My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

by Mark Lukach

  “You don’t know how important this bike ride was to me,” I said to the nurse who had heard my tears and come to my bedside in alarm. She held my hand and looked at me with the pity I so craved. My collarbone was broken, my body bruised, the bike ride that was meant to heal me had instead made me more vulnerable than ever. Worst of all, this year of illness looked like it would forever shape how I interacted with Giulia in an uncertain future. My emotions were now set on a hair trigger. Anything short of complete empathy from Giulia sent me into a tailspin of insecurity. Broken and alone with my injuries, I needed Giulia to take care of me now. Instead, she chastised me and rushed off the phone to eat dinner with her family. Even before my bike crash, this cycle of reactions versus expectations was becoming the new currency in our marriage. I worried we were doomed to never return to a place of mutual compassion and patience. Lying in the hospital bed a world away from Giulia, I was consumed by my doubts.

  Giulia called back a few hours later while I was trying to figure out how I was going to get myself home from the hospital, ninety minutes away from our house and unable to ride a bike.

  “How are you going to take care of yourself with your arm in a sling?” Giulia asked.

  “I’m pretty sure I can handle myself,” I said.

  “You’re definitely going to need some help cooking, feeding yourself.”

  “Who can help?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Giulia responded. There was an awkward silence, and then I stated what felt obvious.

  “Maybe the best person to help take care of me is you, Giulia,” I said.

  “Me? I’m all the way in Italy. How am I supposed to help?”

  I snapped back at her impatiently, “I just spent a year of my life doing nothing but worrying about you, thinking about you, and caring for you—”

  “Oh Jesus, Mark,” Giulia interrupted. “I hope you’re not planning to hang this over my head for the rest of my life. I’m better now. Get over it.”

  We both hung up without saying good-bye. Thankfully, my phone rang almost immediately with a call from Giulia’s friend Annie, who lived in nearby Petaluma. I had texted her that I was in the hospital in Santa Rosa. She came to pick me up and drove me the hour and a half to the city. I was still in bike shorts.

  The next day, I woke up with my back aflame. Turns out I had crashed in a patch of poison oak. I felt even more hopeless.

  six

  August 2010

  Giulia came home a week later. My poison oak was fading, my arm was in a sling, and we were a mess. We existed in different worlds. I submerged deeper into my depression, and she wanted nothing to do with it. I took long walks by myself in the fog, three to four hours at a time, listening to books on tape. I watched a lot of TV. I could easily plow through four hours of Scrubs in a single sitting.

  Giulia stayed away. She felt entitled to enjoy her life and health now that she had it back. She was almost always out, anywhere that would take her from the rituals of her depression. She didn’t want to walk the dog, or take art classes, or do aerobics at our goofy gym. Soon after she got better, we stopped going to aerobics class and then canceled our gym membership. Instead she started antiquing and hunting through vintage stores for clothes and spending money we didn’t have on knickknacks for the house.

  Neither of us worked. We had saved up for a down payment on a house before Giulia got sick but had spent the past year eating away at that. Home prices in San Francisco were skyrocketing, and our supposed down payment was dwindling with each month. Home ownership looked increasingly unlikely. I puttered around with a few attempts at freelance writing, but we didn’t earn much money. It seemed like our self-assigned jobs were to avoid each other.

  My therapist suggested we see a couples’ therapist. Giulia’s therapist agreed. They both recommended the same person.

  Our new therapist was cheery and compassionate. As soon as we sat down for our first appointment, we launched into the messy, tense story of Giulia’s illness.

  We tried to be honest about the specifics. We both had a lot of anger, which wasn’t going to be easy to unpack. I learned that Giulia called me “the Medicine Nazi” in group therapy. She had come up with the name with Marie, a friend she had made in IOP. Giulia also told me she hated the plans that I put together for her while she was recovering. Everything I did felt suffocating to her.

  I wasn’t ready to hear any of this. The rejection stung deeply. My efforts to help Giulia were felt by her as micromanaging and oppressive. I had been anticipating some sort of thank-you at the end of the long haul, but instead I got a resentful “no thank you.”

  I also spoke honestly, and it was just as hard. I shared with Giulia my moments of eye contact with that hostess near the hospital, when I had parked the car and indulged in a moment of escape to another life. Giulia was furious to hear this, reacting as though I had been unfaithful to her. I tried to explain that it was barely a second, and subconscious, but she didn’t care.

  The sessions were brutal. We both cried throughout them and left feeling worse than we had at the start. And we hadn’t even come close to approaching the truly terrifying question of whether or not we could be mutual in our care for each other. While it was important for us to hear each other’s interpretations of the past, it didn’t feel like we were doing anything to heal the rift between us. We were just ripping open very tender wounds and paying $180 an hour for it. We lasted only a few sessions and then unceremoniously dropped out.

  My arm healed. I got back into surfing and running. The restoration of my physical health helped a bit, as did avoiding our biggest conflict. But we were biding time. We both knew something needed to change.

