Manic (2 page)

I didn’t want to remember, and I certainly didn’t want to feel, but unbidden, unwanted, the tears started to flow. With them the memories came flooding back: the jagged edge of a broken blue bottle, waving back and forth before my eyes before it disappeared between my legs; a heavy arm straddling my windpipe; a quick shallow breath in my ear. And everywhere the little devils dancing, rippling across the surface of his skin, my skin, ours.

I looked down again at the mosaic of blood on the sheets. So much blood, it couldn’t all have come from the lacerations on my thighs, which looked fairly shallow. No, there must have been a deeper wound. I reached down and gingerly probed between my legs. My fingers came up slick with fresh blood. There’s always a deeper wound somewhere, if you look for it.

I lay back onto the pillow, exhausted. But the physical pain didn’t bother me anymore. It was dwarfed by a monstrous wave approaching, the tsunami that I’d been trying to avoid ever since I’d arrived in Santa Fe. I shut my eyes tight; I bit my lip; but I was overwhelmed by the realization that for the first time in my life, I was utterly and completely alone.

“If only Daddy were alive,” a voice inside me pleaded. He would have saved me from all of this: not just the evil man with his jagged blue bottle, but the dangerous manias that led me to all these men, and the suicidal depressions that followed. If only Daddy were alive, none of this would have happened. There would be no Santa Fe.

If only Daddy were alive…. The truth is, he wouldn’t have saved me from any of it. Not the manias, not the depressions, and none of the consequences, because he simply refused to believe that the disease even existed. “It’s all in your head,” he would say to me, without the slightest tinge of irony. He didn’t believe in psychiatry. He believed in bootstraps—as in, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and get on with your life. And in the end, he didn’t even believe in that. He didn’t even believe in me.

The moment I had tried the hardest to forget suddenly snapped back to life in full sensory detail, down to the sharp, astringent smell of the hospital room. It had been a long night for both of us. The cancer had spread to the bones by then, and even the morphine drip couldn’t keep the pain at bay for very long. For the past ten days I’d been sleeping on a cot by my father’s bedside and living out of a suitcase, hastily packed while I’d waited for the paramedics to arrive. I barely knew if it was day or night anymore, except by the number of pills that I took.

I was dutifully counting out that morning’s supply, a good double handful, when I looked up and noticed my father’s eyes upon me. I bent over the bed to kiss him good morning, but he turned his head abruptly away. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” I asked. “Do you want the nurse?”

He nodded, and I pressed the call button. His eyes fluttered and closed, but his breathing sounded regular, so I sat back down and continued counting out my pills. When the charge nurse arrived a few minutes later, I gently shook my father awake. “She’s here, Daddy. The nurse. What did you want?” His eyes were cloudy and his face looked odd, the skin bloodless and gray; but when he sat up and spoke to the nurse, his voice was surprisingly strong. He gestured toward the bedside table. “There’s a document in the top drawer there,” he said. “And I need a pen.”

The nurse opened the drawer and took out the paper. I knew what it was, because I’d helped my father’s lawyer get it witnessed and notarized. The nurse pulled a pen from her pocket and handed it to my father, along with the will. Then she turned to leave.

“No, you stay,” he said. “Someone should see this.” With shaking, palsied fingers he uncapped the pen and began to cross my name off every page on which it appeared.

“She’s a drug addict,” he said to the nurse. “Just look at all those pills.” The nurse looked at me. I still had my morning’s supply in my hand, and I instinctively tried to close my fingers around them. But there were far too many, and they all spilled out onto the floor. “It’s for manic depression,” I started to explain, but my father stopped me.

“I put her through Vassar, I put her through law school, and all she is now is a goddamned drug addict. Who’d have believed it—my little girl.” Then he lowered his head back onto the pillow and started to moan softly.

The nurse, bless her, busied herself with the bedside tray. “It’s time for your medication now,” she said to my father, as she fed him dose after dose of brightly colored pills, a rainbow of pharmacology, pretty but no longer of much use. Exhausted from swallowing, he closed his eyes and slept.

I was there when he woke, a few hours later; and I was there when he died, the following week. At his funeral, I prayed for the strength to forgive him his faults, and I thought that I had succeeded. But flat on my back in Santa Fe, too bruised and too beaten to fight my own feelings, I knew better. I could forgive my father for disinheriting me. I could forgive him for refusing to believe that I was ill. I could even forgive him for not protecting me from the world—how could he, when he couldn’t even protect me from himself? But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, forgive him for leaving me alone.

