Your Voice in My Head (14 page)

“What are you doing?”

“Painting. You said it was OK.”

“You didn’t ask if you could paint it pink. Emma! You painted the fucking house pink!”

I’m huffing and crying and the paint is on my hands and in my Jew-fro and the house is indeed an absurd Pepto-Bismal pink.

“EMMA!” He gathers himself. “You are so damn lucky you’re depressed right now.”

I have migraines constantly. The sheer amount of migraine medication I take knocks out the effect of the psychiatric
medication. I’m using it to sleep at night. I see
Synecdoche, New York
and I don’t understand why Charlie Kaufman has made a film about me and GH. So. I am disassociating. Conditions are perfect. It is almost the exact perfect storm as the first time.

I look at the blue sky and trees and see places to hang. I used to look out my apartment window in New York and see places to fall. Where would my body land? Which branch would I choose?

Around 1 a.m. there is a pop from the kitchen and raw sewage rises up from my sink, and does not stop. It’s like the Amityville horror. I keep cleaning it and it keeps coming. The stench is unbearable. I have returned the house keys to GH. I look around my kitchen in wonder. Everything has turned to shit.

I text GH. I tell him what has happened. He does not offer me a space in his paradise. He wishes me luck with the plumbing.

Have you ever seen
Mulholland Drive?
Laura Harring and Naomi Watts meet and fall in love and then they go to Club Silencio and they cry at the incredible singer, and then they come home and Naomi walks out of the room to get something and when she comes back in the room her lover is gone. She’s just walked out of the room. And Naomi’s life becomes a totally different movie. That’s what it feels like.

As I hike to my iPod, “Raglan Road” rolls down Laurel Canyon: “That I had loved not as I should / a creature made of clay.”

I bump into the cat rescuer one day when I am hiking my local hillside. He kisses me. I start to cry. This deters him not a jot.

“Um, my mentor died and then the man who’d asked me to make a family with him woke up one day and left.”

“Your energy is overwhelming. It overwhelmed him.”

“That’s very kind but I don’t think so.”

He traces his finger up my thigh, under my skirt, and into my underwear.

He looks at me and says, “What I’m doing is not about sex.”

“But it kind of is because now your finger is inside me,” I say, like I’m naming that tune on a game show.

“No. I’m just trying to change your flow of energy.”

I pull away from him.

“I understand that by finger fucking me at the side of a major highway you’re only trying to be kind. But … it just isn’t all that helpful.”

That fitful night, I dream that Bob Dylan does abortions as a sideline. I am pregnant with Pearl and GH does not want me to get rid of her, but I figure if Bob does it, GH will be distracted by asking him questions, like “Tell me about when you and Emmylou Harris sang ‘One More Cup of Coffee.’ ” It works. Bob Dylan gets to perform the abortion.

ELECTION NIGHT 2008.

On every TV, there is this beautiful man who worships his wife, who tells us again and again he would be nowhere without her. Everywhere I look during this breakup, it says “HOPE.” The audacity of hope. The stupidity of hope. The self-delusion of hope. Here’s the truth: hope is, generally, a very poor strategy. I start to think about the audacity of despair. Am I brave enough to say this:
this
is a thing worth killing yourself for. If it wasn’t, why would it be a leitmotif of literature, cinema, and opera for all time? Aren’t clichés clichés for a reason, because they’re true?

GH always loved how knotted and messy I was, that my hair and heart could not be tamed. “It’s like fucking Medusa,” he marveled. Now I am a classic of Greek verse, with her esteem flatironed. Just another girl, just any girl. This breakup has rendered me a Medusa afraid of her own snakes.

Barreling towards rock bottom, I reach out to GH, tell him things are not good and I would like to speak face-to-face.
He does not reply. For two days I roil in shock, knowing that he will. But he doesn’t. Finally, an e-mail, cool, saying he’s “glad I’m doing well,” no mention of what I’ve said. It’s as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don’t think I was smarter than or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It’s just that I was me. It was all I had.

I repaint the pink of my guest house, do something called a stain. Now it’s closer to, well, red. 3-D. A bad trip.

Accepting the presidency, Barack introduces “my best friend of sixteen years, the love of my life, Michelle Obama” and I think I will pass out. That, right there, is love in action. When I go home, I try to fix on the happy mental image of little black girls playing jump rope on the White House lawn. Instead I keep thinking of Jesse Jackson. He’s in the audience, crying so hard, he has his finger on his lips like a woman. That is how I cried all day. I cut the picture out of the newspaper in the morning and really stare. We are making the same face but me because I am despairing and Jesse because he is rejoicing and each of us is trying not to crumble with the emotion. Later in the day I decide he is not crying about the historic nature of the presidency; he is crying in the same manner and for the same reason as I: because GH has wooed him only to let him down horrifically, and he feels like an asshole for being taken in. He is looking at Barack and Michelle and thinking this is the greatest day of his life and the worst and he doesn’t know what to do. That’s the real reason Jesse Jackson was crying at the inauguration.

GH was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring
me. It’s like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.

Weirdly, the writer with the famous words and love life, the one who had me in knots through my sessions for years, he’s the only one I confide in. We’re having dinner at a fancy restaurant and I’m in a pretty dress and I’m having a good hair day and L.A. is twinkling in our view and we’re guessing the special. I ask him about the year he was in the tabloids for taking crack and he says, “Emma, please, you don’t take crack, you smoke crack. Have a little respect.”

We laugh and then midway through telling a joke my tears plop into the salmon, which is quite moist enough as it is.

“I’m not crying.”

“Emma.” He puts his hand on mine.

“It’s OK because I’m not crying.”

“Emma. Talk to me.”

We’ve gone years without talking.

I tell him about how I think I’ve lost my faith. And how I can’t stop writing because I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.

He clasps both my palms in his. There’s salmon on his jacket sleeve.

“Emma. You’re just
really sad
. And you’re right to be.”

Everything he could never be for me when we were “involved,” he redeems a thousandfold that night.

I adore him and he adores me and I don’t care who he dates, I want him to be at peace and he doesn’t care who I
date, he wants me to be at peace. Given time, love can take on the most surprising shapes. I tell him this.

“It would blow Dr. R’s mind that you’re an anchor. You were so dangerous! He was so nervous about the damage you could wreak. I said, ‘But he’s so hot.’ Do you know what he said? ‘Hot, like crack cocaine.’ ”

He laughs, puts his head in his hands. Pulls his head back up, still laughing.

And it’s the proof I have in action that distance can change everything, turn something ornamental into something healing, like watching a snow globe become a hot-water bottle.

He drives me to my door and watches to make sure I’m safe, as I get out my key to open the security lock that GH installed.

I am greeted by a sight that is amusing to me now. I kept hiding the T-shirt on which GH had penned that love poem, and wherever I hid it, Junior kept finding it and dragging it out, and I keep finding him making feline love to it, as he is this evening. I take away the shirt, one last time, fold it inside two bin bags, and place it at the bottom of my laundry bin, which, for some reason, Junior is frightened of.

When GH asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time, as I mourn Dr. R now.

Understanding this does not help.

Late the next night, I say to the man who saved my cat, as he undoes my blouse, “I want to die.” I look him in the eye as he unzips my jeans, and I say it again. “I only want
to die.” He thinks that I am role-playing. He puts his hands around my neck and squeezes. Hard.

I lock myself in the bathroom with my BlackBerry, as I did the night GH left, and wonder, if I called him, would he rescue me from this. I look at his number. Please come and get me. Please kick this man out. And I know that if I called … he would not answer.

So I go back to the bedroom and let the man squeeze his hands around my neck again. This is not who I am. But I am here. So this must be who I am. His thumbs press into my throat. I wonder if he will go all the way.

NOW THAT GH IS GONE
, I feel like I’m a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.

