Your Voice in My Head (18 page)

I search for something good to say, something to tell him he’s right to trust in me.

“I’m glad I came to Istanbul. I really am. But even though I’m glad I did this, I still believe that you truly find yourself not in travel, but in other human souls.”

“Then you’re still the woman I knew.”

“I was a kid when we first met.”

I cover my eyes with a tissue, like a fan, like the silly fan GH once sent me from Spain.

“Let me tell you something, and I want you to remember it: who you authentically are—there is no one and nothing that can add to or subtract from that.”

“But … in the closet that afternoon, in the bathtub, I thought: I’ve lost so much. I should just lose it all.”

“You know you don’t have to. It’s like the story you told me about drawing on your face when you were a kid. About deliberately failing the math test because you were afraid of failing the math test. You can break that pattern.”

“When he came in me, he’d weep. You know? You know? In hindsight, it makes me feel like I was a sin eater.”

“Emma. Emma. You are not a sin eater. You got on the wrong train. That’s all.”

I put the tissue fan down, all my cards on the table, wet, all stuck together.

“I miss you. That’s what I meant to tell you. I really just miss you, terribly, terribly, terribly. And goodness doesn’t get to stay. It just doesn’t get to stay. The longest I’ve ever known it to stay … is my parents.”

Dr. R scratches out a note on his pad.

“Losing you both was only the practice pain, wasn’t it? For my mum and dad …”

He puts his finger on his lips, his elbow at his chest, not racked with cancer. “Yes.”

“And when that happens, this will seem like nothing.”

He nods.

“When it happens,” he asks me, “what will get you through?”

“Friends who love me.”

“And if your friends weren’t there?”

“Music through headphones.”

“And if the music stopped?”

“A sermon by Rabbi Wolpe.”

“If there was no religion?”

“The mountains and the sky.”

“If you leave California?”

“Numbered streets to keep me walking.”

“If New York falls into the ocean?”

Your voice in my head
.

At the Istanbul outpost of his office, leaving my psychiatrist for the very last time, I sign Dr. R’s check and hope it will not bounce. But I know that if it does, he will forgive me.

TO GET HOME
, I have to change in London. There’s a layover, so I go into town and find myself, almost to my own bewilderment, walking into the Tate.

My heart is pumping as I get to room fourteen.

There are other girls, gawping, seeing her for the first time. I hang back, let them have their moment with her. I wait my turn.

The first night I spend back in L.A., there is, at 3 a.m., a clatter at the front door. The cats’ hair stands on end. I reach for the nearest thing to use as a weapon. Under my pillow there is … a pen. I will write them away. Nothing happens. Whoever is trying to burgle the place, they can’t get in. They are felled by the lock GH had installed in my home to protect me. But the funny thing is, it reminds me how often I do reach for the pen lately. Anytime I want to die, I write a story instead.

I get out of bed, go down to the computer, and start writing a screenplay that I will write for three days straight, a comedy called
Liars (A—E
). It sells to the Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin, for more money than I have ever seen. I pay off my tax. I pay off my debts. I pay back everyone I owe, realizing, as I do, that the loan I’m returning to my dad dates all the way back to the Priory.

The day after the inauguration, my dad spends an inordinate amount of time Photoshopping Aretha Franklin’s hat onto my baby photos.

Malia and Sasha take photos of their daddy, as if there might not be any. Barack memorizes an exquisite seventeen-minute speech and then the swearing in is a mess. Such is life.

I DON’T EXERCISE EVERY DAY
and I don’t meditate every day, but I do think of suicide every day, as if nodding respectfully at it on my way to work. Some days I awake with the thought of it, or am woken by it. Other days it comes to me when I don’t get out of bed fast enough. More rarely, it is my last thought as I drift to sleep. I haven’t ever had the thoughts once I am out in the world. It isn’t often reactive—it’s unusual that something happens to make me think, I should kill myself! It’s something softer, something more like a scent. Is it my signature scent, I’ve come to wonder, and I barely notice it. Just every few years it gets overpowering. For the most part, the touch of the cats distracts me. Music distracts me. Making love—when I am in love—distracts me.

I wonder if
he
knew—if that’s what he was smelling in my hair? A component. A top note. There is one period and one alone when I didn’t think of it at all, and that’s when I was with him. I wish it weren’t true. I hope he simply met me at the fruition of Dr. R’s work. It’s possible.

Dr. R and GH were, to me, two sides of a coin. They made me feel so good. They made me feel I was a good person. They saw something else.
They saw me
. And now they can’t see me at all. It’s just sad. It’s just sad and that’s all it is. Because I can still see them. I can see the world I was in.

You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him.

I did.

“Life is futile,” says my new therapist, Michaela, “and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.”

She is as different from Dr. R as could be. But isn’t that always the way?

I feel very tied to her. And, yet, I know that even if we were to stay together forever: one of us is going to go first.

The sadness—the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain—isn’t over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn’t. One day I sit down on the sidewalk and sob so hard a woman comes up and asks if she can pray with me. I say yes. I will always be grateful to that woman. She was pretty, young, she was wearing the omnipresent Juicy Couture tracksuit. She looked like she had just worked out. She prayed until the bus came and then I went home and made tea and wrote a note to myself:

At Portobello Market I buy a Victorian ring. It has a skull with a snake woven through it, it costs five hundred pounds, the most I’ve ever spent on one thing except my computer. “Scott Rudin bought me that,” I say as I slip it on my finger, though I also say the same thing when I buy cat food and toilet paper. I buy it because I want to be like the girls wed to their virginity by their promise ring. I want to look at it every day and let the idea of death glitter and sparkle and that’s it. It stays on my finger. It doesn’t usually work out too well for the virgins: there’s a lot of blow jobs and arse sex that goes towards preserving sex until marriage. And in a weird way I imagine my preserving death until death to be the same. I will probably make a lot of strange decisions in the name of staying alive. I am OK with that.