A deep, resonant “bong” chimed through my thoughts, as the clock in the next room struck the half hour. Only thirty more minutes to midnight; only thirty more minutes to die. Remembering had made me more eager than ever. Death wasn’t the easy way—it was the only way out, it seemed to me, or else I would remember forever. Riding a sudden surge of energy, I jumped out of bed, stumbling as the pain caught up to my senses. On the way to the bathroom, I fell once, hard, and almost stayed there on the thick Berber carpet. But then I forced myself to stand up straight and start swallowing: handful after handful of pills, tossed back with increasingly sloppy swigs of tequila.

Twenty-five minutes later, and three-quarters of the way through my stockpile, I no longer felt the pain, inside or out. My head started nodding in tacit submission, but I slapped my cheeks and chewed my tongue and dug my nails into my palms until the pain startled me awake again. Then I commanded my arm to keep on grabbing, and my throat to keep on swallowing…until finally, finally, I held the very last pink-and-green capsule between my fingers, and downed it with the very last drop I hoped I would ever taste of tequila.

My legs slowly slithered out from under me, and I pressed my face gratefully against the cold tile floor, staring up at Christmas through the clerestory window. The last thing I remembered was the clock striking twelve; and a single stubborn snowflake clinging to the windowpane, refusing to let go.

I didn’t know
whether I would end up in Heaven or Hell, or at least in Purgatory. Instead I woke up in County General, strapped to a gurney, covered in a foul mixture of charcoal and vomit, and retching uncontrollably. I knew it wasn’t Heaven, because they kept asking for my insurance. I suspected it wasn’t Hell, either, because the attending physician had kind blue eyes and kept patting my hand. “You’re alive,” he said. “We found you just in time. You’re a very lucky girl.” And so I knew that it was Hell after all. I hadn’t made it. It would be years before I could ever muster together the pills, the opportunity, the money to make another attempt on this grand a scale. This was no gesture. It was genuine despair, and it had failed me.

When I finally got the tubes out of my throat two days later, the nurse gave me a little pad to write on. “Why?” was all I could think of to say. “Why, why, why?” The sweet attending physician finally caught on. “Why are you still alive?” he asked me. I nodded emphatically.

He flipped through my chart. “All I know is that the paramedics were called on Christmas morning. It seems that a young man, a locksmith I think, came by to replace a broken pane of glass at your house, and he found you unconscious. He saved your life.”

“Now, about these other injuries. The police have been waiting to talk to you about them. You’ve got some pretty nasty cuts and bruises down there. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

I nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I looked back up at those sympathetic sky blue eyes and shook my head slowly, sadly, and with absolute finality. If my assailant was also my savior, so be it. Perhaps my doubting father could also be my dearest love. I wondered why I, of all people, had never realized it before. The world is essentially bipolar: driven to extremes but defined by flux. Saints are always just a stumble away from sinners. Nothing is absolute, not even death.

Despite the pink Xanax cloud that was fogging my mind, I knew I had hit on something important. All my life I’d been fighting my own private battle of extremes, with little success—so little that I was about to usher in the New Year from a hospital bed, in thick leather restraints. Manic depression was more than a mental disease: it was a mind-set, it colored everything. The world should be one way or another, I thought. Men either made you safe, or they made you bleed. If they weren’t gods, they were villains, and it didn’t matter if they came at you with bottles, or they came at you with disbelief: either way, you bled.

It was rigid, unnatural thinking. Life was fuzzier than that. I thought of my father, and the perfect smoke rings he used to blow at my command, the endless hours he spent rubbing my back when I had asthma in the middle of the night, and the thousand and one stories that he told me from his big brown chair—cigarette in one hand, whiskey in the other, and me on his lap, in my heaven. It was impossible not to know that he loved me; and that his love had conditions; and that it was still love. The trick was remembering that enormous word
and
.

The nurse came in to adjust the IV, and handed me a box of tissues on her way out. I was crying, my face and chest soaked with tears: tears of resignation, of reluctant compromise. Nothing was absolute, not even despair. I didn’t want this life that I’d been given back, but it was a gift nonetheless, and Christmas gifts should always be opened and honored. I would put death aside a little longer, for now, or at least until I understood why I was still alive.

