Manic (16 page)

When I got out of the hospital, a few pounds plumper but no wiser, I went back to my scavenging. I had become addicted to the risk, the thrill. I became good at it, too. By my junior year, I could dig through an entire bin in two minutes flat. I could hear the guard coming long in advance, and scurry back to my room before he could even catch a glimpse of my shadow.

Which is why, much as I loved Vassar, I was relieved to see those four years end. I knew that I was graduating one swift step ahead of scandal. Law school, I thought, had to be better. At least I would have my own apartment, safe from prying eyes, and a car to get around in. And who knew? Maybe with the change of scenery my depressions would dissipate. Maybe I wouldn’t even get depressed at all.

It was a lovely dream, which lasted all the way up to and halfway through my first contracts seminar. By the end of that class I knew that I had made a serious mistake. I should never have gone to law school. I was an English and art history major, for God’s sake, not a right-wing, right-brain entrepreneurial type. Business bored me, and I lacked the proper reverence for money. So it was no great surprise that the black beast was waiting to greet me when I got home. The depression that descended upon me that first year of law school was unlike any I had previously known. It was as if all my past depressions were just training, leading up to this, the ultimate war.

As the darkness deepened, so did my hunger. It penetrated my bones to the marrow, a constant throbbing reminder of the emptiness inside. Although I knew there would never be enough food to satisfy my cravings, that didn’t stop me from trying. I bought in bulk from wholesale grocery stores: sheet cakes and slabs of beef and cases of canned spaghetti. I ate it all in a rhythmic numbness. Whenever possible, I used my fingers instead of a fork. The food felt somehow more satisfying, less illusory that way. I ate until I fell asleep. Then I woke, and ate some more.

On the average, these episodes lasted five days. Every binge was followed by a week or two of remorse and self-recrimination. For the first time in my life, I was actually gaining weight. I was putting on as much as ten pounds per binge, and I didn’t know what to do about it. My identity was tied up in a size six body—or better yet, a size four. Thin to me meant more than pretty. It meant disciplined, empowered, in control: all the attributes I secretly knew I lacked. But mostly, the illusion of a sound and healthy body was essential camouflage. I needed it to hide the evidence of an unsound mind.

This was well before bulimia became a household word. I’d heard of girls at Vassar shoving their fingers down their throats to lose weight in a hurry. I tried sticking my fingers down my throat, over and over and over again, with no success. I gagged, my face grew red and apoplectic, but the food would not come up. Finally, I decided it was time for drastic measures: I would fast the food away. Fasting was easier than dieting. Dieting required moderation, and my bipolar genes operate best in black and white, not gray.

Self-imposed starvation, I discovered, is different from hunger. It’s subtly fueled by pride. “I’ve fasted eight days, why not make it ten,” you soon begin to tell yourself. Ten becomes eleven, eleven quickly turns to fourteen. As weak as your body may be, your spirit is lifted by the knowledge that you have created this fast, this shining monument to self-denial, all on your own.

My hip bones were my guide. When they clearly protruded from my body, it was safe to start eating. But I remained vigilant, scrutinizing my naked body every day for hours at a time in the mirror until I lost all sense of a normal physique. I expected my belly to be not just flat but concave, and the slightest hint of a swelling would instantly start me fasting again. But no matter how strict I was with myself, no matter how thin I became, depression was always waiting for me, eager to undo all my discipline with its omnivorous hunger. Again and again I gained back all the weight I had lost. Then pound by pound, I would fast the weight away.

Binge/fast. Binge/fast. I was two distinct people: the one who showed herself in public but never ate, and the one who never saw the light of day and did nothing but eat. I even had different wardrobes for the different identities: chic designer clothes in bright, come-notice-me colors for the thin girl versus shapeless, billowing swaths of black for the fat one. I wore hats in both phases, but while the thin girl sported beribboned boaters and saucily tilted berets, the fat one stuffed her greasy hair beneath a baseball cap and prayed that no one would look at her. I lived this dual existence for a good twenty years, managing by stealth and luck never to be seen in my binge phase by anyone who mattered to me. I had a few close calls—curious boyfriends, mostly, pounding on the door and wondering where I was—but I never allowed anyone to get close enough to discover my secret.

I’ve always lived alone, by necessity, and I thought I always would. Then something miraculous happened. After years of trying one mood stabilizer after another, I finally discovered a medication that works. I wouldn’t say that the black beast is banished altogether, but it’s manageable. Whereas before I could expect to spend at least half of each month in the throes of depression, now whole seasons go by without my ever once contemplating suicide. Now when I suffer, it’s usually for a damned good reason, one that has nothing to do with my dopamine or serotonin or norepinephrine levels. The guy didn’t call when he said he would, maybe, or the car needs a brake job I just can’t afford.

