Madness (22 page)

"Of course not." I sigh, rolling my eyes. "Everything is perfect. Just right."

He smiles, shaking his head. "I have to say, it sounds pretty good."

"It is. It absolutely is," I say. I lean forward in my seat. "It's nothing like it used to be. That's ancient history. I've turned over a
new leaf. I'm a totally different person." I laugh, delighted. "I'm not crazy anymore."

He scribbles something on his little pad. "I think, honestly, that your bipolar is in remission."

"You mean I'm well."

He smiles. "I mean you're in remission."

Same thing.

I throw my purse over my shoulder and stride out the door into the perfect, sunny summer day.

Jeff swings me around when he comes home. I am wearing an apron, laughing, and Jeff is kissing me. We are in a movie, a movie of normal people. It's a boring movie. No one will want to watch it but us, but we watch it, amazed.

"Peanut!" he cries, setting me down. "How was your day?"

I dance around the kitchen with my spatula and tell him. My day was perfect. I did everything right. I wrote a new chapter. I did laundry and folded it and put it away. I got the mail and paid the bills. I went to the store and came home and carried the groceries up all by myself. I had coffee with a friend, and the Johnsons are coming for dinner, we're having pasta, and salad, and I made bread and I bought five kinds of cheese, and olives, and for dessert a blueberry lemon tart. The crust is from scratch. The pasta is homemade. I made three kinds of sauce so people can choose.

I forget what it's like to be mad, a blissful sort of amnesia. This is the nature of bipolar: when the episodes end, it's back to the regular world, and the regular world looks like heaven, and you relish your sanity. How could this be just remission? Lentz is wrong. My mood has leveled out. My family is breathing a little easier. Jeff seems to be the rock that will keep me grounded for good. He treats me like a queen, a miracle, and for the first time I am loved not for the constant excitement, the insane
passion
that always drew men in and then, of course, pushed them away, not for how I
look or what I do, but for who I am, quirks and strangeness and flaws and all. In the circle of his love, I can finally relax, breathe easy, love him back with everything I've got. And for the first time, I have something to give.

I relish the small tasks and the chores and the hours I spend writing in my office. I sometimes just walk around the house, a little disoriented, trying to grasp the fact that I live here, that all the pretty things are mine. I close my eyes and open them and everything is still there. The days tumble over each other, sunlit and gorgeous, drenched in things that are real. I find myself making plans—for the evening, for the fall, for the coming year, for my life. I've never been able to do that before—the madness always intervened.

Sometimes, I get the uneasy feeling that I'm fooling everyone. In the middle of a gathering of friends, at a party, at a show, on a walk with Jeff, I'll remember the past. It leaves me a little shaken, bewildered by how I've gotten from there to here. I feel it in the pit of my stomach, the shame of it, the feeling that I am getting away with something, living a life I don't deserve. It's someone else's life. I've snuck in and am squatting in it. I'm wearing someone else's wedding ring, occupying someone else's house, and everyone loves the woman I'm pretending to be, not me. Who would love me? I hate the person I was. She disgusts me, her and her mess and her madness, her garish excess, her disorderly excuse for a life. She was a monster. She was sick. Suddenly I can feel her in me, like bile in my throat. I can't let her out. The spell will break, and she will take over again. I want to forget her. I want her dead.

Then the feeling passes. I believe in this new world with a religious fervor. It is my savior. If I am very good, they'll let me stay, and soon, if I work hard enough, I will belong.

I decide I should get a job. I have all this boundless energy, energy to spare. Finishing a novel isn't enough. I'll work full-time, keep writing, and still have time left over to live my overflowing life.

I'm at a celebration for the opening of a new section of Minneapolis's city magazine. I had my first job in journalism here years ago and, hired again, have thrown myself into the creation of an arts and entertainment section. I thought it up, pitched it, designed it, hired the freelancers, wrote the features, and edited the thing. The people at the magazine have gone nuts. There are notepads with my name on them, radio ads about my section, the publisher keeps taking me out to lunch—my job is to grab a younger readership for stories on the Minneapolis arts scene, revamp the magazine's image, and make the publishers money in the process. Horrified by the notepads and ads, I'm trying not to think about what I'm suddenly supposed to be. I just brace myself and go galloping into my job.

There are people everywhere, laughing and drinking white wine. People I've never met come up to congratulate me. I'm a little overwhelmed, so I keep smiling, figuring it can't hurt. My editor pushes me forward to say something. I have no idea what comes out of my mouth. I have no idea how I wound up here. I say something that is apparently coherent, and now people are clapping. It dawns on me that they think I am a real person. And now that I think of it, I
look
like a real person. I see myself through their eyes: I am dressed in real-person clothes. I have a real-person job. I drove here in a car that I own. I drove here from a house that I own, which also contains my husband; not only do I have a husband, I realize, but I have a
second
husband. Julian's a lifetime away, our divorce came and went with little fuss. The wild years are over. I'm sober, I'm not crazy anymore, and here I am, a new person with a real life at last.

I look around myself in alarm. There are the photographers. There are the ladies who lunch. There are the wealthy patrons of
the arts, the hip gallery people, the mayor, the music people in black. There has been a grave mistake. Someone let me in.

So I'd better have fun while it lasts.

I'm a whirlwind of activity. I make phone calls, assign stories, juggle meetings, edit, interview, and write and write. I'm going to succeed if it kills me. Any success I've had before this doesn't count. This is different. I'm going to show them all.

I sit in the morning meetings, brainstorming stories, trying to believe I am one of them, trying to pass. Their voices are level; I try to keep my voice level. They do not get worked up; I won't get worked up either. They are respectable people. Very Minnesotan, very mild, very nice. I glue myself to the chair, do not wiggle or hop. I amuse them with my interruptions and ideas and cackling laugh. But they see me, they like what I'm doing, so I belong. I am officially a person at last.

"I'll take it," I say, scribbling in my notebook. I look up at my editor, who's standing in front of the dry-erase board in the meeting room. "I'll take the story."

"But you took the last one."

"I'll take this one too. I have plenty of time."

"You're editing a section by yourself."

"It's a light month." I swallow my coffee and poke at my bagel with my pen. "I really want to do it." I jiggle my knee under the table, wishing this meeting would move along.

The editor laughs. "All right," he says. The other editors look at me a little strangely. There seems to be a concerted effort at this magazine to move as slowly as possible. I am a little bit resented for my incessant work. People keep telling me to slow down.

"You wanted to see me?" I say, standing in my editor's doorway. I love this guy. He gave me my first job here when I was nineteen.

"How are you?" he asks.

Niceties! Nonsense! "Fine," I say. "What's up?" I go in and sit down.

"I'm a little concerned that you're working too much."

I blink. "I'm not. I'm working as much as I need to to get all my work done."

He nods, smiling. "Maybe you shouldn't be doing quite so much work?"

Ridiculous! "I'm just making the section as good as it can be."

"And it looks great," he says, nodding and nodding. "It looks really great. I just don't want you to burn out."

I laugh out loud. "Of course I'm not going to burn out! Don't worry about me. I always work this much. It's just how I operate. I like to get things done, and I don't like to waste time. Hey," I say. "I'm just trying to give you my best." I smile my most winning smile.

He shakes his head and laughs. "Okay," he says. "Whatever you say. Just don't be afraid to ask for some help, all right?"

"All right," I say, hopping up. All right, all right, all right! "Thanks!" I say, and leap out the door.

"They're driving me crazy!" I shout when Jeff comes home from work. I spin around in my office chair while he drops his briefcase and kisses my head. "It's always,
slow down, slow down, slow down,
doesn't anybody want to get anything
done?
Don't they get bored? Sitting there in their cubicles, churning out the same old articles they've been churning out for years?" I jump out of my chair and charge down the stairs, calling, "Dinner!"

