Prozac Nation (35 page)

I'd think this through, and then I'd down another Mellaril. How much Mellaril was I taking? Who knows. In preparation for my journey to England, I had purchased several prescription bottles' worth, so I had a hefty supply with me. Dr. Sterling had explained to me that Mellaril was only toxic at really high levels. It interacted with the brain, not the heart the way Valium did, so it was a hard drug to OD on. (Presumably, it takes a lot more medication to shut down your brain than it does to slow your heart to a deadly standstill.) That's why it was a good thing to give to suicidal depressives. Even so, lethal or not, I doubt she meant for me to be swallowing these little orange pills every few minutes. But that's pretty much what happens to people who take any kind of medicine for anxiety: When a crisis comes on, they swallow one pill after another, in search of relief. Pop them like M & M's. On the bottle, it says, “Take three times a day, or as needed.”
As needed!
Who do they think they're dealing with?
As needed,
in my case, means a pretty constant flow, a portable intravenous dripping into my arm—or, at the very least, new pills digesting in my stomach and entering my bloodstream at all times.

 

What would it take to make me go back home? Food poisoning should have done it. I caught a nasty case by eating some quiche in the cafeteria at the Tate Gallery (so much for all the wonderful London museums), and for three days I couldn't get out of bed except to vomit. Manuel feels so sorry for me that he lets me sleep in his king-size bed, and I am in such a filthy, effluvial condition that he opts to stay in the cellar room rather than lie down anywhere near me.

Now that I am sick and can't move, I am able to relax and reflect for the first time since I've arrived in England, and I experience a mysterious calm. I like the feeling of not running, the reprieve from life that I'd come to London to find. All the space on this big mattress, the ability to stretch my legs a bit across the serene coldness of these bare white sheets, has become my idea of a good time these days. At this point, even Manuel, seeing that I'm not even physically—never mind emotionally—fit for the leisurely rigors of traveling, is strongly urging me to go home. But somehow, I can't seem to make plans to leave, though I call Continental several times a day to move my departure date around. The computer records every one of these changes, and finally one of the operators, in her mild British manner suggests that I simply call once when I finalize my itinerary.

As I struggle to make these simple arrangements, it astonishes me to recall what clarity of vision I needed in order to plan this trip to London in the first place. I convinced my mother, various professors and advisers at Harvard, Samantha, Dr. Sterling, and a couple of other minor characters that this was a good idea. I had to lobby the forces. Then I had to get a passport, a work visa, a ticket through my frequent flier program—which involved only a bit less paperwork than it takes to, say, do your long-form tax returns, and even then you usually get an accountant to do it for you. But I was able to manage it because I had such a desperate, deliberate goal: I
had
to get the hell out of my life for a little while. When I want to escape, when I
need
to escape, it is amazing what I am able to do, it is shocking what hidden reserves of strength I can find to undertake the task. You would think that this resourcefulness, if husbanded properly, if channeled into something useful, could really make a difference. My God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression! But now, lying in Manuel's bed, knowing how simple it would have been to pack my bags, go back home, and take that path of least resistance—which is to say, face my depression—I couldn't exert myself even the tiniest bit. The thought of how bad it will feel to be alone with my feelings—or even at a hospital with Dr. Sterling and my feelings—is so unbearable that it makes London seem like a beautiful reward. I feel like an alcoholic or drug addict who will do anything to avoid going to AA or into rehab, anything to postpone that decision to stop the drinking. But what is it that I'm refusing to stop? Being depressed?

 

I recently read that treatment for depression costs the United States something like $43 billion annually in lost productivity and employee absence. Depression, in other words, is a huge waste of time and money. It's a drain on so many resources, and even something that is supposed to be delightful, like some time spent in London, turns into a disaster. The guilt I felt constantly, not just about all that I wasted in London, but about all that I was missing out on in every part of my life—my Harvard education was mostly devoted to propping up my mental health—was enough to cause a whole depression on its own.

One night, when I first got to London, I met up with Rhoda Koenig, then the book critic for
New York
magazine, who had moved to this city on the Thames because she liked it so much better than New York. Rhoda and I had been kind of friendly when I was a high school intern at
New York,
during one of my wonderfully productive swings, but she had absolutely no patience for me when we dined out in London. “I can't stand listening to you,” she kept saying. “When I was your age, I saved up my money, I waitressed for months so I could take myself over to Europe. I didn't have a lot to spend so I stayed in youth hostels, which were uncomfortable, but I was so thrilled to be there. I went to museums, I went to galleries, I saw plays, it was wonderful. But all you seem to be able to do is complain that you miss your ex-boyfriend and you can't plug anything in! This is ridiculous!
”

And I couldn't argue with Rhoda. I knew she was right. I know how taxing it is to do something even as small and brief as having a meal with a depressive. We are such irritating people, can see the dark side of everything, and our perpetual malcontentedness kind of ruins it for everybody. It's like watching a movie that you think is great, spiritually uplifting, a lot of fun in spite of its faults, and you're with someone who is in film school or is a professional movie critic, who tends to analyze every moment of the picture until the pure joy that you feel just because you do—no need to explain it—is expunged by all his nitpicking and hairsplitting. And this curmudgeon ends up ruining your night, choking your buzz, killing your joy Well, that's what it's like to be with someone who's depressed. Only it's not just one movie or just one night. It's all the time.

I wanted Rhoda to understand that I knew I wasn't easy to be with. I kept trying to reach her across the table, to get her to see that I was calling out to her from a very desperate place. I tried, but by then I was so diminished I no longer even knew how to elicit people's sympathy, something I had once done with such skill. Instead, Rhoda ended up making some broad conclusions about how spoiled and ungracious my whole generation was. I was so far gone that I didn't even come across as sad any longer, Just obnoxious.

