Your Voice in My Head (10 page)

He snorts with laughter. “Sex and Love Addicts. Anonymous.”

“What? I’m not a sex addict!”

“You have patterns of love addiction.”

“Yeah, but nice patterns. Like Liberty prints or something.”

“Be serious for a moment.”

“Yes, I have patterns of love addiction. But I’m a woman. Of course I do.”

He scribbles. I prod him.

“You do what you like. I’m just saying it would be worth checking out.”

I take the phone number he hands me.

“Why couldn’t I make it work with Simon?”

He shakes his head. “You can’t give unconditional love to somebody who hates himself.”

On the subway from Dr. R, I listen to “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills and Nash. The carriage is empty and I sing a little—I do all the parts myself—it’s really rubbish—until six or seven girls get on the 6 train. They wear the uniform of a girls’ baseball team. They are Latina. They have no make-up on. Their bodies are strong. They talk for half an hour and never once mention boys. They yammer and yammer, marveling at one another’s performances. One starts talking about having light eyes and what it might be like, and I excitedly take off my glasses.

“Mine are yellow. I’m not lying. But you have to see them in the sun.” They crowd round to examine.

“She isn’t lying.”

“What’s it like?”

I look at her. I think about it and, looking down, see I’m very tan and the sun has caused the scars that run the length of my wrist to rise and whiten. My arm would make an excellent hopscotch board for a mouse. The girl is waiting for an answer. I turn my arm over.

“It’s good.”

There isn’t an Ophelia in the bunch. This is maybe a huge advertisement for the importance of girls doing team sport. They stand up, and as they crowd off the carriage, the leader calls behind her, “Look after your pretty eyes.”

I promise the girl I will—promises to strangers being easier to keep—and it’s only halfway up the block to my house that it occurs to me: I mean it.

Once Simon is gone, I start to become whole. I am as well as I have ever been, better actually. My decision-making is rational. Not impulsive. My house is tidier. I walk all the time. I am working my ass off to eat right, and some of my ass comes off. I’m weight training with a batshit-crazy Russian girl, who not only keeps me fit but also means that, in context, every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 a.m. I am irrefutably the sane one. Sounds privileged, but you can do it for free too, running along the river, not buying the chocolate cake. It’s not a weight diet, it’s a mind diet. Fish. Gross. Eat it. Vegetables. Gross. Drink them. Friends and strangers are appalled by my green concoctions I slurp through paper straws. I go to the light. I literally go to the light, moving to an apartment where, for exactly the same price, the sun is streaming in.

Writing from Czechoslovakia, my parents seem to be in an equally happy headspace.

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER
, Dr. R doesn’t have his full attention on me. He keeps looking at the phone, as if it were about to do something. He excuses himself to take a call in another room.

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s going on? Is it because I’m getting well and now you don’t find me interesting?”

“I had a patient almost die of an overdose this weekend. At the Chateau Marmont.”

“Eep. Like John Belushi.”

“Something like that.”

“Were they famous?”

“Emma.”

“They were famous. Do the papers know?”

“Not yet.”

It seems I keep this patient in the back of my mind, although I don’t remember filing him for future reference until he is sitting next to me at dinner two years later.

Airports make me want to reach out to ex-boyfriends. I was at the airport in Atlanta, Georgia, and I wrote the famous writer who’d had me twisted for years an e-mail. Saying to myself, there’s no harm in a friendly note. But here’s what happens:

I’m looking at it thinking, Is that a friendly note to someone I want to feel at ease as my friend, or is that a love letter to a lover? Into the letters-waiting-to-be-sent file it goes. And that’s huge. I don’t usually stop to consider things before acting. And I look at it again and see what I also mean to say is, “This is the rational area, this is the area for behaving rationally.”

“I think,” I tell Dr. R, “I’m really, a lot better.”

I show him some hate mail I’ve received about one of my books.

“You know what’s funny with hate mail? It always says ‘Emma Forrest, I have read every single thing you have ever written and not once have I found any redeeming qualities.’
Wait, look at this: ‘I have read
Thin Skin
three times now, and it is a piece of shit.’ ”

“Should have read it the fourth time,” laughs Dr. R, “that’s when it got good.”

“So does that mean my experiences are a piece of shit or my writing is a piece of shit or I’m a piece of shit?”

“Emma, that’s a lot of feces.
Thin Skin
is a tough one. It was a tough time.”

“OK, but you know the J. G. Ballard quote? ‘I want to rub the human face in its own vomit and then force it to look in the mirror’? I’m drawn to that because of my attraction to bulimia, right?”

“You’re drawn to it because of your attraction to humanity.”

“You think I’m really nice.”

“You are.”

“But I do these not-nice things.”

“No, you do self-destructive things and sometimes forget the difference between things that are destructive to you and things that are destructive to other people. Just swear off the latter, which is against your nature anyway, and we’ll deal with the self-destruction as and when it arises.”

“OK.”

“But it hasn’t.”

“Why hasn’t it?”

“You got older.”

“That’s it?”

“The other part too.”

“I got w—”

“You can say it.”

“No, because then I have to take responsibility for it! Then I have to keep doing it, you know?”

He won’t look away. “Say the word you were going to say.”

“I got wiser?”

He blinks. “No question.”

“Because I got older?”

“Because you did the work.”

I frown. “It’s really nice not being miserable.”

“There are people who have no choice. You fell out of love with madness. That took self-awareness. And it took courage.”

I smile at him. “If I’m Dorothy, are you the Wizard or the Scarecrow? Are you the horse of a different color?”

