Your Voice in My Head (15 page)

“I love you so very dearly,” said GH, again and again on the phone, and though it makes no sense, I answer “I know,” because I do.

Junior smiles: “People can only do what they can do.”

I brush the rest of the pills into my bath. I am surprised when they sink straight to the bottom. And then, I guess, the coating comes off because the water starts to turn red. To a bystander, it looks like I am bathing in what might have been. I look. And I look. This simply isn’t me anymore.

I get out of the bath. I pull the plug. I scoop up the coatless pills, stripped to their white undergarments, and put them back in the bottle.

Four hours later, my landlord comes by. Four hours: probably would have been saved. Might have died. Would have had liver damage. Would have been kicked out. I go
to the door, my clothes covered in cat hair from lying in Junior’s closet nest. But Scott doesn’t notice.

“EMMA! You painted the house red!”

“Sorry!”

“It’s like we’re in a dissected human organ. Emma! You painted the house into your broken heart.”

I go upstairs, close the closet door, and sit on the bed, in my battered Converse and shame.

“I miss you,” I tell the air to tell Dr. R, “so much.”

The air passes it back: “I know.”

The bottle of pills goes back in the cupboard, for another time, another lover, another life. Or just, as needed, for headaches.

I CLEAR OUT EVERYTHING
of his. Every book he sent, every love letter, every poem, every piece of jewelry, the framed Tiffany photo he gave me to keep him safe when he was away. At some point, I happen to open the freezer and find, in the back, the Stouffer’s low-fat frozen lasagna he brought with him the first night he stayed. Something tells me not to throw it in the trash. A voice in my head says I must take it down to the garden where we had made love so many times, and bury it there. So I do.

My window of reason is swinging. Suicides are so tragic because nothing interrupted them. I recognize that I need to get my medicine levels checked. Barbara suggests Dr. K, the only problem being he is in San Francisco. Ever since “the incident,” at sixteen, that town has been my “Don’t drive through Texas.”

SB and Teeter were with me ten years ago for the first suicide. It’s like Vatican II, this new one. New resolutions. We forgive the Jews. Many regretti. My mother will fly in
and meet us there. On the long drive north, SB wants to listen to drippy American music and I want to listen to British melancholic pop, some nice New Order. I win, and we discover that when men peer into a car that is blasting “True Faith” on the outskirts of San Francisco, they are disappointed to see three women. Teeter is in the back with SB’s dog, Buzzo, who is wearing a neckerchief and a glower.

SB and Teeter come up with a game where you replace the last word of a film title with the word “penis.”

The Thin Red Penis

My Own Private Penis

Revolutionary Penis

When we get to the hotel, I take a bath whilst simultaneously washing my bra, T-shirt, and knickers, because they got sweaty from the drive and since I have to hand wash them and hand wash myself I figure it’s best to do it at the same time.

SB walks in to use the toilet. “That’s some Emma-logic.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are dirty and your clothes are dirty and you are together in a bath stewing in your own dirt.”

“Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

Mum, having landed, calls me from the hotel corridor. “I’m lost.” Both of us Capricorns, she insists that I am a mountain-climbing goat, whereas she is a yard-dwelling goat.

I notice, during this trip, the ways in which she finally does seem like a seventy-year-old. She is having a hard time putting on seat belts, working ATMs, zipping her own jacket.

SB and Teeter go off to have fun, and Mum and I stay in the hotel room playing with my tarot cards. Over and over again, she keeps drawing “Twin Flame.”

That’s you and Dad, I say, suddenly churlish that they should have found true love, even if it resulted in my existence.

“Look. I’ve never told anyone this. I moved to England chasing another man. He never got in touch. I met your father the first week.”

I know she was planning to abort me and Dad said, “Let’s just take a chance,” and they did, they took the chance and they’re together over thirty years later.

