I drink at dusk in autumn.
This is dangerous, as dusk comes a little earlier every day, cutting my afternoon off at 6:30, then 6, and then, suddenly, this past weekend, around half past 5.
I can almost feel the lonely, lavender air come down like a curtain, or a veil. The world dims in quick shutter stages, the leaves in the driveway swirl and scratch, and I love all this in the same way I enjoy sad movies. Throat aching, I sit looking out the window. I might as well drink; it’s not as if I’m going to get anything done.
This time of year always reminds me of when I lived in Duluth, fall of 1990. Dusk was later up north, but it came down like a sheet of dark water. The wind in the maples made an eerie whistle and on murky evenings we could hear the foghorn blowing across the lake.
I was 24 and in love, but anxious too. About my husband’s addiction, the future for my two young sons, the rent and oil bills and groceries we couldn’t afford. Dusk came and I remember, I always felt a slice of fear.
I still do. I think there’s a moment — you can miss it if you’re working or inside a bright kitchen or talking on the phone — when the world goes from light to dark and crosses something empty. It’s that moment when I always realize that we’re actually, each of us, simply stranded in a little sphere of gravity, exhaling useless carbon dioxide, unnecessary, really. And completely alone.
Nothing matters in that moment: even for me, a mother who loves her three with a wild, irrational force, there is no real purpose in putting children forth. They’re only walking out into a world with random car crashes and weak blood vessels, after all. And money — what IS money, anyway? — which will govern their lives but ultimately come to nothing. Paper, like leaves. . . .
And no news, whether of despots or ecologists, really matters either. Claim a country, for what? And sustainability? It’s a pipe dream. Everything is temporary, just a flash of activity occurring in a particular time. There is nothing to sustain because in the end it’s only earth and water and sky.
It is at this point, that crevice of early evening when I begin thinking pleasantly maudlin thoughts, that I pour a half glass of wine. I drink for a moment or two — just a bit, that’s all it takes; the habit as helpful, I think, as the alcohol itself — and suddenly, I’ve bridged the empty place, reached the other side, reattached myself to things, to people, to the dollar bills in my wallet. It’s an easy ritual, effective, benign, and warm.
For my former husband, however, the cure never did take. I understand now, in ways I didn’t before, that he felt constantly, as many addicts do, that gap between light and dark. He once told me, after we’d been married for about ten years, that he was alone, always. And I became furious. Was I not a good wife? A constant presence? A comfort?
The answer is no — to the last, at least. I live today with wry teenagers and a wonderful, new husband, happy in most things and tethered to ordinary events roughly 23 hours a day; yet I often feel that dusky, wise melancholy creep in. And make no mistake. Though I treat it, as do many people I know, with only moderate amounts of good wine, I share something with the man I knew back in Duluth, father to sweet babies and a genuinely lost soul, who kept trying to fill the empty space with tokes and lines, Jack Daniels and Miller Lite.
Saturday, probably the last good riding day of the year, my husband and I were on our motorcycle headed west into a sky like dark felt cracked with fiery gold. We cornered sharply, taking the ramp onto 394, and I thought, as I do so often, “We could die,” then immediately, “But, of course, it would matter so little and to so few.” And this was, in the molten light of the setting sun, somehow comforting.
We came home then, quiet, both of us, and opened a strange screwcap wine called Fin., a fruity, currant and cherry-filled Cabernet Sauvignon from 2005.
I sat at the table with my glass. It took only a few ounces, a quiet space in time filled with the smell of fresh, chopped garlic, and there was that sudden lifting of my disbelief. I stood to help my husband with dinner. Once again, I’d crossed the gap. Dusk was gone.
