All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

I do. Here’s one: I fear I’ll one day put a gun to my head, to know what that feels like, to bring myself closer to the one person I can’t seem to reach another way.

  Um, okay.

  Also, I could have saved him. That’s the big one. I had my chance. I could have saved him but I betrayed him with selfishness and inattention.

  I don’t buy it.

  I knew you wouldn’t. I don’t expect you to. But it’s true.

  She sat for a long time in silence.

  Do you really believe that? she said at last.

  I’ve thought about it almost every day since he died, I said.

  Here’s what I think, she said. I think what he did was the ultimate act of selfishness. And you’re one of the casualties. You didn’t kill him. He killed himself. But you can’t bring yourself to blame him, so you’ve got to go looking for suspects, and the most convenient one to finger is yourself.

  A fury rose within me, an urge to defend him, but I couldn’t think of how, so I held my tongue.

  Be clear what it is you’re mourning, she said. You’re not mourning what you had. You’re mourning what can never be. You’re mourning the loss of possibilities.

  I wanted to tell her she was wrong, or maybe just glib. I wanted to tell her that the manner of the death made a difference in the manner of the mourning. I wanted to tell her that a suicide bequeathed the grieving a unique blend of emotions—anger and guilt first among them—and an intensity of regret otherwise unknown in the human experience. But I feared her superior education, her wider breadth of reference. She’d probably run circles around me, leaving me feeling lousy about how poorly I understood the central event of my life, and I didn’t need it, not that night—I was too invested in my own mythology; I’d exposed myself and been told I was wrong—so I rolled over and pretended to sleep.

  We honed a routine of twice-weekly telephone talks, occasional visits to the other’s city, afternoons in bed whenever possible, followed by nights on the town. We tinkered with the definition of our situation. For a time we were having an affair. For a time we were boyfriend-girlfriend. For a time we were even something like friends with benefits, free to see other people. Depending on the week, we were either in cahoots or in love, or all of the above.

  Bob Bartley and I talked so infrequently I remember every occasion with uncanny clarity. I even recorded these encounters in my journal, they were so strange and suggestive. The first time, he asked if I would proofread something he’d written. I didn’t want to proofread his work, but you don’t say no to the most important person at the world’s most important publication.

  I read the column. I disagreed with everything in it, but it was powerfully written. That was the unmistakable thing about his editorials—even if you thought they were crude ideological screeds, as they almost invariably were, they left you with no doubt about what he believed. He claimed to craft everything he wrote for optimum “muzzle velocity,” as he once put it to another journalist. His style owed a great deal to the old yellow journalism of personal invective; he didn’t just savage his opponents’ ideas, he aimed to obliterate his opponents altogether, or at least ream them with a rusty poker for their intellectual bankruptcy, their moral cretinism.

  I told him I saw only one mistake. He’d made the words “pipe dream” one word, with no space between them. I told him it should be two words, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, which was my authoritative source in such matters.

  He told me he didn’t care what Webster’s New World Dictionary said. It was his editorial, and he wanted pipe dream to be one word: pipedream. He said I should delete the space I’d inserted between pipe and dream.

  I did.

  We talked a second time a few months later. I was standing in the hallway with a colleague from the Leisure & Arts page, and Bob Bartley approached us. He said he had two doctors’ appointments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan the next day. He had a bit of leisure time to spare between them, and wondered if there was any art worth seeing at the museums on the Upper East Side.

  I said, Yes, there’s a wonderful show of Walker Evans photos at the Met.

  He said, Thanks, I may have a look at that.

  A few days later I met him in the hallway. I said hello.

  He did not say hello.

  I said, Bob, did you see the Walker Evans show at the Met?

  He stopped and looked at me. I wondered if I should have called him Mr. Bartley.

  He said, Yes, I saw it.

  What did you think?

  It wasn’t for me, he said. I stayed for five minutes and went to the Egyptian galleries.

  Walker Evans was, among other things, a great documentarian of Depression-era southern poverty; Bob Bartley was appalled by the very idea of poor people. He’d once told the Washington Post Magazine that he didn’t think there were any poor people left in America, “just a few hermits or something like that.” To Bob Bartley, Walker Evans’s photos were a form of pornography that depicted human beings in a sinful state of filth and depravity, and such images had no place in an American museum.

  Of course I disagreed. Not only did I appreciate the unadorned honesty of Walker Evans’s photographs, I’d grown up in a poor family myself. As a child coming of age on a farm where we couldn’t make enough money to get by, I’d stood in line with my mother at the community hall in Currie, Minnesota, for handouts of surplus government cheese. Pictures of people like us from the time of the Great Depression hung in many museums, farmers too broke to feed themselves without government help.

  Bob Bartley didn’t believe the government should be in the cheese-handout business.

  Rachel came to visit during her winter break. She was working on a long paper and wanted someplace quiet to hole up and write. My apartment served nicely, as I was gone each day for ten hours. I’d come home from work to find her in bed, exactly where I’d left her, surrounded by a scattering of papers. Wound up from copyediting against deadline, I’d pour myself a glass of bourbon and put some Miles Davis on the stereo, cook us dinner. The music didn’t bother her. She stayed in the bedroom, naked, unshowered, writing intently. I made it my duty to see that she ate, since she claimed to be uninterested in food, only words, ideas. I brought her cold drinks. When she panicked at the prospect of running out of paper, I went to the stationery store and bought a stack of legal pads. I was doing my best to be the handmaiden to creativity. That’s what I would have wanted from her.

  I took her at her word that she was on to something, a new theory, a work of genius. I could hardly tell her to stop; that would have been heresy to both of us. If you’re working and it’s flowing, you run with it. The muse didn’t visit very often, so you had to give yourself over like a love slave when she did.

  I assumed at first that her claims to genius were at least tinged with irony. On the third evening she began to frighten me. She’d hardly slept. She talked in great strings of sentences, making metaphors one after another. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened as her pronouncements became ever more grandiose. She claimed she was channeling James Joyce. She said she was rewriting the Book of Genesis. She was drawing a map for the politics of a new era. She was going to touch off a peaceful revolution, achieve what Marx had only dreamed of.

  She was going mad in my bedroom.

  It’s the year one, she said. It’s a politics for an age of information overload. The only difference between words and worlds is a typographical error. The only difference between immodality and immorality is a typographical error. I’m writing a bible for our times. It’s going to change everything. George Bush won’t bring peace to the Middle East. I will. I’m going to show the way. I’m going to have enemies, and they’re going to want to put me away in an institution. I’m going to tell them I’m already in an institution. The University of Virginia is my institution. I’m going to make geniuses of everyone in the world. I’m going to succeed where Jesus failed.

  How? I asked.

  Because Jesus was not
a woman. Because women weren’t allowed to paint and act and study philosophy and math and they weren’t allowed to write. I’m the first. I’m the female Jesus.

  I told her that she was scaring me, that she sounded delusional, but she only laughed at me with pity.

  You’ll see, she said. Maybe you should just go away for a while. Come back when I’m finished. Then you can read it and know.

  I left to run some errands. I stayed away for hours, stopped in a bar for drinks, hoping that by the time I returned she’d have left.

  She hadn’t moved.

  She started calling herself a mystic and a prophet. She claimed that if only she could sit down with Hillary Clinton, one-on-one, and teach her to see the world through the theory of the oneness of everything, then Mrs. Clinton would become our next President and the world would never again experience want or war. I began to argue with her, my voice rising in frustration. She remained unperturbed. She said she was sad that I couldn’t see the future the way she could, but that one day soon I would. I would see and I would understand. She would help me along to the place where she was, and there we’d be partners in bliss.

