The Noonday Demon (8 page)

Starting in high school, I was aware of a confused sense of sexuality, which I would say was my life’s most impenetrable emotional challenge.
I buried the issue behind sociability so as not to confront it, a basic defense that saw me through college. I had some years of uncertainty, a long history of being involved with men and with women; it complicated my relationship to my mother in particular. I have occasionally been prone to a mood of intense anxiety about nothing in particular, an odd mix of sadness and fear that springs from nowhere. It would come over me sometimes when I sat on the school bus as a small child. It would come over me sometimes on Friday nights in college, when the noise of forced festivity overwhelmed the privacy of the darkness. It would come over me sometimes when I was reading, and it would come over me sometimes during sex. It would come over me always when I left home, and it is still an accessory of departure. Even if I am just going away for the weekend, it rushes in as I lock the door behind me. And it would usually come also when I returned home. My mother, a girlfriend, even one of our dogs, would greet me and I would feel so sad, and that sadness frightened me. I dealt with it by interacting compulsively with people, which almost always distracted me. I had to keep whistling a happy tune to slide out of that sadness.

The summer after my senior year of college, I had a small breakdown, but at the time I had no idea what it was. I was traveling in Europe, having the summer I had always wanted, completely free. It had been a sort of graduation present from my parents. I spent a splendid month in Italy, then went to France, then visited a friend in Morocco. I became intimidated by Morocco. It was as though I had been set too free of too many accustomed restraints, and I felt nervous all the time, the way I used to feel backstage right before going on in a school play. I went back to Paris, met some more friends there, had a grand old time, and then went to Vienna, a city I’d always wanted to visit. I could not sleep in Vienna. I arrived, checked into a pension, and met some old friends who were also in Vienna. We made plans to travel together to Budapest. We had a congenial evening out and then I came back and stayed awake all night, terrified of some mistake I thought I’d made, though I didn’t know what it was. The next day, I was too edgy to try breakfast in a room full of strangers, but when I went outside, I felt better and decided to see some art and thought I had probably just been overextending myself. My friends had to have dinner with someone else, and when they told me that, I felt stricken to the core, as though I had been told about a murder plot. They agreed to meet me for a drink after dinner. I did not eat dinner. I simply couldn’t go into a strange restaurant and order alone (though I had done this many times before); nor could I strike up a conversation with anyone. When I finally met my friends, I was shaking. We went out and I drank much more than I ever drink, and I felt temporarily calm. That night, I stayed awake all night again with a splitting headache and a churning stomach, worrying obsessively about the boat schedule to Budapest. The next day I got through, and during the third night of not sleeping, I was so frightened that I was unable to get up to use the bathroom all night. I called my parents. “I need to come home,” I said. They sounded more than a bit surprised, since before this trip I had negotiated every extra day and location, trying to extend my time abroad as much as I could. “Is anything wrong?” they asked, and I could only say that I didn’t feel well and that it had all turned out to be less exciting than I had anticipated. My mother was sympathetic. “Traveling alone can be hard,” she said. “I thought you were meeting friends there, but even so, it can be awfully tiring.” My father said, “If you want to come home, go charge a ticket to my card and come home.”

I bought the ticket, packed my bags, and came home that afternoon. My parents met me at the airport. “What happened?” they asked, but I could only say that I couldn’t stay there anymore. In their hugs, I felt safe for the first time in weeks. I sobbed with relief. When we got back to the apartment where I’d grown up, I was depressed and felt completely stupid. I had blown my big travel summer; I had come back to New York, where I had nothing to do except old chores. I had never seen Budapest. I called a few friends, who were surprised to hear from me. I didn’t even try to explain what had happened. I spent the rest of the summer living at home. I was bored, annoyed, and rather sullen, though we did have some good times together.