“I’m the Jew with a pad and pen. Don’t worry about me. It’s you. Time’s …”

“Up.”

I SIGN AS A SCREENWRITER
with William Morris and move to L.A. and have a “normal” boyfriend, Christopher, who is a schoolteacher and surfer. We homemake. It’s really lovely. This was Heath Ledger’s bungalow for a time before we took it. There is a love letter for Heath tucked into the wall when we move in. I don’t know what to do with it. I hide it in a box of special things. One day Christopher, by happenstance, picks Heath up in the ocean and brings him home. I think about the letter and how I could possibly give it to him.

People are always asking, “What’s it like being with Christopher, being with someone so good?”

It’s just in his nature. Christopher, like most of the others I’ve been with, has recently given up alcohol. But under your sobriety is your nature, just as under your mental illness is your nature. Some people use twelve-step as a cover for their narcissism. Others really do want to change. I learn this from being with him.

His mom is the loveliest woman and helps make our home beautiful. It is a country cottage. There is no sadness here. Just hummingbirds. Perry is out of his mind with joy. He is a new cat. Junior is terrified of walking down stairs, and every time he needs to use his litter I have to carry him down.

One night I wake hearing rustling. Perry is next to me. I peer over the banister and see Junior in his box. From then on we never discuss anything, but he can do it. It’s like getting well. He moves like a little old lady, but he can manage, and that’s how I feel. You do it how you can do it; so long as it’s getting done, you’re OK. He comes downstairs backwards like how one might maneuver out of a tree. I did the same thing, myself.

Perry comes to me one day while I’m making tea. He has a lizard in his jaws.

“I’ve become incredibly interested in murder,” he tells me.

“I thought you were all about killing mice.”

“Yah, but that’s so done. I only kill lizards now.”

I do one terrible thing to Christopher whilst we are together. Christopher talks so glowingly of his ex-girlfriend that I start to obsess about her, until I track her down and message her on MySpace, but don’t tell her of the link. We become friends and keep writing until I forget how I “knew” her.

I go back to New York to see Dr. R and I tell him what I’ve done.

“We’re going to call Christopher right now and you’ll admit it.”

“Right now, right
now?”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes. You tell him while you’re here with me.”

I hear Christopher take a breath from the other coast.

“Well … that’s really weird.” He pauses. Then he adds: “But I knew you were weird when I fell in love with you. The only part that matters is I want you to tell her the truth. It isn’t fair to her.” This is the kind of man Christopher is.

Dr. R is coughing a little and after we hang up with Christopher, he has a proper hacking fit. When he gathers himself I tell him a secret I’ve been keeping for some months now.

“Dr. R. I think I’ve transferred my childhood fear of my parents dying onto you. Lately, I’ve started worrying that one day, you will die. What does that mean?”

He stares at me, looks down at his pad.

“It doesn’t mean anything.” And then he tells me time’s up.

IN
CALIFORNIA
, having composed the letter of explanation to Chistopher’s ex, I hit Send.

I sit back that night and say to myself, “That was properly mental. That’s borderline personality stuff and you don’t want to be that.”

Borderlines are what is commonly known as “evil.” They enjoy causing trouble.

The ex says she is shocked and disturbed by my confession and that she needs to think. I never hear from her again. I am taken off her friends list. It makes me think, though: I don’t lose friends as often as I used to.

Mum calls in the morning to tell me about the only cat she didn’t like.

“It was at a house we’d rented in Edinburgh, and it was in the garden and it looked exactly like a snake.”

“How can a cat look like a snake?”

“Well, it was long, and its body was the same width as its tail and it had no hair.”

The next day a thought occurs to me and I call Mum. “Is it possible that the cat you saw in Edinburgh was, in fact, a snake?”

She ponders this.

“Yes. I suppose it might have been.”

There are still minor daily spazz-outs in my happy life with Christopher. For example, a regular trip down to the Laurel Canyon Country Store to drink Lilly and Spike’s special coffee. When I get there, I see, tacked to the community noticeboard, an eight-year-old child’s multi-pose audition card, where he’s half-naked next to a lost-pet poster. The pet poster says: “Our beloved tortoise, Hokey Pokey, wandered off on Sunday. She has been with us for sixteen years. She is about a foot long.” This is the worst moment of my life. The man at the deli in front of me has a terrible comb-over. This is the worst moment of my life. The sandwich I buy contains wilted lettuce. This is the worst moment of my life. When I get home, my cat refuses to sit on me. Of course the fucking cat refuses to fucking sit on me. He’s a cat. And yet. This is the …

Still, Christopher and I keep homemaking and seeing movies and finding cheap eats in L.A. We go three times a week to Singapore’s Banana Leaf inside the Farmers Market until they start giving us free mango juice and, in a coup, free rice crackers. We hike Fryman together. He runs back and forth without his shirt, all crazy and Catholic and self-flagellating.

When it unpicks, we calmly follow the cotton as it unwinds. He doesn’t want to raise children in America and I do. I am second to the ocean, it is a religion I can’t understand
and that I resent. It is the easiest, sweetest breakup. We go camping in the redwoods of northern California. We aren’t going there to break up with each other, or maybe we are. We visit the Henry Miller Library. We eat incredible pancakes. We hold each other. Then he asks if I want to stay together and I say “no” and I ask him and he says he doesn’t think we should stay together either. I cry my eyes out because he’s so lovely and then we drive back down the coast holding hands and listening to Neil Young.

He waits until I’m not there to pack up his things from our home, leaving me a note like nothing I ever thought I’d deserve: