by Ka Hancock
I felt stripped under Mickey’s gaze because he was not wrong.
“I want you to take some time. Let all this uncertainty about me, about us, let it settle.” Mickey kissed my nose, then he walked out.
I took a day to see what it would feel like to not see him or talk to him or touch him, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. He was right; I was pretty okay with whatever was going to happen as long as I had some lead time. Being true to that, I decided that perhaps growing attached to a mentally ill man called for a different kind of falling-in-love protocol. I wanted to understand Mickey’s illness; I wanted to see it from a clinical perspective. So, I called him and asked if I could meet his psychiatrist, and he seemed almost relieved that I’d suggested it.
I liked Gleason Webb immediately. A round man, balding and unassuming, warm and appreciative, he took my hand in both of his. “This is a rare pleasure, Lucy. I feel like I already know you.”
When I told him why I was there, he said that I was a smart girl to look under this rock. I laughed, but I knew he was serious, and after that first meeting, we got to work. In fact, after that, most of my dates with Mickey started out in Gleason’s office.
Dr. Webb thought it was imperative that I understand the black depressions that could completely immobilize Mickey. So he chronicled Mickey’s descents to this dark hell where he could not move, could barely breathe, and did not care if he lived. Dr. Webb made sure I understood how hypomania could quickly lead to a psychotic break. Gleason gave me pharmacological handbooks so I could gain a working knowledge of Mickey’s medications. Mickey gave me journal entries he’d written when he was manic so I could comprehend his inability to rein himself in when he was spinning off the planet.
He was determined to make me understand his disorder. He explained that his thoughts sometimes moved so fast, he actually perceived himself as outrunning whatever the next moment held. He described his psychotic need to race past the day, determined to get so far ahead of it that he could actually look back on it and adjust it to his own specifications.
During these therapeutic dates, Mickey was like a laid-back professor who expounded on his illness in the sympathetic third person—completely rational, a gifted orator. He made no excuse for who—or what—he was, and I was absolutely crazy in love with the man explaining the man. But of course it was the man being explained that I needed to be sure of. I shared this thought with Gleason privately, and his advice to me was to do my best to merge Mickey’s many nuances into a single entity. He had me diagram all of Mickey’s unequal parts, everything from his magnetism to his charm to his cruelty, the neediness that came with his depressions, the irrational self-confidence that was part of the mania, the tenderness and vulnerability. I told Lily at the time that when I looked at all these components, it felt as if I were dating a fraternity.
As his life unfolded before me, Mickey could not comprehend my ability to love him. He backed away from me more than once in an effort to save me. One time he did it for a hellish ten days. I was in the last stretch of finals week with graduation right around the corner, and Mickey’s timing made me furious. My life was on track, I was in love, I was graduating, I was moving home and getting ready to start a new job teaching summer school. Maybe it was everything else I had going on, but my heart couldn’t take his withdrawal, and our conversation quickly turned into a screaming match on my front porch.
He stood there vomiting up what sounded like a speech he’d been rehearsing for weeks. “Lucy,” he’d shouted. “Can you even begin to understand what it’s like to hide the fact that you’re mad from the world? Can you imagine a man who’s taught himself to command his weirdness? I do that all the time. I wear a mask. I’m insane behind it, but I know how to look like a fully functional person to the world. I’ve trained myself not to yell out loud at inappropriate times by promising myself I can do it later. I know how to command my irritability. I morph it into something socially acceptable by promising myself that I can unleash it later. Later, when I’m alone!
“But don’t you see, Lucy? I’ll never be alone if we do this. You’ll be there. You’ll be there when I can’t keep it in anymore, and I’ll scare you and you’ll leave.”
“I won’t leave.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know me!” He was yelling, and I tried to put my arms around him, but he backed away and started up again. “Lucy, you’re not hearing me. I know how to fake it! I know how to look completely sane when I have to. But I can’t keep that up for very long. I have to let it out when I’m by myself.”
“So what? You’d rather be by yourself than deal with me?”
