Your Voice in My Head (17 page)

I START TALKING TO
another devoted patient of Dr. R’s. We find each other on Facebook and, after sharing loving memories, eventually I confess to the part of me that is angry at him for not warning us he was dying. And angry that I still don’t know what happened. He was there for me completely. And then he was gone, with only a confusing voice message to untangle it. I couldn’t bring myself to probe Barbara for the details. My new Facebook friend suggests I speak to Dorothy Rick, a psychiatric colleague of Dr. R’s.

Dorothy agrees to talk to me, and I fly back to New York to see her. Her office is large and beautiful. She is beautiful and tiny. She looks like a precocious little girl as she curls into her leather chair. And I ask her, why, why, didn’t he give me any warning?

“Because the level of denial was profound. I saw him in the hospital a week before he died …”

“Which hospital?”

“Columbia.” She hands me a preemptive tissue. “He was
sitting up, but very weak. It had been grueling and Barbara needed a break, but no one believed this was the end.”

I screw up the tissue without using it.

“When was he diagnosed, exactly?”

“August 2007. He called me and said, ‘There’s news that’s not good, but I’m going to beat it.’ It was stage three.”

“Meaning?”

“It was in both lungs.”

“Was he a smoker?”

“No. He was hoping to have surgery, with chemo and radiation, shrinking the tumor so that they could operate. And they did do that.”

“When?”

“February. They were very, very hopeful. They believed chemo had taken care of it and he was doing very well post-op, he was in great spirits.”

She pushes her hair back from her face. I am glad. I want to see everything.

“A month after surgery, they did a CAT scan and found something and it was not good news. But he was seeing a top oncologist who was telling him we can try this protocol.”

“What’s that?”

“Atypical treatments. He had to be hospitalized to do that. And that’s when he got pneumonia. He was still practicing two weeks before he was hospitalized.”

That’s when I used up a whole session telling him about stupid
HEWZ VAN
and the fucking Abba-Zabas. Whilst he struggled to keep his breathing even, I was nattering on about nothing, because I didn’t really need him that day.

“Emma, we spoke and he sounded weak and he was very
sick, but very hopeful. And that was the truth. He specifically asked me not to tell the patients we shared.”

“So he died of …?”

“He died of pneumonia. Barbara said he wasn’t supposed to die. The kind of cell he had was curable.” She sighs. “He didn’t believe he was dying, so he was being honest. I’m telling you now: he didn’t betray you.”

Then I cry. I uncrumple the tissue. She waits for me to get it together, until I ask her, how exactly, she would define Dr. R’s method of psychiatry.

“He was into harm reduction. That’s new thinking of the last five to ten years, and it’s how you keep people coming back. Old-school psychiatry is about being a ‘tabula rasa,’ which means blank screen. But psychiatry has evolved since then. We all started doing training at the same time and realized that wall was over. Humanity is key. As Dr. R proved, you’re most effective when you’re a mensch.”

Then she asks me to tell her a little bit about myself, to tell her what’s been going on. I tell, for the fiftieth time, the story of GH and his 180, and how hard I’ve been working to understand it.

“You’re not gonna find an answer. There isn’t one. The answer’s you. The answer is, despite it all, you’re not hurting yourself anymore.”

She’s very good. She sounds a lot, in her thinking, like
him
.

I ask her, “What would Dr. R say?”

She grins.

“Well, let me put on my Dr. R hat.”

“What does a Dr. R hat look like?”

Is it a baseball hat? Was it there the whole time and it was
just another one of the things I wasn’t looking at about him because I didn’t know what would happen next? Did it say Yankees or Mets? (Note to self: ask Barbara if he supported the Yankees or the Mets.)

Dorothy puts up her hand. “It looks like common sense. He’d say walk away.”

I want to say, “How?” In what manner would he want me to walk away? When I was at school “Mysterious Ways” by U2 was a huge hit and I’d invent mysterious ways in which to move (I’d ask to be excused from chemistry for the toilet and walk to the bathroom mysteriously). How might he want me to leave GH?