We are sharing a bed in the dockside room, though I spend most of the night awake, filling in the forms Dr. K has sent over in advance of our meeting. Around 1 a.m., Mum, fast asleep, sits bolt upright and inexplicably announces: “I think I’m going to say ‘ooooh.’ ”

She waits a comedienne’s beat (a comedienne’s beat, even in her sleep!) and then she says “OOOOOOOH.” She instantly turns back over and starts snoring.

“Room service?” says a voice at the door the next morning, and Mum answers by singing, in the manner of Holly Golightly: “Rooom service wiiiider than a mile …”

We take a cab, get to Dr. K’s early, faff about pretending we might buy clothes at a next-door boutique, when we will not buy clothes at a next-door boutique. In his waiting room, he has the same
New Yorkers
as Dr. R had a year ago. I wonder if he was bequeathed them. Dr. K’s office is larger than Dr. R’s, with better air breezing through the
large window. His chairs are a bit less comfortable, though his air is comforting.

A slight, gray-haired man around the same age as Dr. R, he smiles and goes through the forms I’d filled out in advance. “Huh,” he says, behind his desk, “huh.”

He looks up. “You are lighting up across the board.”

“So I figured out, from these questions, that I’m not a germaphobe or a hypochondriac and I’m not obsessive-compulsive. But all the other answers. What do they say about me?”

“They’re indicative of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Ha. That’s brilliant. Love is a battlefield.”

He raises his eyebrows, and without his asking, I start to explain myself. When, having eaten up most of the session, I finally stop talking, his response is as straight an answer as one could ever hope to get from a psychiatrist.

“I would advise that you have no contact for at least six months. Don’t respond to him, ever. Don’t be in touch. Six months.”

“Right,” I say, “so, OK. But, what happened?”

“What happened? With him?”

He tilts his head upwards as if balancing the answer to my question on the end of his nose.

“Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men—not often women—where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me that it happened on the plane.”

“Do they … do they come back from it?”

He has a very sweet smile. “That is not a pattern we’ve observed before.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“He’s a very good actor,” he says, and, I answer, “Thanks.”

“But great actors,” he explains, “are trained to follow their instincts. Great humans are supposed to take instinct and consider and not act on them.”

I don’t know why I can’t say this out loud (I’d have said it to Dr. R), why I say it only in my head:

What people don’t understand when you’ve already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don’t want to die. I do not want to die. But I’ve taken the red pill and now I don’t know what’s going to happen. When you don’t have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don’t know where they could go.

What I say is, “I realize, of course, that GH owes me nothing, because that would imply that the world is fair. Dr. R’s death proves otherwise.”

Dr. K weeps a little, discreetly. Then he gets out a prescription pad.

“I’m going to double your Strattera and add Klonopin, for use as needed.”

Watching him write, it occurs to me: “So, how did you know Dr. R?”

“Oh.” He looks at me. “I was next door.”

“Next door where?”

“The room next door. At East Ninety-fourth Street.”

I am stunned.

“I’m really sorry. I never noticed you.”

He smiles. “I always wondered what was going on inside that room. I am very glad to meet you, because you came from behind his door.”

After the session, Mum takes me to see the Richard Avedon exhibit. Alongside the portraits is a quote from Avedon: “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.”

I stop at his photo of Janis, fists up, when she still had fight in her. And at Marilyn, in sequins, exhausted. We stand, for a long time, in front of no. 40, Groucho Marx, without makeup, and in old age. Mum says it is who he really is. I ask her why. “There is great depth, and sorrow and dignity.” It costs $45,000. I want it. The picture, but also the attributes.

We go to City Lights, the bookstore launched by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who first published Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
. It’s heaven. I buy GH books that I will put under my bed and never give him, but they are there, for him, covered in dust and cat hair, dusted with my snores. One day, they will hear me make love to other men. But they are his. I buy some too for Dr. R. They are in my desk drawer, under my computer. City Lights has every book ever. It fills me with an addict-like need, like I want to fall to my knees and snort them, instead of reading them.

