Prozac Nation (33 page)

Samantha smiles at this thought. “I'd love to give Manuel to you,” she says. “He's exactly what you need right now.” Samantha knows that Manuel is a nice guy who'll buy me dinner and talk to me, which she thinks is a good idea. She also seems to think I'm having a bit of a breakdown here, and the best way to cope is to go with it, preferably while enjoying polite conversation and good meals in fancy restaurants.

Look, he couldn't be any worse for me than Mellaril.

Within a few days and after a few phone calls, the deal is as good as done. Manuel doesn't seem that excited about having me visit—he's heard some pretty weird things about me from his brother—but Samantha is certain that if I am really nice to him, it will all be fine.

I have earned enough frequent flier miles to qualify for a free ticket to London, and I envision liking the city so much that I will decide to get a job and stay. I see London as this wonderful exit from my dysphoric life. I've never been there, never been anywhere in Europe, but I am so excited by the prospect of escaping from the here and now that I figure it will all fall into place once I arrive. I keep thinking that London is the city of Blake and Dickens and all these wonderful writers. I am so desperate to believe that I will like it there that I completely ignore the fact that I hate Blake and Dickens and all those other writers, that I switched from majoring in English to Comparative Literature because I pretty much hate the whole British canon. Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth—the whole bunch of them can go blow as far as I'm concerned. Still, I proceed with my plans, which are all that's keeping me afloat right now, and remind myself that I've always loved those naturey paintings by Gainsborough and Turner, that there are lots of them hanging in the Tate Gallery, that British artists will keep me cheered. I'm doing what I need to do.

Dr. Sterling doesn't know quite what to say about London. She sees me as more scattered and frightened every day, still refusing to go to a hospital but not quite crazy enough to be forceably committed. So she just figures, if London will help, give it a try. It's not exactly that she's given up on me—I know she hasn't, but I think she's waiting for me really and truly to hit rock bottom. She doesn't seem to think I can be helped as much as I need to be until I fall into that desolate place that's nowhere and never. The breakup with Rafe appeared to have strung me to the end of my tether, but I'm still looking for an out, still hoping to escape the brutal sorrow I will have to face before I can get well. She tells me that the therapeutic term for my behavior is
in flight,
and that there's nothing she can do any longer to get me to land properly. I'm going to have to crash on my own.

Luckily, it's early enough in the semester for me to rearrange my whole class schedule to accommodate my travel plans. My tutor, who is also my academic adviser, thinks it would be a really good idea for me to get away for a while, so she's willing to let me read by myself across the Atlantic and turn in my junior essay at the end of the year for full credit. Our tutorial is pass-fail anyway. Another junior faculty member agrees to do an independent study with me on Marx, Freud, and philosophical trends in the late nineteenth century. He feels sorry for me after I tell him my various tales of woe, and he's convinced that if I can get out of the country and still stay in school that would be the best thing. A writing instructor agrees that I can take his course without actually showing up for it, as long as I turn in some stories now and again. I've taken more classes than I needed in previous semesters, so I can afford to take only three now. Harvard's system is pretty thoroughly set up so that a student can be enrolled, even in an honors concentration like Comparative Literature, without taking classes or doing any work. I'm effectively taking time off without actually taking time off, which for some reason assuages my conscience and makes me think I'm less sick than I am.

Only one person bothers to point out the madness of this plan. My sophomore year adviser, who is also the head of my department, tells me I'm making a big mistake. He calls me into his office for a little chat about my academic plans after seeing my application to do an independent study, which he has to approve.

“I know what you went through first semester,” Chris says as he smokes and swallows coffee in his office. “I know about the miscarriage—remember, I visited you at Stillman—I know about your emotional problems. But I think you should either really leave school or really get into it. This intermediate approach that you're trying to take is going to lead you down the path of no good. Elizabeth, my advice to someone with your nature—and I think I've gotten to know you pretty well—would be to take some good, challenging courses, really immerse yourself in academics. You love the Bible, you did so well in those graduate seminars you took last year in medieval Hebrew mysticism. Take some more classes like that! Use your mind!” He smiles as he says this, and his optimism kills me. I mean, what mind? I'm loaded on Mellaril. My brain is temporarily out of service. “Go deep into your studies, or else just get out of here for real. Go to Europe and backpack your way around the Continent. Visit Prague, Rome, Berlin, Budapest. Those are wonderful places for a young mind to explore. But don't waste a semester of valuable class time on courses that you don't care about and won't attend to.”

