Madness (12 page)

I am on the phone to my agent, sobbing, pacing,
I'm lost, I'm lost, I can't find the crepe stand, what am I going to do? I can't go out like this
—I have fleeting moments of clarity during which I realize I am not doing well, and moments of abject terror as I pace around the hotel room, crying my head off.

Then the escort comes and drives me off to the BBC for radio interviews. I comport myself appropriately. I sit in my little sound studio wearing headphones, being interviewed by BBC London, BBC Leeds, Belfast, Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh, Wales. Their accents are fascinating and I can't understand them at first but then I catch on and have to restrain myself from taking on the accent, which I like very much.

I am running down a rainy street in one shoe. I dash into a shoe
store, shouting,
U.S. size six! Black heels! I'm about to be late for BBC TV!
Which, absurdly, is true—it's just come to me, and I am running around trying to find my hotel, where the escort will be waiting to take me to the studio—the girls in the shoe shop are incredibly helpful, and hurry to find me the very black shoe—they urge me to take both, though I say I need only one—I arrive, somehow, at the hotel, and the escort, looking alarmed, steers me to my room,
No, you must have a
dry
suit,
and, agreeably, I defer to her wisdom. But how on earth did I get wet?

Suddenly, Julian is here, and we are lost on a sunny residential street in some city or another, and it's very spring-like and sunny out, and I am in a rage, and I am kicking a garbage can and howling, when
out of the blue with no warning,
there is my friend Jo! At the end of the street! What is she doing here? Has she been sent to collect me? (She has.) She looks as if she is moving quickly but the air has obviously become liquid, impeding her progress. She arrives. I fall against her chest, sobbing with relief. Her sweater is pink and very soft. Her earrings brush the top of my head. She is real. I am saved.

It was a mixed episode, Lentz tells me when I come down from the rafters around April. Brian's gone, and after pushing it away for all of tour, it hits me in the gut when I get home. I pace the halls at night, doubled over myself with grief. My parents have finally split up, after twenty-five years. My own marriage, well—Julian and I alternate between screaming at each other and ignoring each other completely. Suddenly I'm not just his crazy wife. I'm his wife with one book out and a novel in the works. More than ever, I am everything that is wrong with his life. I am the reason he can't hold a job, I am the reason he's not in school. I'm never home, I just left him and went tooling around the globe. His resentment poisons the air.

I try to make it work. I'm attached to him. And I said I was going to be married, and so, goddammit, I'm going to be. I don't want everyone else to have been
right.
But eventually, in May, Julian slams out of the apartment. When he comes back, I'm in my robe, sitting on the couch in the dark, having a drink. I offer him one. He sits down in his armchair, twirling the ice in his glass. We have a remarkably civil midnight conversation, and a few days later, he moves out.

It's obvious. This whole business of marriage—what was I thinking? I'm not suited for marriage! It's too
slow,
too
settled,
too
sedate
for someone like me! I'm a girl of the world! I've got places to go, things to do, people to see! And why not? Apparently people like my book. It still hasn't really registered with me that the past months spent talking day after day to strangers about something as raw and frightening as a life-threatening eating disorder has left me a little shaken, a little unstable, and desperate to forget the whole thing. So I'm flush with money from its publication and the sale of a novel. I'm the successful single girl, not a care in the world, I'm Mary Tyler Moore, tossing my hat in the air. It's summer, and I'm on a roll.

Here's how you make absolutely sure that you'll keep getting crazier by the day:

• Ignore everything your psychiatrist tells you. Disregard all his warnings about the way you're living your life—in fact, do absolutely everything he tells you not to.
  
• Don't always take your pills. They're a hassle, and what if they make you dull? You don't need them. And if you're going to take the pills, take them with a glass of wine. It will make the mood swings even more exciting.
  
• Don't sleep; you've got to make sure your body clock is as fucked up as possible. The less you sleep, the more manic you'll get, until soon you'll go completely over the edge.
  
• Drink caffeine. Tons of it. Take your morning pills with coffee. It can't hurt.
  
