by Janet Capron
“You causing a disturbance around here?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, officer, I was overcome by heartbreak. My boyfriend’s up there with another woman.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think he wants to have anything to do with you. Better let it go,” he said.
“No guy’s worth that,” his partner said. “Why don’t you just go home now.”
At least when I got to Maggie’s, she was still safely snoring. I don’t know if I could have withstood any more confrontations just then. As soon as I lay down in my pink-and-cherry-red bedroom, I fell into a peaceful coma-like sleep.
Highcrest
Around the turn of the century, Highcrest was built as an homage to the great English estate, with its wild gardens, faux woods, gazebos, and vast, rolling lawn. In the sixties, a few enterprising psychiatrists, sensing a buck in the drug-plagued generation, had transformed Highcrest into a profit-making institution, designed almost exclusively for the recalcitrant sons and daughters of the well-to-do. It was not what is now known as a “rehab,” where the staff educates the patients about addiction. There were no meetings, not even group therapy. Instead, Highcrest was a last bastion of the traditional brand of psychiatry that subscribed to the theory if the patient’s problems were confronted and dealt with, the excessive behavior would simply disappear. In other words, analysis alone could cure anything, except psychosis. They held out small hope for me.
But then, few of my fellow inmates were as messed up as I was when I arrived, as evidenced by the fact that I was confined to the “seclusion room” on the attic floor along with a Jamaican nurse’s aide. Lucy, my own private warden, hugged the same bright green acrylic cardigan around her sagging, white nylon bosom every day and read strange tabloids with photographs on their covers like the one of the two-headed baby or the man who hiccupped to death. I don’t know where she found these weeklies; I had never seen them in those days on any newsstands in Manhattan.
The doctors had decided at my intake that I was “too euphoric.” They prescribed elephantine doses of Thorazine and Stelazine to bring me down, but in the meantime, I wasn’t allowed to mix with the other patients. From my attic window, I watched those patients, my contemporaries, as they were ushered out onto the great lawn for their morning recess. They tramped slowly back and forth in groups of twos and threes, bundled up in their Saks Fifth Avenue duffle coats. Keeping their heads down, they shuffled the leaves along underfoot and flapped their arms in the cold, the first frost making their breath smoke. I didn’t particularly envy them their relative freedom. Except it was hard to get comfortable where I was being held, under fluorescent lights in a low-ceilinged room that had been furnished like a kindergarten lunchroom, with long tables built close to the ground and miniature plastic chairs. There were no toddlers at Highcrest. My guess was the doctors got a deal at the local nursery-school tag sale.
In the beginning of my stay in the attic, I saw handwriting form in the scratched red linoleum. It began by printing GET WELL in jaunty, raised block letters, which was all fine and good, but then it turned into looping script and became prolific, as tomes full of hysterical directives and exhortations began to appear. I had to ask the incorporeal author, or authors, to please stop; it was not appropriate in a nuthouse. Before the Thorazine and the Stelazine could shoot me down entirely, I had one final vision—the most panoramic of them all.
The vision had been triggered by something I read in Plato on one of my sojourns into a secondhand bookshop downtown. From what I understood, the philosopher contended that we started out whole but were torn into halves, and then spent the rest of eternity looking for each other. No wonder it was so excruciating for me, I thought. I was the torn and ragged half, the open wound that knew itself. By contrast, Michael was in denial; nevertheless it was true, he was my other half. Inside the hospital I discovered just how right I was when one night, in the dark safety of my private bedroom, I witnessed Michael and me cast in a variety of roles across the arc of centuries. I was watching a succession of tiny movies inside my head, except the images were more vivid than celluloid; they were three-dimensional and shimmered like holographs. Pictures came to the surface lit up with the detail and texture of living memory.
