By Melita Schaum

  My husband has started smoking again, and I am furious. Not for what he’s doing to himself—which is considerable, given he’s a sedentary fifty-seven-year-old with skyrocketing cholesterol, thirty pounds on the far side of fighting weight (the size of ten roasts! I chide him when the scales ratchet up past 225)—but for what he’s done to me, which is open in me again the trapdoor of addiction.

  I’m sitting on our back deck with my own pack of cigarettes, the first I’ve had in my possession for some time. In my palm, the casing is smooth, pristine white and gold, shiny and dangerous in its cellophane skin. It’s still unopened, but already I can taste from memory the tobacco, the filter’s dry tip, the first drag of toxic, sweet, bitter smoke. All my commitments, all my resolutions, fall away; after years of clean living, I keep forgetting that I was a smoker for twenty of my forty-seven years.

  Addiction is bigger than most things—bigger than the people you love, bigger than your own logic, sanity, loyalty to life. I recall the anger that flared in me when Jim came home last week, jacket reeking, breath foul—and, a split second later, that old craving, sharp as thirst, as if his fall or my fury had somehow turned back on me, refired a circuit I thought long dead.

  This is an incongruous place to be thinking of smoke. Our deck here in northern California overlooks woods and blue sky, a creek tumbling down a small valley below, the Bay and Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, shimmering in the sun. We bought this house a year ago, an emblem of our new life together—both of us finally secure, tranquil, our late-in-life marriage an idyll of the good life that seemed to be embodied in this lovely, hillside home. We’d found it on a lark one weekend, bought it three days later—as if the house had simply been waiting for our presence to complete it. As if all the happy future needed was for us to pull up at the curb.

  Right now the morning sun is silvering the deck’s redwood, a hummingbird is hovering in the still air above roses, and the sky is the color of heartbreak. But I’m not looking at any of these things. Instead, I’m staring at the pack in my hand as if it were a ship on a horizon.
  This isn’t the first time I’ve slid all the way with Jim, down the rabbit hole I thought I’d plugged up forever. Last fall, after twelve years as a nonsmoker, I slipped into the habit again, astonishing myself. Jim had been struggling with deadlines and fourteen-hour workdays. When he began to come home with smoke in his clothes and matches in his pockets, I was irate, then decided to try tolerance, believing his promises that he’d quit once his projects were through. Why didn’t I hear the echo in the room?

  At first all he brought from the office was the smell; then packs began to emerge from his briefcase and jacket pockets—soon there was an itching curiosity preying on me: after over a decade, what would a cigarette taste like again? I lit up my first in late July; by October I was back at the University of Michigan for a teaching stint, eye-deep in a stressful semester, smoking a pack and a half a day.
 
  What a smoker at forty-seven feels—aside from the shorter breath, the hammering heart, the quicker way that cough erupts in your old lungs to wake you in the morning—is the humiliation of addiction. The defiance that worked so well at twenty has become a see-through garment by your forties, no longer fooling anyone. In Ann Arbor that fall I would sneak away to the river that ran near the house I was sharing with a colleague, pretending it was for the scenery or a little fresh air, but really to lean on the railings of the small trestle bridge in secret and light up, avoiding glimpses of the riverside trail I used to run (all exercise seemed ironic now, almost in bad taste), cringing in shame when a couple strolled by, walking their dogs in the autumn sunlight, and the woman turned to the man as they passed me and subtly waved her hand in front of her face, giving him a private, knowing pout.

  On campus, I smoked outside the classroom building with the losers and the Goths—kids in black trench coats with dough-colored faces who smoked between classes in a group by the exit doors, along with a couple of custodians and one psychology lecturer who had a reputation for statutory dating. Fat kids, emaciated kids, kids with Doc Martens and too much makeup, and one woman from the Internship Program who looked 110 years old—tanned, but more like a piece of leather than a swimsuit model—and whose gravelly smoker’s cough I could hear as far away as the elevators. It haunts me still.

