by Philip Roth
“Awesome,” said Donald, and thinking perhaps, as Sabbath was thinking, that this was the way people in a madhouse were supposed to talk, he took a cold can out of the plastic sack and even opened the tab for Sabbath before handing it on to him. Sabbath took a long swig just as the baby cocaine dealer came in to have her vital signs checked. She was listening to the music on her headset and singing along with the lyrics in a flattish, unvarying, throaty tone. “Lick it! Lick it! Lick it, baby, lick it, lick it, lick it, lick it!” When she saw Donald, she said, “Ain’t you goin’?”
“I wanted to see them take your blood pressure one last time.”
“Yeah, that make you hot, Donny?”
“What is her pressure?” asked Sabbath. “What would you think?”
“Linda? Doesn’t make much difference to Linda. Her pressure isn’t the big thing in Linda’s life.”
“How do you feel, Linda?” Sabbath asked her. “Estas siempre enfadada con tu mama?”
“La odio.”
“Por qué, Linda?”
“Ella me odia a mí.”
“Her pressure’s 120 over 100,” said Sabbath.
“Linda?” said Donald. “Linda’s a kid. 120 over 70.”
“Wanna bet the spread?” said Sabbath. “A buck on the spread, another buck if you hit the diastolic or the systolic, three if you nail’em both.” He took a wad of singles out of his pants pocket, and when he smoothed them into a pile on the palm of one hand, Donald took some bills out of his wallet and said to Karen, who was standing holding the blood pressure cuff beside the chair where Linda was seated, “Go ahead. I’ll play him.”
“What’s going on here?” Karen asked. “Play what?”
“Go ahead. Take her pressure.”
“Jesus,” Karen said and put the cuff on Linda, who was singing along with the tape again.
“Shut up,” said Karen. She listened through the stethoscope, made a recording in the ledger, and then took Linda’s pulse.
“What was it?” said Donald.
Karen was silent as she entered the pulse rate in the ledger.
“Oh fuck, Karen—what was it?”
“120 over 100,” Karen said.
“Shit.”
“Four bucks,” said Sabbath, and Donald peeled off the money and gave it to him. “Next.” Sciarappa the barber, back in Bradley.
In the doorway was Ray in his silk robe. He went silently to the chair and rolled up his left sleeve.
“140 over 90,” said Sabbath.
“160 over 100,” said Donald.
Ray nervously tapped the book in his hand until Karen touched his fingers and made him relax them. Then she took his pressure. Linda, leaning against the door frame, was waiting to see who was going to win all the money. “This is great,” she said. “This is crazy.”
“150,” said Karen, “over 100.”
“I got you on the spread,” said Sabbath, “you got me on the diastolic. It’s a wash. Next.”
His next was the young woman with the scar on her wrist, the tall, pretty blond who slouched and who had given Sabbath directions to Roderick House before dinner. She said to Donald, “Aren’t you ever leaving?”
“If you come with me, Madeline. You look good, honey. You’re almost standing straight.”
“Don’t get alarmed—it’s the same old me,” she said. “Listen to what I found in the library today. I was reading the journals. Listen.” She took a piece of paper out of the pocket of her jeans. “I copied it from a journal. Word for word. Journal of Medical Ethics. ‘It is proposed that happiness”’—glancing up, she said, “Their italics”— “‘it is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.’”
Donald looked pleased, proud, beguiled, as though the reason for his stalling around was indeed to run off with Madeline. “You make that up?”
“If I’d made it up it would be clever. Nope. A psychiatrist made it up. That’s why it’s not.”
“Oh bullshit, Madeline. Saunders isn’t stupid. He used to be an analyst,” he told Sabbath, “the guy who runs the place, and now he’s, like, this cool-guy psychiatrist who tries to be relaxed about everything—not too analytic. He’s into this big cognitive behavioral thing. Trying to make yourself stop if you’re having obsessive ruminations. Just train yourself to say ‘Stop!’”
“That’s not stupid?” asked Madeline. “And meanwhile, what am I supposed to do about my rage and having no confidence? Nothing is easy. Nothing is pleasant. What am I supposed to do about this idiotic therapist I had this morning for Assertiveness Training? I had her again this afternoon—we had to sit through a videotape on medical aspects of addiction and afterwards she led the discussion. And I raised my hand, I said, ‘There are some things that I don’t understand about this tape. You know, when they have the experiment on the two different mice—’ And the idiot therapist says, ‘Madeline, this is not a discussion about that. This is a discussion about your feelings. How did the tape make you feel about your alcoholism?’ I said, ‘Frustrated. It raised more questions than it answered.’ ‘Okay,’ she said in that perky way she has, ‘Madeline feels frustrated. Anyone else? What do you feel, Nick?’ So we go around the room, and so I raise my hand again and I said, ‘If we could ever just for a minute shift the discussion from the level of feelings to the level of information—’ ‘Madeline,’ she says, ‘this is a discussion of people’s feelings in response to this tape. If you have a need for information, I suggest you go to the library and look things up.’ That’s how I wound up in the library. My feelings. Who cares how I feel about my addiction?”