I told Dr. R New York brought it all to the surface like the medieval use of leeches to draw fever. My Gypsy Husband was like marrying New York. He was the best city in the world, he was the only city in the world, until he closed in on me.

If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the dark instead, and make something out of it.

Perry slaps me in the face in my sleep. I wake up at 6 a.m. feeling, instead of sadness: anger and the need to pee. Something takes me down to the garden. I find the place where I buried the box of low-fat lasagna. I pull down my pajama bottoms, crouch low, and piss on it. As my eyes drift, I see Perry, slightly to my right, watching me with the intense concentration of a bodyguard.

I’M WRITING A NEW SCREENPLAY
at a wooden desk in a Tuscan barn house from the fifteenth century. I’m with a man who was briefly my boyfriend but is now my friend, and he’s a dear one, one of the dearest,
even
after I have coerced him into admitting that I am “sexually, just not his thing,” and even after I have compiled, in a resulting fit of pique, an outlandish secret list of what “his thing” might be (“Page 3 Girls with six fingers?” “Marmite?” “Voiceover by Morgan Freeman?” “The
Ghostbusters
theme song?” “The theme song from
Ghostbusters 2?”
). We’ve eaten fresh tomatoes and cheese and then pastry with pine nuts and drunk the best coffee ever. He’s downstairs writing at his desk and I’m a floor above in a tower. I decide to listen to “Postcards from Italy” by Beirut. It’s an amazing song. I mean, it’s a lot of other things too, so much history with GH there. But it’s also just a fucking great song. This afternoon, it has no history, just melody and words and it does nothing to my heart but make it expand with the joy I’ve been feeling all week.

Then my friend comes up the stairs from where he’s been working. “Two things: one. Will you read what I’ve written? And two. Will you stop singing: you sound like a fucking pub singer.”

We go into the garden for tea. It’s sunny, there’s a cat on me, it’s sunny, there’s a plum tree above me, it’s sunny, there’s a valley, it’s sunny, so I have my glasses on to protect my vision. My friend looks at me and says, “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“No I won’t,” and then, “Why?”

“The lenses are different.”

“No they’re not.”

“They are.”

I’m getting irritated with him because I don’t know what he’s on about, and then I take them off and see that I have picked up and have been wearing, for twenty minutes, his glasses, which are not sunglasses but heavy-duty prescription ones.

I replace the glasses with my Ray-Bans, and we speak of it no more.

The cat, tangled and blue-eyed, looks up and says, “Bitch, you has learned nothing.”

All is well.

Can I tell you what it’s like to live inside Millais’ painting of Ophelia? There are patches of water so warm. Drowning, I can see the sky, the branches of trees hanging overhead. It’s very beautiful. I will stay afloat for as long as I can. There is a boy who floats alongside me for a while, we hold hands and watch the sky together, feel each other’s skin wrinkle and prune because “we’re leaning out for love
and we will lean that way forever.” There is a bend and he drifts away, a current he cannot fight. But there is always the man on the riverbank, the one you can’t see, the one under the paint. Like the people who hold out cups to the marathon runners. I can hear him. And he’s keeping me afloat. It’s so cold and so dark but above me it’s open and blue and with the water tugging me down, he’s still calling, “Look up! Look up!”

And I do.

I thought I needed to know about my Dr. R’s final week, about the diagnosis and the treatment. How did he die? What could have stopped it? But I don’t need to know about his death. It is the least important part. What matters to me was his life. I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them but that I had them.

Mum writes me an e-mail about
Synecdoche, New York
. She says she found it very beautiful and very moving. When I ask why, she says, “Because I’ve been thinking about my own mortality.” She’s never said this out loud before, we’ve never acknowledged that she might not live forever.

She trusts me to cope with this information.

I file it away, and feel glad that she’s thinking about herself, though thinking about herself means thinking about me. And what I’ve done to her. And what I’ll do without her. And what will become of me.

“I don’t need you to be happy with someone,” she assures me when I ask if she’s disappointed that I haven’t yet made love last, “I need you to be happy with yourself.”

I had my goodbye with Dr. R. And, truth to tell, I saw GH too, not long after Istanbul, but from as far away as can be. An agency party after a Los Angeles awards show.

I wore a dress I bought when I was with Simon, one Simon had thought too tight, too low-cut. Uncontrollable, overflowing me.

“You will see GH if you go,” said Mum.

“I know.”

“You are brave.”

“I am that. Also … I am without skin and without dignity.”

In this dress, all the tattoos are visible. They patch me over where my blood would come out. That wasn’t how they started, but it’s what they became.

At the party, I spend a long time talking to Robert Downey Jr. and I completely forget I ever sent him prison packages. I wonder if he remembers that he was in prison. Our other lives before we were saved, before we were pre-modern.

But what you really want to know about is the conversation with GH. It was basic, really: “How’s your mum and dad?” “How are your sisters?”

Until an actress with a slender body the color of fattening truffles comes up and jokingly declares that she is finally ready to fuck him. And he says, “Ha! Finally!” because what can he say? Her hair is expertly colored and back-combed. We are in Hollywood. I have elected to be here and I have elected to be
here
.