  The next morning she stuffed her papers in a bag and left for the train to her father’s place. Some of her clothes remained scattered in the bedroom. She didn’t say a proper goodbye, just walked out the door in mismatched socks, her unwashed hair twisted in little pretzel shapes. I loathed myself for the relief I felt once she was gone. I was scared she might never be the same, that by encouraging her, replenishing her paper supply and bringing her dinner in bed, telling her all the while to keep writing, I’d unwittingly chauffeured the vehicle that had driven her over the edge.

  I called Rachel’s father, but he didn’t answer. I left a message telling him to be alert for changes in his daughter’s state of mind. Then I caught the train to work and tried not to think about any of it. But when I got back home I looked up some half-remembered lines of Seidel:

  You said you were Baudelaire—

  Or was it Marlowe?—

  You said you were Blake

  Talking English with the angels,

  And said you were Christ, of course,

  But never would say

  You were yourself.

  They appeared in a poem called “Hart Crane Near the End,” and I didn’t need reminding how he’d met his.

  Her father saw right away that something was wrong. It took forty-eight hours to get Rachel an appointment to see her longtime therapist. After talking to Rachel for fifteen minutes, the shrink advised admitting her to a psychiatric emergency room, ASAP. The shrink’s secretary called an ambulance. The cops arrived. They spoke to the shrink, who told them what the situation was: a manic episode gone out of control. The cops then talked to Rachel, who calmly convinced them she was fine. An argument ensued among Rachel’s father, the therapist, and the cops. While they argued, Rachel slipped away and vanished into the city, but before she left she told another therapist that if she were forced to go to the hospital she’d kill herself. She did not want to be held captive. She would not stand for it.

  Rachel’s father called me at work, told me Rachel was on the lam. If I saw her or heard from her I was to call immediately. I hurried through my work of fitting headlines, writing photo captions, proofing copy, then I rushed for the elevator, hustled over West Street on the pedestrian bridge, and crossed Liberty Street to the subway station beneath the World Trade Center towers. I took an uptown N to Fourteenth Street, caught the East Side express to Fifty-ninth, transferred back to the N train home. No message on the machine; no sign she’d been in the apartment. I ate a bowl of soup. I paced. I called two of her friends in New York but neither one answered.

  There was a knock at the door, firmer than she would have knocked. I squinted through the peephole at two cops. I opened the door. They flashed their badges, offered their names. They asked if I’d seen her recently. I told them it had been a couple of days.

  Do you mind if we come in? one of them asked.

  Not at all.

  Just a formality, the other said. Gotta make sure she’s not cut up in pieces in your tub.

  They sauntered around the apartment, thumbs hooked in their belts, leaning torso-first through doorways. I heard the curtain rings slide back and forth on the shower rod.

  The cops thanked me and left.

  An hour later she rang the buzzer, three large shopping bags in her arms, a new pair of shoes on her feet. She told me she’d eaten a nice dinner and had her nails done. Afterward, she went inside a Catholic church somewhere in Manhattan, sat in the back pew.

  I heard breathing, she said. And whispering. Like the devil was whispering in my ear. I could tell because the voice spoke with a forked tongue.

  She went on about rectifying Einstein’s inadvertent creation of the atom bomb, using her vision to reveal the secrets of the unity of matter encoded in the invisible digits of zeros and ones that undergirded the vast computer web. She said she’d discovered a theory that would have saved Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath from suicide, if only she’d been able to share it with them.

  When she went to the bathroom, I called her father.

  Just stay with her tonight, her father said. I’ll come get her in the morning.

  Rachel emerged from the bathroom and gave me a funny look. I tried to stay calm as a fury of helplessness rose inside of me.

  I’m sorry, I said, what’s the plan again?

  Silence on the other end.

  I think sooner is better, I said.

  Okay. I’ll call the cops and have them come right over.

  Fifteen minutes later, the same two cops came to the door. The look on Rachel’s face when she saw them absolutely crushed me.