I saw my question had stung him, but he was on a roll. “Yes. Yes, dammit, I think that’s what I want!”
I nodded, my head aching, tears stinging my eyes. “I’m in love with you. And you standing here being an ass doesn’t change that. But you need to decide. It’s your life that you keep trying to push me out of, so the decision is yours. There’s nothing else I can do to prove myself. If who I am is not good enough, and you really want to be alone, then I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Mickey looked as if I’d slapped him, but I was so tired and so mad I didn’t know what else to try.
“Go home, Mickey. Go home and be alone and be nuts if that’s what you need to do.”
“Lucy . . .”
I looked at him and did my best not to cry. I didn’t quite make it, but I lifted my chin and looked him square in the eye. “Mickey, I really think everyone should be important enough to just one other person on this freaking planet to be fought for. Even me. And nobody’s fighting for me. So I’m done.” I walked in and shut the door, the pounding of my heart a hammer in my head. I shoved my piles of notes off the table and threw my textbook against the wall, spilling my Coke. I looked at the mess, thought of the exam at seven thirty in the morning that I was not prepared for, and started to cry in earnest. My head was throbbing. I took three Excedrin PM and went to bed.
Somehow I got through that next week. I passed my last final, picked up my cap and gown and honors ropes, made sure my sisters knew what time to be in their seats the next morning, and then, because I was moving back to Brinley, I set to work packing boxes. Anytime Mickey crossed my mind, I simply turned up the radio. He must have been serious because I had not heard from him.
I had to be at the Matthews Arena and lined up by nine thirty to be ready to march in at ten, and it took everything I had to drag myself there. I’d worked hard and I should have been excited. I was graduating magna cum laude. This was the period at the end of my formal education, and it should have been thrilling, to file into that giant gymnasium to “Pomp and Circumstance.” But I just wanted it over. The arena was massive, but I still had this notion that I could scan the packed-to-capacity seats and find my family. Didn’t happen.
The addresses were blissfully short, and before I knew it, we were graduating. It seemed to take forever to get to my row, but finally I was on my feet. For the most part the crowd had been respectful—a few exuberant whoops, a few cowbells, but mostly just shouts and applause from dignified well-wishers when familial pride got the best of them. Finally, it was my turn. Lucy Houston. I took one step and heard my sisters screaming and above their noise a man shouting, “I love you, Lucy.”
I stopped, stunned, and turned in the direction of the voice, but couldn’t see where it had come from. I’d stood there long enough to disrupt things, and the next graduate had to propel me forward. I accepted my diploma cover thinking I’d imagined it. But then as my dean was hugging me I heard it again, louder. “I LOVE YOU, LUCY.” The dignified head of the department smiled and said, “Someone very loud and obnoxious loves you, Miss Houston. Good for you.”
Somehow I got back to my seat, where I planted myself and looked straight ahead. I knew he was watching me—I could feel it—and all the emotions I’d tried to keep at bay since he walked away broke loose inside me. I ventured a look a few times in the
direction he’d shouted from, but I couldn’t see him. I don’t know how I got through the rest of the ceremony. When it was over, I just sat there, numb and a little afraid of what was happening. Lily found me and wrapped her skinny arms around my neck. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks, I can’t believe I made it.”
She laughed. “Not that. I’m happy for you. He’s wonderful.”
I started to cry all the tears I’d refused to cry since our fight. “What’s happening? What do you mean?”
Then Mickey was there and I was in his arms and he was kissing me and I was crying and Ron was taking pictures and Priscilla was shaking her head, trying not to look concerned.
We got engaged to be engaged that afternoon at lunch with my sisters and Ron. Mickey asked me between the salad and the main course and told me wrapping a string from my tassel around my finger was just a place-keeper until I picked out the real thing. Mickey said I couldn’t really say no since my family had already given us their blessing, something he had apparently obtained that morning in the overflow parking lot.
