The Black Veil by Rick Moody

Author:Rick Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504027700
Publisher: Open Road Media

WHAT IS THIS WORLD GOOD FOR NOW THAT WE CAN NEVER BE JOLLY ANYMORE …

Three days into the family therapy seminar at Jen’s rehab, the two of us were scheduled to have a conversation in front of the entire cast, consisting of a half dozen other alcoholics, their family members, and a pair of alcoholism counselors from the upstate rehabilitation center with the pastoral name. You were not permitted to drink during the family therapy seminar, it was part of the agreement, and so I hadn’t drunk anything, concluding my career as a problem drinker the prior weekend with three beers at a friend’s house while watching the Red Sox. This was ending with a whimper. I wasn’t experiencing delirium tremens during this episode of temperance, but neither was I comfortable. I perspired a lot. All the broadcast fare on the television in the motel where I was staying while partaking of the family therapy seminar seemed to feature minor character actors raping other cast members. That’s how it looked each night, after the sequence of confessions and bad-news bulletins that filled our therapeutic days. I couldn’t sleep, in my polyurethane motel interior. I spent much of the night swimming in bedclothes, especially the night before our scheduled communications workshop. That afternoon we all had gazed powerlessly as a couple in their sixties, Everett and Lucinda, began bickering and then disagreeing violently. Everett, who was the recovering alcoholic, denied charges lodged against him, said his wife had been wrong to bring him to this damned place, his wife was a damned fool, needed to have her head examined, and Lucinda had responded, not long after the conversation, with a heart attack. They were a charming couple; he was an old jazz musician who in his baldness and robustness reminded me of my grandfather. They told amazing stories, both of them. And they were miserable.

It wouldn’t go well for Jen and me, either. The opening round of our own communications prizefight was about how I had to move out, had to pack my things, had to find another place to live, and I was unprepared for this and for the fact that Jen had waited to give me this news in public. I think what Jen is saying is that she can’t live with you while you are drinking, the counselors chimed in. But I’m not drinking. And so forth. The conversation didn’t go well after this blow; I couldn’t get my footing, and so I tried to say inoffensive things as briefly as possible. As I was digesting the fact that I wouldn’t have anywhere to go when I left the rehabilitation center, one of the referees decided that it was time for Jen and me to say that we loved each other. It might be really nice for all of us here if you two told each other that you loved one another. And there was Jen, radiantly beautiful after her month of AA meetings, her group therapy, her

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