Your Voice in My Head (12 page)

I tell him my sister, having surveyed the Internet, has collated the comments into one conclusion: “You are having a fat ugly baby that’s using GH to sell books.”

GH grins. “That’s only if it’s a girl, love. If it’s a boy, it’s an unwashed anorexic who’s using you to boost its intellectual credibility.”

GH goes back to set. Mum, Dad, and Lisa come to visit me.

The kids’ film
Kung Fu Panda
is being advertised on billboards everywhere, and one of the first things Mum says when she walks in the door is “I
do not
want to see the word ‘Pandamonium.’ ” She shakes her head. “That is not what I’ve come here for.”

Other things she does not want to see in L.A., and which provoke a vocal and vigorous reaction:

Pictures of Seth Rogen.

Nectarines from Whole Foods.

And the whole family gets cranky at the incessant beep of GH’s texts.

ONE OF DR. R’S PATIENTS
finds out about his death from my blog. A middle-aged drug addict who went back and forth for treatment, he had been trying to get an appointment only to hear the message saying the office was closed.

His name is Mike and he writes on his own blog:

GH comes home and starts shouting, “Gypsy Wife?” and I hide from him behind the sofa, just because. I’m planning to burst out. “Gypsy Wife?” he bellows. And then I get scared. Why have I hidden behind the sofa in the nude? It’s a mad thing to do. I’m mad. This isn’t good. I should just stroll out. Or I could stay behind this sofa forever and he’d eventually move on and I’d have to hear him make love to other women on the sofa and that would be rubbish so I should probably just stroll out now. He goes out into the end of the garden calling for me. I come out, put on my clothes, and arrange myself on the sofa. When he comes back I tell him I was there the whole time and he just didn’t see me. Then we talk about shape-shifting, then we make love, then we swim, then we do some reading, then we do some writing, then we bake a cake, then we watch a movie, then we make love, then we go to sleep. Somewhere along the way he says, “It’s good we’re not mad anymore,” and I concur.

KNOWING THE DEPTHS OF MY FEELING
for the great man, GH arranges for us to fly out and see Leonard Cohen play in Lisbon, Portugal. At seventy-four, Cohen’s on a comeback tour, after years of living up a mountain as a Buddhist monk, after years, before that, of alcohol and pain. The venue he’s playing is basically a parking lot. Listening, eyes closed, GH wrapped around me, I carry R with me. I carry the wisdom of all Jews, of everything worth knowing. I listen to Cohen turning ugly things in on themselves, making them beautiful. I am, to a large extent, here because of Dr. R. I think back to that session when I told him about what happened in San Francisco. And I realize that this is the happiest night of my life.

I am turning this over and over like a pebble. I am so happy and I’ve been this way with GH for six months now and it’s the longest I can remember. It’s not mania. Is this mania? It’s not. Is it needy? It’s not. We don’t need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we’re
good together. We’re good people together. And I have the funniest feeling. I can really, truly touch this all, this happiness, and the sadness too, I can trace all of it with my fingers. It isn’t theoretical or distant. It isn’t a facsimile. This feels like me. This is me. I love him, and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me. Every time he says “I love you,” I answer, “I believe you.”

When we get back to the house we’ve rented in a little fishing village, GH arranges for my parents to come stay with us. Before they arrive, he spends a tormented half hour wondering whether or not to hide the Chekhov short stories he’s been reading.

“I don’t want them to think I’ve left it there on the table to try and get them to like me.”

“Well. Are you reading the stories?”

“Yes.”

“So leave them where you left them.”

The very first thing Mum does when she walks in is look at the coffee table and beam: “Oh! People don’t read the short stories of Chekhov nearly enough!”

As he helps her with her things, GH lifts my mum’s sweater to his nose and turns to her. “I wanted to smell your sweater. I stopped myself.”

“You can,” she offers sweetly.

He takes me aside and whispers, “She’s like amber, there’s so much reflected inside. I just want to keep looking at her.” He’s right. That he understands, straightaway, how amazing she is makes me trust him more.

GH butters a digestive biscuit and Dad’s ears prick up. “Are you putting butter on a digestive biscuit?”

GH looks guilty. “Yes. I say you should spread butter on everything until you find something butter doesn’t taste good on.”

Dad is delighted. His whole face contorted with joy—he has a triangle mouth like Eric Cartman from
South Park
.

They go off together into the night, ostensibly to fetch us dinner. After what feels like several hours, Mum and I start to worry. Eventually they return with a lovely Indian platter, which we devour. We package away leftovers, though we ate it all so fast we can’t remember what anything was. Taking a Sharpie, Dad labels one carton “Mystery.” GH scrawls beneath, “…  wrapped in a riddle.” Dad grabs the pen back. “…  cloaked in an enigma.” They smile at each other.

Washing-up done, Mum looks at GH: “You guys should go to bed before Dad says something terrible.”

Dad’s mind visibly whirs—there is so much tabloid fodder to pick from that he simply cannot choose. Dad leaps to his feet and, pointing at GH, bellows: “GH is made of cheese and jelly!”

From then on, when my dad talks about GH he says, “My boyfriend says …” but then one day I mention “Your boyfriend sends his love” and Dad snaps, “He is
not
my boyfriend, I am
his
boyfriend.”

At the Spar supermarket, two nine-year-olds in Ronaldhino tracksuits follow us up the aisle. We catch them staring. “Don’t mind him, GH, he’s just a fat-head!” says one boy of the other. This, despite having, himself, the fattest head either of us has ever seen. The lack of self-awareness fills us with delight and we skip arm in arm into the night.

At a petrol station a mother pushes her little boy towards GH for a photo. The boy is twisting to get away. Why wouldn’t he? GH is in a sartorial phase I can only describe as Bobby Sands does Dexys Midnight Runners. This child will always remember him as a terrifying vision from his nightmares.

“Love, he doesn’t want to,” pleads GH.

“You do!” the mother says to the boy.

“Love, he doesn’t.”

“Now you don’t get any sweets!” we hear her yell at her kid.

GH puts his head in his hands.

To cheer him up, we go for his favorite thing—an aimless nighttime drive—and listen to “Postcards from Italy” by Beirut and “One More Cup of Coffee” by Bob Dylan over and over again. We have to hit replay before the song ends. “You do that? I do that,” says GH, as he holds one hand on my heart whilst he drives.

GH wants us to road trip across America when he gets back. He asks me to book out Christmas and my birthday for the dream trip to Istanbul. He’s decided that we should definitely start trying for Pearl in January. I want everything he wants.

“The only thing I know for certain,” he writes me, “is that I want us to be family.”

We’re born alone and we die alone, but we get to travel with people along the way, and if, like Dr. R, you get lucky, you have a worthy consort. I feel as if I have that. I cannot express how much I admire GH, his intellect, his kindness, his sensitivity. Dr. R doesn’t get to see it, but all our work has come to this.

WE’RE AT A BUDDHIST RETREAT
near the fishing village, lying on our backs in the clifftop grass. We have no shoes; our hair is splayed as if for a body search. The ocean is behind us. The view is spectacular. Luke Kelly singing “Raglan Road” is the voice in my head: “We tripped lightly along the ledge / of the deep ravine where can be seen / the worth of passion’s pledge.”

We lie beside each other, our fingertips touching, but don’t talk. I think about Dr. R. How he left me, without telling me he was going anywhere. But how, before he left, he planted the seed in my mind of this patient who overdosed at the Chateau Marmont. After a while, I say as breezily as I can: “I thought it was you.”

“What, baby?”

“Who overdosed at the Chateau? I thought you were Dr. R’s patient too and that we were just leaving it unsaid.”

He smiles. “No, love.”

We are silent again. He is in his own world. My tears fall
very gently into the grass. I would like to go back, one day, to the retreat and see if anything is there, where I cried. I have never before, nor since, experienced such peace nor such love. Those twin hippie passwords of idealism. So shocking, the moments when they’re actually tangible.