Over two thousand years ago, our home was in the desert. Michael was an Old Testament patriarch, loyal to the tribe but most of all to his father. He studied holy books six days a week and often late into the night, and he neglected me, his obedient, illiterate wife. Why was his first duty to God instead of to me, who loved him so? Such a Goody Two-shoes Michael had been in this incarnation, such a self-righteous, inflexible man. He ignored me, and it hurt.
Then I saw myself as a young woman, oiled with patchouli and draped in silk, living in purdah. My lord visited me. I worshipped him, but he treated me with silences. He made love to me from a great emotional distance; I was so far beneath him, it was as if he were depositing his seed into the earth.
In a more recent incarnation, eighteenth-century Europe, we saw each other only once, one night at a ball. I was dressed in a ravishing white gown. Our eyes met across the grand salon; we danced; he disappeared. The pain of trying to love—of being heterosexual in a world that, until lately, had been determined by such inequity—was beginning to wear on us, I could see that. It was getting hard to do more than meet for an hour or two during the course of a lifetime. But at last, on the eve of 1972, the conditions were right (well, close enough).
Afraid that the Thorazine would make me forget, I repeated my vow through the night like a catechism: I would win Michael back. I would make him understand. Nothing they planned to do to me, no amount of tricky brainwashing, could make me be false to my obsession.
And that is what Highcrest taught me, the secret of the recidivist, the glory of duplicity. I walked stiffly through my days like a hardened criminal, avoiding any body language that would betray me with the inverted integrity of one who will not be coerced. I discovered a gritty, spiny bedrock of resistance deep inside that I could touch at will, and yet, during all the hours spent under scrutiny, I was the model patient cooperating fully with authority. I secretly harbored what I thought of as my true self, keeping sight of that self even in my dreams at night. I never surrendered, even as I was assaulted with the routine crucifixion of mind-crushing drugs and the desolate monotony of imprisonment. Despite how it looked on the outside, I never flagged in my resolve to get back to the street.
This was not the case for many of the other inmates. A lot of those kids quickly saw the errors of their ways, and it wasn’t just an act they put on for the doctors either, because during those few furtive moments when we were left to ourselves they had no reason to pretend. Same as taking candy from a baby, I thought, as I watched them fold up like so many dashed kites in the wind. They were only fooling when they were out there, these day-tripping hippies, just along for the ride. Once trapped, they navigated through the corridors of the locked hospital together like a cartload of Flying Dutchmen; their former lives robbed of meaning, they searched bewildered—I could see it in their frightened eyes—for a new world safe from punishment. The whole debased mansion seethed with jailhouse tension.
Exactly what was happening there came home to me on the morning when the entire male staff, a brawny crew disguised as nurses in their benign-looking white suits, dragged two frisky teenage boys who had run away at recess back onto the great lawn. First they trussed up the boys in straitjackets. Then they stuck needles in them and threw each one into isolation. And what had been those fugitives’ original crimes that landed them in Highcrest? I understood the youngest one, a sophomore in high school, had been caught smoking hash in the family rec room, and the other slightly older boy had taken a bad acid trip.
I watched the male patients undergo the solemn ritual of haircuts once a month on barbershop day; I watched the females become passive and demure. It wasn’t going to happen to me. I would not fall for my captors. The way I saw it, Highcrest got results by instillin
g fear, same as any correctional institution, except the hospital, operating for profit, offered less in the way of rehabilitation if possible.
One method I had for keeping aloof was to expose my cute, short, chubby shrink for the supremacist he was. As a young hired hand, he lacked the sophistication of the higher-ups. He was easy. So I asked him what he thought of a world in which women were expected to take care of the kids and men go out and do everything else.
“Did it ever occur to you that men ‘go out and do everything else’ because they can’t stay at home and have children?” he asked me in a Korean accent so thick his words were nearly indecipherable. But I got the gist. His eyes, full of his good nature, were twinkling with the romance of what he just said. This sexist was not going to be my undoing, that much I readily promised myself. As part of my cover, however, I would faithfully report my dreams to him, like an obedient analysand. I excelled at that—he was only the latest in a long line of shrinks, after all.