As always, I am in tears by the time he finishes with his speech. Of course he's right, but I am completely desperate to both run like hell from Harvard and still, somehow, remain vaguely attached. I know it's precisely this neither-here-nor-there approach that has led me into this marginal existence that is at the heart of my depression, but still I can't stop myself from my behavior. I know, somewhere deep down, that going to London is just more self-destruction, more fleeing from the inevitable, more of an avoidance tactic, but I must persist. “Maybe I really will do all my reading for the independent study and for my tutorial,” I say, still crying because I know better. “Maybe I really will get something out of it.”

“Oh, Elizabeth.” He sighs. “I visited you in the hospital last semester. I know the condition you're in. You're not going to sit around England reading Marx—”

“Yes I am,” I interrupt. “I'm going to read in the British Museum in the very room where he actually wrote
Das Kapital.
”

“Oh, Elizabeth.” He breathes in deeply. Chris is a scruffy guy, a standard rendition of the groovy academic, always wearing jeans and a tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows, always smoking unfiltered Camels, always trying to be both friend and wise elder to his students. I actually think that Chris really cares about me as much as any professor at Harvard ever had, though it is hard for me to relate to his discipline of choice, narratology, another sad attempt to turn literature into a science. Still, Chris has always been on my side, and I can tell he is truly struggling with whether to let me get away with this correspondence-course approach to my education.

“I'm not going to keep you from doing what you need to do, and I will sign this independent study form for you because I never want you to be able to say that I stood in the way of your doing something that might possibly be valuable to both your mental and intellectual health,” Chris finally says, after a few minutes of brooding and smoking while I sat there weeping and wailing. “But let me just say, I feel certain that this is very wrong. Very, very wrong.”

12

now it's raining it's pouring

the old man is snoring

now i lay me down to sleep

i hear the sirens in the street

all my dreams are made of chrome

i have no way to get back home

I'd rather die before I wake

like marilyn monroe

and throw my dreams out in

the street and the

rain make 'em grow

 

TOM WAITS

“A Sweet Little Bullet

from a Pretty Blue Gun”

 

A few weeks before I leave for London, I call Rafe and tell him I have something very important to report. In portentous tones, I say that I am going to England and that I am never coming back, as if the idea that I will be lost to him for good might feel like something besides relief. He mutters something or other to me, the kind of thing you say if you are an R.A. in a dorm, something about getting away and gaining perspective, and finally he mentions that it would be a shame to go to Europe and not spend any time on the Continent. I have no idea what he means by this and then he tells me that the Continent is Europe without the British Isles, and it seems stupid for me to try to explain that I have no energy for Paris and Amsterdam and Venice, that I will most likely spend my time in London completely catatonic. If he doesn't know me well enough to know this on his own, he probably doesn't know me at all and our love was even more of a mirage than I knew.

 

On a Saturday night in March, at the Continental Airlines gate in Newark, my mother, who must feel really bad for me, gives me $500 in cash to get me “started on a new life.” As if we were in Russia in 1902 and I was off to begin afresh in the New World, where the streets would be paved with gold. I wonder how long we can carry on this charade, how long both of us will be able to perpetuate this fiction that I am going to London to live? Clearly, if I have any purpose at all, I am going to London to die or at least to ride out this wave of death.