I was a star in the making—cold and chilly, with
a calculated twinkle. It was a favorite conceit of mine always to have fresh flowers in my office, a touch of femininity to offset my no-nonsense pinstripes and neutered smile. And not just a single token rose, either, but armfuls of the rarest, most fragrant or flamboyant blooms I could find: red parrot tulips, delicately scalloped at the edges; or orchids so fleshy they bordered on the obscene.

I justified the expense by telling myself that it was good client relations. Any attorney who could afford hothouse tulips in December must look like she is doing something right. In truth, it was simply camouflage, something to hide behind, to divert attention. At that point in my career, I could easily afford to blow a few hundred bucks a month on flowers. What I couldn’t afford was scrutiny.

The rumor around the office, which I didn’t discourage, was that I had a wealthy boyfriend. Little did my office know that depression was my secret admirer, and had been for years, long before I ever started practicing law. I never knew when depression would come to call, or for how long, or how dangerous it would be. I only knew that I had to keep it secret, or else. Or else what, I wasn’t quite sure, nor was I willing to find out. So the flowers had to stay fresh and pure. I couldn’t allow a hint of darkness or decay around me, at least nothing that couldn’t be masked by a Casablanca lily. I gave my secretary a standing order to change the water in all the vases daily, and to discard anything that looked to be dead or dying.

There would always be more, I figured. So long as none of the partners ever found out that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing as a lawyer, most of the time; that I hated every moment of this existence and every one of their faces; and that the most fragile thing in that office was not, by far, the tulips…so long as they just came in, dumped off a file, said “Nice flowers,” and left without noticing the deep purple circles under my eyes or the mound of wet wadded Kleenex under my desk, so long as we all agreed not to look too close, or to ask too many questions, there would always be more flowers.

Call it superstition. Call it strategy. Whatever I was doing, it apparently worked, because one April afternoon a few years before my father died I was asked to join the team of lawyers working on the firm’s big Michael Jackson case. Our first order of business was to find an expert witness to testify that Michael’s songs were not “substantially similar” to any of the plaintiff’s songs. We needed a musicologist of the first degree, someone who would impress a jury not just with his expert credentials but with his demeanor, his sincerity, and his innate likeability.

Twenty lunches later, we’d narrowed the field down to two stellar candidates. One was a famous university professor, well known and well respected in the insular world of entertainment expert witnesses. The other candidate (let’s call him Joe) also had impressive degrees, but he was twenty years younger and still had hair—lots of it, tied back in a long, neat ponytail. Plus he was a practicing musician, on the road ten months of the year with a band that had known better days, but was still hot enough to command its roadies’ respect. As the junior attorney on the litigation team, I felt it was my role to inject some youth into the lawsuit. This was, after all, rock and roll we were defending. So naturally I was leaning heavily toward Joe. It didn’t hurt that his band’s biggest single had also been the theme of my high school prom. Impressed as I was with his credentials, I was still just a few years shy of a crush.

The day Joe was to be introduced to the rest of the team dawned bright, hot, and sunny, which cinched my choice of restaurants for the big meeting. Where else but The Ivy: that homey little ersatz cottage on North Robertson, that vine-covered nest of vipers where the industry elite meet and mingle over fresh blood and crab cakes. I’d told the team in a preparatory memo that in my opinion, Joe struck just the right note with his unique blend of musical expertise and showmanship. And sure enough, he showed up looking professorial but hip in a crisp, black Armani jacket and well-worn jeans. I could have kissed him. I could have kissed everyone, it was going so well. By the time our crab cake entrees arrived, our table was convulsed in laughter, one anecdote leading to the next in a seamless flow of one-upmanship. I caught glimpses of the people at other tables watching us, wondering who we were.

We lingered so long over crèmes brûlée and cappuccinos that the angle of the sun started shifting to the west, and the patio began to grow cool. Slipping on his suit jacket, one of the senior partners asked about the time. “Almost four,” I said. “Are you serious?” Joe said, surprised. I assured him that I was. “Shit,” he said. “I forgot to take my lithium.”

The next few minutes are engraved in slow motion on my synapses. Joe excused himself to get his medication from his car. Nobody said a word until he got past the gate. And then the table exploded. Senior partners don’t laugh easily, and record execs are even harder to amuse. But for the next few minutes, until they spied Joe coming back through the gate, you’d have thought
lithium
was the funniest word on this earth.