Mickey told me later that falling in love with me wasn’t just his destiny, it was his crusade. He had taken to heart what I’d said about being fought for and spent the last ten days fighting his demons for me. In the end, he’d won. I was pretty sure it didn’t get better than that. And after sifting through the minutiae of his strangeness, and identifying all his known parts, I simply couldn’t find a good enough reason not to love him. We pledged our imperfect selves to each other and vowed to form something bigger than either of us alone, utterly certain we were capable of our dreams.
We made it official the next week and ordered matching silver bands. I moved home and started my new job teaching history to summer school students. I was in love and life was fabulous. I thought I knew all there was to know about Mickey and that anything I’d missed couldn’t possibly be that important. But I soon learned that knowing and experiencing are two very different things. Despite everything I thought I knew, I had still fashioned the man I was marrying from my own selective notions. Not until a few months later was I forced to see his condition in its shattered totality.
On a Saturday in early June, we’d made plans to go sailing with Ron and Lily. My sisters and I had inherited my father’s most prized possession: a thirty-three-foot Catalina cruiser—The Rose of Sharon—named for my mom. We’d had her restored a few years after Mom died, but it pretty much fell on Ron to keep her sail-ready. Now Mickey would help him.
Mickey had been working like a madman on his house, and because he’d had to let his manager go, he was pulling the swing shift at Colby’s, which meant he usually worked until after two in the morning. I had to be in the classroom by eight, so we pretty much lived for the weekends. We did manage to grab dinner together most nights, and we never missed an appointment with Gleason. Except for that week, when Mickey canceled it. He was swamped, trying to finish the staircase at his house for a showing the next Tuesday, but he was on schedule to finish up in time to go sailing. Besides, he assured me, he was completely in love and all was well in his world. I giggled and didn’t think anything of it.
I should have.
I was home putting groceries away when he called me five times in less than an hour. First just to tell me he loved me—he sounded out of breath. Then to ask me where the paintbrushes were—I had no idea. Then to laugh and tell me he forgot why he called. He rang back a minute later to remind me again that he still couldn’t find his shorts. Again? He hadn’t mentioned it once. The last time he called was to rather desperately demand that I quit calling him. “Lucy, I’m serious. I’m trying to finish this up, what are you trying to do to me?”
“Mickey . . . you called me,” I said, my heart skipping a beat.
“What? Oh, sorry. No. No.”
“Mickey? Honey?” He didn’t answer me. Instead he dropped the phone, and I could hear him groaning. Or maybe laughing. Either way, he sounded hysterical.
“Mickey!” I shouted. I threw the milk in the fridge and drove straight over to make sure he was okay.
When I was in the third grade, we had a fire that burned down the school. We’d been trained with a fire drill every month and we knew what to do, but we never imagined it would actually happen. That was how this felt to me, as if everything I had learned to this point had been a kind of drill for what was never supposed to happen.
East Haddam was twenty minutes away but I was determined to make it in ten. I thought I was pretty calm until I hit Smith Road and realized I was flying at sixty-six miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone. I was shaking, but I forced myself to slow down. Mickey’s house was on the shore of Bashan Lake. He’d bought it from his grandmother when he was twenty-five so she could move into an assisted-living center. Naturally she gave him a good deal, and that good deal pretty much cost him his relationship with his brother. He told me once when we were stripping the wallpaper in the guest bedroom that he planned to surprise David with half the equity when it finally sold. But the massive colonial was a never-ending project. Especially the foyer and the grand staircase Mickey had meticulously restored down to its original mahogany.
The house had just come into sight when I saw the red and blue flashing in my rearview mirror. I slapped the steering wheel but kept driving. I swear I would have stopped if anyone had been on the road, but there was not a soul and I had to get to Mickey, so I gunned it instead and prayed the cops would let me by. I turned down the gravel drive and slid to a stop, then ran around to the back door. It was wide-open, but Mickey was nowhere to be seen.
“Mickey?” He was not in the mudroom. “Mickey!” He was not in the kitchen either, but he’d obviously been there because it was an absolute mess. Several pages of crooked scrawl were scattered on the table and the floor. I gathered them up when I saw that it was a letter to me.
