Story, possibly by Fitzgerald, about a reformed alcoholic seeing his city anew

Question

In Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri writes:

If I'm not mistaken, there's a story or an essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man emerging from twenty years of alcoholism, noticing the city he lives in as if for the first time, and blinking at the sunlight. I may have made up some of the details in my head.

_{Chaudhuri, Amit. Finding the Raga: an Improvisation on Indian Music. New York: NYRB, 2021. p. 245.}

Is there anything in Fitzgerald's œuvre that this might be? Since Chaudhuri hedges for all he's worth, it's even possible that he is thinking of a story or essay by someone other than Fitzgerald. So in the entire corpus of world literature, what work could Chaudhuri be alluding to? Bearing in mind that this work may or may not exist, and it may or may not be a short story.

Answer 1

It's not twenty years, but "merely" twelve, but otherwise this fits the description of Fitzgerald's The Lost Decade, a short story published in Esquire in 1939.

The story deals with a man named Louis Trimble, visiting a newspaper office in New York. An underling, Orrison Brown, is assigned to take him to lunch and care for him the rest of the afternoon:

"Orrison - Mr. Trimble's been away a long time. Or he feels it's a long time - almost twelve years. Some people would consider themselves lucky to've missed the last decade." ... "Take him to Voisin or 21 or anywhere he'd like. Mr. Trimble feels there're lots of things he hasn't seen."

In the course of taking him around New York and showing him the sights, Orrison finds out that the man had been drunk for ten years. A review by Jefferson Flanders summarizes the story as:

Trimble is no stranger to the city; a native, he hasn’t left its environs in ten years — in fact, he has designed one of its premier buildings. But Trimble has been oblivious to its sights and sounds because he’s been “every-which-way drunk” for a “Lost Decade,” and has now only just emerged from his alcoholic stupor to begin to appreciate New York anew, aware of what he has lost and eager to reexperience life.