Your Voice in My Head (13 page)

“This is what love should be like: what we have,” he says, gobbling down the dinner I made. “This is the standard we’ll both have to hold out for when we’re next with someone.”

And it’s crazy because here we are, this is it, you don’t leave the path to find the path. This is what he says we should look for. I don’t understand any of it.

I lock myself in the bathroom. I call from under the door: “You can go now.”

“Em. Please let me in! Em!”

“I’m fine. Please leave now.”

“Have you cut yourself?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Promise me!”

“I can’t.”

This is where my cat gets shut in when he’s been naughty. I curl up on his mat. From my vantage on the naughty
mat, I can see, through the bathroom window, GH leave through my door and then my gate. I hear him turn on the car (he sits there for some moments) and then I hear him drive away. Still, I wait on the mat like someone who’s unsure whether or not their attacker has left.

As I’d heard his footsteps down my wooden steps, I’d cleared the phlegm from my throat and called out loud: “Take the cheesecake.”

“OK.”

“And take the suicide letter.”

His voice falters here. “OK.”

4 March 2000

Mummy

Daddy

Lisa

Please forgive me

I have had such a happy life with
you Mud lies down and goes to sleep now
.

I love you always
.

I will protect you always
.

I NEED DR. R
more than I ever have, but instead, I have to get through this breakup myself, like normal people do. Only I’m not normal, he’s not normal, and this is not a normal situation. GH and I are in his house watching
Harold and Maude
and then
Moonstruck
and then
Cleopatra
. I look at Liz, look at Burton. Have you ever felt that you don’t truly taste the chocolate you’re eating until you get to the last square? That’s what the weekend is like. He’s watching
Cleopatra
, saying, “That setup took ages to do and it wasn’t worth it. See that part with the birds? Three days that would have been!”

He does a week’s work in Santa Fe, and I imagine he will come back with Native American jewelry and an apology. Instead: “I got you this.”

I look at it. The context is off. The love of my life brought me a bag of useless crap.

After that, I found a letter to my website that I’d ignored (which I don’t often do) because it described a portrait the writer had painted of GH. I stop reading there. She resends it and I read it this time. GH looks very much like her little brother, she says. She hadn’t much interest in GH until her brother died of a heroin overdose and then he spoke up about addiction. She misses her brother. She found his body. “I’m not crazy or dangerous, just a bit eccentric and lonely.” It breaks my heart, her self-awareness. I know that feeling, inside sadness, seeing it, being able to articulate it calmly and clearly, and it doesn’t make any difference. I know the woman’s painting is just sitting there, and I think about picking it up. Not now. Not now.

GH leaves two more things on my doorstep late one night. Music he’s made me. To draw me in. And sage, he says, to burn him away.

You can’t do that, contribute to my exorcising you. It’s like giving yourself a nickname
.

Because they don’t know that it’s over, his online fan community continue to say that I’m fat and ugly. I have felt that I was fat and I have felt that I was ugly and there’s something both horrifying and exhilarating about seeing it said by strangers. Seeking out the worst he can find, GH, himself, googles exotic permutations of his name:

GH + Talentless + Cunt

I look at the comments about us compulsively and though I understand that reading them is a version of self-mutilation, I can’t figure out how to stop. Some veer into Jew territory and I find myself longing for the days of good old-fashioned handwritten anti-Semitism. The online fans begin to actively wish for my death. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll take an overdose of lithium,” says one. The sentence ends with a smiley face icon. One hasn’t lived until one has experienced death threat by emoticon.

Soon enough, they have done research that links me to Dr. R and are speculating that I am a cocaine addict. It kills me like nothing else that they should write his name. But … why am I here?

Why am I listening? Because some part of me, even after all his work, still doesn’t know which voices are real or not?

If Dr. R were here. If Dr. R were still alive. My mum is beside herself, more than I’ve ever seen her. I don’t know what to do, or whom to turn to, so I write to Mike, Dr. R’s addict.

I’M SUDDENLY AND UNNERVINGLY PANICKED
by me.

The smell of my armpits
.

The scent of myself on my fingertips after I’ve masturbated. The perfume of my hair on the pillow
.

Your lover says, “This is what you’re like and this is what you’re like,” and you giggle and say, “I don’t know what you mean!” And after they’ve gone, then, then you know what they mean. And there’s no one to share it with.

It’s only a heartache. It isn’t a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin-Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When Dr. R’s wife and children are going through his loss?

Spotted weeping at Shabbat services, I am called to the office of my rabbi. I tell the story, my embarrassment at feeling this loss so hard when it follows on the heels of Dr. R’s death.

Rabbi Wolpe shakes his head. “Love is extremely serious. I don’t think this is trivial.”

A freezing fall in Manhattan and I find it hard to go back to New York, and especially to meet people on the Upper East Side. Within a fifteen-block radius, there are two rooms where I took my skin off. No one ever knew. In one room I talked and talked to a wise man in high trousers. In the other, there were hardly any words, just a skeletal man covered in fresh bruises, kissing a woman with curves and fading scars.

I am in New York for the honor of lunch with Dr. R’s widow, Barbara. We meet at Sarabeth’s, around the corner from his office. She is blond, pretty, clever as hell. To match her sunshine hair, I eat yellow foods. First I eat an omelet and then the lemon ricotta pancakes from her plate. I figure, if I just keep eating, I won’t cry in front of her. If I don’t cry, I can also stop myself saying, “What happened? Why didn’t he warn me?”

She smiles as I eat her food.

“We were together twenty-seven years. Carpe diem was our motto. He was someone who did believe, in his heart, in living, and we always did, and we kept doing it after the diagnosis.”

She pushes her remnants around the plate as if, were it to fall in the right order, she could say the right thing to make me feel better. Even in her grief, she is thinking of his patients.

“He gave his patients a sense of confidence, no matter how messed up things were. He was that positive. When he got the diagnosis he said, ‘Life is rough but we fight this,
we get through the chemo and get on.’ It never occurred to him and so it never occurred to us that he wouldn’t win. The end was a big shock.”

Getting out her handbag, she brings a pile of books to the table. “These have been coming for you.” I look. They are addressed to me, Dr. R, and GH. There are sprinkled with photos clipped from magazines of me and GH together.

“Do you know what these are about?” she asks.

“It’s just a crazy fan.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was dating this movie star …” I stop, because I feel like I’m explaining a fringe subculture. Transgender. Plushies. Actors.

We hug goodbye.

As I ride the 6 train home with my stalker books, I think how strange it is that Dr. R and GH have finally intersected, not at all in the way that I wanted. And I think of Barbara, her parting words before I head into the station.

“I always tell my kids and I am telling you: you can have this kind of love. It’s like grabbing the brass ring at the carousel. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love …” The train picks up speed, her voice in my head trails off: “is that you can lose it too.”

I GET AN E-MAIL NOTIFICATION
of dispatch from Love Fifi underwear. “We are so excited you found us. We are going to take care of you, now and forever.”

It is very nice of the underwear to assure me like that, but it is startling. I don’t want promises. Not from anyone.

I notice the hand cream by my bed says “Apply generously” and I say out loud, “Fuck you, hand cream!”

I see
O, The Oprah Magazine
on stands and though she usually poses in different happy ways in happy colors, this month it seems like the “O” is for Ophelia, who is floating down the cover on her back. How to repair love
and
gowns stained by drowning!

A raccoon walks by my window. But there are no more portents, no coincidences, no signs. It is just an animal, rabid, fiercely clawed. It’s just trying to survive.

I feel the waters rising up around my heart. They don’t stop. This is my last breath, this is my last heart. I’m searching frantically for an air pocket.

I have sex with a guy who saves my cat from being stuck up a tree. A Rottweiler chases Perry almost to the top. It’s a sweet Rottweiler, but Perry knows the harm of which it’s capable. “Can I try to get him?” asks the man, a passing friend of my landlord. He shimmies up with ease and gently talks Perry down.

I go in the house to find a thank-you present. I can’t find anything good so I give him my vagina. He is very, very tender to my cat. He is rough with me. Doesn’t it
at least
go: he saves my cat from a tree … then we talk about Barack Obama … then we have sex? No, not so genteel a preamble as that. It means less than nothing and within twelve hours it means everything. It is reckless and this means my meds are off. That is where I am again. I was trying to break a spell. It did not work. I said it wrong. It took me back in time instead.

Perry comes down from the tree filled with ennui. He has four mouthfuls of food and gets bored. Doesn’t want to play outside. He just wants to be next to me, warm flesh against warm flesh, and that breaks what’s left of my heart.

The cat rescuer comes back for me, once, twice. We don’t know each other’s number, he just appears. Each time I am caught unawares and wearing something more schlumpy, bizarre, and unflattering than the last. Like I have on a poncho and worms coming out of my eyes and one of my arms is made out of Dudley Moore. One day, I swear to G-d, I have on underwear my sister made printed with Jon Stewart’s face and also, unfortunately, period stains.

On Halloween a beautiful bisexual squeezes my breasts and a man asks me out and each time this happens I feel
crushed because it’s the wrong one. We are three minutes from GH’s house and I am wearing a Snow White costume. And I cannot go to him.

I remember I am on his video card. It was real. I rent three videos and resolve to keep renting every week, just like Joe DiMaggio putting roses on Marilyn’s grave each birthday. Only less beneficent and more self-serving.

When people say, “He
is
a really good actor,” I feel strangely proud.

I ask my landlord, Scott, if I can paint the downstairs of the guest house. It’s depressingly off-white and chipped. He walks by and I’m on a stepladder huffing and crying and spreading paint.