Then I heard him. “Where are you? Mic?” I shouted as I stuffed the pages into my back pocket. I hurried down the hall to the foyer, where he’d been working for weeks on the staircase. When I rounded the corner, I wanted to cry and scream and wake up from what I was sure was a nightmare in primary colors. The beautiful floor that last week had carefully been papered to protect it was exposed and splattered with blue paint. Orange paint had seemingly been thrown against the wall and left to pool at the baseboard. Vivid footprints were on the wooden stairs Mickey had been oiling to a high sheen, and several balusters were glopped with a tragic combination of several colors.
Near the top of the staircase was Mickey, naked and covered in paint.
I gasped. “What are you doing?”
He stood quickly and knocked over a can of yellow paint, and I watched in numbed fascination as it trickled down the stairs in a slow stream toward me. Mickey’s laughter brought me back, but it wasn’t a laugh that I’d ever heard before.
“You’re early! Come in. Are you from the Realtor’s office? I told them three, but, well . . .” He introduced his project with a flourish. “You get the idea. I think when you walk into a house it should make a statement, don’t you? Did you bring juice by any chance? I need fuel. Grape juice is a great antioxidant. I saw it on the health channel. They delivered a two-headed baby on that damn show. I swear. You alone or did you bring your office?”
“Mickey, it’s me. Lucy.”
“Lucy? That’s my girlfriend’s name. Shit, am I bleeding?” He seemed to notice for the first time that he was covered in what he presumed to be blood, and he started to dance around at the top of the stairs trying to find its source on his naked body. I ran across the foyer, doing my best to avoid the slippery puddles.
“Mickey! Honey, it’s okay. It’s not blood. Mickey, can you hear me?” He was now slapping his face with both hands, and I was afraid he would slip in the mess and fall down the stairs. When I got close to him, I tried to take his hand, but it slid out of my grasp. “What’s happening? No, no. No!” he sang in breathless and escalating panic. “What is this stuff?”
&nb
sp; “Mickey! Honey!” I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get his attention, and I was standing right there screaming at him. I ran into the bathroom and grabbed a towel, then threw it over his shoulders and wrapped my arms around him. “Mickey? Mickey! Look at me, baby!”
He was shaking and grunting like an animal. I held him as tightly as I could, but he was stronger than I was, and whatever he was afraid of made him that much more of a force.
I heard footsteps downstairs and wondered if Mickey had actually called a Realtor. But it was a police officer with his hand on his gun. Drawing it, he said, “I’ll need you two to come on down here.”
That seemed to stop Mickey for a second. As for me, I couldn’t put the moment in context. But then I remembered the flashing lights and speeding faster away from apparently this very officer.
“Thank God!” Mickey boomed. “Look at me! I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’ve been shot, and in my head I imagined I needed a cop and here you are. What are you doing here? Don’t you know to knock? You can’t just break in here with your little gun and your little badge. I got rights! I got a right hand and a right foot. You probably do, too!”
“Mickey, be quiet!”
Mickey jerked around to me and flung off the towel. “Who the hell are you, woman! Get out of my house.”
“Sir, now.” The policeman had taken a few steps across the foyer and was trying to stare Mickey into cooperation, but Mickey had assumed the posture of a cat getting ready to pounce. I took a deep breath and ignored my hammering heart. I stepped in front of Mickey and said to the officer, “I need you to call 911. My fiancé is not dangerous, he’s just naked and delusional and I need to get him to the hospital. Can you please help me?” To his unwavering stare, I said, “Look, that’s why I was speeding back there. My name is Lucy Houston. This is Mickey Chandler. He lives here. You can arrest me later, but right now he’s having an episode. He’s not bleeding. He’s not shot. He has bipolar disorder, and as you can see, he’s not doing very well at the moment. Please.” I shouted all this over the expletive-laced mutterings coming from Mickey as he resumed his ruining of the balusters.