It’s like she can see it all swirling under my skin.

“Look. I get it: you’re a writer and he’s a great psychological profile, but I don’t know how much good that’s gonna do you, honestly.”

“Do you believe he meant it all the times he said we were going to be a family?”

“I believe
he believed
everything he said to you.”

Then she shakes her head and says a very strange thing.

“It’s just a movie.”

“What?”

“It’s not real. You don’t have to feel as hurt as you do. It was only a movie.”

I love this woman. I ask if I can see her again when I’m next in New York. We agree to make it a regular appointment when I stop through.

On the way out the door, I remember to ask her how and where she met Dr. R.

“Oh,” she says, “I trained him.”

IN DECEMBER I SPEND CHRISTMAS
and my birthday in Istanbul, just as GH had planned. But I go without him. As I navigate the amorphous abstraction of disappointment, it is a thrill to be somewhere that is full of “Yes” and “No” answers. The “Yes” and “No” of Islam. The call to prayer that blares across the city every morning. Then the dance music that keeps you up at night. The architecture, full of squares, cubes, and spheres. My favorite is the Aya Sofya—the Byzantine church with its four added minarets.

Staying in a cheap hotel where each room, instead of being numbered, is named for a Turkish love poem, I eat baklava every evening, and drink tiny coffees.

I feel so much more courage in Istanbul.

My bed is single and my room spartan, but I can admire the Sea of Marmara from my window. Silhouettes dance across the moonlight: on top of the horizontal line of the Marmara there is a continuous horizontal band of city walls, red roofs and mosques rising up pale between them. It could
have been sad being here, this trip he had fantasized. But it isn’t.

Le Corbusier said, “Everything leads me to single out the Turks. They were polite, solemn, they had respect for the presence of things. Their work is huge and beautiful and grandiose.”

It is just the city in which to harbor enormous feelings. In California, I felt that the expanse of nature outside my house—the vast sky, the mountains, the endless trees—was surely helping me pull through. But there’s something about this city with its man-made grandiosity that I find soothing, anchoring. Anything can be achieved. Everything is within my power.

Walking the streets, there are stray cats everywhere, sad-eyed, seeking shelter from the rain. They look like hopped-up Edie Sedgwick in disheveled calico fur. There is no cat food at the nearest deli, so I buy salami, have them chop it up, and spend my birthday feeding the cats. I understand I am a psychopath to care more about animals than humans, but there are no homeless humans here, or dogs. Just homeless cats.

It is soon snowing mercilessly. On Friday, I light Shabbat candles in my little hotel room. Turkey remains the only truly moderate Islamic country, and they are deeply proud of it. I leave behind the irrationality of the last few months, and it is a joy to be in a place where people are constitutionally reasonable, when all the countries around them are half mad.

I visit the Blue Mosque, the last great mosque of the classical period, incorporating Byzantine elements with
traditional Islamic architecture, its interior adorned with blue tiles. My hair is very dark and long now, and as the snowstorm whips it in circles around my face, the mosque lends a faint tint of blue to my skin. I take out my compact mirror, vanity in the long shadow of devotion. The looking glass tells a story of a girl who lives under the sea.

Jet-lagged, I treat myself to a 6 a.m. breakfast at the Four Seasons. I eat pastries and read the Turkish paper. On my way out, I steal food for the cats. It isn’t stealing because I paid fifty dollars for a buffet, but I enjoy experiencing it as a transgression. Salmon, sausages, and bacon galore, for the non-halal felines.

Morning just breaking, I walk over to Cemberlitas Hamam, the oldest Turkish bath in the city. It was built in 1584 and the only light comes from the hundreds of stars cut out of the domed roof. I can hear the call to prayer from the Blue Mosque as I lie, naked, in the piping-hot steam. There is no one else there.