  About three months after I broke my collarbone, Giulia surprised me by purchasing two tickets to see Sufjan Stevens in concert. Sufjan was one of my all-time favorite musicians. I had first discovered him back when I lived in Baltimore and spent many of those long bus rides up to New York listening to his music.

  With all of our free time and free spending, it was our first date since our celebratory meal at our favorite pho place, more than four months before.

  It was also my first chance to see Sufjan live, and I loved every minute of the concert. He played songs from his latest album, the weird, computerized Age of Adz, which I had been listening to on repeat for the past few months.

  The last song of the concert was a twenty-five-minute opus called “Impossible Soul.” Sufjan danced in fairy wings and neon clothes, and for the first time I really listened to the words. The song is about a relationship: the boy wants out, the girl wants in. The whole thing boils down to the girl reminding the boy, over and over again, of how much better off they were when they were together, or as she put it, “Boy, we can do much more together. It’s not so impossible.”

  I had been struggling to articulate what exactly I wanted from Giulia, and Sufjan gave me the language in “Impossible Soul.” I needed to hear these words from Giulia. I was angry because I didn’t feel loved. Whether my sense of abandonment was real or imagined, it was the reality of my experience, and I needed Giulia to tell me that we were better off together. But I felt like I couldn’t ask for it. That would cheapen it. It had to happen on its own.

  I left the concert euphoric. It had been an amazing show, but more important, it gave me a better understanding of how I felt and what I wanted. Giulia and I had suffered through her illness together, but we were trying to recover separately. We had to recover together. It shouldn’t be so impossible.

  I had missed the beginning of the school year, so there was no returning to work. Giulia futzed around on Craigslist, trolling for jobs, but neither of us was ready for a career again. We were still too shell-shocked from our traumatic year.

  We decided instead to travel. That nest egg hadn’t vanished yet, so why not spend it on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. We loved Ocean Beach, but it was where Giulia had gotten sick. We needed a change of setting. Yes, she had gone to Italy, and I’d had my bike
ride, but we needed to do something together.

  We toyed with going to one place for a long time or many places for a short time. Everywhere was an option. New Zealand. Indonesia. South Africa. India. The planning was fun, but it also showed us how much our roles had changed in our marriage. Giulia had always been the one focused on the details. I tended toward the spontaneous. But now I was the one who kept questioning the practicality of our ideas, and Giulia kept pushing them further afield. She wanted to be gone for a year; I thought about Goose, and having to give up our house and pack our stuff into storage, so I lobbied for only a few months. She wanted to be as off the beaten path as possible; I never wanted to be too far from psychiatric help, just in case.

  We finally settled into the idea of an around-the-world trip for four months. We’d do a month in Indonesia. And then another month in Kenya, where friends had started a girls’ school, so we could volunteer. And a whole bunch of little stops in between. We’d leave San Francisco at Christmas and be home mid-April, in time for me to apply for teaching jobs the following year.

  We consulted her psychiatrist and stocked up on more medicine than we could possibly need. We packed up our clothes and sublet the house to a family we found on the Internet. We drove Goose up to Cas and Leslie’s house and had a tearful good-bye.

  We cleared security at the airport, and Giulia instinctively handed me her passport and ticket to carry. I had never carried the passports before. In all our previous travels, Giulia had carried the passports. We both knew she was the more responsible one.

  This year of illness had changed us into different people, and we needed to relearn how to be together in our new roles.

  We began our trip with two weeks on an organic farm in Bali. We had no Wi-Fi or air-conditioning, the perfect ingredients for living at a slower pace. We spent long, quiet hours together picking lettuce, cooking dinner, and sweeping away the ants that were everywhere. We then set out for four dreamy weeks of wandering around Indonesia, sleeping on beaches, eating banana pancakes, motorcycling around dusty roads, paradising.

  Most of all, we enjoyed ourselves. There was no official declaration of a truce, but we gingerly avoided each other’s triggers. It’s as if we made an unspoken agreement that while we were surrounded by so much splendor, we shouldn’t fight. All it took was avoiding certain topics.

  After six weeks of carefree living in Indonesia, we jetted off to Bangkok, where we met Suoc. She had always wanted to come to Thailand, and our around-the-world trip offered as good an excuse as any. Compared with the beaches of Indonesia, Bangkok was unwelcome, polluted, and traffic clogged. We did some sightseeing the first day but were content to spend much of the time at the hotel, enjoying the continental breakfast and the air-conditioning.

  Our second night in Bangkok, Giulia went into her mom’s room to watch Blue Valentine. I stayed in our room to read a book. Giulia returned a few hours later, sat down on the bed, and burst into tears. I had no idea what was going on.

  “What’s up, honey, are you okay?” I asked, putting my book down.

  Giulia kept crying, her hands covering her face. I laid my hand on her back and slowly rubbed to try to calm her down. “What happened?”

  “Are we going to make it, Mark?” she asked.

  “What? Where’s this coming from?”

  “I mean, is this relationship going to make it?”

  I froze. We had spent all six weeks of our trip and many of the months preceding it avoiding any discussion of our relationship. With one question, the whole tenor of the trip changed.