I more or less forgot about all that in the years that followed. After that summer, I went to graduate school in England. Starting at a new university in a new country, I hardly panicked at all. I settled right into the new way of life, made friends quickly, did well academically. I loved England, and nothing seemed to frighten me any longer. The anxious self that had gone off to college in America had given way to this robust, confident, easygoing fellow. When I had a party, everyone wanted to come. My closest friends (who are still among my closest friends) were people with whom I sat up all night, in a deep and rapid intimacy that was fantastically pleasurable. I called home once a week, and my parents observed that I sounded as happy as they’d ever heard me. I craved company whenever I was feeling unsettled, and I found it. For two years, I was happy most of the time, and unhappy only about bad weather, the difficulty of making everyone love me instantly, not having enough sleep, and beginning to lose my hair. The only depressive tendency that was always present in me was nostalgia: unlike Edith Piaf, I regret everything just because it is finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it’s
always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.

I remember my early twenties as reasonably placid. I decided, almost on a whim, to become an adventurer and took to ignoring my anxiety even when it was connected to frightening situations. Eighteen months after I finished my graduate work, I started traveling back and forth to Soviet Moscow and lived part-time in an illegal squat with some artists I got to know there. When someone tried to mug me one night in Istanbul, I resisted successfully and he ran off without having got anything from me. I allowed myself to consider every kind of sexuality; I left most of my repressions and erotic fears behind. I let my hair get long; I cut it short. I performed with a rock band a few times; I went to the opera. I had developed a lust for experience, and I had as many experiences as I could in as many places as I could afford to visit. I fell in love and set up happy domestic arrangements.

And then in August 1989, when I was twenty-five, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and my irreproachable world began to crumble. If she had not fallen ill, my life would have been completely different; if that story had been a little bit less tragic, then perhaps I would have gone through life with depressive tendencies but no breakdown; or perhaps I would have had a breakdown later on as part of midlife crisis; or perhaps I would have had one just when and as I did. If the first part of an emotional biography is precursor experiences, the second part is triggering experiences. Most severe depressions have precursor smaller depressions that have passed largely unnoticed or simply unexplained. Of course many people who never develop depression have experiences that would retrospectively be defined as precursor episodes if they had led to anything, and that get dropped out of memory only because what they might have foreshadowed never materializes.

I will not detail how everything fell apart because to those who have known wasting sickness this will be clear and to those who have not it remains perhaps as inexplicable as it was to me when I was twenty-five. Suffice it to say that things were dreadful. In 1991, my mother died. She was fifty-eight. I was paralytically sad. Despite many tears and enormous sorrow, despite the disappearance of the person I had depended on so constantly and for so long, I did okay in the period after my mother’s death. I was sad and I was angry, but I was not crazy.

That summer, I began psychoanalysis. I told the woman who would be my analyst that I needed one promise before I could begin, and that was that she would continue the analysis through until we had completed it, no matter what happened, unless she became seriously ill. She was in her late sixties. She agreed. She was a charming and wise woman
who reminded me a little bit of my mother. I relied on our daily meetings to keep my grief contained.

In early 1992, I fell in love with someone who was brilliant, beautiful, generous, kind, and fantastically present in all our relations, but who was also incredibly difficult. We had a tumultuous though often happy relationship. She became pregnant in the autumn of 1992 and had an abortion, which gave me an unanticipated feeling of loss. In late 1993, the week before my thirtieth birthday, we broke up by mutual agreement and with much mutual pain. I slipped another ratchet down.

In March 1994, my analyst told me that she was retiring because the commute from her Princeton house into New York had become too burdensome. I had been feeling disconnected from our work together and had been considering terminating it; nonetheless, when she broke that news, I burst into uncontrollable sobs and cried for an hour. I don’t usually cry much; I hadn’t cried like that since my mother’s death. I felt utterly, devastatingly lonely and entirely betrayed. We had a few months (she wasn’t sure how many; it turned out to be more than a year) to work on closure before her retirement became effective.