Then there were my father Rayfield’s frequent visits. Maggie had tried with no success to get him to take responsibility, play the heavy. But precisely because, unlike most people over thirty, he was so laid-back, I could trust him, and I looked forward to seeing him. Before I went completely loco, I had occasionally gone up to see Rayfield, who was now long sober and living quietly with his fourth wife, Betsy, in Cobb’s Wharf, a commuter town on the Hudson. He and I would take drives in his Porsche, during which it became clear he was complicit, comparing my insanity to his own fond memories of the late 1920s, when he was a young byline reporter calling in his stories from a speakeasy.
Add to this our ancestors, a long line of rebels. The first American in our family had run off from English boarding school with two classmates and stowed away in the hull of a ship—one of the few Pilgrims to sail into the harbor at Plymouth Rock who was decidedly not a Puritan.
My mother was enamored of this New England background. Her German Jewish antecedents had come over before the Civil War, and by the middle of the twentieth century, her family’s identification with WASPs was nearly complete. The marriage, while lit up by passing mutual attraction, mostly represented the hallowed tradition of a money-for-pedigree trade. (Except that much later, after my grandmother died, Maggie would learn there would be no inheritance after all. Maggie and I were “nouveau poor”—the other side of the American rags-to- riches story.)
While I was incarcerated at Highcrest, Rayfield and I began to get to know each other better. His stable was near the hospital, so, smelling of leather polish and horse, he made a point of stopping by after his ride. (He was the night news editor on a New York daily, which allowed him to avoid most people most of the time and ride his horse in the afternoon.) Rayfield had done considerable time in sanatoriums himself and obviously felt right at home. We became coconspirators scheming for my release.
“Don’t worry, all you have to do is learn how to play along and you’ll get out of here soon,” he said, patting my hand. One day he said, “You know, some of this is my fault. I’m sorry I neglected you, but I felt so damned guilty, I was paralyzed. Do you think you could ever forgive the old man?”
I didn’t respond right then, but no doubt about it, he knew how to sweet-talk me. Anyway, even if it wasn’t much of an excuse, at least it sounded true.
Naive offender that I was, I continued to be openly defiant, but Rayfield was persistent. He kept telling me I had to act “as if.” “That’s all they’re looking for. Listen to me and you’ll get out of here a lot sooner.”
My shrink decided to take the same candid approach. He smiled one of his twinkly smiles and waved a batch of keys in front of my face. “If you want to be free, you better behave.” Unless I appeared to be making progress, I would never even get out of seclusion, let alone win any privileges, such as the much-coveted two hours of prime-time TV after dinner. I laughed out loud. Of course, how simple. Act the part and you’re as sane as anybody. Once I figured that out, I applied myself. I made friends with some of the other inmates and took up canasta.
The biggest threat to my criminal resolve proved to be the narcoleptics, the Thorazine and Stelazine. Some bunch of pharmaceutical wizards finally managed to encapsulate hell. When administered in large enough doses, these drugs do nothing to soothe the soul; they merely break the circuits of the mind. My imagination shut down and it became impossible to sustain a thought. Each minute was suspended by itself like a sixty-second island without a bridge. The natural flux of emotion was lost to me, and my libido sank into an abyss. I felt marooned inside a now larger body I could barely stand to lug around. There was no escape from the passing of time. Like everyone else, I watched the clock sixteen hours a day.
“Why won’t you let your mother come to see you?” my shrink asked.
“Because the bitch put me in here.”
“She did it to save you, you know that.”
“All she had to do was park me on a beach somewhere. I just needed sun and rest. And it would have been a lot cheaper. No, she didn’t do it to save me. She did it to punish me. So fuck her.”
My will survived. Never, never again. Huddled freezing against the wall on the great lawn so I could smoke, standing in line for my cups of medication, in bed after lights out, or even while I was shoving homemade brownies into my mouth (in a desperate attempt to simulate pleasure), I continued to silently curse everybody.