  “Blue Valentine was so sad, but it was really honest,” Giulia said. “The husband and wife fell out of love. People do that all the time, but they pretend they haven’t. In the movie, they were honest about it, so they separated.” She started to cry again. “Have we fallen out of love?”

  I hung my head. It was such a sad question to have to ask, and sadder still to try to answer. But hearing it said aloud somehow felt like a relief.

  I had been silently wondering the same. The way we’d been treating each other suggested that the cracks in our relationship might be gaping chasms. Perhaps we had been too intoxicated with puppy love to notice them before, and it took the crucible of psychosis and suicidal depression to show us our relationship for what it really was. Or maybe our young love had been untested.

  “What makes you think that we’ve fallen out of love?” I asked. I was afraid to answer her question, because I worried the same thing, but if I answered her, she would never unhear my uncertainties. I cowered in silence.

  “A lot of things. We don’t like the same stuff. You read your books and listen to your podcasts, and I watch my romantic comedies. You read the news and I watch the Oscars. I like wine and you don’t drink anything. Some nights I wish we could share a bottle of wine together. Or go get a coffee. You don’t even drink coffee. We don’t even have that ritual.”

  “Those are small things,” I said. “People don’t have to like the same things to get along.”

  Giulia twisted her mouth skeptically.

  “But you’re right, we don’t like the same things, and it would probably be easier if we did,” I said quietly, my words tripping over themselves in an embarrassed mumble. “It would be nice if we could get our coffees together. Or surf together. Or play tennis. Maybe it would be better if whatever made us feel good individually could also make us feel good together.”

  She breathed deeply and then looked me right in the eyes. In college, we used to lie in bed and look into each other’s eyes long after we had run out of things to talk about, and we would fall asleep that way. She hadn’t looked at me this intently in years.

  I looked right back, and I began to feel dizzy. In my periphery I noticed the corners of the room dissolving, and before long, the whole room had faded away. Only Giulia was left. Her outline shone bright against a nonexistent background. She was close enough that I could reach out to touch her, but my body had disappeared, too. I was nothing more than a pair of eyes, and I saw her under a microscope, but also from high up in the sky, ten thousand miles above.

  I saw in Giulia all the impressions I had made of her over the course of our ten years together: a glamorous, ambitious rock star of a student; a businesswoman par excellence; a joyful, adventurous companion; a wounded, confused wife; a helpless, terrified patient in a psych ward. I tried to see through the layers of these impressions, to see Giulia for who she was and not who I wanted to believe her to be; but then she began to fade, too. I wondered if I even knew who Giulia was. Had I created an array of expectations for who she should be, canceling her out in the process? Everything became blurry, my head spun, and I thought I was going to faint.

  “Mark, are you okay?” Giulia asked me, the concern noticeable in her voice.

  Her words snapped me back into the room, sitting on the bed with her, and I reached out and put my hand on her hand.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just that question—it’s the hardest question you can ask of a relationship. It made me dizzy just to hear you ask it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she offered.

  “Oh no, don’t be sorry. It’s important. We have to talk about this. We can’t ignore our problems like we did for the last six weeks in Indonesia. It’s a good thing.”

  “So what do you think? Are we going to make it?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know the direct answer to that. But, sitting here now, I realized that I have all these expectations of you. In our past together, I have collected conclusions about who you are and how you will react to things. Like, this question you’re asking, if we’re going to make it. I’ve thought about it dozens of times, but I never brought it up because I was afraid that if I did, you would freak out at me.

  “I’m just as terrified as you are that our marriage might not work out. But I’ve never brought it up to anyone, not even my therapist, because I am afraid of the answer.”

  “But you gotta give me a chance to have the conve
rsation with you,” she said.

  “Yeah, exactly. I think I know you so well that I don’t let you actually be you. So now here we are, talking about if our marriage is gonna make it, and you’re the one who brought it up. And we’re not angry. I didn’t expect this at all. Shows you what I know.”

  We sat in an awkward silence for a minute. “So what do you think? You’re still not answering my question,” Giulia said.

  “I don’t know, really. I just think it’s important to realize that I have expectations of who you are, and you have expectations of who I am, and right now our expectations are stuck in a conclusion that we aren’t going to be good to each other. I’m always imagining you as a mean Giulia even before you act, and I get so angry at you about it.”

  “But the truth is, I am pretty mean,” Giulia said. “And you are, too. We aren’t nice to each other, Mark. I used to spend so much time thinking about how I could make you happy. Now, I don’t even try. You’re right there, every day, but I don’t try to be nice.”

  “Yeah, but maybe how we act is because we’re preemptively reacting, if that makes any sense. It’s like I know you’re not going to be nice to me, so I don’t try being nice to you first, because no matter what I do, you’re going to be pissed off by it, so why try.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure if this makes any sense. I’m just saying—we haven’t always treated each other this way, which means we don’t have to treat each other this way forever. We weren’t mean to each other when we were eighteen.”

  “But there was a spark when we fell in love at age eighteen,” Giulia said. “That happened in a moment. And honestly, I want that spark back.”

  “A spark isn’t the same thing as loving someone, we both know that.”