by Erica Jong
I’m not sure what time I awakened, but Brian had been up for hours-probably the whole night. I staggered to the bathroom and the first thing I saw was a crude drawing Scotch-taped to the mirror. It depicted a short man with a halo and an enormous erect penis. Another man with a long beard was about to blow him. Behind them both was a huge eagle (resembling the American eagle) except that it had a very obvious and human-looking erection. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” Brian had scrawled above the picture.
I went to my desk in the bedroom. Pieces of my index cards (containing all the notes for my thesis) were scattered on the floor beneath the desk like confetti. On the desk top was a display of books: the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton were propped open and certain words, phrases and letters were circled in various colored inks. I could make out no system or code at first glance, but there were furious notes in the margins. Phrases like “Oh Hell!” or “The Beast with Two Backs!” or “Womankind is too unkind!” Sprinkled over Shakespeare and Milton were the remains of a carefully torn-up twenty-dollar bill. Elsewhere on the desk were reproductions ripped from art books. They all depicted God or Jesus or Saint Sebastian.
I ran into the living room to look for Brian and found him adjusting the amplifier on the hi-fi. He was playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, and he began turning the volume up loud and then suddenly turning it down soft, to create a sort of siren effect.
“How loud can you play Bach in this society?” he demanded. “This loud?” He turned it up. “This soft?” He turned it down so that it was barely audible. “You see! There’s no way to play Bach in this society!”
“Brian, what did you do with my thesis?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew perfectly well what he had done with it.
Brian was fiddling with the hi-fi and pretending he hadn’t heard me.
“What did you do with my thesis?”
“How loud do you think you can play Bach in this society without the police coming?”
“What did you do with my thesis?”
“This loud?” He turned the volume up.
“What did you do with my thesis?”
“This soft?” He turned the volume down.
“What did you do with my thesis?”
“This loud?”
“Brian!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. It was no use. I went to my desk and sat there staring at the “display” he’d left. I wanted to kill him or myself. Instead I cried.
Brian walked in.
“Who do you think will go to heaven?” he asked. I didn’t answer.
“Will Bach go? Will Milton go? Will Shakespeare go? Will Shakeswoof go? Will Saint Sebastian the Bastard go? Will Abelard the Gelding go? Will Sinbad the Sailor go? Will Tin-bad the Tailor go? Will Jinbad the Jailor go? Will Norman Mailer go? Will Whinbad the Whaler go? Will Finbad the Failer go? Will Rinbad the Railer go? Will Joyce go? Will James go? Will Dante go or has he been already? Will Homer go? Will Yeats go? Will Hardy go with a hard-on? Will Rabelais go with the Rabble? Will Villon go vilely? Will Raleigh go royally? Will Mozart go lightly? Will Mahler go heavily? Will El Greco go in a clap of lightning? Will the light bulbs go?” I turned and looked at him. He was waving his arms wildly and jumping up and down.
“The lights bulbs will go to heaven!” he shouted. “They will! They will!”
“You’re driving me crazy!” I yelled in utter exasperation.
“You’ll go to heaven!” he screamed, and then he grabbed my hand and started leading me toward the window. “Let’s go to heaven! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He threw open the window and leaned out.
“Stop it!” I screamed hysterically. “I can’t stand this anymore!” and with that I began to shake him. He must have gotten really frightened because he put his hands around my throat and started choking me.
“Shut up,” he yelled. “The police will come!” But I wasn’t screaming anymore. He tightened his grip. I started to black out.
Why he let me go before he killed me, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was plain dumb luck on my part. I don’t know how to account for it. All I know is that when he finally let go, I was shaking all over and gasping for breath (and I remember later finding big blue bruises on my neck). I ran into the hall closet and sat there in the dark biting my knees and sobbing. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I gasped. And then somehow I collected myself and called my family doctor. He was in East Hampton. I called my mother’s psychiatrist. He was in Fire Island. I called my current psychiatrist. He was in Wellfleet. I called a friend of my sister Randy’s who was a psychiatric social worker. She told me to send for the police or a doctor- any doctor. Brian was psychotic, she said, and possibly dangerous. I was not to stay alone with him.
A Sunday in June and if you want to get sick, you’d better do it at a beach resort. No doctor to be found. I finally reached the guy who was pinch-hitting for my internist. He would be over right away, he said. Five hours later, he arrived. During all that time Brian was astonishingly subdued. He sat in the living room listening to Bach, seemingly in a trance. I sat in the bedroom trying to absorb what had happened. We pretended to ignore each other. The calm after the storm.
At least Brian’s problem had a name now. It was the next best thing to a cure. Being told he was “psychotic” had given me a strange sense of relief. Here was a disease to be treated, a problem to be solved. Naming the thing made it less frightening. Also, it diminished my guilt. Insanity was no one’s fault. It was an act of God. There was something very comforting about that. All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
We endured the afternoon together with Johann Sebastian Bach. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” quoth Congreve (who surely is in heaven playing cards with Mozart). When I think of all the bad times that Bach has helped me get through I’m sure he’s in heaven too.