  The woman I was sharing a house with that term was an elderly divorcee—kind, but in love with her own cleanly routines. Her smoke-free house, in which I rented a bedroom, office, bath, was carpeted in aqua shag and trimmed in gold, and she had two white Persian cats the shape of throw cushions that would sniff my jacket incriminatingly after work and let the air out slowly through their horrible grins. I remember shivering in the back yard, eating breath mints, flushing butts, trying to time my indiscretions so she wouldn’t catch me—me, a middle-aged tenured professor, feeling like a busted teenager.
 
  And terrible evenings on the phone with Jim. Both of us quitting. Caving in. Climbing back on the wagon that kept jerking out from under us. The lies he told and I told back over endless long-distance calls.

    “Are you smoking again?”
    “—no.”
  That second’s tick of pause in which you feel the truth take flight. After that, there’s nothing much left to say.

  I remember sitting in the stairwell of a restaurant clutching my cell phone, crying because he’d lied to me again—crying because, when I’d confronted him that time, he’d added (casually, after a weary admission and apology) that couples did that sometimes, they told small lies to each other, that it was human nature, no big deal. Lies. Tears. I felt the fabric of our marriage stretching. And all that time I was impatient to end the call so that I could step into the frigid, windblown street, cup my hands around a Bic, light up and take that first, sweet, guilty, elixirous drag of oblivion. Who was the bigger liar?
 
  I finger the pack now, spin it on the tabletop, watch it gyrate to a stop. That was seven months ago. Now I’m tasting again this moment before the plunge. The sense that I have time—something that falls away when you’re hooked again. The luxury of deferral. Choice. Reason, whatever that might be. I turn the pack on its side, read its ridiculous warnings. I look around at my life—beautiful, tranquil, secure—and deep at the core, a nugget of ingratitude and restlessness. Think of addiction as a sudden change of address. Whatever mansions you’ve been blessed with, it sweeps you back to the hovel inside yourself—the one you’ll always have a key to, the one you hate and deserve.

  I have a publicity photo of myself at 24, advertising a poetry reading at some local café. In the picture I am gaunt and artistic-looking, with a black beret and long slim legs. Defiant grin. Driven eyes. Somehow I look more textured to myself, lean and idea-filled, more real. I smoked constantly at that age—in newsrooms and carrels, bars and bedrooms. Everywhere I went I trailed the smell of ash and fire and combustion. A sweet scent of hell. Euridice’s perfume.

  To me it was the smell of work, of writing, as if my words needed to be ignited and inhaled and spewed back out on the page along with the smoke that fogged the tiny rooms in which I churned out poems and stories. Cigarettes, coffee, Scotch . . . phrases, images, words . . . these were the participles of my life. I didn’t know any other sentence. I didn’t want to; that one said it all.

  That desire for another self—I felt it again the night before last, angry at Jim and suddenly, sharply longing for a smoke. I felt that other, younger self surface—the one who was keener, more creative, less safe. And, most of all, immortal.

  I know that for Jim it’s about getting older. His aches and pains plague him now, in ways they didn’t even five years ago. I gaze at him—prone on the sofa at the end of the day—and across the ten years that separate us, I try to sympathize. I think his smoking is a kind of defiance, a scourge and solace of the body, so long his friend, that’s now beginning to betray him. What’s left to lose?

  I too have my aches, but I fight those with exercise. It’s my own brand of denial maybe—dragging my bones up yet another hiking trail just to say I can. For me smoking has to do with something else that’s left behind—acuity, freedom, risk. My “smoking self”—sexy, blade-thin, sparking like flint. Always on fire with a new idea, another smoldering manuscript. Always dressed in black.

  I confess: my writing has been going badly this spring. It’s part of last fall’s irony—those months in Ann Arbor, hating myself for smoking, yet pumping out pages and pages of good work while I sat at an outdoor coffee kiosk, shivering, burning my cigarettes down to the filter, my fingers growing jaundiced with nicotine. Writing like a demon released from a twelve-year bottle.
 
  I swore to quit at Christmas, with a five-day dry-out drive across the country ahead of me, my return to California and Jim. Sporting nicotine patches, chewing gum like a ruminant, I played the car radio loud and belted out the lyrics to “Help Me, Rhonda” to keep myself from screaming. In Illinois, I was half-mad with cravings; dopey and irritable from Des Moines to Omaha; starting to breathe more freely by Wyoming; okay at Salt Lake City; free at last, I thought, as I crossed the Donner Pass in snow and headed down toward Sacramento, Davis, Berkeley, sunshine, blue skies, home.

  But being “dried out,” I came to learn, is not always a selective state. Along with the smokes, the indulgence, the risk and self-loathing, my words too seemed to have vanished into cleaner air. A kind of mental listlessness set in as week after week unscrolled and my notebook stayed blank, my mind unfogged by chemicals but empty. I ran three miles a day, joined a gym. New Year’s leaked into Valentine’s Day and dribbled on to March.

  Blocks happen. I busy myself when they do. Take on other tasks, run errands, read a lot. I keep telling myself that health is more valuable than yet another publication—who, after all, kills themselves for art? Unfortunately, a long list of names does come to mind, a roster of those who perished young but great. A rock and a hard place—consumption or shopping lists—which, I find myself wondering, is worse?

  Today I’m preparing coursework for the coming fall’s classes—five months sooner than I normally would—drafting an outline for a survey course in literature, writing out lectures I won’t be delivering until Halloween. My files on the English Romantics are stacked nearby—notes on the mad, bad and dangerous that I don’t even remember taking. The pack of cigarettes lies beside my books and legal pads, silent as a landmine, mute as a muse.

  Jim knows the demons too.

  We met during a summer I was spending in Berkeley, house sitting for a novelist I knew. An ex-girlfriend of Jim’s introduced us—with the uncanny perception of an old lover, she seemed to know we’d click, and we did. On our first date, he took me to a new restaurant that had just opened in the city, a chic tapas place with tiny tables and an hour’s wait. We sidled in with a crowd of trendy twenty-somethings at the bar. I ordered a Pinot Gris. He ordered club soda.

    “You don’t drink?”
   
    “Not anymore. I got sober sixteen years ago.”

  It startled me, that easy, unconflicted admission. Neither belligerent nor shy, just a simple statement of fact. His life laid before me—take it or don’t.

  We talked about addictions, compulsions, lifestyles; he was relaxed and articulate. I found myself admiring his confidence, thinking this was a man who knew how to make choices. Who had been through it all—the dark and the light. When I said something to that effect, stumbling a little over the obvious compliment, he shrugged.

  “One day at a time,” he said, raising his eyebrows laughingly at the cliché. But there were no quotation marks, no irony in his voice.

  I had quit smoking ten years before, converted to health like a new religion. In the weeks before we’d met, I’d been enjoying the ideal weather of northern California, running trails, mountain biking every weekend. I was in perfect shape, trim and tan, righteous as a saint. I told him I could never imagine going back to my old life, that after all these years it had gotten easy.

    “It’s one decade at a time for me.” I fingered my drink smugly.
   
    “That’s good,” he nodded, “but remember—” his voice was kind. “Once an addict, always one.”

  “Every man,” wrote Thomas de Quincey, “is either a fool or a physician.”
  I page through my lecture notes, figure de Quincey is as good an author as any to rocket-launch a passel of sophomores into the Romantic Age. Influence on Keats. Contrarian to Coleridge. Someone also well acquainted with the dark and the light.
 
  There’s an irony in the fact that I first read de Quincey in graduate school, a period of my heaviest smoking. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater struck me as garbled at the time—self-indulgent, unintelligible. I thought his writing was as addled as his laudanum-soaked brain. I, who have taken happiness, both in a solid and a liquid shape . . . I wrote scathing seminar papers on the disorder of the confessional genre (“clotted confusions . . . acts of gratuitous self-humiliation,” I quoted de Quincey against himself), commented on the lure of the narcotic to the “spurious and defective sensibility” of the nineteenth-century mind. Of course, I was oblivious to the ashtray heaped beside me, one butt still smoldering as I lit another and another—an ambitious, driven graduate student, working hard into the night.

  Now I open his sequel Suspiria de Profundis, browse again its yellowed, forgotten pages. Blackwells 1845. First titled “Sighs from the Depths.” It certainly is a strange upwelling, a jumbled, fantastical potpourri of prose. It occurs to me that my views on confessional writing haven’t changed much in thirty years. I still think it’s a messy genre, unkempt, ragged at the margins, clutching and spilling secrets, half in love with the very dangers it decries. The only difference these days is that I seem to be hooked on it now myself.

  Lunacy, religion, grandeur, dream—my students, no doubt, will be bored by these ramblings. They will look up from their own groundedness, salute the air, ask how much of this will show up on the quiz. Their lives are still orderly, their futures uncontested, a landscape of clipped lawns and wide avenues. They, like all the young, will live forever, reside above both law and chaos.

  I think we will all be tested, sooner or later. In de Quincey’s fable “Savannah-la-Mer,” three dark women rule our destiny—three Sorrows, three weird Sisters: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears—she holds a key that opens every cottage and castle. Mater Suspirorum, Our Lady of Sighs, her meek eyes filled with the wrecks of dreams. She also bears a key, but seldom uses it; her empire is among the homeless, vagrant, exiled. And the third Sister, the one he calls defier of God. . . mother of lunacies. Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness. Madonna of madness and maelstrom, the one he knew so well. She needs no key. She storms all doors.

  Is addiction a distortion of the self, or its realignment? A flight from or towards that deeper, more vivid self?

  I tap the pack against my palm. Prostration before the dark idol. I tug on the gold tab, pull back the wrapper, open the flip top. A silky row of white coffin nails. In my mouth the first cigarette is soft, dry, tasteless as dust. Chimera or call? I press on the lighter, bring it to the tip, but the Bic is new and doesn’t want to catch. A few futile clicks. I shake it, try again. Three more unsuccessful sparks. I take it as an omen, lay the unlit cigarette down again crosswise on the pack for now. Place the lighter beside it. I sit back with my hands behind my head and contemplate the group. My luck has held. For now.

  I don’t know what I would do if Jim ever drank again. We had a near miss at our wedding a year ago, a small affair with friends, toasted with champagne. I saw the fire in his eyes. He wanted to lift a glass at his own wedding. Somebody’s ignorant spouse poured him a flute of Veuve Cliquot. It was a moment that froze between us as he held the glass up and looked at me, poised at that brink between the lure of an old life—single, free, uncompromised—and this new shore he was landing on, a long stretch where his new bride stood with love and panic in her eyes. He hung—we hung—in that balance for an enormous instant. Then he put down the glass, untasted. Took my hand. Danced with me. For now.

  We pirouette forward in this new union, not knowing the steps sometimes, but stumbling on. A first marriage late in life for both of us, it has its challenges. Last winter we merged two houses full of furniture—a jumble of teak and glass, kilims from Turkey next to Mexican masks, books and clothes, spoils from our lives and travels from Peru to Senegal. Muddled, interspersed, piled into closets and stacked in hallways—none of it felt like mine anymore, or like it ever was. Then this spring I moved my papers to our house. Nearly half a century’s worth of documents, files, photographs, manuscripts. All my writing. All my long nights of solitude and work.

  This was the true wedding, the weeding, my terror of rearranging everything I’ve done and been. I panicked at the prospect of losing my words, of blurring that integrity, that past, familiar, vivid self.

  Maybe it’s the strain of marrying at midlife, with so much else behind us. So many other attachments. So many other lives dogging our footsteps, urging us to turn, return.

  For our engagement, a friend of ours consulted the I Ching, ancient Chinese oracle, to gauge our future, image what our marriage would be. The figure she drew was hard but auspicious: It was a gnarled tree growing on a mountainside, slow but with persistence, finding its difficult purchase on the rock.

Critics are tough on Shelley, call him love’s dreamer. Learning at last that head and heart could not be reconciled. Too many women, too many infatuations. I think of his good, blonde Harriet, first wife, pretty but dull, who had two babies before she turned eighteen and drowned herself in the Severn after he ran off with his black-eyed Mary, child of radicals, brilliant, passionate, renegade. Mistress, adulteress, writer and lover, until she too became the wife he adored and kept at home and longed to leave.

  The man who teaches seminars on Shelley at our campus was once married to my best friend. A dark, unstable, passionate, angry, loving woman—all nerve and blood and terror and devotion. Everything about her was dark, distilled, intense. She drank hard, smoked hard. She and I together spent our young adulthood giving in to our wild addictions. For five years we chain smoked through a whirlwind of late nights and failed loves, a postmortem of bars and breakfast joints, sick with booze and bad judgment and nicotine. We’d fallen out by the time she married my colleague. She was dead a few years later, at forty-nine. What snuffed her spirit? What dark melody lured her away?

  This Christmas I saw my colleague at a faculty party with his new fiancée, a pert L.A.-blonde lawyer he met through an executive matchmaking service. She represented Monsanto (legally, symbolically), and with her retainer they were closing on a condo in an upscale complex that looked like Arlington from its freeway exit. It struck me that he’d had his Mary—disordered, addicted, ill and brilliant. Now he enjoyed his Harriet, good income and a family-sized garage.

  I think of my dark friend, my co-conspirator, my partner in adventure and laughing crime. Heedlessness and freedom. How is it that she is dead? How is it that I’m still alive, sitting here among potted roses and a postcard view, secure and settled on a deck in the sun? I breathe in the clean, enormous peace of this place. The wind riffles a mosaic of sun and leaves, the headlands of Marin a blue wash in the distance. The roses nod to each other, blowsy and shameless, all the colors of lingerie—ermine-white, blush-pink, the vampy, supermodel reds.

  But Paradise too has its disruptions. This winter four trees came down in heavy rain and landslides, wrecking our prospect to the east. Where once were woods, we now see the blue flicker of our neighbor’s television set at night; some days I’m privy to their marital quarrels, no longer muffled by landscaping. The other morning I overheard the woman sobbing—desperate, hysterical, her voice through tears rising to a falsetto you push me and push me—and her husband, pulling the car door from her grasp let go I have to go the weird, limping rhyme of argument doesn’t our relationship mean anything to you anymore? As he struggled into his Volvo, safe steel box, with its full tank, leather seats, satellite tracking system that already knew the way across the Bay to the law firm in the city where, behind marble and glass he could buy some normalcy. Through the gaps in our trees I saw the woman turn back into the house, that slipping box we call a home, despondent in her bathrobe, her hair an asylum-snarl, trailing her diminished life. And the world carries on—perfect, blue, indifferent. Ordinary as flies.

  If I could only be a visitor here—on this deck, in this life, surrounded by its conflicts and commitments. But it doesn’t work that way. Behind this sun, this smell of pine and jasmine, birdsong and beauty, is a string of telephone calls to make, appointments, chores to coordinate—the gardener, the carpenters and plumbers, the stores and shopping lists, the tango with the vacuum cleaner, the sinks full of breakfast dishes. Jim, too, feels the strain, the drive to meet the mortgage, pay the lion’s share of bills. Small wonder he too wants to rebel sometimes, give up the fight.

  There are days I want the madness back. It begins as an ache in the back of my throat, a palpable sensation. What part of the brain has its cul-de-sac right there? The core of me that tingles into craving. A buzz behind the palate, a thrumming between the eyes, like a tuning fork reaching to find its truest pitch.

  Sometimes it isn’t madness, but the sheer feel of irresponsibility again. The single life, doing exactly as you pleased—no betrayals because no loyalties, no lies because no promises. Clean and unfettered. Everything weightless and without consequence. Nostalgia, a glimpse into another life, a jolt, a rush, a high that races up the ganglia like heroine. Light up. Tune out. Become someone you once thought you were.

I debate myself. What a relief it would be to smoke. Doing it not out of vengeance, not out of weakness or impulse. But to deliberately demystify the demons. Defuse the obsession.

