The End of My Addiction

really talking about me when he began reciting the accomplishments that “amply merited” the award? For every supposed victory Barre recited, I thought of an alcohol-related defeat that landed me in a hospital emergency room, a detox or psych ward, a rehab center.
    Barre concluded by saying that I would now “go on to do new medical research.”
    I turned to my mother and cracked, “Research for the next bottle.”
    “Stop it!” she said.
    On the video, Raymond Barre beckoned me forward and pinned on my lapel a Legion of Honor cross from President Chirac’s personal reserve of crosses, saying, “In the name of the President of the Republic and by the powers vested in me, I make you Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.”
    He kissed me on both cheeks, the guests applauded, and my mother clapped her hands along with them. On the video one of the guests called out, “Your turn, Olivier.”
    Raymond Barre kindly said, “No reply is necessary.”
    I had not prepared any remarks, but I managed to smile and say that I was not at all sure that I deserved the evening’s award. Thanking the guests for coming on behalf of myself and my family, and acknowledging many questions earlier in the evening, I explained that my brother and sister were absent because of my mother’s illness. Those remarks pleased my mother, as I could tell from the expression on her face.
    The video ran on with a brief additional montage of departing guests. There I was with Jean Bernard, asking him how he was getting home in the bitter cold and hearing him say, “I am walking, of course. It is only a few steps.” There was Jean Dausset, expressing his disappointment that there was not a piano for me to play or at least a tape of my songs. And there was Raymond Barre saying, “Come visit me in Lyon, where we can have more time together. Congratulations once again, my dear friend, and good night.”
    Another exterior shot of the hotel with its lights ablaze followed, accompanied on the soundtrack by Arif Mardin’s arrangement of “Your Heart’s Desire,” which I composed after finishing rehab at Marworth. It moved me to think of all the effort and expense Arif had gone to in arranging and producing a demo track of the song, and it made me feel all the more acutely the loss of my career and the separation from my friends in New York. Then the tape ran out and the television screen went blank.
    My mother’s seventy-ninth birthday was coming in March. “You have given me a wonderful early birthday present, Olivier!” she exclaimed. I wished I could give her the present she really wanted.
    On the night of the Legion of Honor ceremony I had managed not to drink despite the champagne served to the guests, only returning to the liquor bottle the next night. Now I felt the craving for alcohol well up inside me as it did every afternoon and evening, a flood tide of increasing physical tension, emotional anxiety, and mental preoccupation. I had recently moved back into my old apartment. I told my mother I had to leave and went to fetch my coat from the closet.
    “May I keep the video?” my mother asked.
    “Of course,” I said. “I brought it for you.” I had no interest in seeing it again. I felt like I had just watched myself playing a part in a fictional movie. The man in the video wasn’t a real person. He was a mask I showed the world to hide my inadequacy. If people like Raymond Barre truly thought otherwise, they were naive or deluded.
     
    I began to fall.
    Two or three times in the first months of 2000, my mother had to be briefly hospitalized. During one of these stays, I went to her apartment with Danielle to fetch something I had left there. I was drunk, and I stumbled and fell backward into a glass display cabinet that held a Venetian glass vase that my parents bought when I was a child and that my mother loved. It was the vase she always put flowers in.
    I cried out, “The vase, the vase!”
    Danielle cried, “Your back!”
    The vase was okay. My back was a mess, a sea of glass shards embedded in it. At the ER, they picked out the shards and sewed me up. A few days later, the wounds became infected and I had to return.
    In April I fell and broke my left wrist while Rollerblading hungover, my second or third attempt at the sport. It needed surgery right away, but I waited until I had sobered up and Danielle told me there was no alcohol on my breath. I wanted to be sure the hospital treated me like a normal patient. It had