With my brain chemistry finally in some semblance of balance, you’d think that my body would soon follow suit. After all, I can’t remember the last time I binged. With depression at bay, I just don’t feel the need to anymore. But my body doesn’t seem to care that I’m sane. Apparently it has a mind all its own, and food is still the enemy.

To ward off the inevitable pain and distension, I find myself eating less and less with each passing day. As a result, I’ve gradually wasted away, from a petite but relatively normal size four to a two to my current size zero. What’s less than a zero I don’t want to know. While obesity may be a national epidemic, you don’t see people going up to perfect strangers to tell them that they are too fat. But apparently there is a social consensus that thinness is in the public domain. Rarely a week goes by without someone commenting on my body, telling me I need to “put some meat on those bones,” or “have a cookie, for God’s sake.”

I do my best to avoid all reflective surfaces—mirrors, shop windows, shiny spoons, and the like. I tell myself, like a mantra, that genuine beauty is more than skin deep. But it’s impossible to feel even remotely beautiful when strangers are constantly pointing out your flaws. Do they think that I haven’t noticed myself? No doubt they assume that I’m anorexic, and can’t see what’s right in front of my eyes. They couldn’t be more mistaken. I mourn my breasts, my hips, the former softness and roundness of my upper arms. I miss the swell of my buttocks against a tight pair of jeans, the subtle fleshy friction between my thighs. I long for some kind of cushioning against the sharp edges.

But mostly I long for sustenance—a sense of fullness, an absence of ache. It’s a primal hunger, that goes beyond food: what I really crave is normalcy. I want to sit down at dinner with another human being and do more than push the meal around the plate. I want to go to the movies and toss back popcorn, go to a ball game and gorge on hot dogs. I want to join the Friday night gang at Guido’s for fried calamari and veal Milanese. I want to say yes, finally yes, to an oatmeal cookie.

So tomorrow at ten I’ll see yet another in a long, long line of specialists. I’ll let him poke and prod with his rubber-gloved fingers and cold metal instruments. I’ll swallow the shame and tell him my story. “Why have you waited so long to seek treatment?” he will ask. Because I never thought life could be any different. I thought I would always be mentally ill, that depression owned me, body and soul. I never had a long enough glimpse of clear blue skies to believe in anything but bad weather. And now? It’s simple. I’m hungry again.

I look harmless enough, I suppose. Sitting here
on this park bench, watching the nanny parade pass by, I probably look like a quiet, tolerably well-groomed woman in her early forties, who’s just killing time. Waiting for an appointment, perhaps, or maybe waiting for a rendezvous. The waiting part is right. I am waiting; I have been waiting; I do nothing but wait. And the killing part is right, too—except it isn’t time I want to kill, it’s that chipper young nanny in the gold velour sweats with the cherubic-faced child in her arms.

I was young once, too, if never chipper. But I did have great expectations from life. After all, but for a recurring mental illness, for a few years there I had it all: a good education, a lover who desired me, a lucrative job. I call them “the Prozac years,” that glorious span in my thirties when everything seemed to go my way. For the first time in my life, a medication was actually working. Prozac seemed to knock me out of depression, but it didn’t kick me up into mania. Instead, it nudged me ever so subtly into hypomania, every manic-depressive’s dream.

Hypomania is that idyllic interlude just before mania when all of your senses are in a state of heightened arousal. But they don’t overwhelm you. Nothing overwhelms you. The sun never shines too bright, but you feel its warmth on your skin. The wind never blows your hair awry, but it whisks the clouds away. Life is liquid and even; it balances.

I met Alan when I was hypomanic. He was the kind of man no one ever thought to call “Al.” He was the top rainmaker in our firm. I was a humble associate who had somehow managed to attract his notice. He told me later that it was a combination of things: an appellate brief I wrote, an outspoken comment I made at the annual firm picnic, and the way my red hair gleamed against a gold silk scarf. “You stood out” was all he said when I asked him why he chose me above all the rest of my peers to be on his team.

So I was on the inside at last, and I liked it fine. But with the overconfidence bred of hypomania, I knew that I could get inside deeper still if I focused all my energies on it. I started staying at work later every night, churning out memo after memo addressed to Alan’s attention: crisp, well-researched, thoroughly gratuitous memos designed solely to make his life a little bit easier, and to focus a brief but shining spotlight on me.

It worked. I was finally called into Alan’s office. He was, as always, impeccably dressed, in a single-breasted charcoal gray suit with thin pinstripes. His glowing white shirt had the signature French cuffs. It was his trademark, to shoot his cuffs just before the kill. I’d seen him do it in court and more frightening still, in the office, when he fired someone in my presence.

Alan was on the speaker phone. He motioned me to sit down without ever looking in my direction. Fifteen minutes later, he was still on the phone, and I was still sitting quietly. His conversation did not appear to be going well. Legalisms were shot through with four-letter words, culminating with Alan slamming down the receiver.