I wasn’t in any position to evaluate the wit. All I could hear, doglike, was the tone: contempt. And all I could think was, what would they say if they saw the pharmaceutical cornucopia that I am carrying around right now in my purse? If plain old lithium was good for such a belly laugh, they’d die of hilarity over my dozen assorted mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antianxiety agents, and atypical antipsychotics.

I had often wondered what would happen if the firm ever found out about my mental illness. Now I knew. I knew without having to be told that Joe was strictly history from that point on, that he didn’t have a chance in hell to act as Michael Jackson’s expert witness or to have any affiliation whatsoever with our firm in the future. And I knew, with certainty, that I would have to tell him.

While everyone else laughed, I flashed through my options: (1) I could defend poor Joe, reminding my colleagues of his credentials, his reputation, and his prelithium impression; (2) I could defend manic depression, educating these influential men about the importance of battling stigma whenever possible; or (3) I could simply say nothing and wake up tomorrow knowing that I was one step closer to making partner, and one step farther away from myself.

I faced my future unadorned and realized that I wasn’t quite ready to give up the fairy tale yet. Not the one about making partner—looking at these men sitting next to me, I knew that I would never be one of them. Believe it or not, I wanted to be callous, too, to be hard enough never to care, but I wasn’t. The truth was I was soft deep down, where the really hard decisions are made. I knew that I would cry over what happened to Joe.

No, the only real fairy tale I couldn’t relinquish was the one where I wake up one fine sunny morning to discover that the spell is broken, the curse is lifted, and I am not bipolar anymore. Manic depression was not my identity back then. It was simply something I had, like a nasty flu or poor credit. I wasn’t even convinced it was real, most of the time. I just knew that whatever it was, it was all my fault, and I didn’t like to look too closely at that.

My choice was made. To defend Joe would be an act of solidarity with the disease—symbolic, subtle, but internally unmistakable. And I wasn’t about to sacrifice my future for something I didn’t really believe in, that might magically go away any morning now. So when the others laughed, I threw back my head and chortled. I listened to their jokes with apparent avidity for the next few minutes. And when Joe returned to the table I, like everyone else, avoided his eyes.

It took me a whole week to get up the courage to meet with Joe in my office and tell him the bad news. I didn’t mention the lithium. I made up a story about old-fashioned execs wanting old-fashioned experts. All the time I was lying, though, I wanted to warn Joe to be more careful, to remind him that high-profile jobs demand low-profile lives. But mostly, I think I wanted to confess: to obtain his forgiveness and absolution for the sin of hypocrisy that was still eating away at my hopelessly Catholic soul.

Instead, I offered him flowers: a glorious bunch of daffodils, fresh from the flower market that morning. Forced blooms, the florist had called them, trying to justify the price tag. Forced blooms: flowers made to bloom early, before their time. It sounded painful, but they were worth every penny. I would have paid anything at that point for a graceful good-bye.

Joe left with his daffodils. I grew sick of the sight of myself, day after day, pretending to join in the lithium jokes that continued to circulate around the office until they were finally succeeded by Prozac jokes. I began avoiding other members of the litigation team, coming in later and later until eventually I was doing almost all of my work at night. I started giving away my arrangements to the graveyard cleaning crew, first a stem or two, then a handful, then whole bunches at a time; until one afternoon I arrived at the office and discovered I was completely out of flowers and had forgotten to order more.

I picked up the telephone and dialed the florist, then put it down at the first ring. There weren’t enough flowers in the world, I realized, to beautify this office, this life, or this lie that I was perpetuating. I picked up the phone again and dialed another number: the headhunter who had been chasing me for the past six months. “Listen,” I said. “There’s something you should know about me before we talk, because it’s going to make a difference where I go and what I do. I have—” I checked myself. “No, I
am
manic-depressive. So what do you think about that?”

“So’s my cousin,” he said, not missing a beat. “And do you know…” he rattled off the names of three top lawyers at rival entertainment firms, with whom I had worked closely in the past. “But I’m not actually sure you should tell anyone you’ve got it,” he said.

“Of course I shouldn’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to.” Then I smiled, a real smile. Stories don’t always have to end happily, I realized. Sometimes it’s just enough that they end, to make way for new stories. I looked down at the legal pad next to my phone and realized that I had sketched a perfect daffodil.