 

In the end, it was Noah Biddle, my freshman-year boyfriend of sorts—well, at any rate, he taught me how to do a bong hit—who convinced me to stay in London. He said he'd come for spring break, that we'd rent a car—a Jaguar, he hoped—and travel all over the beautiful English countryside, and all of that would make me feel so much better. We could keep riding through all the manicured greenery of England, past all the lordly manors and mansions, smoking pot and blasting whatever music I wanted to hear on the tape deck, stopping at Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral and Oxford and Cambridge, running away from ourselves together.

Noah had recently resurfaced in my life because he and his girlfriend broke up about the same time Rafe and I split, and misery loves company. Suddenly, in his newly humbled state, Noah was all kinds of interested in me, which seemed ridiculous since I was clearly such a mess. I knew that everything he had to offer was too little and too late for me, but I harbored some small pathetic hope that maybe he would, after all this time, be the one to save me, so I agreed to do England with him.

But naturally, his visit to England was an unmitigated disaster. His first mistake was trying to touch me—and I don't mean fuck me, though that would have been a bad thing too, I just mean touch me at all. By the time he arrived in London, I was virtually tactophobic. I felt so much at the mercy of everyone that the only part of me that seemed inviolate was my body. Of course, if anything, quite the opposite was true: Manuel had succeeded in touching me in whatever manner suited his pleasure; it was my body that was quite vulnerable and my mind that was, in fact, untouchable, unreachable by much of anything human. Still, strange and seemingly supernatural forces invaded my psyche at a constant rate. Moods and feelings of a mostly miserable variety swooped down on me like birds of prey at fierce and unpredictable moments. I felt like such a messy, highly reactive creature that I didn't want people to get near me. I felt radioactive, as carcinogenic as uranium, and it made me deeply suspicious of anyone who'd be fool enough to get in touching distance of this poison girl. So when Noah happened to put his arm around my hip in a manner that felt proprietary (he probably thought it was friendly) the first time he walked through the door of Manuel's house, I started to scream. I went on and on about how I was not his property, how dare he act like he owned me, how dare he put his hands on me without my permission. I had been so solitary in that catacomb of a cellar room that the peculiarities of rote human interaction daunted me: Every little thing was grounds for hysteria.

And from the moment he arrived, Noah was all excited to be in London, not even a little jet-lagged, not even wanting to take a nap before we got on with our day, bristling with energy over the thought of such small attractions as Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. And his upbeat mood, rather than having the contagious effect he'd probably hoped for, made me resist him, made me more defiant in my depression. I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool—everyone who didn't feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.

 

We check into the Savoy because Noah wants to stay in London for a couple of days before we start traveling. I am perilously low on cash—in fact, I'm probably down to zero—which is okay because Noah is loaded, and he wants me here even though I'm so unpleasant. He wants me to stay and pretend we're a couple—Lord knows why, no one is watching—even if it means that I spend a lot of time screaming and yelling and telling him how much he annoys me, and he spends a lot of time asking when I last took a Mellaril.

He thinks that if I keep taking my Mellaril, I will behave. He doesn't understand that it makes me too tired to do any of the touristy things he wants to do, running around with his special four-star guide book that's called something like
London on $2000 a Day,
trying to figure out where all the smart and stylish Sloane Rangers—where
tout-le-monde,
as Noah, in his Continental mode, might put it—are dancing and dining these days. He takes to the role of ugly American so naturally it is alarming. He calls ticket agents and spends untold sums of pounds to get orchestra seats to the latest theatrical productions, even though I assure him that I will fall asleep in the middle of anything, even if it is Maggie Smith who has the lead in
Lettice and Lovage.
We meet strangers in restaurants, and he introduces himself as, “Noah Biddle, Harvard College, Porcellian Club,” even though I keep telling him that no one in England knows or cares about any of this stuff. Being
anywhere
with Noah is almost more embarrassing than being with your belching, inappropriate Uncle Al at a restaurant like Lutece, suffering in silence as he asks the waiter for catsup.

“Noah, you know what's funny about you?” I begin one night, as I try to keep from dozing over a dinner of Dover sole. He shrugs, probably hoping I will offer him a pleasant tidbit of insight and not the usual barbs I toss his way. “It's funny how you act so nouveau riche, you try so hard to impress all these people, but you're from this crusty old American family that's supposed to be above this kind of thing. It's like you're still climbing the ladder even though you're already on top.” He smiles, as if this were a compliment. He seems to be inured to the fact that he's here with me, that I am miserable, and in my misery I am determined to make him miserable too. I have no idea how I will survive his lack of irony, or my own, for another two weeks.

 

The day before we are to pick up our rental car—no Jaguar is available so instead we're getting a BMW—Noah and I go to a bookstore to get a guide to the Lake District. I can't imagine why we're going there, Noah will hate it, it's probably so rural that there'll be no place for him to wear his Armani suit or to spend the money that he is withdrawing from a Merrill Lynch credit card fund, which he could probably keep dipping into for another hundred years and still have the principal left to live on.

As we are flipping through paperbacks in the travel section of the store, Noah pulls out his map of London, and tries to plot a nice walk back to the hotel—maybe past Big Ben and through Hyde Park and Bond Street, he suggests. But it's raining and freezing, like always, and this is no time to take any mode of transportation besides a taxi. I am so tired, I have been taking more and more Mellaril, because easy is getting harder every day, so suddenly I find myself on the floor of the bookstore screaming, “I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown here, and you want to walk past Big Ben!”

I keep yelling, pounding my hands on the floor—I am too exhausted to stand up, and in the midst of this tantrum Noah walks away, pretends he doesn't know me. To get even, I start pointing at him from the floor, gesticulating wildly, and say, “That guy is with me, don't let him pretend otherwise! That man is my husband! Don't let him leave without me!”