  You didn’t, she said. You didn’t just betray me.

  I’m sorry. It’s for the better.

  You backstabbing son of a bitch, she said. You dirty Judas!

  I rode with her in the ambulance, held her hand. For the first time she looked scared. She said she’d known all along that her genius would be punished, she just hadn’t expected me to be among her punishers.

  Her father met us at the hospital. He explained the situation to the intake nurse. Two other nurses coaxed Rachel onto a gurney and wheeled her down a dismal hallway, through a set of doors. We heard a shriek, then a long, piercing wail.

  We later learned they’d strapped her down and injected her with Haldol and Benadryl, a typical welcome-to-the-psych-ward cocktail.

  The next time I saw her was in a private room at Mount Sinai Medical Center, a few days later. She was heavily doped on a combination of drugs whose names I couldn’t keep straight. She still professed visions, warned against the unseen and disruptive powers of static electricity. I didn’t know who she was anymore, or what she was in the process of becoming. I feared she might never come back, which made me scared for her, and almost as scared for me. Her psychotic break confirmed a thing I’d long suspected, that if I let people get too close to me they were doomed; she later admitted that in the worst of her mania she’d been gripped by visions of my brother as described in the journals of mine she’d read, those grotesque gropings toward understanding him by imagining his brain sprayed on the wall.

  They brought a man in, she said. A big black man, and they did the same thing to him that they did to me. They held him down on the bed and put a needle in his arm, and he screamed just like I did, and I said, Don’t you see? He’s human and he needs to be touched with love and not poked by your instruments. They told me to go away and shut up. It’s not your concern. Go away. It’s not your concern. They said it over and over.

  She turned and spoke to her nurse.

  You’re a healer. I like how you treat me. You don’t poke me with anything. You touch me. You hold my hand. You’re helping me come back to the ground. It got scary up there.

  I began to visit her every day. Sometimes she was happy to see me. Other times she hardly appeared to notice I was there. She’d long since st
opped asking questions of anyone. She slept, or watched TV, or read and reread the get-well cards she’d been sent.

  It’s so beautiful, she said. So beautiful. Everyone is together. My mom is laughing with me. She brought me chocolates and flowers and lots of gifts. She never did that before. This is what I want, exactly what I want. I’m so happy. It’s been so long since it was like this.

  What a few days earlier she’d viewed as a betrayal and an imprisonment, she now saw as a means of unifying the nuclear family. Her parents had divorced more than half her lifetime ago, but now she’d gone to the loony bin and brought everyone together again. Her mania was a blessing in disguise, she said, just the thing to repair the breach between her mother and father, and between them and her siblings.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wouldn’t last.

  One night she asked if I would please bring her a map and a book about gardening. I want to look at places far away from here, she said. I want to think about growing things. I want the idea of fresh air. I can’t have any here. They won’t let me leave. Not even for five minutes.

  The next night I brought her a guide to flower gardening and a Rand McNally atlas. She set them aside without looking at them.

  During her second week at Mount Sinai, I fell ill with a foul winter cold. I called in sick to work and didn’t leave my bed for three days. I’d never been so thankful to feel so bad; it meant I didn’t have to sit in her sterile room and pretend I was still her boyfriend.

  The morning she checked out, her father dropped her off at my place with a prescription bag full of pill bottles. After a few minutes of bogus pleasantries he fled, as I’d figured he would.

  I tended to Rachel with cool solicitude, clinical courtesy. She shone with a glittering confusion, beautiful and fragile as a Fabergé egg. That fragility haunted me. Our relationship had been best when we’d offered each other pleasure with our minds and bodies on a plane of equals. I had no sense that she wanted me anymore, only that she needed me, and it was precisely that neediness, so uncharacteristic of her, that made me want to flee. If I truly wanted to learn the art of taking care, here was my chance—but to be needed by someone was more than I could stand, because I knew I would fail. I just knew.