up and moved around the table, sliding in beside her on the banquette. ‘I think most men would think they’d have sex with a Russian woman with their wallet in their hand,’ he said. ‘Russian women are crazy about money.’ She looked at him blankly and he added: ‘Oh come on, you’ve heard that before.’ I began to gather my things, and as I did I heard him say: ‘It was the most important moment of my life. I remember every second of it. And now you’ve ruined it for me.’
If this was a Tennessee Williams play she’d lose the plot and start screaming, or else she’d crush him like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth, who can’t be made into a victim by anyone, even though her looks are fading and she is terrified of death. And if, on the other hand, it was a John Cheever story, he’d have sex with her and then go home to his wife and children in Ossining, where no doubt someone would be playing a piano. He’d mix a martini and go out on to the porch and look over the orchard to the lake, where the family skate in the winter months. Gazing dreamily into the blue light of evening, he’d see a dog, a dog named Jupiter, who’d come prancing through the tomato vines, ‘holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.’
I’d stolen, of course, the closing scene of ‘The Country Husband’, with its swerve up and away, out of the trenches, the animal earth, as if gravity were just a joke and the yaw and pitch of flight was somehow in our repertoire. Recently, I’d begun to become suspicious of this weightless element in Cheever’s work, to see it as another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking. Now, however, the line seemed very lovely, an antidote to the harshness that is all too present in the world. I folded a few dollars on the table and left the King Cole then, spinning through the revolving door and escaping, a little tipsy myself, into the cold, illuminated air.
3
FISHING IN THE DARK
WHEN I TOLD AN AMERICAN friend I was travelling by train from New York to New Orleans she looked at me incredulously. ‘It’s not like Some Like It Hot any more,’ she said, but I didn’t listen. I love trains. I love gazing out of the window as the cities slide by, and I couldn’t think of anything more pleasurable than taking a sleeper, crossing in darkness through the Blue Ridge Mountains and waking with the dawn in Atlanta or Tuscaloosa.
In the interests of thriftiness I’d decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I’d do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat’. Before I left the Elysée for Penn Station I looked again at the route map. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: twelve states. Still, I guessed it would be less arduous than Tennessee Williams’s first trip to New Orleans. In December 1938 he travelled by bus from Chicago, stopping off to see his family in St. Louis and arriving in the south just in time to ring in the New Year. It was the Depression and he had no job and hardly any money, but all the same he felt at home immediately, writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place in this funny old world.’
At the station there were people charging in every possible direction, and yet as soon as I worked out which check-in desk I needed, it all proceeded with beautiful efficiency. A uniformed porter took my bags down to the train and advised me against the seats above the wheels. It seemed like a return to a more civilised age and I felt for a moment, if not like Sugar Cane, then at least equal to Jack Lemmon’s Daphne, sashaying along the platform in his ill-fitting heels.
The first stop was Philadelphia. I took a window seat, stowed my bags and arranged all my little bits and bobs in easy reach: that strange homemaking impulse that overcomes travellers on overnight trips. iPod, notebook, water, a bag of sticky grapes I’d bought after hearing yet another horror story about Amtrak food. I spread my plaid blanket over my knees and as I did a great wave of claustrophobia overtook me. I was at the time at the tail end of a period of chronic insomnia. I could barely sleep in my own bed, with earplugs and an eye mask. My flat had been broken into ages back, and ever since my reticular activation system had locked on red alert.
Only those who are persistently deprived of sleep can understand the panic that wells up when the conditions it requires are likely to go unmet. Sleeplessness, as Keats put it, breeds many woes. That maggoty word breeds is exactly right, for who lying awake at three or four or five in the morning hasn’t felt their thoughts take on an insectile life, or experienced a minute crawling of the skin? Sleep is magically efficacious at smoothing out the tangles of the day, and a shortage makes one agitated to the point of lunacy.
As anyone who’s ever drunk too much will also know, alcohol has a complicated relationship to sleep. Its initial effect is sedative: the slumpy somnolence most of us are familiar with. But alcohol also disrupts sleep patterns and reduces sleep quality, limiting and postponing the amount of time spent in the restorative waters of REM, where the body both physically and psychologically replenishes itself. This explains why sleep after a wild night is so often shallow and broken into pieces.
Chronic drinking causes more permanent disturbances in what’s known prettily as the sleep circuitry: damage that can persist long after sobriety has been attained. According to a paper by Kirk Brower entitled ‘Alcohol’s Effects on Sleep in Alcoholics’, sleep problems are more common among alcoholics than the population at large. What’s more, ‘sleep problems may predispose some people to developing alcohol problems’, and are in addition often implicated in relapse.
Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway suffered from insomnia, and their writing on the subject is full of submerged clues about their drinking. The two men first met in May 1925 in the Dingo American Bar on the Rue Delambre in Paris, when Fitzgerald was twenty-eight and Hemingway was twenty-five. At the time, Fitzgerald was one of America’s best known and best paid short story writers. He was the author of three novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, which had been published a few weeks before. A pretty man, with neat little teeth and unmistakably Irish features, he’d been careering around Europe with his wife Zelda and their small daughter Scottie. ‘Zelda painting, me drinking,’ he recorded in his Ledger for the month of April, adding in June: ‘1000 parties and no work.’
In a way, the bingeing shouldn’t have mattered. He’d just finished Gatsby, after all; that perfectly weighted novel. Its great strength is its indelibility: the way it enters into you, leaving a trail of images like things seen from a moving car. Jordan’s hand, lightly powdered over her tan. Gatsby flinging out armfuls of shirts for Daisy to look at: a mounting pile of apple green and coral and pale orange, monogrammed in blue. People drifting in and out of parties, or riding away on horseback, leaving behind some lingering suggestion of a snub. A little dog sneezing in a smoky room and a woman bleeding fluently on to a tapestried couch. The owl-eyed man in the library, and Gatsby’s list of self-improvements, and Daisy being too hot and saying in her lovely throaty voice that she hopes her daughter will be a beautiful little fool. The green light winking, and Gatsby calling Nick old sport, and Nick thinking of catching the train back to St. Paul and seeing the shadows of holly wreaths cast on to the snow.
A different man could have survived a blowout after building something as lovely and as durable as that. But Fitzgerald was too unanchored to be able to tolerate his chosen pace of life. For years, he and Zelda had been reeling hectically around the globe, ricocheting from New York to St. Paul, to Great Neck, to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, trailing wreckage in their wake. Just before he’d arrived in Paris there’d been a particularly troublesome spell. Zelda had an affair with a French aviator and was becoming very strange, while Fitzgerald was drinking heavily and getting into fights, at one point ending up in a Roman jail, a scene he’d later use to mark Dick Diver’s definitive loss of control in Tender is the Night,