“If you will only keep monitoring your feelings,” said Karen, “that is what is going to keep you from being addicted.”
“It’s not worth it,” said Madeline.
“It is,” said Karen.
“Yeah,” said Donald, “you’re an addict, Madeline, because you’re not connected to people, and you’re not connected to people because you haven’t told them your feelings.”
“Oh, why can’t things just be nice?” asked Madeline. “I just want to be told what to do anyway.”
“I like when you say that,” said Donald. “‘I just want to be told what to do.’ It’s a turn-on in that little voice.”
“Ignore his negativity, Madeline,” Karen the nurse told her. “He’s just pulling your chain.”
But Madeline appeared unable to ignore anything. “Well,” she said to Donald, “in certain situations I do like to be told what to do. And in certain other situations I like to make demands.”
“So there you go,” said Donald. “It’s all too fucking complicated.”
“I had art therapy this afternoon,” Madeline told him.
“Did you draw a picture, dear?”
“I did a collage.”
“Somebody interpret it for you?”
“They didn’t need to.”
Donald, laughing, started on another Pepsi. “And how’s your crying going?”
“I’m in a real slump of a day. I woke up crying this morning. I cried all morning long. I cried in Meditation. I cried in group. You’d think it would dry up.”
“Everybody cries in the morning,” Karen said. “Just part of getting under way.”
“I don’t know why today should be worse than yesterday,” Madeline told her. “I think all the same dark thoughts but they’re not any darker today than they were yesterday. In Meditation, guess who we read from in our little daily meditation book? Shirley MacLaine. And this morn
ing I went to the sharps nurse to get my tweezers. I said, ‘I need my tweezers out of the sharps closet.’ And she said, ‘You have to use them here, Madeline. I don’t want you to take them back to your room.’ And so I said, ‘If I’m going to kill myself, I’m not going to do it with my tweezers.’”
“Tweeze yourself to death?” said Donald. “Hard to do. How do you do that, Karen?”
Karen ignored him.
“I got very angry,” said Madeline. “I told her, ‘I can crack the light bulb and swallow it, too. Give me my tweezers!’ But she wouldn’t, just because I was crying.”
“At AA,” Donald said to Sabbath, “they go around at the beginning of the meeting. Everybody has to introduce himself. ‘Hi, my name is Christopher. I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Hi, my name is Mitchell. I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Hi, I’m Flora. I’m cross-addicted.’”
“Cross-addicted?” Sabbath asked.
“Who knows—some Catholic thing. I think she’s in the wrong group. Anyway, they get to Madeline. Madeline gets up. ‘My name is Madeline. What’s your red wine by the glass?’ How’s your smoking?” he asked her.
“I am basically smoking like a fiend.”
“Tsk-tsk,” said Donald. “Smoking is just another of your defenses against intimacy, Madeline. You know nobody wants to kiss a smoker anymore.”
“I’m smoking even more than when I came in. A couple months ago I really thought I had it . . .”
“Licked?” said Donald. “Could the word be licked?”
“I was going to, but I thought, I’m just not using that word around him. You know, nothing is easy—nothing. And it’s making me nervous. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that. What am I supposed to do about being left on hold all day? Everything is such a fight. I’m still fighting my managed care from the first time I was here. They keep telling me I should have called them when I was admitted to the Poughkeepsie ICU. I was in a fucking coma. It’s hard to push 1 and push 2 when you’re in a coma. And even if you could, they don’t have phones in the ICU.”
“You were in a coma?” asked Sabbath. “What is that like?”
“You’re in a coma. You’re out,” said Madeline in the voice that didn’t sound as though it had seen much change since she was a ten-year-old. “You’re unresponsive. It’s not like anything.”
“This gentleman is Roseanna’s husband,” Donald said to her.
“Ah,” said Madeline, her eyes widening.
“Madeline is an actress. When she’s not in a coma she’s in the soaps. She’s a very wise girl who wants from life no more than to die by her own hand. She left her family an endearing suicide note. Ten words. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve this gift.’ Mr. Sabbath wants to bet on your blood pressure.”
“Under the circumstances, that is very kind of him,” she replied.
“120 over 80,” said Sabbath.
“And what do you bet?” Madeline asked Donald.