He looked up at me and grinned. “Well, that was fun,” he said. “Fun?!” I asked. “That guy just called you a slimy son of a bitch.” Alan laughed. “Yeah, but look who got the last word in. It gave the appearance of closure. And never forget: appearances matter.”

He looked me slowly up and down. I knew that I had passed.

He then handed me a folder stamped “Privileged/ Confidential.” It contained all his trial notes for the upcoming lawsuit that everyone was talking about, by far the hottest case in the office. We represented three major studios, and stood a good chance of getting the business of several more if we won. The stakes were high, and competition to get on this small but elite team was fierce.

“Read the file and we’ll discuss it over dinner,” Alan said. He didn’t stop to ask if I already had plans. Nor did I expect him to. This was the inside, after all. The deep inside. What could possibly be more important than that?

At dinner, to my surprise, Alan didn’t talk at all about the lawsuit. In fact, he talked about everything but: his childhood, his Princeton years, his current dreams and aspirations. We both consumed a fair amount of cabernet that evening, but I knew it wasn’t the wine talking. It was the hypomania, working its magic. I had seen this before: normally reserved men breaking down or opening up or otherwise deactivating all their defenses in my presence.

I’ve looked in the mirror when I’m hypomanic and even I can see it: my eyes are an open invitation, a bottomless well of empathy. “Trust me, tell me everything,” they say, and people do. Not just men sitting across from me at a candlelight dinner, either; and not just men, for that matter. Men and women everywhere seem compelled to talk to me, touch me, give me their confidence. It happens in the oddest places: in the aisles of the supermarket, waiting in a movie line, sitting at a coffeehouse, and
especially
in elevators. Hypomania breaks down that invisible wall that exists between well-mannered strangers. There are no strangers anymore, only unknown friends, waiting to tell me their stories.

When Alan walked me out to my car, he leaned against the fender and pulled me into his arms. He took his time. He didn’t kiss me all at once—he nibbled, as if tasting me for flavor. Then he gradually, bit by bit, as if he had all the time in the world, explored my lips. It was the single most persuasive kiss I’d ever received in my life, doing justice to his reputation as the lawyer who could convince you of anything. By the end of that kiss, I was willing to go anywhere, do anything, feel whatever Alan desired.

This continued for the next couple of months. We worked together during the day without ever betraying our after-hours feelings. Then once or twice a week, we would have dinner, followed by a heavy-duty petting session in the parking lot. As the weather grew colder, we finally took the action inside. We went back to the office and made out like randy teenagers on Alan’s couch (I was too junior to merit comfortable armchairs, let alone a whole couch). But always, just as we were on the verge of actually making love, Alan would stop, put his hand gently over my mouth, and say, “Wait. It isn’t time yet.”

Well, I knew a thing or two about time, and in my opinion, it was way overdue. This was as close as I had ever come to the absolute inside—a senior partner at one of the top firms in town, who was handsome and famous, and who knew how to kiss a girl silly. Plus I actually liked him. Our wry senses of humor played well off each other, and the quickness of his mind never failed to astonish me. I even swooned when he corrected my grammar. After every sweaty session on the office couch, I used to go home and fantasize about our future. It was just a matter of time, I figured. As long as I stayed hypomanic, anything was possible. I could even be one of those smiling young women I saw pushing their strollers through the park every Sunday afternoon. As long as I stayed hypomanic, I could have it all.

As the days of work grew longer and more intense, I became justifiably worried. I knew that lack of sleep is a primary trigger for mania. And indeed, I could feel myself getting more and more agitated with each successive sleepless night. But the biggest problem, of course, was Alan. Early on, in a fit of intimacy following an exceptionally head-spinning bout of kissing, I had told him that I was manic-depressive, but that it was under control. He held me at arm’s length and stared at me with his cross-examination stare. “It had damn well better be, because I’ve got a lot riding on you,” he said.

I knew what he meant. Neither of us mentioned it by name, but we were both thinking the same thing. A sexual harassment lawsuit was the last thing Alan needed at this juncture in his career. I kissed him as convincingly as I possibly could, and he allowed himself to be convinced. But the issue festered between us from that day forward, more powerful in its silence than it ever would have been if openly explored.

I hid my symptoms from Alan, and from everyone else, as best I could. Fortunately, every lawyer preparing for a major trial is snappish and irritable. My accelerated speech went unnoticed. We were all talking a mile a minute, troubleshooting rat-a-tat-tat like machine gunners under heavy fire. In short, we were wired, and none more so than Alan, who seemed to subsist solely on black coffee and M&Ms. In the midst of this, my own steady ascent into mania went largely unnoticed. Except by me. I knew damn well what was happening, and I begged my doctor to fix it before it got out of control. But all he could offer was the suggestion that I take a leave of absence to try out some new medication.