Later that month, I complained to the selfsame analyst that a loss of feeling, a numbness, had infected all my human relations. I didn’t care about love; about my work; about family; about friends. My writing slowed, then stopped. “I know nothing,” the painter Gerhard Richter once wrote. “I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy.” So I too found all strong emotion gone, except for a certain nagging anxiety. I had always had a headstrong libido that had often led me into trouble; it seemed to have evaporated. I felt none of my habitual yearning for physical/emotional intimacy and was not attracted either to people in the streets or to those I knew and had loved; in erotic circumstances, my mind kept drifting off to shopping lists and work I needed to do. This gave me a feeling that I was losing my self, and that scared me. I made a point of scheduling pleasures into my life. During the spring of 1994, I went to parties and tried and failed to have fun; I saw friends and tried and failed to connect; I bought expensive things I’d wanted in the past and had no satisfaction from them; and I pushed on with previously untried extremes to reawaken my libido, attending pornographic films and in extremis soliciting prostitutes for their services. I was not particularly horrified by any of these new behaviors, but I was also unable to get any pleasure, or even release, from them. My analyst and I discussed the situation: I was depressed. We tried to get to the root of the problem while I felt the disconnect slowly but relentlessly increasing. I began to complain that I was overwhelmed by the messages on my answering machine
and I fixated on that: I saw the calls, often from friends, as an impossible weight. Every time I returned the calls, more would come in. I had also become afraid of driving. When I drove at night, I couldn’t see the road, and my eyes kept going dry. I constantly thought I was going to swerve into the barrier or into another car. I would be in the middle of the highway and suddenly I would realize that I didn’t know how to drive. In consternation, I would pull over to the side of the road in a cold sweat. I began to spend weekends in the city to avoid having to drive. My analyst and I ran through the history of my anxious blues. It occurred to me that my relationship with my girlfriend had ended because of an earlier stage of depression, though I knew it was also possible that the end of that relationship had helped to cause the depression. As I worked on that knot, I kept redating the beginning of the depression: since the breakup; since my mother’s death; since the beginning of my mother’s two-year illness; since the end of a previous relationship; since puberty; since birth. Soon, I could not think of a time or a behavior that was not symptomatic. Still, what I was experiencing was only neurotic depression, characterized more by anxious sorrow than by madness. It appeared to be within my control; it was a sustained version of something I had suffered before, something familiar at one level or another to many healthy people. Depression dawns as gradually as adulthood.

In June 1994, I began to be constantly bored. My first novel was published in England, and yet its favorable reception did little for me. I read the reviews indifferently and felt tired all the time. In July, back home in New York, I found myself burdened by social events, even by conversation. It all seemed like more effort than it was worth. The subway proved intolerable. My analyst, who was not yet retired, said that I was suffering from a slight depression. We discussed reasons, as though to name the beast would be to tame it. I knew too many people and did too much; I thought I might try to cut back.

At the end of August, I had an attack of kidney stones, an ailment that had visited me once before. I called my doctor, who promised to notify the hospital and to expedite my passage through the emergency room. When I got to the hospital, however, no one seemed to have received any notice. The pain of kidney stones is excruciating, and as I sat waiting, it was as though someone, having dipped my central nervous column in acid, was now peeling the nerves to their raw core. Although I described the pain I was in several times to several attendants, no one did anything. And then something seemed to snap in me. Standing in the middle of my cubicle in the New York Hospital emergency room, I began to scream. They put a shot of morphine into my arm. The pain abated. Soon enough, it returned: I was in and out of the hospital for five days. I was
catheterized four times; I was placed, ultimately, on the maximum allowed dose of morphine, which was supplemented with injections of Demerol every few hours. I was told that my stones did not visualize well and that I was not a candidate for lithotripsy, which would have eliminated them fast. Surgery was possible but it was painful and might be dangerous. I had not wanted to trouble my father, who was on holiday in Maine; now I wanted the contact with him, as he knew this hospital well from the days when my mother was always there, and could help with arrangements. He seemed unconcerned. “Kidney stones, those will pass, I’m sure you’ll be fine, and I’ll see you when I get home,” he said. Meanwhile, I did not sleep more than three hours any night. I was working on an enormous assignment, an article about deaf politics, and in a haze I talked to fact-checkers and editors. I felt my control over my own life slipping. “If this pain doesn’t stop,” I said to a friend, “then I’m going to kill myself.” I had never said that before.