By dark, with the fire calmed down, we collapsed into rusty lawn chairs. Sometimes nobody would talk for a long time, as we’d turn from the kaleidoscopic patterns of the coals to stare up at the stars. Eventually, the half dozen friends left would help carry the plastic bags of dirty paper plates, napkins, and plastic cups back into the house, where the party unwound into the early morning. Beer after beer, wine glass after glass. Easier just to bring the gallon jug into the living room, save having to get up for refills.

By dark, with the fire calmed down, we collapsed into rusty lawn chairs. Sometimes nobody would talk for a long time, as we’d turn from the kaleidoscopic patterns of the coals to stare
up at the stars.

In discussing the importance of pleasure, Susan Griffin (in The Book of the Courtesans) suggests that “gluttony” stems from a fear of losing pleasure, which is, of course, always fleeting, transitory. Strange how a persistent pursuit of pleasure can generate pain. How a virtue can become a vice.

I think Larry’s drinking crept up on us both. By the mid-seventies, I knew, though I was too cowardly to admit it, that if I wanted to talk seriously with him I’d better do it in the first hour and a half he was home from teaching. Actually, this was familiar behavior for me: as a child, I had grown expert at knowing I could talk to Daddy between his second and fourth drinks; any earlier, he’d still be tense from the bank — and later, he wouldn’t really be there. Of course, no one in our family had a drinking problem. We were nice people; it was part of civilized life to drink before dinner. During. After.

It took me decades to acknowledge the signs that now seem so obvious — the intolerance of frustration, the frantic behavior if my husband didn’t get a drink when he wanted/needed; the memory lapses; the arguments because of memory lapses; the stocking up on booze even when we couldn’t pay our bills. The slurry, insensible speech. The raging outbursts.

For my MA thesis, I had filled index cards with notes showing that Hemingway heroes drink brandy with other heroic men, white wine with lovers and priests, and beer when they’re exhausted and overwhelmed. But in the novels Hemingway heroes normally handle their booze. Communing over a cognac with a fellow “insider” is one thing, as when, for instance, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms drinks with Lt. Rinaldi, but Mike Campbell’s messy drunkenness at Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises is another. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the formidable Pilar tells Robert Jordan, that although “no one cares for wine more than I do,” drunkenness “is a thing of great ugliness.”

…before dinner, we congregated for drinks — often on one of the patios perched high over the azure arms of Lago di Como, the setting sun glittering ripples on the water.

The first year we were married, after we saw Tom Jones at a Phoenix drive-in, Larry chortled that he identified with Squire Western. Wallowing in a disintegrating hay stack, the squire’s scruples were as sloppy as his drunken stumbling. Hardly “grace under pressure.” I tried to forget Larry had said that. Maybe he’d been joking.

Is there a different expectation, a different standard we have for behavior as the decades take their toll on us? What is funny in one’s teens and twenties, uproarious, is less so in one’s thirties with a baby sleeping in the next room, and pathetic in middle and older age.

I was over fifty when I spent the month of May at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio. Between the delicious, exquisitely served meals, we residents were left alone to write, to think, to wander the gardens, drinking in the aroma of jasmine, exploring eighteenth-century grottoes. Quiet, privacy, no interruptions — a monastic silence — for hours. But before dinner, we congregated for drinks — often on one of the patios perched high over the azure arms of Lago di Como, the setting sun glittering ripples on the water.