Brushing past my leg, a velvet shark, Junior goes into my clothes closet to take his thrice daily nap. I go to the bathroom, find my bottle of pills, and then follow him in, right into the back, so I won’t be found. Junior snuggles down. I take three pills, and then two more.

I count out the rest of the pills. There are more than enough. I have that weird moment—I had it the last time—where I have a headache and worry about taking two from the bottle, will I then have enough left to kill myself?

I am nearly thirty-two now. If I do it this time, it has to work. If it doesn’t work I will most likely have to leave this guest house. I have bad credit now, nothing will ever be as nice as this, my cats are happy here.

There is no note. I have nothing left to say.

Junior crawls onto my chest. I had hoped that one of them would. That I wouldn’t go alone.

In the back of the closet in which I’m curled, I find a high-heeled shoe I’ve been missing for a year. Junior has put a toy rattle mouse in it. Pleased to see it, Junior wakes, grabs it in his little jaws, and goes into the bathroom. Uncurling myself, I follow him.

He settles down on the mat. I run a bath and put the remaining pills on the windowsill. I lie back in the water, my hair floating wet behind my broken mind. Through the slats of the blind, I can see the trees and beyond them, I can see that the moon is full, our moon, the one we’d send back and forth to each other. “Tonight is perfect.”

Then I hear a voice.

“Just wait,” says Dr. R in the form of Junior, his orange paws up on the side of the tub, pulling his head over the edge, peering at me like a meerkat. “Just wait.”

I’m talking to the air. Seeking solace in a cat. Noting portent in the random.

If I do this then Dr. R’s death will have been for nothing. I hate it when Beyoncé wins a Grammy and in her speech thanks G—d. He didn’t have time to help out in Darfur but he made sure you won an MTV Moonman. I know Dr. R left behind much bigger things than me. I know it. I know that I was not his primary relationship. But I was one of them.

The gap he left in front of him was watching his children grow up, was growing old with his wife.

All the girls offering me their ear now are younger than me. Ali is twenty-seven, Elishia twenty-eight, Natalie
twenty-seven. Danielle is twenty-five and going through the same thing. I do not have the heart to tell her that the best advice I can give is that she will survive it and go through it again. And that it will be infinitely harder three years later, and five years later, and eight years later it may feel insurmountable.

“Pearl, Pearl, a pearl of a girl.” I sing-song it with each little white pill. It’s like a madrigal: pill, pearl, tear, pill, pearl, tear.

“We’ll call her Pearl,” said GH, “because her loveliness is self-created through her own intense willpower.”

Sifting through the wreckage of my future, I wish I could be more like my imaginary daughter.

Of course there are questions of addiction patterns, of course he freaked out. Of course it’s nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn’t. I was everything to him and now I am nothing. I am closing my clamshell around myself.

Irregular Pearl.

I make a necklace from the pills. Pop one in my mouth, then another, swallowing bathwater as I go.

Junior is purring, loud, a Tibetan chant of the dead. And then I hear Dr. R, and look down at Junior: “Emma Forrest …”

No. I didn’t dream this life. These incredible highs. The terrible lows. I want to be a cheerleader in … in …

“Where?” says Dr. R, cat-faced, injecting logic.

“In Minnesota.”

“It’s cold there.”

“Yeah.”

“Better to be a cheerleader here. There’s blue sky.”

“There is blue sky.”

I don’t understand why GH stopped being my husband. “I didn’t stop,” he wrote, the week of the breakup, “I am your husband. Always.” “But you’re not here.” I see the ghostly chorus of other lovers who came before me, the other women he walked away from overnight. I wasn’t the first. I won’t be the last. I am a pearl strung on a necklace.

Junior nudges me, bats at my toes in the water.

“No one ever loved you like GH. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it’s here. Look around. The spider under the Flann O’Brien book. The gate that finally closes. The lock on your front door. In small but important ways, he made your house safer to live in.”