy and vacant in its casket. But she had never seen the corpse in the woods, the way the face looked or the way the body swung from the bough where the rope had been looped. She had only ever envisaged it. She envisaged it at that moment, saying, with the intonation of what sounded like truth:  

“She died in a car-crash. A head-on-collision. The man driving the car that hit hers was drunk. She died in a drink-driving accident.”