A leave of absence! After everything I’d been through to get where I was, did he honestly think I could just walk away? I knew that the second I stepped out the door, five other associates would be clawing one another’s backs to take my place. So no, I told my doctor, leaving was not an option. He gave me a prescription for a new mood stabilizer. But first, he said, we’ll have to wean you off the Prozac, which means that things may get much, much worse before they ever get better.

And sure enough, within forty-eight hours, I was walking and talking so fast even my own shadow couldn’t keep up with me. Alan complimented me on the amount of work product I was generating. In fact, he was so impressed by my overall energy and drive, he even made me second chair on the trial, an unheard-of honor for an associate at my level. But like all of Alan’s career decisions, it was a well-calculated move. I was an automaton at that point, at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t sleep; I didn’t eat; I just worked, in a single-minded frenzy. I was über-lawyer: not only efficient, but nasty to boot.

Needless to say, we won the trial. It was a big-time victory, covered by all the papers. “Tonight,” Alan said, catching me alone in the hall and whirling me about, “we celebrate.”

I knew what that meant—or at least I thought I knew. Surely tonight, it would finally be “time.” What else could Alan be waiting for? That night, a dozen outfits later, I finally achieved the desired look: a simple black sheath with a Chanel chain-link belt and a long rope of pearls. It was elegant, which Alan liked, and deceptively demure, which he liked even better. Deceptive because underneath the basic black, I was anything but: I had on the fancy Paris lingerie that I’d never dared wear before. Lacy silver-snap garters, sheer silk stockings, and a black satin camisole. Like all the best lingerie, it left everything to the imagination and nothing to chance.

Alan’s face lit up when he saw me, then he proceeded to ignore me for the rest of the meal. It wasn’t his fault, really. People kept coming up to us every five minutes to congratulate him and talk about the case. I decided to concentrate on the plate in front of me instead. I couldn’t remember when I had last stopped to eat, but all of a sudden I was ravenous, not so much for the food itself, but for the sensations: the tingle of champagne, the crunch of the baguette. Alan had ordered caviar, and every spoonful felt like tiny explosions against the roof of my mouth. Between the beluga and the garter tickling each thigh, I was halfway to orgasm and Alan hadn’t even touched me yet—much less talked to me.

I finished off my champagne and signaled for another glass. Our waiter, Jarrod, was a dead ringer for Cary Grant, complete with English accent. He certainly had all the requisite charm, even complimenting me on my dress, which is more than Alan had found time to do. In between courses, we held a running conversation while Alan chatted up colleagues. I learned that he was (surprise, surprise) an actor, and that he was about to open in an Equity waiver production in Hollywood.

“You should come,” Jarrod said. His hand briefly brushed against mine as he refilled my glass.

You have to understand what mania does to the skin: it lights up every nerve ending. The slightest sensation feels like a volcanic eruption—and there I was, swathed head to toe in silk, my flesh ripe with desire. And who was feeding me, pouring me wine, paying me attention? Not my date, but this gorgeous young man with the Cary Grant cleft in his chin. Alan was still talking to the man at the next table. Bridges are only kindling, I thought. I decided to torch this one.

I waited until Alan was looking in my direction, reached in my purse and pulled out a card. Smiling sweetly, I asked, “Honey, do you have a pen? I want to give this guy my phone number.” Alan shook his head, looking a bit bewildered, I thought. “Oh, never mind,” I said. “I’ll just use Jarrod’s pencil.” And I did, scribbling my digits on the back of the card and handing it to Jarrod with the most meaningful smile in my arsenal.

“In fact, Jarrod, what are you doing later tonight?” I asked, crossing my legs to expose a glimpse of garter. “Maybe we could have a drink after hours somewhere.”

Alan was stunned. Jarrod looked at him and beat it, mumbling something about the crème brûlée.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Alan demanded.

“Having fun,” I said, sipping champagne.

He reached over and took the glass from my hand. “You’re manic, aren’t you?” he asked.

Never, but never, call a manic person “manic” to their face. For some reason, when you’re in the very throes of it, the term
manic
sounds like the most degrading, insulting, offensive character slur imaginable. I suppose it’s like accusing a drunk of being an alcoholic: beneath the accusation is the threat that you’re going to take the drink away. So when Alan called me manic, I instinctively twisted away from him.

“How dare you,” I hissed, and got up so abruptly that I knocked the champagne bucket over. It spilled onto the table and all over Alan’s suit. I watched with satisfaction as the signature white cuffs grew piss yellow with wine. Then I turned and walked out of the restaurant.

He was right. I was manic. I knew it, but I couldn’t think beyond the moment. All that mattered was how I looked in my own mind, making the grand exit.

It took me a whole week to calm down, a long, miserable week during which the mania finally peaked and then crashed, giving way to unimaginable despair. I thought I knew depression in all its many flavors and layers, but never had I known a depression like this.