Up Till Now: The Autobiography

if she remembered asking that question. She didn’t. I asked her, “Why do you think you asked, why? It was a profound question, what do you think you meant by it?”
    She sighed. “I was probably asking you why you didn’t understand why I drink.”
    I tried so hard to talk to her. “You’re killing us,” I told her. “Why can’t you stop? I love you. What do you need? We’ve got love. We’ve got our home. We’ve got our future together. Why are you getting drunk?”
    “I’m not drunk.”
    The situation got steadily worse. We had to install an alcoholmonitor in the car, a device that makes it impossible to start a car with alcohol on your breath, so she couldn’t drive drunk. We were terrified she was going to kill herself, or someone else.
    Two or three months after our marriage I just couldn’t take it anymore. Finally I told her, “Nerine, I’m going to get a divorce.”
    “You can’t use that word,” she said. “You should never use that word.”
    “You promised me you would be sober and you haven’t stopped drinking. I’m starting divorce proceedings.” People who have not dealt with the addiction of someone they love deeply can’t really understand the compromises you make to love that person, the lies that you tell yourself, the insults that you have to accept. But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to get through to her. We separated for a brief period during which she pleaded with me for another chance. This time, she swore, this time. I was facing decisions unlike anything I’d ever had to deal with in my life. Did I really believe in the healing powers of love or was that just something I said because it sounded good? Finally I told her, “You go to rehab and I’ll stop the divorce.”
    She agreed. I thought we’d won. When she came home we spent a quiet evening together, talking hopefully about the future. She was committed to sobriety, she told me. The next morning I went to play tennis with some friends. “Come with me,” I said. “Everybody’d like to see you.” Instead she stayed home, and by that afternoon she was drunk.
    Nerine was in rehab for thirty days three different times. I understand now that the concept that a person can change their life in thirty days of rehab is nonsensical. A person can’t change the driving forces in their life in a month. Perhaps it could be done in a year, but certainly it takes a minimum of six months to let your body heal.
    Twice she almost drank herself to death. Once, when we rushed her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, her blood-alcohol reading was 3.9—legally 0.08 is considered drunk. She couldn’t stand, she was as pale as death. Four days later I brought her home. “You almost died,” I said. And there was such an arrogant, quizzical smile on herface, similar to the expression I’d seen so many years earlier when she jumped off the platform on the bungee cord ride. It occurred to me at that moment she wanted to see how close she could come to death. I asked her, “Do you want to die?”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I’m stopping.” Within a day she was drinking again.
    The second time she was literally missing for three days. No one had any idea where she was. I was totally frantic. Finally someone called from a charity home in downtown Los Angeles, a flophouse really, telling me that “a woman who said she was Mrs. Shatner” was there. The people in that home welcomed her and saved her life.
    I was so frustrated, so angry. We were so close to a wonderful life together but we just couldn’t get there. She was everything I had ever wanted; she was a princess, she had such majesty about her. And then to see her drunk, to see our life together being shattered. I would sit in our house and cry. I remember sitting in a chair one morning, my hands over my eyes, sobbing softly. She had been drunk the night before and I’d finally begun to understand that my dreams of our life together were never going to become reality. She came down the stairs and looked at me and asked, “Why are you crying?”
    “Don’t you know?” “No.” She had no memory of the night before. I remembered every ugly detail, I remembered the impact and she remembered nothing. I just couldn’t solve the mystery of alcoholism, why our love wasn’t strong enough to overcome her need for alcohol.
    Leonard and Susan were incredibly supportive. Leonard tried to help, he knew