Your Voice in My Head (6 page)

There is a Priory doctor I am compelled to see as an outpatient. I don’t remember much about him, but I have all his bills. I have his follow-up letters where he doesn’t know my name or my mum’s name but he sure is trying to get my money. I imagine it as a chapter in a Helen Gurley Brown book: “A
modern girl pays for her own psychiatric treatment.”

Almost immediately, I want to get back to my apartment—even in my state I am enough of a New Yorker to know that it’s a steal I oughtn’t let go. I want to get back to Manhattan. And I want to get back to Dr. R. I call him from my parents’. We speak for half an hour, long enough for him to decide he doesn’t like the drug the Priory put me on. Depakote, too 1950s—though that seems fitting to me, throwback girl that I am. (Maybe I’m on the same drug as Bettie Page! I think. I’m still to some extent excited by my madness.) Later I will find out that Dr. R is an exceptionally gifted psychopharmacologist, which is why his initial miscalculation hurt him. He gets it right next time. For now it’s just his voice on the phone that helps stabilize my mood.

THERE’S A SET OF PHOTOS
of me in my bra and panties and knee-high socks, bleeding all over the place. They were taken by an unnamed photographer, a fashion god, the week before the suicide attempt.

“Maybe I should hang on to these,” says Dr. R when I show him.

“No.”

I stretch out my hand. I walk over to him, hover above his seat.

“I look fat.”

He doesn’t sigh or gasp. He makes some notes.

“You know you’re not fat.”

“I know that. I said that I
look
fat.”

I take them from his hand, put them away, and snap: “What’s the point of being one way, if you appear, in posterity, to be another?”

“Whether or not you look bigger than you are in a photo
is not what defines you. It would define some women. Shallow, disturbed women. Not you.”

No matter how many times I stood before him saying, “I am shallow. I am disturbed,” he’d never repeat it back to me. In a romantic relationship, you can make the person say that. I always got my boyfriends to say it back to me.

If you piss behind a lamppost when you’re twenty, that’s carefree and eccentric and bold. If you piss behind a lamppost when you’re thirty-eight, that’s just disgusting. Isn’t it? If you’re a man making eyes at girls at twenty, that’s raffish. If you’re doing it at thirty-eight, it’s foul. People don’t know. We don’t know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people.

We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who’ve left us is because we knew them so well.

I have intense pain for Dr. R and longing and actually a genuine connection. But I didn’t know him at all. And in that sense, he is a safety zone. The safest and also most challenging loss I can conjure. I mean, who is it I’m longing for? I know a little bit from our sessions and a little bit from his obituary.

I don’t know where he died. I don’t know how he died. I need to know.

I do know that Dr. R has been in my life for over eight years because I am growing sad wondering what he would make of Barack Obama. And then silly things. When someone dies too young you think of all the things he will miss, his children growing up, his twilight years with his wife, but you also say, “I cannot believe he missed Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin.” You stretch heavenward for his wisdom (regardless of whether you believe in heaven, it’s where you stretch, much as suicides who jump off bridges die with dislocated arms, instinctively trying to grab back on) and in the same breath can’t stand that he missed out on Tina Fey’s impression of a woman he didn’t live to see.

IT’S JUST OVER SIX MONTHS
since I got out of the hospital and I want to watch election coverage with my friends around me, but my house is too filthy to allow anyone in, so I rent a hotel room. I am still living in disarray; I am still spending money wildly (easier to rent a hotel suite than to tidy up); I still cannot understand why anyone thinks my cutting is problematic. Oh! Here’s something funny! When I got back from hospital, Bad Boyfriend and my English Flatmate had become a couple. So I’m in contact with neither. But I am not too upset, because there’s a boy—Mike—whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. At eleven, I knew “things would be better if only I had a floor-length floral skirt in autumn colors.” Grandma knuckled down and made the skirt of my imagination for me. I put it on. And then I cried, because things weren’t any better.

I have tried to find happiness through hair color. Election 2000, I have hair that is supposed to be blond but has turned
out an ash-y orange. SB says it is the exact same shade as the toupee worn by a
Sopranos
villain called Ralph Cifaretto, who beat a teenage mistress to death. “That isn’t how I want to look,” I explain to my mother in our daily call.

“Oh!” she says, “but his hair’s nice!”

So, I look like Ralph Cifaretto, Florida is in the balance, and I’m determined that Mike, being corn-fed and Midwestern, would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I’m stable, and then I wouldn’t have to do the work to get there. Mike is just a nice boy from Ohio. Ohio Mike. When I am sent to interview Brad Pitt for the cover of
Esquire
, the first words out of my mouth when he walks into the room are: “
Oh
. You aren’t as good-looking as Ohio Mike.”

“Who’s Ohio Mike?” asks Pitt, good-naturedly, for he is nothing if not good-natured.

I have long sleeves with special holes so I can hook them over my thumbs, not a smidge of skin viewable, so covered is it in cuts.

“This guy I like, who’s better-looking than you.”

There are two stories I remember (intertwined by the hypermania), one story of love and one of art, and both of a kind of revolution that I like very much. I dwell on the tale of Che Guevara picking up Aleida, who would become his wife, by telling her he was off to overthrow the Bolivian government and did she want to come with him?