I start at the magazine working thirty hours a week. That creeps up to forty, then fifty, sixty. By August 2003 it's eighty, and I'm whipping up and down the aisles between the cubicles at the office. I'm out late every night at openings and shows. I wake up at the crack of dawn to work on my novel, which is finally nearing completion, then race into work, where I move in fast-forward, delighted by the efficiency of my various systems, clicking along; answer the phone, assign the story, edit the piece, make the call, set up the interview—stopping briefly when someone comes over to talk to me, talking to them a million miles an hour—dash out
of the office for the lunch, dash back in for the meeting, sit down at my desk, e-mail the writer, file the press releases, scribble the notes, get a little burst of energy and gallop down the hall, gallop back, crash into my chair, and slowly the office is emptying out, and I'm typing, and people are stopping by to say good night, and I'm typing, and I am humming under my breath, whole symphonies, all the parts, and I keep typing, and suddenly it's totally quiet.

I peek over the top of my cubicle and survey the cubicle farm. All the little ants have gone home. I notice that it's dark outside. I look at my watch: nine o'clock! Jeff! I grab my coat and go running out of the office. I tear through the streets, his car is there, he's home! The little yellow lights in the window are delightful! I take the stairs two at a time, burst in the door, run through the house, and fling myself at Jeff, "I'm sorry I'm late! Lost track of time! Did you eat? I haven't eaten. What do we have? How was your day?" I'm throwing things in bowls and stirring wildly and boiling water and I have about fourteen hands, and he tells me how his day was, "You're kidding! Oh, no! What a jackass! Good job! That's great!" and I break out my symphonic song, and throw whatever I was stirring into a pan, and he laughs at me, and I laugh, and we laugh and eat dinner and have sex and then he falls asleep, and I lie there.

My head is humming. I worry that it is humming so loudly it will vibrate the bed.

It doesn't feel like mania. No no, it's
happiness,
it's
energy.
I'm doing everything right.

Even though I've gone crazy every summer for most of my life, this year it's not crazy—I'm just having a fabulous time. There's a theater festival in town. Two weeks of hardly any sleep, parties, people everywhere, my days spent writing wildly in the office, churning out stories on both the festival and the rest of the art scene, and then there are the interviews, and the meetings, and I'm still racing along on the novel.

I'm on fast-forward, alive with the old addiction to thrills. My speech speeds up, I'm flinging my hands around, my heart is pounding like mad. There is drama and gossip at the festival, and I need no sleep and no food, and I ignore Jeff, vacating the house completely, doing precisely nothing like running a home life. No night is too late and nothing is too much and nothing is enough.

At the end of the festival, there are two hundred people in our house, fabulous food, endless booze—thank God Jeff and I don't drink—music blasting, people spilling out into the yard, every floor of the house packed with wildly gesturing, heavily inebriated actors, all of them seemingly moving as fast as I am. People crowd into my office, sitting in piles on the chairs and the floor, shouting and gesturing. I'm euphoric. The conversation gets louder and louder, we laugh until we fall out of our chairs. I'm at my most charismatic, my grand schemes seem perfectly reasonable. Mania is contagious, pulling people into its whirlwind orbit. I'm the pied piper. There's nothing wrong with
me.
Absolutely
everyone
is crazy. I'm riding the swell of excitement with everyone else.

The party breaks up around four o'clock in the morning, and at six I hop out of bed and keep moving. Work has never been better. I've never written faster, never worked so hard. It's fucking
great.

Madness? This isn't madness. This is more fun than I've had in years. Why would I want to come down? This is just how it is now, this is how it's always
supposed
to be—I've hit my stride, and I just didn't realize how painfully
slow
I'd been going before. Everything before, pshaw. That was nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, you've never seen anything like it. Watch
this.

I'm taking my meds without really thinking about them, and I show up for my appointments with Dr. Lentz, sighing with irritation that I still have to bother with this nonsense. I report—and believe—that everything is going well, better than well, so he has no reason to think that anything's wrong. I brush off his incessant questions about whether I'm doing too much. What is it with these people? Lentz, my parents, Jeff, my friends—all of them making a fuss, telling me I'm doing too much, nattering on about the job, the book, the parties, the shows. How could I be doing too much when I'm doing everything
right?
The meds are obviously working brilliantly, as anyone can see with even a cursory glance at how great my life is. It baffles me that Lentz has any doubts, and I tell him he's just stuck in the past. Everything's different now. He has nothing to worry about, and neither do I.