“It’s not what I imagined,” he says later.
But what did he imagine? I think of the blizzard of images that I’ve stored about madness, the lore of lunacy that I brought to the ward when Sally was admitted, as vivid and unreal as the ogre in the forest or the wolf at the door.
“Sally is a mental patient, Pops. There are people who if they find this out will see her as an eternal mental patient and nothing more. They’ll trust her less. I know how they talk, especially about girls. There’s no mercy. They’ll snicker about her and crack jokes. We have to keep this from getting out.”
PART THREE
The next morning I go to the ward alone, with a suitcase into which I immediately start packing Sally’s notebooks and felt-tip pens, her magazines and pajamas—the objects she accumulated during the course of her stay here.
While she changes into the blouse and jeans I brought along for her to wear outside, her roommate stirs in her bed. Her blanket slides off her like a broken layer of sod, as she sits up and plants her feet on the floor. She rises, wobbles for an instant, and then, trudging, negotiates the five steps it takes to reach the bathroom. It seems a cosmic triumph of action over torpor when she pushes open the beige steel door. And for the first time, I glimpse her face: that of a girl in her late teens, but slack and downward, as if the very muscles that sustain expression have gone dead in her.
At the nurse’s station Sally’s name is still on the erasable board, at Level 3: permitted to go outside for fifteen minutes at a time. Primly she sits down on the little bench near the ward’s locked entrance where the classics professor had sat before his son took him home.
“You made it, girl,” says Nurse Phillips. And to me, as she ducks into the glass-enclosed command post where half a dozen staff members are at work: “I’ll be back in a few minutes with Sally’s prescriptions.”
Julian appears with information about the behavioral clinic in Washington Heights where Sally will continue to receive treatment as an outpatient after she is discharged. “Your doctor’s name is Nina Lensing. I think you’ll like her. I’ve set up an appointment for the day after tomorrow.”
Blushing, he invites me to a recital in which he is to perform as cellist. “We’re doing Beethoven’s Opus 132, one of his great late quartets. There’s every possible emotion in that piece. It’s probably more than we should be taking on. But the music is supernatural.”
He shakes my hand and hurries off.
I sit on the bench next to Sally and we watch a new patient being admitted, a Chinese woman in her late fifties, “hearing voices again,” as the young man accompanying her calmly explains. With Rufus and another nurse, he escorts her down the hall.
Nurse Phillips returns with a fistful of prescriptions. “We don’t want to see you here again, girl. You understand?”
Sally and I walk to Lexington Avenue in silence, pass through the turnstiles of the subway, and take the train downtown. Sally tries to involve the man sitting next to her in some private insight, as if he is naturally aware of what is going on in her mind. He acts interested. I move her to a seat at the other end of the car. The man—well-dressed, bearded, middle-aged—laughs, knowing and possibly nasty.
“It’s dangerous to talk to strangers,” I say, scolding her as if she were a five-year-old.
The apartment is empty when we arrive. On the table is a note from Pat: WELCOME HOME SALLY! SEE YOU AFTER REHEARSAL!
Sally is out of breath, having had to rest several times as we climbed the stairs, though they had never presented the slightest difficulty to her before.
A light breeze wafts in from the river three blocks away. Pat has thoroughly cleaned the apartment: everything is neatly in its place.
Sally goes straight to the shelf where the accessories of her crack-up are sitting: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the King James Bible, her notebooks, arranged punctiliously by Pat. Sally picks up her Walkman, handling it as one might a broken vase after a wild party.
She climbs onto the loft bed and lies down.
“Pat put on your favorite sheets for you,” I say.
“Hmmm.”
She slides off her shoes, which fall to the floor with consecutive thuds. When I call her name, she is too far gone to answer.
I drift through the apartment. Our harmless bohemian perch. Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. She is ours to take care of, but she has always been ours. It hits me that I neglected to drop off her prescriptions at the pharmacy. Now it will have to wait; to leave her alone even for a few minutes is out of the question.
I telephone Jean-Paul, an independent movie producer who approached me a few days before Sally’s crack-up with the idea of my cowriting a script for a young director he’s promoting—a fashion photographer whose ambition is to make “a grand love story that will be an update of Funny Face set in the world of haute couture.”
“Jean-Paul,” I say to his answering machine, “I had to leave town unexpectedly. I’m back now. Let’s get together as soon as possible and pick up our conversation where we left off.”
I don’t have much hope of this call bearing fruit, but it’s a start, I have to get to work again. On the radio, Mayor Giuliani is talking to one of his constituents. “It’s not the terrorists I’m worried about. Terrorists we can control. It’s weirdos like you living in your caves.” I turn the dial to a classical music station. A Bach sonata.
“That’s like the music I listened to before you locked me up.” Sally’s voice drifts down from the loft bed.
With a magnetic tab I attach the Wellness Contract to the refrigerator door, like the marshal’s order of seizure you sometimes see glued to the entrance of disgraced restaurants.
Manic depression is a biological illness. I cannot make it go away because I want it to go away.