• Work around the clock—it's important to put yourself under as much stress as possible.
  
• Eating normally would stabilize your blood sugar, so don't do that; it's better to keep your body in as unstable a state as you possibly can for maximum results.
  
• And, above all else, drink like a fish.
  

Me, I drink up all the liquor in the world, all the booze in several men's liquor cabinets, all the wine in my own collection and then all the wine in the collection I buy to replace the first one, all the wine and martinis in the bars in the city. Anything I can get my hands on. There is never enough.

I am absolutely convinced that the booze helps me control my moods. It raises the volume and heightens the colors and fills me with a sense of happiness when I want to come up, and when I need to come down at the end of the night, it blunts my thoughts, my perception of the shrieking world around me, and lets me black out, or sleep, whichever comes first. I have worked out an elaborate system of just how much to drink, at exactly what time, to keep my mood humming along at the perfect high. It doesn't cross my mind that the booze itself is one of the reasons the highs and lows are so extreme.

I wake up in the morning, running through the day in my head—the work, the cleaning, the laundry, the party tonight. I fling the covers off and make the bed with absurd precision, hospital corners, get it right, get ready, pour myself a liter or so of coffee, land in front of my desk, and start tapping away without so much as a thought about what I'm going to write. I go for a few hours, then run off to throw in the laundry, hop up for more coffee, write a
million e-mails, call my agent for no particular reason and babble for a while. I get a flash of inspiration and grab one of the dozen or so yellow notepads that litter my office to scribble down my ideas for the next several books, and back to the laundry, in with the whites, then back to the desk—I flip madly through books, looking up obscure facts that are suddenly absolutely crucial to the making of my point, the central point, the one that clinches everything, drop the books in a pile on the floor, scribble notes on yet another notepad, and then I need something I wrote on one of the notepads three days ago, I need it right this second, and I rip through the notepads—but wait, the laundry, and I'm flying downstairs and staggering back into the apartment under the weight of piles of every piece of fabric I can find, clean or dirty, the point is the excellent efficiency of washing and the necessity of absolute cleanliness, dump them on the living room floor, and now it's time for a glass of wine, the very thing, white wine goes perfectly with laundry, who would drink red for laundry? Twenty-six floors above the city, in this apartment that Julian has recently vacated, I stop for an instant to soak in the gold late-morning light streaming through the windows. Then I haul out the ironing board and iron everything, the socks, the sheets, I pull down the curtains and iron them too, and since I'm on a roll, I get down on the floor and iron the carpet,
Oh, Marya, stop being weird,
I chastise myself, and then I fold everything with perfect sharp creases, creases that would do my grandmother proud, wait! I am inspired! And I dash back into my office and whip off another few pages, an excellent day, two chapters, I go out to the kitchen and pour another glass of wine, toss it back, grab my purse, and zip out into the sunny summer afternoon.

The days tumble over one another, each full of obsessive shopping for my perfect apartment, for the perfect dinner parties, perfect evenings out with friends, each day turning my head toward man after man so quickly I can hardly keep their names straight. The nights are all the same, a party or a date. They end with me
getting out of bed and putting on my clothes,
You're leaving?
Or they end with me getting out of bed, putting on my robe, and telling them to leave,
Do I have to?
Or they end with me fumbling with the key in the lock and letting myself into my apartment, kicking my shoes off on my weaving way down the hall.

The doctors call it
hypersexuality.
It's one of several typical goal-seeking behaviors that are common in mania, all of which involve rabid energy and a total loss of impulse control—this game I'm playing involves risky one-night stands, a compulsion to seduce, but no real interest in the sex itself. The sex isn't the point. The point is to shut off the maelstrom in my head.

Someone catches my eye: my mind empties out of everything but the need to get him. My heart thumps, and there's a dull, mute pounding in my skull. Sound fades, and I am only aware of my single-minded mission—I must catch him, I must win. It's a rush, a pure, clean high, uncomplicated by thoughts. A few words, a few glances, a brush of the back of the hand, and he's mine. I am no longer anxious, no longer fearful, finally neither low nor high. I find myself in unknown beds or my own, staring at the ceiling, drumming my fingers on their backs. I feel the weight of their bodies, crushing me, pinning me down. They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.