Mum and I are on the tram back to the hotel when I turn on my BlackBerry. An e-mail from GH, a week late,
in response to one I’d sent. He says how happy he is. He says how happy I sound. I hand Mum the BlackBerry. She shakes her head. “It is dutiful and—I don’t know—weary. It’s like he has emotional amnesia.”

“I’m on his video card,” I blurt, like when someone couldn’t have done a murder in the Bronx because their subway card registered a fare to Brooklyn.

She hands me back the BlackBerry.

“I think you have to accept that the GH you knew isn’t there at the moment. I was witness to how much he loved you. I have the photos. I have the letters he sent me about you. I have the poems. This isn’t the GH I knew. I don’t recognize this person. Emma—he’s shed his skin.”

Her heart is broken too. She has to say the thing that will give me back my life. She draws on every reserve. I see how much it hurts her and it hurts me too. I came from her joy and her pain, I lived in it and I live in it now.

I watch in disbelief as we pass a street with his surname, and one block later a street with the pet name he gave to me. We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

I say something about Dr. R, about his sudden death. Mum whips her head around.

“GH died? What?!”

“Dr. R!”

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about GH.” She pauses. Her face lights up. “I just realized that I want to kill GH.”

She puts a miniature Snickers in her mouth.

I look out the window. This is a beautiful city and I had a good time. I thought I would never, ever be back. I thought I could never speak this city’s name again, let alone permit it to speak mine. Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn’t, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

I FORCE MUM TO COME
to Shabbat services with me that week. I want her to hear Rabbi Wolpe’s sermon. This turns out to be a potent one.

“So there’s a Chassidic story of Rabbi Bunim of Pshischa, who was a famous Chassidic master who was walking with some of his students one day, and he pointed to a bunch of Chassidim and he said, ‘You see those Chassidim over there? They’re dead.’ And the students said, ‘What do you mean that they’re dead?’ and he said, ‘They’re dead,’ and they asked him, ‘How do you know they’re dead? They’re up, they’re walking!’ and he said, ‘Because they’ve stopped asking questions.’ They walked on for a little while and one of his students said to him, ‘Rabbi, how do we know we’re not dead?’ and he said, ‘Because you asked.’ ”

I look over at Mum.

“So I want to say something about the asking of questions because I asked myself a brand-new question, not about life, although it turned into that
 … 
But I was reading the Torah portion this week and it was of course the same Torah portion that occurs each year at
this time and I’ve read it I don’t know how many times but I never ask myself the question. It’s the part where Jacob wrestles with an angel, and as he wrestles with the angel when the dawn is about to break he says, ‘I won’t let you go until you bless
 … 
until you bless me
.’
And the angel says to him, ‘No longer will your name be Jacob but from now your name will be Israel because you have fought with human beings and with angels and survived
.’
Now I’ve read that story a lot of times but only this week did it occur to me that he doesn’t bless him!”

Mum is screwing up her face the way she does when she’s thinking.

“He doesn’t say, ‘May you have children, may you have wealth, may you be healthy, may you be happy,’ and yet Jacob lets him go! So I knew as is inevitably the case for a good question there must be some answer that speaks to us, to our hearts, to our souls, that means something, why does Jacob let the angel go?”

Here’s where I start weeping. Mum looks up at me and I try flicking away the tears with an index finger at each eye.

“And
I realized that for Jacob that there must have been a blessing in that, and there was and there is for us. What the angel gave Jacob was the blessing of self-transformation. You don’t have to be Jacob anymore. You’ve struggled. And now you can change.”

My tears are now projectile (it’s actually quite biblical).

“It doesn’t mean that bits of Jacob won’t cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater
 … 
and he gave him, in fact, the most important blessing—the blessing from which all other blessings flow—which is he gave him the blessing of transforming his soul into something better, something more beautiful, something closer to God, something closer to what he was meant to be
 …”