Each female visitor to the hammam is assigned a woman to scrub and clean them, to beat and knead their aching limbs. The women who scrub you are, themselves, naked. My woman has enormous, pendulous breasts and the pale gray eyes I’m used to seeing in New York on Dominicans. As we try our best to communicate, she lathers my hair, laughing and saying to me: “Baby girl.”

I cannot tell if she is saying I
look
like I am a baby girl, or asking if I have a baby girl.

She grins. She is missing a tooth. “Baby girl.”

She says it again, beaming. “Baby girl?”

I have a terrible moment, where I decide she must be asking about Pearl. Enveloped in steam, tears prick my eyes. I am glad when soap fills them.

At the exit, they sell home-made soap with the evil eye attached, to protect yourself from people who’d wish you ill. I buy one, wondering, How do you hang it inside yourself?

The nineteenth-century French adventurer Pierre Loti wrote
Aziyadé
, about the Istanbul harem girl he fell in love with. He said he had found his soulmate. They planned to escape the harem and make a life together. And then, one morning, his ship sailed home, with him on it. When he returned, many years later, he found that
Aziyadé
had died of love for him. The book doesn’t say she killed herself. It says she died of love. I suppose she stopped eating. Maybe her heart really did break beneath her jeweled veil.

“Are you mine?”

Yes.

“Are you mine?”

Yes.

“Are you mine?”

No.

“No?”

No. I loved being yours. But now I’m mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.

Dodging snowstorms, I wander to Topkapi Palace, which from 1465 to 1863 was home to the Ottoman sultans. A complex of four main courtyards and many intricate smaller
buildings, it has hundreds of rooms and chambers, containing the most holy relics of the Muslim world, as well as the well-preserved harem rooms.

When I visit, the exhibition running is called The Sacred Trusts. They are displaying the cooking vessel of the Prophet Abraham, the turban of the Prophet Joseph, the Prophet David’s sword, the Prophet Muhammad’s cloak. I find the guidebook especially compelling:

I spend hours there, until I find myself separated from the crowd, in an unexpected side room that I can’t find noted in the guidebook. Beneath the elaborate gold-leaf calligraphy, there is a sofa, a fan, and a small coffee table bearing old issues of
The New Yorker
.

A door opens.

“Em-ma For-rest!”

“Dr. R?” So this is where he’s been. “Can I hug you?”

He nods.

“Michelle’s a hugger. You know? Michelle Obama. You missed that. But she loves to hug people.”

“These are different times.”

“Yeah.”

He leads me into his office and settles in his chair.

“Can you turn off that light?”

“Right, of course, and that one.”

“Thank you.”

The room is just as it has always been, and the schoolkids of East 94th Street can be heard rattling by on their bikes.

“So …” He smiles. Opens his hands towards me, which I know means, “Where’s your head at?”

“I’ve been having a hard time without you.”

He nods. “Bereavement is hard. You’ve been very lucky. You haven’t lost anyone before. Your reaction is not inappropriate. All those years of cutting. Now you have a reason to be in pain. It’s an interesting challenge.”

“Thank you!”

“I have no question that you’re up to it. You’re completely different from the girl who was on my doorstep.”

“Do you think you could have helped him?”

He shifts. He knows who I am talking about. “Yes.”

I drop my head.

“But this isn’t your concern.”

“Do you think he meant the things he said?”

“I do. He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you’re depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you, Emma.”

I look at the ground, I look up with wet eyes.

“I’m afraid of loving again. I’m afraid I’ve lost my faith.”

“You haven’t.”

“The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It almost gave way again.”

“You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.”

I shake my head. “Because of you, I’m even more afraid of my mum dying. I’m mourning her now. I’m trying to inoculate myself.”

“It won’t help when it happens.”

I am afraid to remind him of this …

“I told you in our last face-to-face that I had started to obsess about you dying.”

He smiles. “The point of psychiatry is that it should be terminated.” I flinch but he continues. “We don’t want you to be with us forever. I want to get you out of here. I want us to figure out how you can grieve this and let go.”