“I bet low, honey. I bet 90 over 60.”
“Hardly living,” said Madeline.
“Wait a minute,” said Stella, the Filipino nurse. “What is this?” She got up from the desk to confront the gamblers. “Usher is a hospital,” she said, glaring directly at Sabbath. “These people are Patients. . . . Donald, show a little mental toughness, Donald. Get in your car and go home. And you, did you come here to play games, or did you come here to see your wife?”
“My wife is hiding from me.”
“You get out. You leave.”
“I can’t find my wife.”
“Beat it,” she told him. “Go reside with the gods.”
Sabbath waited around the corner from the nurse’s station until Madeline’s blood pressure had been taken and she appeared in the corridor alone. “Can you lead me to Roderick House again?” he asked her.
“Sorry, I can’t go outside.”
“If you could just get me aimed in the right direction . . .”
Together they walked down the staircase to the first floor; she went as far as the porch, where, from the top of the steps, she pointed to the lights of Roderick House.
“It’s a beautiful fall night,” said Sabbath. “Walk me there.”
“I can’t. I’m a high-risk person. For a psychiatric hospital you have a lot of freedom here. But after dark I’m not allowed outside. I’m only a week out of ACU.”
“What’s ACU?”
“Acute care unit.”
“The place on the hill?”
“Yeah. A Holiday Inn you can’t get out of.”
“Were you the most acute person there?”
“I don’t really know. I wasn’t paying much attention. They won’t let you have caffeine after breakfast so I was busy storing up tea from morning. So pathetic. I was too busy working out the caffeine smuggling to make many friends.”
“Come. We’ll find you a Lipton’s tea bag to suck on.”
“I can’t. I have program tonight. I think I have to go to Relapse Prevention.”
“Aren’t you a bit ahead of yourself?”
“Actually, no. I’ve been planning my relapse.”
“Come with me.”
“I really should go and work on my relapse.”
“Come on.”
She hurried down the steps and started with him along the dark drive to Roderick House. He had to move fast.
“How old are you?” Sabbath asked.
“Twenty-nine.”
“You look ten.”
“And I tried not to look too young tonight. Didn’t it work? I get carded all the time. They’re always asking for my ID. Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, the receptionist gives me a copy of Seventeen. Aside from how I look, I act younger than I am, too.”
“That you can expect to get worse.”
“Whatever. The harsh reality.”
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“I don’t know. The only thing that doesn’t bore me. The only thing worth thinking about. Besides, by the middle of the day I think the day has just gone on long enough and there’s only one way to make the day go away, and that is either booze or bed.”
“And that does it?”
“No.”
“So next you try suicide. The taboo.”
“I try it because I’m confronting my own mortality ahead of my time. Because I realize it’s the critical question, you see. The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I’ve already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all. Why can’t I just be fast-forwarded?”
“You’ve got a mind, don’t you? I like the mosaic it makes.”
“I’m wise and mature beyond my years.”
“Mature beyond your years and immature beyond your years.”
“What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.”
“The too-wise child who doesn’t want to live. You’re an actress?
“Of course not. Donald’s humor—Madeline’s life is soap opera. I think he anticipated something of a romantic nature between us. There was an element of seduction, which was sort of touching in its own little way. He said lots of glowing and flattering things about me. Intelligent. Attractive. He told me I should stand up straight. To do something about my shoulders. ‘Elongate, honey.’”
“What happens when you stand up straight?”
Her voice was soft and the answer that she muttered now he couldn’t even hear. “You must speak up, dear.”
“I’m sorry. I said nothing happens.”
“Why do you speak so quietly?”
“Why? That’s a good question.”
“You don’t stand up straight and you don’t speak loud enough.”
“Oh, just like my father. My high, squeaky voice.”
“Is that what he tells you?”
“All my life.”
“Another one with a father.”
“Yes indeed.”
“How tall are you when you stand up straight?”
&n
bsp; “Just under five ten. But it’s hard to stand up straight when you’re at the lowest point of your life.”
“Also hard when you went through high school not only five ten, not only with a conspicuously active mind, but flat-chested to boot.”
“Golly, a man understands me.”
“Not you. Tits. I understand tits. I have been studying tits since I was thirteen years old. I don’t think there’s any other organ or body part that evidences so much variation in size as women’s tits.”
“I know,” replied Madeline, openly enjoying herself suddenly and beginning to laugh. “And why is that? Why did God allow this enormous variation in breast size? Isn’t it amazing? There are women with breasts ten times the size of mine. Or even more. True?”
“That is true.”
“People have big noses,” she said. “I have a small nose. But are there people with noses ten times the size of mine? Four or five, max. I don’t know why God did this to women.”