Free Drunken Angel (9781936740062) by Alan Kaufman Page A

good.”
    â€œBetter than mine?” Tsofnat snapped.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI see. What else did this Finn not have?”
    â€œYour amazing hair,” I said, knowing it to be a stretch—she was fully aware of its tumbleweed coarseness. But there is that part of us that yet wants to believe against all evidence to the contrary that the painful fact is untrue, that even our own perception of reality lies—that what is ugly is in fact beautiful.
    On the other hand, I knew that if she bought the lie about her hair, then I had her in my pocket.
    One month later, in a private ceremony attended by a few friends and relations from her side, we were married.

20
    IT AMAZES ME TO REALIZE THE EXTENT TO WHICH we alcoholics stake our illusory hopes on the flimsiest, most ill-conceived evidence, all the better to later tear them down so that, bottle in hand, we can wallow amid the rubble in an orgy of drunken bitterness, survey the carnage with a certain longing, confirmed in our suspicion that life is a cheat; that all along we were right to suspect existence itself of shortchanging deceptions.
    But though all along we intuit, sense, know , that only ruin can ensue from a foolish strategy, yet we elect to proceed, wed someone sure to harm us, in order to be harmed—feel the disillusionment that has only one possible, immediate, and quite lethal antidote: booze.
    Clearly, Tsofnat was a severe manic-depressive. In marrying her, I knew what I would get, and got it. The raging shut-in with haunted eyes and bride-of-Frankenstein hair stormed through my days and nights, locking herself behind closed doors, weeping, screaming, threatening suicide, just as my mother had. And in my darkly mounting sense of justification—given Tsofnat’s abominable
public displays—I could grab, in turn, for whatever little pleasures and leisure and momentary stays from life were obtainable, and with a sense that these were my due, these I deserved: look at the psychotic woman I’m married to. The Shrew Queen of Hell.
    Under the pitying witness of Elia, with considerable heartbreak and disillusionment I watched Tsofnat’s performances. My own theatrics were, I thought, Emmy-level—so much so that I even believed them myself. At such times, I wept like a man lost. Elia, unable to bear this spectacle of a good-looking young new husband heartbroken by an insane wife, poured me tall tumblers of brandy and once even broke out a fifth of some very old British Mandate–era scotch and said: “Here, poor boy. I was saving this for a special occasion. But with a wife like that, you deserve it.” I made quick business of the bottle. And then of the brandy too.
    Under their name I ran up a tab with a local grocer for cigarettes and booze. By now I had little left of common decency and knew it, but I couldn’t bear to dwell on that for very long. To kill the pain, I drank increasing amounts of liquor in the space that Elia had cleared for me out back in her old pottery studio, an amazing giant wooden shed of cobwebs, flowers, potter’s wheels, unfinished semiabstract ceramic figures writhing from the workbenches and shadows. I loved it in there. Set up shop quite nicely. Want only to write, I told myself. Just leave me in here alone long enough, keep the cigarettes and booze coming, and one day I’ll emerge with a masterpiece in hand.
    But there was the painful shame of my treatment of these two women. It choked the language in me, blocked my ability to write. Often I woke from a blackout slumped over my typewriter. I read ferociously for escape from my despair: Dostoyevsky and Coetzee, Babel and Hemingway, Conrad and Borges. Occasionally, encouraged by booze, I sipped brandy, dragged deep on Time cigarettes,
and sketched down the scenes humming through my head, a disjointed narrative of fragmentary nightmarish recollections that yet might have built to something, though probably not much. Inevitably,