I pick up one of her notebooks, with its paisley pattern on the cover—its mark of innocence—and open it to a random page:
I walk and I walk. I can’t stop walking. I am by the pier. If you listen closely enough you can hear life coming from the water. The moon and stars are covered by the bright electric lights that rise into the sky—a blanket that keeps the face of heaven invisible but the world below awake. When looking up, I can see a creation of the world’s future painted across the sky and the many people never resting, just working to complete that painting.
I guiltily put the book down, excusing the violation on the grounds that she is ill, her writing will tell me what I can’t discover from being with her, it will help me to understand. But what have I learned, apart from further evidence of the surpassing poetry inside her?
The door buzzer rings. It’s Robin. At our landing she leans on the banister, groaning comically, spent from the climb.
“Sally’s asleep,” I say.
But in fact she is standing behind me, having climbed down noiselessly from her bed. Her feet are bare, her face pale and shiny and, it seems to me, rounder than usual. She seems less vivid than she used to be, thickened by sleep, more stolid, yet less present, it seems, as if the live wire of her being has been grounded.
“My poor sweetheart,” says Robin. She has brought taped episodes of the television show Little House on the Prairie. She pops one into the VCR and curls up on the sofa bed with Sally.
“You don’t know how to love each other,” says Sally.
By prearrangement, Robin and I ignore this, though I am encouraged by Sally’s allusion to the real past, rather than an idyllic one that never existed.
“I’m going to fill the prescriptions,” I say. “Then I’ll be at my studio for a while. Sally’s next dosage isn’t till evening. You can call me there, if you need me.”
It’s with a feeling of hot angry shame that I hand over the full picture of Sally’s mental torment to the pharmacist on Eighth Avenue: the muscle relaxant cogentin, the anticonvulsant valproic acid, the antipsychotic haloperidol, a sleeping pill, an antianxiety agent—everything she was taking at the hospital, and lithium thrown in for good m
easure in the event that it proves to be therapeutic.
I read judgment in the pharmacist’s cocked brow as he ponders the order, though he may just be happy for the business. When he asks for my insurance information, I inform him that I’ll be paying in cash.
“It’ll come to $724,” he says. “I’ll need a deposit. They’ll be ready for pickup in a couple of hours.”
A flash of panic. I have $3,500 left in the bank. Pat has about $1,500.
After paying for the drugs, I walk to my little workroom, my “studio” as I call it, a boxy space in a building by the river where I have been writing, on and off, for the past ten years. Three stories of scaly white paint on a brick facade, the building stands out on West Street like a man who has quit shaving and cutting his hair. In the late 1960s, it was sliced into “affordable work space for artists,” the rents kept in check thanks to the largesse of a philanthropic organization whose long-term aim was to increase real estate values in an area of tenements and abandoned auto repair and printing shops.
I haven’t set foot in my workroom in twenty-four days, and the space feels different, more vacant, unnecessarily bare. The traffic two stories below on West Street echoes loudly, and mites of dust drift from cracks in the trembling walls.
From a drawer I remove the manuscript of the novel I recently completed—or so I believed. Sleep of Reason I called it. A disgraced big-city journalist returns to his hometown, where he lands a job as crime reporter on the local rag. He ends up writing about burglaries that he himself commits, turns his burglar into a popular figure, and then, masquerading as his creation, seduces the woman who rejected him when he was a younger man. The novel had gone to three publishers with hints of future interest but no immediate sale, and I decided to withdraw it from submission with the idea of making some changes.
Now it seems melodramatic, overromantic, my reporter self-destructive and too desperate for love.
I lay the manuscript in front of me on the desk, a crisp pile 405 pages high, neatly typed and proofed for the eyes of prospective editors. With pencil in hand, I find myself eradicating his voice—eradicating the offending “I”—and replacing it with a third-person narrator, omniscient and bloodless.
A suspicious sentence leaps up at me:
There was a hum in the air, the sonar of panic I called it, that special pitch of brutality you hear when things start breaking down.
Deleted. Along with every other passage I deem too emotional or overwrought. Any whisper of chaos that I come across in the narrative is surgically removed, each excision decided upon in an instant with no thought of its effect on the novel as a whole. It’s as if my aim is to neuter the book, to relieve it of feeling itself.
I work steadily in this vein for several hours, until around five. On the river outside my window are kayakers, sailboaters, water-skiers—a resort town scene that I gaze at as if from the wrong end of a telescope. A garbage scow floats past my window on its way to the landfill on Staten Island, accompanied by a raucous mass of seagulls.
As I am leaving, I pass the studio of Joe, the eighty-year-old abstract expressionist painter down the hall. Joe’s door is ajar, his giant box fan driving a torrid gust of air.
“How’s the work going?” I ask.
“Couldn’t be better!”
He hands me a mug of vodka and we listen to Joe’s ancient Maria Callas LPs, surrounded by his paintings: cheerful explosions of color and abruptly changing lines that are emblematic of Joe’s free spirit and hand.
At Bank Street Robin is on the sofa reading a book about the attainment of inner peace. She marks her page and hastily places it in her bag, not wanting me to see it, worried perhaps that I will disapprove. It isn’t serious enough, it isn’t literature. I am oddly pleased; I was under the impression that she had long ago stopped caring about what I thought of her.
Sally is asleep, out of sight, the intensity of her presence as palpable as ever.
“How does she seem?” I ask.
“I think she’s becoming more aware of what’s going on around her. A few hours with Sally and you feel like you’re speeding through a dozen changes. A dozen lives.”
She slings her bag across her shoulder and starts toward the door.
“I made dinner. There’s enough for you and Pat. Sally ate, then said that she couldn’t breathe and would I call an ambulance. I talked her down from that. She told me that we needed to discuss our relationship, but she was going to wait until I calmed down and was myself again. It’s so wild with her. I still haven’t discounted the possibility that she’s in touch with a higher force.”
“I wish she’d get back in touch with the lower one.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to think positively for once in a blue moon.”
As usual, our past overwhelms what the present throws up at us. We remind each other of our younger, unformed selves.
“What she needs now is love, Michael, more than ever, the feeling that she is being cared for no matter what. You know this, of course. I’m not being critical of you, it’s just what I feel from her in the strongest way. I’m very sensitive to her. I have to watch myself. She gets inside me. She always has. Being with her, I sometimes feel as if I’m going to break apart myself.”
I open the door. Robin lingers in the vestibule, inches from me, reluctant to leave. “She lashed out at me when I tried to give her something for her upset stomach. ‘You’re not my doctor!’ It was hard, but I’m proud of the way I handled it. I let it slide away. I’m learning about my emotions—I wish I had done a better job of it earlier. Sometimes you have to let things float by without becoming overattached. It’s a discipline. If you sit quietly you can watch your thoughts drop away like rain. If only I could teach this to Sally. It’s helped me a great deal. You of all people know how emotional I get.”
An hour or two after Robin has left, Sally wakes up and wanders around the apartment, half lost, trying to orient herself to her new surroundings. For an instant she rests her head on my chest. It lasts no longer than the length of time it takes to receive a peck on the cheek, and I stop myself from extracting from it the promise I am looking for. I am her father and I am her nurse, yet I’ve no idea what this dual role will do to us. The nurse’s competence is predicated on detachment, a necessary coldness of heart.
“How would you feel if right now was the end of the world?” asks Sally.
She takes her meds without a peep of protest and tumbles into oblivion again.
I double-lock the apartment door, like Rufus.
Pat comes home churning with a muted energy, and digs into Robin’s vegetable lasagna.
“I’d like you to come to rehearsal at some point,” she says. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready. Probably in a week or two.”
Sally, on the sofa, opens her eyes.
“Welcome home!” says Pat.
She rises, toppling into Pat’s arms like a fallen statue.
Later, when Sally is asleep again, I say, “She’s still far away. I don’t see her coming back. I keep looking for signs.”
“You’re looking too hard, Michael.”
I go back to my studio for a few hours and resume work on the sterilization of my novel.
The Outpatient Behavioral Clinic is located in an austere granite building with carved keystones over the windows in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. The building is mostly devoted to treating ocular diseases, and as we enter, Sally and I nearly collide with a departing patient with a bandage as thick as a dinner roll over his left eye. In the lobby are more people in various phases of macular degeneration and blindness.
The behavioral clinic is a modest suite occupying a narrow sun-drenched corner of the sixth floor.
“Will you be okay, Father, when I’m grown up and it’s time for me to leave you?” asks Sally. And she busses me on the cheek as if she has leaped into an imaginary future in which it is time to bid me good-bye.
After a couple of minutes a woman comes out t
o the waiting area to greet us: Dr. Nina Lensing, Sally’s new psychiatrist, German-born, in her midthirties, wearing a wrinkled top with spaghetti straps, small scholarly metal-rim glasses, and a helmet of bright blond hair.
As soon as Dr. Lensing has introduced herself, Sally blurts out, “Why did this happen to me? Why me?”
Lensing’s face opens up into a delighted smile. “I’ve asked the same question about myself under different circumstances a dozen times. And you know what? We’re going to work on finding the answer.”
Sally’s leg is shaking at lightning speed.
“I bet you feel as if there’s a lion inside you,” says Lensing.
“How did you know?”
“Have you been pacing a lot?”
“It’s all I do. When I’m not sleeping.”
Lensing nimbly lowers herself into the waiting area chair next to Sally’s and tells her in a tone of woman-to-woman straight talk that mania—and she refers to it as if it is a separate entity, a mutual acquaintance of theirs—mania is a glutton for attention. It craves thrills, action, it wants to keep thriving, it will do anything to live on. “Did you ever have a friend who’s so exciting you want to be around her, but she leads you into disaster and in the end you wish you never met? You know the sort of person I mean: the girl who wants to go faster, who always wants more. The girl who serves herself first and screw the rest. It could be a boy too, of course, I’m just giving an example of what mania is: a greedy, charismatic person who pretends to be your friend. We may not be able to resist her every time, but one of the things we’re going to try to learn is to recognize her for what she is.”
“You’re talking about me. I’m that girl,” says Sally.
“Sally, they don’t make them any smarter than you. Now come on, let’s get cracking.”
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