'Everything's fine,' Bobbi Anderson said in the unnatural stillness, and then she began to dig.
BOOK 1. THE SHIP IN THE EARTH Chapter 5. Gardener Takes a Fall
1
While Bobbi Anderson was tracing a titanic shape with a compass and thinking the unthinkable with a brain more numbed with exhaustion than she knew, Jim Gardener was doing the only work he seemed capable of these days. This time he was doing it in Boston. The poetry reading on June 25th was at BU. That went all right. The 26th was an off-day. It was also the day that Gardener stumbled - only stumble didn't really describe what happened, unfortunately. It was no minor matter like snagging your foot under a root while you were walking in the woods. It was a fall that he took, one long fucking fall, like taking a no-expenses-paid bone-smasher of a tumble down a long flight of stairs. Stairs? Shit, he had almost fallen off the face of the earth.
The fall started in his hotel room; it ended on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, eight days later.
Bobbi wanted to dig (although she would be at least temporarily diverted by the odd things which were happening to her beagle's cataract); Gard woke up on the morning of the 26th wanting to drink.
He knew there was no such thing as a 'partially arrested alcoholic.' You were either drinking or you weren't. He wasn't drinking now, and that was good, but there had always been long periods when he didn't even think about booze. Months, sometimes. He would drop into a meeting once in a while (if two weeks went by in which Gard didn't attend an AA meeting, he felt uneasy - the way he felt if he spilled the salt and didn't toss some over his shoulder) and stand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Jim and I'm an alcoholic.' But when the urge was absent, it didn't feel like the truth. During these periods, he wasn't actually dry; he could and did drink drink, that was, as opposed to boozing. A couple of cocktails around five, if he was at a faculty function or a faculty dinner party. Just that and no more. Or he could call Bobbi Anderson and ask if she'd like to come over to go out for a couple of cold ones and it was fine. No sweat.
Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an actual thirst, a physical thing - it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the Saturday Evening Post, the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.
All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off - stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night - every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.
Usually.
He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and separation from the University of Maine as a Full-Time Poet, which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.
He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. 'Goddam thing better rhyme, too,' the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener. 'Real poimes rhyme.'
Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love-letter from Dr Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.
On another occasion, a small press in West Minot agreed to publish a book of his poems (this had been in early 1983 and was, in fact, the last book of poems Gardener had