The other I obsess over is Bob Dylan seeing the violinist Scarlet Rivera walking along the road with her violin case and spontaneously asking her to come to the studio with him.
Desire
comes out of it the year I am born. Violins at a
revolution. Icons trying to get their wives to stay, others seducing them for the first time. Sometimes Bob Dylan is the one who, in my head, ends up dead and posed, Christ-like, at the hands of the CIA. Che, meanwhile, briefly converts to Christianity and writes an ill-received screenplay.

Maybe it’s because I’m manic, but I can conjure people. A week after nonstop listening to
Desire
, I see Bob Dylan on the streets of downtown New York.

To my Soho Grand election suite, SB and I have corralled: Ohio Mike, his friends Ohio Bob and Ohio Joe. They are enormous men, shaped like beer cans with legs. They work with their hands and own their own power tools. I haven’t known men like them. I’m used to London boys with their skinny ties and bodies. Or pear-shaped Jewish men from the family tree. They haven’t known girls like me. SB can tell that things are not going to work out well in this election and she is in the corner, reading Philip Roth.

None of these boys needs or wants his soul to be fought for. God, I’ve got so much fight in me and no one to throw it at (a game of dodgeball, because at least if I could save someone through love, I would be dodging myself).

To that end, I am an appalling show-off.

“If Bush gets in I’m chucking my shoes out the window,” I announce, because not enough people are looking at me.

The result is indecisive because of Florida, so I throw one shoe out the window. I immediately regret it, as I do with so many of my manic decisions. TiVo hasn’t been invented and yet my life is already littered with TiVo moments: just let me rewind that. Just let me skip that part. That didn’t happen!

I can see it, my high-top Nike in the snow beyond someone’s fence, so near and yet so far. I walk home in my one sneaker, the snow the same gray mush as a hung parliament. On the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue I see Susan Sarandon zooming toward me on a scooter. I have never met her, but she’s part of my father’s nonsense world. If you eat one of my dad’s French fries he snaps, “Oh! I was saving that for Susan Sarandon’s séance!” On his website, jeffreyfriedchicken.com, you can find a partial inventory of other things being saved for the big day (a copy of the
Independent
, a Twinkie, Ron Howard).

I look at Susan Sarandon, so gracefully balanced on her scooter and in her life. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone, and she’s in front of me, so I stop her and, without introducing myself, ask: “Susan? How the hell are we going to get through four years of George Bush?”

It’s 2000, so I don’t even know the half of it. She brakes her scooter and fixes me.

“Well, we got through the first one. We’ll get through the second.”

She has that same rhythm of calm as Dr. R.

Snow-scooter Susan sees me through until my next session.

I’
M CURLED UP IN
the leather chair like a cat, and Dr. R’s leaned into his leather chair like a far classier cat. I smile at him. He smiles back and writes something on his yellow notepad.

“What are you writing?”

“Just making notes.”

“About me?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yes, about you.”

“Are you drawing me?”

“Sort of.”

I decide that if Dr. R were in a boy band, he’d be the cheeky one.

“If you were in a boy band, you’d be the cheeky one.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, they all have a different personality type. Like: the cheeky one, the innocent one, the tough one!”

I think.

“They could do a boy band of psychiatric disorders.… The bipolar one, the body dysmorphic one …”

“Right, the obsessive-compulsive one.”

“And if it were a spin-off series, right, like
The Colbys
was from
Dynasty
 …”

“What’s that?”

“Yeah,
Dynasty
had this spin-off
The Colbys
. Anyway, then they could have a spin-off with unclassifiable phobias, like the one with a fear of dancing.”

“That’s chorophobia.”

“OK, the one with a fear of himself.”

“That’s called autophobia.”

“Wow. There’s a name for everybody.”

“Pretty much.”

I sniff, as if I’m not sure what to ask next, though I’m exactly sure.

“So … what am I?”

“It’s not always helpful to classify.”

He writes something down.

“Seriously. What am I?”

He smiles again.

“You’re Emma.”

This would be a good time to say, I have tried several psychiatrists and therapists, from age eight on. It’s in our blood as Jews; it’s in our blood as intellectuals; as bourgeois, maybe;
maybe
it’s in our blood because we are psychiatrically unwell.

Why would an eight-year-old need a therapist? Well, anyone who can have a therapist should have one. That’s what I remember my mother saying. Also. I was mad. No. I was in trouble. I was under threat of expulsion.

As I write it down, it is no small thing—that the beginning of this path to “wellness” was under duress, that I was sent there as a villain. I was also sent there wrongly accused. This is the truth. I didn’t do it. I wanted to. And then I got scared. Ella did it. Her mother blamed me. I told Ella we should send Lucy a sex note and pretend it was from a boy in the year above. It was literally “Meet me in the library after school for more sex.” I wrote the note, then chickened out. Ella took it out of my school bag and placed it in Lucy’s desk. The headmistress had the handwriting analyzed. I swear to G-d, she did everything but call in MI5.

Did they know that I didn’t do it, I recently asked my parents? “Well, no.” Why had I never spoken up before? Well, these things just start to matter less, is that it? Or is it that we take the roles we are handed because it is a relief, no matter how unflattering, to have a role? Even in the unfairness, was there a gratitude at not having to figure myself
out because they had decided for me? And because they had done that, I was sent to my first shrink to figure myself out. Which never happened. Not at that age. I just relished the chocolate brownie my mum bought me on the way to the sessions.