And then the game is over. I've won, and I want them to take their sticky, heavy bodies and go home.

I litter the city with unsuspecting, nice guys, drawn in by the same things every man has ever been drawn in by—the over-the-top everything, the whirlwind that my hypomania creates. They call me "passionate." Only certain men are interested in women like this, and somehow I find them all this summer, and eat them for a snack. It's endlessly entertaining, when it isn't boring as hell.

It's night. I'm in San Francisco visiting a friend. We're in a bar, for a big change. There's a crowd.

Nice to meet you,
he says, and extends his hand. He holds mine a little too long.

Likewise,
I say. I am suspicious. So far he is sharky. All he needs is a gold chain. I dislike his goatee. He looks like the devil.

You're Marya,
he says. He looks at me intensely, as if he means to communicate some important bit of information that I urgently need to know. The bit of information is that he is a player, and that he wants to play. The bit of information is the bait.

I always bite.

As far as I know,
I say.

I've read your work,
he says. (My
work?
I think, raising an eyebrow. He means
Wasted. Work
seems a little grand.)

Really,
I say, and look away. I glance around the bar, through the haze of bluish smoke. We are very young and very hip. We are arrogant beyond belief. We never stop performing. Someone climbs up on the table and does an impression of someone we don't like. We live to be liked. We will absolutely die if we aren't adored.

I love it,
he says.

What?
I lean forward to hear him.

I love your work,
he shouts.

Ladies and gentlemen, there they are! The magic words!

Oh,
I say, and wave my hand.

No, really,
he says.
I've been reading up. You're amazing.

Folks, can you believe it! Bonus points! He said it!
Amazing!
My head grows to the size of a watermelon, making it difficult to hold up.

Next, we are standing in the living room, separated by a coffee
table, screaming at each other,
Fuck you! No, fuck you!
Someone overturns the coffee table. Something breakable is thrown, and, predictably, breaks. He punches the wall, his face the color of a tomato. I collapse on the floor and thrash my arms and legs.

No, wait! Not yet. Sorry about that. I skipped a part.

Can I call you?
The crowd is thinning out. Only the die-hards and the drunks remain. It's two or three or four
A
.
M
.
Everyone staggers out onto the street, heading for one-night stands or empty beds.

Depends,
I say, picking up my purse.

On what?
he asks, smiling his sharky smile.

If you can find my phone number,
I say, and smile, and go.

I win this round.

Now, the trick is to get rid of him before he finds out what a fucking freak I am.

Because, of course, I'm mad, and he doesn't know it yet. I haven't gone crazy right there in front of him. The crucial moment hasn't come—the moment when he's standing in the middle of the room, his arms dangling at his sides, staring at me in disbelief, unsure what happened and when it will happen again. And he hasn't said it yet:
You crazy bitch. You crazy fucking bitch.

But he will. They always do.

His name is Jeremy. He lives in California, getting rich on the tech boom. He is alarmingly beautiful—bronzed skin, light brown hair, liquid brown eyes the size of saucers—the women of his family tssk,
Those lashes are wasted on a man.
He's the original pretty boy, gorgeous and knows it and flaunts it shamelessly, and he's smart enough and funny enough, and he'll do in a pinch. It's the nineties, and I am all of twenty-four. Everyone in San Francisco has too much money and too many credit cards and is drinking too much booze. There's quite the little scene. And so Jeremy and I hit it right off.

In a hypomanic leap, we fly off to New York, whirl through it, have sex continuously and drink up every bar in the city and go to
parties and clubs and generally do what you'd expect two very young, very arrogant, pretty little kids to do. We decide, a day or two in, that we're in love. We destroy the hotel room. We make a lot of ridiculous promises and grand statements and a hell of a mess.