    One for Jim.

    One for me.

    One for our life together.

    Then we’d begin again on equal footing.

  My reasoning grows more ambitious. If I could smoke for just one hour every day. This hour of warm late morning, sitting overlooking ocean, pen in hand, revisiting who I am and who I’ve been. The drug as a magic key to open doors inside myself. Or is it the opposite—do I escape myself this way, go somewhere else?

  De Quincey too tried to manage the demons. He rationed himself to seventy drops of opium a night. Then one hundred. Then two. The decanter of ruby-colored poison hidden in a cupboard. Then placed in view but out of reach. Domesticating the temptress: a game with shifting rules. Time and again he’d wake up eighteen hours later, surprised to find the bottle empty, glass overturned, his garbled papers scattered across the floor. She storms all doors.
 
  I turn from love and laudanum to Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” of course, my copy blue-veined with notes. Thou still unravished bride of quietness. Still smooth and unopened, the turn not yet made. “A bride is only a bride for a moment,” I tell my students. “Then the fall.”

  The ode is the perfect form—contemplative, unhurried, not at all the wayward self-indulgence of confession. The deft hand of the poet, sculpting anarchy into song. Your own disordered thoughts returned to you laundered, neatly folded. Recollected in tranquility. “

  The urn survives its makers,” I prod my students, pacing the room to keep them awake. “It’s a foster child, adopted and passed on. What do you make of that?” They tilt their heads politely. Discussion lags. The poem means little to them at this age, twitching like thoroughbreds at the brink of their young lives. Everything is before them, still to be lived; this is all they know or need to know. Sterile beauty is tedious. The bell is about to ring, and they will race into hallways, their arms around books and boyfriends, laughing, fizzing into the future.

  Perfection is a form of arrival. That dream of things being finally in place, life landing at its resting point—maturity, sobriety after years of error, marriage, being settled. And yet such stasis repels me too. It stinks of the terrifying cleanliness of heaven. Forever wilt thou love and she be fair. But perfection is a sanitized, featureless idea. Of course there are no missteps where there is no motion. We need the flaws; they are our handles on each other. Our purchase. It’s the texture, the roughness, that lets us hold on and grow.

  Ravishment means to be taken, to surrender. To this, to him, to life. Surrender feels better than choice, and deeper, even if it’s to something dark. Indeed, the depths are always dark. We are creatures who need both dark and light, who want it all.

  I’m still angry as hell at Jim. That feeling of betrayal, the lack of care for himself, for me. He slipped so fast, no warning. His promises dissolved. Guilt is cheap; so is apology—it’s just smoke and mirrors, diversionary tactics, and I won’t buy it. Not this time.

  And yet I also know he’s not to blame. I fear the disorder in him because I too have a deep disorder in my heart, a turmoil lying there waiting, unresolved. It has to do with words and wounds and solitude. With restlessness and addiction, needs and freedoms. He taps into that again, with all its discords and harmonies. A rich and complex and disturbing tune. The heard melody that is nothing less than the signature of who we are.

  Maturity’s strange gift may be uncertainty. Not the uncertainty of youth, which is like bashing around a dark room trying to find the lights. If we could only land on the switch, we think, it would all come clear. In age we begin to realize that there might not be a switch. Not in this room, this life. Keats talked of Negative Capability—the ability to exist in ambiguity, mystery, doubt. Love, compulsion, language—it’s all a poise, a balance, not a resolution. Ever precarious, ever about to change.

  If you asked me whether I lit that cigarette and smoked again to write this piece, I’d tell you the answer is irrelevant. If not today, there’ll be another morning when I sit in the sun facing books or blank pages, fingering a pack. Or longing for a wild friend, a minute of youth, lost solitude, risk and sweet error.

  I still smell smoke on Jim’s clothes from time to time. Inmate of all this beauty, I keep plotting my escape, rage against this settling. And yet we love, defying all the boundaries. In the room where there is no light, where we abide together in all our glory and disorder, we learn to sit still, forget vision, take what we can from each other and the dark.