I've gotten ahold of a student work visa, I've brought along a list of phone numbers so long it could rival London's version of 411, but somewhere underneath this veneer of possibility I know that nothing about London will be any better than anywhere else. My tutor, at the eleventh hour, had advised me to go to some Caribbean island or even to Florida—she kept saying that a mood like mine needs Barbados, not Britain—but by then it was too late. Besides, I had to go somewhere with the premise of actually accomplishing something other than getting baked on the beach. As I prepared to go to London, I packed a whole bag full of nothing but reading material—Freud's
Totem and Taboo,
Heidegger's
Being and Time,
Milan Kundera's
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Derrida's
Margins of Philosophy
a Marx-Engels anthology and other beach-blanket books like that—because I was hell-bent on some version of productivity. But somewhere in the back of my mind I must have known better. How else to explain my last-minute decision to bring Carrie Fisher's
Postcards from the Edge
along too?

About a week before leaving for London, I'd gone to a wedding and met Barnaby Spring, a recent Harvard graduate who lived in Sloane Square and was squandering away his inheritance on various adventures in filmmaking. He'd spent the last year shooting footage in Kenya or Mozambique or Borneo or someplace like that. Barnaby was a London native, a real live Brit, an Eton boy who'd been in boarding school since he was seven years old, and he promised to pick me up at the airport and generally be at my disposal when I arrived. At this wedding, in anticipation of my imminent excursion I was in a pretty cheerful mood so I'm sure Barnaby had not the least idea of what he was in for. He might have begun to get a better sense when, the night before I left, I called him six or seven times—this was the first time I'd ever made a call to another continent in my life, so I guess in all the excitement of this novelty I decided to keep doing it over and over again—just to make sure he'd be at the plane, on time, or even a little early. I tried to explain, each time I phoned him, that I was sorry to be so anxious and bothersome, but it was after all my first time in Europe, and I kind of had this excessive phobia, dating back to my homesick days at summer camp, about people meeting me at airports and bus depots. I tried to make light of it—
ho ho ho, I'm so silly
—and Barnaby seemed willing enough to play along. But by about the seventh time I called, it was already 5:00
A.M.
in England, and the initial charm that Barnaby seemed to find in my last-minute jitters had worn itself down to nothing but an annoying sleep disruption.

Of course, the whole flight to England was nothing but an annoying sleep disruption. I took one hit of Mellaril after another, but in all my anxiety I couldn't rest on the plane. Just my luck, as soon as I arrived at Gatwick, with customs and whatnot to deal with, the medicine began to take effect. Making my way through the airport felt like walking through an ether-filled cavern with weights on. The air, everything, the whole atmosphere seemed so buoyant, so hard to move through. I almost fell asleep in Barnaby's car (a Jaguar, of course), but I felt that would be rude so I made every effort to stay awake and alert. And it was about then that I realized what a desperate mistake coming to London had been: I had not a single friend in the whole city, I'd be at the mercy of strangers with funny accents, and I'd have to put a lot of energy into being charming and pleasant at a time when I was completely unequipped to do anything but zone out. What an idiot I was! I almost asked Barnaby to take me back to Gatwick right away, to put me on a plane home immediately, that this was the hugest mistake ever.

And then I remembered I had nothing to go back to. No classes, no boyfriend, only some friends who were clearly exhausted from all the care I'd extorted from them over the last few months. It was pretty much England or bust. There was no way out.

Since Manuel was not going to be home until later in the evening, Barnaby took me back to his apartment, which was full of black leather furniture and a black stereo system with black speakers on an array of black shelving surrounding a black television set. I don't know what I expected—something archetypally Anglican, I guess: overstuffed sofas, gold-leaf detailing, Victorian and Edwardian and Jacobean and Elizabethan touches throughout. I was envisioning something out of
Brideshead Revisited,
and instead the place was more like Mickey Rourke's penthouse in
9 1/2 Weeks
. I got this strange feeling, looking around at all the cameras and video equipment, at everything so dark and orderly, that far from being an English gentleman, this guy was more likely to be an amateur pornographer. Or perhaps he was both. After all, there's always been that certain seamy, incest-on-the-manor underbelly to the inbred British aristocracy, all those people in Alistair Crowley's crowd smoking opium, popping laudanum, and fucking their siblings. Barnaby's probably the type who wears bikini briefs instead of boxer shorts, I thought. Leopard-skin prints, maybe. And there was something really disconcerting about how damp and skinny he was—and, well, Jesus, all that black leather.