… And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My mind was going Numb

from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’

At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburbs than Europe’s concise landscapes. In the tiny restaurant, we shoved four wobbly tables together, ordered Asian greens, and sat for hours fiddling with our chopsticks and drinking burnt-orange-coloured Thai iced tea. No one but M. talked and no one listened to him. His nervous and joyless verbal traverses were the out-loud equivalent of knee-shaking or leg-swinging. I’d hear occasional individual words: dusk, kindness, playful, accoutrements, heavenly. Make it stop, make it stop, I’d pray (I’d learned to pray in AA), watching his mouth move evenly and continuously like a machine in a factory, punching hole after hole in my day.

I knew M. had very little to do during his early sober weeks – he always looked sad when our lunches broke up. As he was walking me home (I could put up with the two blah-blah blocks to my apartment), I interrupted his monologue about Catholicism’s effect on Spanish architecture to ask him – the request felt altruistic – if he’d be willing to help me carry bags of clothes to Beacon’s Closet to sell. I told him I was broke. He welcomed this change of subject. Oh, I am too, he agreed. This contradicted what he’d rolled out as he walked me home from lunch earlier that week, when I’d asked him what he did for a living. I get a steady flow of royalties from my father’s literary estate; he’s an author. We’d all been trying to figure out who his father was; M. was evasive, while simultaneously dropping constant hints, as if his father were so famous we’d see M. in weak reflected light if we knew. And I’ve got the Schnabel portrait of him I keep in storage, he added. I might have to sell it. That didn’t sound like broke to me. It’s just one Schnabel, he said defensively. And the royalties are more of a trickle, he assured me, flow is hyperbole.