As we walk back through the retreat towards the exit, GH touches each colored Buddhist flag and, as he does, asks me: “Are you mine?”

“Yes.”

“Are you mine?”

“Yes.”

“Are you mine?”

“Yes.”

“Are you mine?”

“Yes.”

He has to stay in the fishing village, shooting for a few weeks. I am going back to America the next morning. Leaving our hotel for dinner, we happen upon a local arts and crafts store. Amongst the Aran sweaters and knit handbags is a fluffy pink coat for a baby girl, with attached rabbit’s ears at the hood, and a soft flannel carrot sewn into one pocket. It’s the cutest thing we’ve ever seen. GH gasps. “It’s Pearl’s rabbit coat.”

“She would look sweet in it,” I agree.

But there is a mist in front of his eyes. “I want to buy it for her now.”

“Come back and buy it for her when she’s actually been born,” I reason.

He touches the coat. He strokes it. He feels it against his cheek. He paces back and forth, in and out of the store. We
head back towards the hotel. He turns on his heels and goes back into the shop. He comes out with Pearl’s coat in a plastic bag. I look at him. He looks at me and shrugs: “I was worried it might be gone.”

At our hotel, a red-faced yelling man wakes us at 6 a.m. with his red face and yelling. The tray of breakfast we’d ordered is not nearly as sodden as his demands that GH cast his kids in the movie. I link any problem I have had since then directly to the foul yelling man, as if he were the sorceress entering the ball on my wedding night.

“YOU KNOW THE THOUGHT
of coming home to you and starting our life and making our family is what’s getting me through this shoot?”

I have been in Los Angeles, waiting so long for GH to come home. I count it off in the Sunday
New York Times
, which we read together in bed at my house (for some reason we always get up and go to my house to read it) after buying coffee from Spike and Lilly’s Laurel Canyon stand.

He knows my mum has mailed me a copy of my suicide letter because I’m writing about Dr. R, and wants to be with me when I read it. I ask what he wants for his homecoming dinner and make him the agreed ceviche and a passion-fruit cheesecake.

He texts me from the plane to say he’ll be in my arms in a few hours and our life together will begin in earnest. Then he turns off his phone and the plane takes off.

I have a ridiculous red tasseled burlesque costume, and I decide to sit on the wall outside my house and wait, like
Penelope looking out to sea for Odysseus, only spanglier. At the last minute I am too cold and decide it would be better to wear something with easier access. I put on a T-shirt dress. His plane lands.

When he arrives at my door, he is shaking like—they say “a leaf” but it’s more like someone in need of an exorcist.

“Are you OK?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Let’s go upstairs.”

We lie on the bed. He looks at me.

“I think I need space.”

“OK.”

“OK?” There are tears rolling down his face.

“It’s OK.”

I keep saying it over and over whilst I stroke his head—“It’s OK, it’s OK”—because I have no idea what is going on. He puts his head in my lap and his shoulders heave. “Thank you. Thank you.”

He lies there a long time.

“Em, you’re taking this so well.”

He looks like hell, like something you’d find in the plughole after Meatloaf washed his hair in your sink.

“You need space,” I say back at him, wondering where he’s put Pearl’s coat.

“I need all the space.”

A thought occurs to me. “Did you want me to have Pearl because you thought if we had a baby, you wouldn’t be able to leave? Is that why you wanted me to get pregnant?”

“Maybe. That might be true.” He can’t look at me because he is crying so hard.

“Eat the ceviche.”

“What?”

“Eat the fucking ceviche you had me make.”

I imagine, when he is an old man, looking back on his life, at the breakups that litter his library floor like books fallen from the shelf, “Eat the fucking ceviche” will be one he thinks he must have read wrong. But it is what I say.

He sniffs, wipes his face, smiles weakly. “OK. If you’ll share it with me.”

We eat from the bowl. “This is the healthiest thing I’ve had in months.”