After months of this, and finally in the spirit of playing along, I consented to a visit from Maggie. She arrived dressed as a demure, beyond-reproach mother in a modest wool shirtwaist. I refused a hug, so she sat primly on the sofa and sniffed. “Don’t stare at me like that, Janet. I had no choice. The beach was out of the question. You were much too ill. You would’ve died, Janet. I hope you stop blaming me, because nobody’s going to let you out of here until you do. But they tell me you’re getting much better. Thank God. This has been the worst ordeal of my life. You have no idea what you put me through. And then you won’t speak to me? As if any of this was my fault. Please get well, Janet. Then you can come home.”
Home? Oh boy, back to Maggie’s again, that famous bastion of sanity. But it was the only way out. Anyway, it was rigged from the start. Maggie was the one holding the keys. Sure enough, after about ten months of incarceration (which some, but not me, might call a short bit), they let me go on condition I stay with her for a while. I damn well wasn’t so-called cured, but I’d learned my lesson. From now on, I would snort speed more intelligently. Crystal meth was like the ocean: you can swim in it; just don’t turn your back on it for long. I understood that much. Each night before I went to sleep both at Highcrest and then right after my release in my pink-and-cherry-red bedroom, I clenched my bloated fists and swore in the unseen face of the now distant God Almighty they would never take me again.
PART II
Highrise
The picture window spanned the better part of the east wall. On the other side of the window, the electric outline of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge hovered at eye level like a giant Peeping Tom. In my new silk slip, slimmer than I had been in a while, I stood with my arms spread, the upper half of my body pressed against the cool, tinted glass. I imagined I was an ebony-hard thing, invincible, leaning into the brink at the prow of a ship. The sounds of the street could not reach me, only the hum of the air-conditioning that whispered through its vent and fanned out unobstructed through the bare L-shaped studio.
The week before, I had put down two months’ rent and one month’s security, and as soon as the check cleared I moved in. Once again my mentor, Corinne, had come to the rescue. She knew of a few vacancies in another Sutton Place building a little farther south. Even though it had all the trappings of an exclusive apartment house, the Coventry was actually full of transients far less reputable than met the eye. Although I managed to get a reference from our pompous family lawyer, it turned out to be unnecessary. The Coventry was an emporium of whores and other fringe types, all of whom had palmed the rental agent and th
e doorman and then slipped in as happily as eels sliding off rocks.
Through the dense bourgeois patina of the Upper East Side there has always run a stunning brass thread, an underweave of polished chicanery—like Berlin between the wars—that the ponderous, academic Upper West Side, for instance, could never hope to match. A few blocks away, ritzy hookers, drug pushers, smugglers, and mafiosi milled unselfconsciously through Bloomingdale’s on weekday afternoons, past worldly, insular Upper East Side matrons who had mastered the rarest of urban skills: deliberate oblivion.
This was the milieu I now prepared myself to enter. Here a woman was free to be greedy and wicked. Here the hierarchy collapsed, inverted even. On the East Side madams hoarded sin in their exclusive fiefdoms. They tucked away their blue money with childlike glee, hiding their jewels in safes, their lives behind compliant doormen. As long as the whores were discreet, their remarkably disinterested neighbors looked the other way. The whores’ materialism grounded me; their sensuality reassured me. High above the street now, I was beyond reproach, beyond the grasp of those doctors waiting to sweep loose women onto locked wards. As long as I had money, they couldn’t touch me. As long as I paid the rent, I was as good as sane.
While I was stewing in Highcrest, I had evolved a working definition of sanity: street-smart. That’s what I aspired to: the habits, the values, the what I thought of as common sense of madams and call girls. They understood the importance of sumptuous textures, sexual novelty, the imperious pleasure of beholding Manhattan at night from a penthouse window—that must be the secret to surviving out on the street, I decided while at Highcrest: live in the senses.