Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page B

him two wishes. The guy asks for a bottle of beer. The genie instantly produces, and tells the man that the bottle will never be empty and will always be cold, and that he still has one more wish. Just to be sure, the man tells the genie, you’d better give me another one.

    WHEN I WAS STILL young and brave enough to crave adventure, I came to the East Coast. I had been an adult the first time I’d ever set foot in New York, a few years earlier, and the city had offered the usual elixir. I walked eighty blocks, from the Guggenheim Museum to Greenwich Village, in a daze of happiness. I stood on a corner amid whirling snow and fleets of cabs and all the other pop culture icons that I had grown up seeing on movie and TV screens; the idea that these things were real—that you could walk into this luminous scene and become a part of it—was humbling and life-altering. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso’s
Guernica
was still housed, and I had to hang on to the railing when I turned on the stairs and saw it for the first time. However sophisticated I deemed myself to be, I had grown up with wheat fields and suburbs as the visual constant, with art as something that mostly belonged in books. Being in Manhattan was like running headlong toward your own life, or finding out you could fly. To turn away from it would have seemed the failure of a chance not taken.
    Cambridge had its own gorgeous, if more reserved, version of seduction. On my first trip there I had gone to the Orson Welles Cinema, with its arty documentaries and cappuccino machine, and I’d wandered through Harvard Yard in a battered leather jacket, trying to pass as a local—sensing, I think, that I had found a place fargreater and more consuming than the confines of my own sad heart. Maybe this is a common perception of youth, holding back fear with exhilaration. But I look back now and see myself as shadows bumping into light. The light was trying its damnedest to win, and part of the plan, I believed, was to get out of Texas.
    THAT FIRST SUMMER in New England, I lived in a sprawling three-story house with six other people. The household included a physician, a physicist, a dancer, and a couple of puppet makers, and somehow this glamorous cast found me exotic—partly, I feel sure, because of the hard-drinking image I was still trying to pull off. I had the boots and macho countenance and two bottles of whiskey I kept in brown bags on a closet shelf, and my housemates seemed amused by the drawling Texan who had invaded their genteel counterculture. My closest friend in the house was Jackie, the dancer, who attired herself for a normal outing in faux leopard hats and pink elbow gloves, and each evening at the dinner table would begin the recitation of her day by saying, “First, I got up!” We adored each other—she was the revolutionary Dr. Joyce Brothers to my tragic heroine—and one afternoon, the day after a summer party at the house, we were sprawled in the backyard, comparing notes. I had a worse hangover than usual, and in a moment of candor, said so. Besides being a dancer and an eccentric, Jackie was alsoan RN; she had worked in the trenches of the medical field and seen the psychic casualties of the sixties and seventies. We were lying next to each other with our eyes closed—the peer-analytic position—and out of the blue she said, “Are you an alcoholic?”
    She might as well have been asking if I were a Pisces, the question was so gentle. And I was so surprised that I answered honestly. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I know that I’m psychologically addicted.”
    The exchange hovered through my consciousness for the next three years I would drink. Jackie had dared to ask what I could not; my answer had let someone else in the room with all that fear, if only for a minute. A few months later, I moved down the street to an attic garret, a place with all the romantic underpinnings of the life I hoped to lead and all the bleak