Dr. Steven Pearlmutter walked in at five-all apologies and sweaty palms. From then on our life was in the hands of the doctors and their smug little categories. My husband Brian, Dr. Pearlmutter assured me, was “a very sick young man.” He was going to “try to help him.” He began by trying to give him a shot of Thorazine-at which point Brian bolted and ran down the back stairs (all thirteen floors) and into Riverside Park. The doctor and I chased him, found him, stopped him, cajoled him, watched him bolt again, chased him again, cajoled him again and so on. The rest of the details are as sordid as they are common. From then on hospitalization became inevitable. Brian was now completely panicked and his delusions became more and more colorful. The days that followed were nightmarish. Brian’s parents flew in from California and promptly declared that Brian was perfectly OK but that I was crazy. They tried to prevent him from taking any medication and they constantly made fun of the doctors (which, admittedly, wasn’t very hard to do). They urged him to leave me and come home to California-as if being away from me would automatically make him all better. Dr. Pearlmutter had referred Brian to a psychiatrist who tried for five gallant days to keep him out of the hospital. It was no use. Between Brian’s mother and father, Brian’s boss, the Miracle Foam people, Brian’s well-meaning former professors and the doctors, our lives were no longer our own. Brian was hounded by his would-be caretakers and each day he flipped out more.
On the fifth morning after Dr. Pearlmutter’s visit, Brian took all his clothes off near Belvedere Tower in Central Park. Then he tried to climb on King Jagiello’s bronze horse along with bronze King Jagiello (crossed swords and all). The police finally took him to the psycho ward at Mount Sinai (sirens screaming, Thorazine flowing like wine), and except for a few weekend passes, we never lived together again.
It took another eight months or so for our marriage to sputter out completely. After Brian got to Mount Sinai, his parents moved in with me, denounced me day and night, went to the hospital with me every evening, and never allowed us more than ten
minutes alone together. Visiting hour was only from six to seven anyway, and they were determined to keep us apart even then. Besides, when I was alone with Brian, all he did was attack me. I was a Judas, he said. How could I have locked him up? Didn’t I know that I would go to the Seventh Circle-the circle of the traitors? Didn’t I know that mine was the lowest crime in Dante’s book? Didn’t I know I was already in hell?
Hell couldn’t have been much worse than that summer anyway. The Diem regime had just fallen and Buddhists kept immolating themselves in a funny little country whose name was growing more and more familiar-Vietnam. Barry Gold-water was running for President on the platform of sawing off the entire Eastern seaboard and floating it out to sea. John F. Kennedy was not yet one year dead. Lyndon Johnson was the nation’s one hope for defeating Goldwater and preserving peace. Two young white men named Goodman and Schwerner went south to Mississippi to work for voter registration, teamed up with a young black man named Chaney, and all three of them ended up in a ghastly common grave. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant erupted in the first of many long, hot summers. Brian, meanwhile, was in the hospital raving about how he was going to save mankind. Certainly mankind had never needed it more.
We drifted apart. Not all at once, and not through my meeting someone else. I didn’t go out at all while Brian was in the hospital. I was shellshocked and needed time to recover. But gradually I began to realize how much happier I was without him, how his frantic energy had sapped my life, how his wild fantasies had deprived me of any fantasy life of my own. Slowly I began to prize hearing my own thoughts. I began to listen to my own dreams. It was as if I had been living in an echo chamber for five years and then suddenly someone let me out.
The rest of the story is mostly denouement. I loved Brian and it made me feel terribly guilty to realize that I liked living without him better than living with him. Also, I think that I never quite trusted him again after the attempt he made to strangle me. I said I forgave him, but something inside me never did. I was afraid of him and that was what killed our marriage in the end.
The end dragged on. Money, as usual, was a precipitating factor. After three months at Mount Sinai, the Blue Cross coverage ran out and Brian had to be transferred. Either he had to go to a state hospital (something which terrified us both) or to a private hospital (where fees were about $2,000 a month). We were up against a money-green wall.
His parents stepped in then, not to help but to harass. If I’d let him go to California, they’d pay the cost of private treatment. Otherwise, not a penny. I lived with this ultimatum for a while and then finally decided I had no choice.
In September we made the pilgrimage to California. We “lit out for the territory” not by covered wagon, but by 707, and we had my father and a shrink in tow. The airline would not fly Brian home without an attendant psychiatrist-which also meant that the four of us had to travel first class, munching macadamia nuts in between Libriums.
It was a memorable flight. Brian was so agitated that I forgot my own fear of flying. My father was popping Libriurns by the minute and admonishing me to be brave, and the shrink (a sweet-faced twenty-six-year-old resident who identified with us to the point of total incompetence) was jittery and needed my constant reassurance. Mother Isadora-I took care of all of them. All the gods, the daddies, who had failed.
At the Linda Bella Clinic in La Jolla, the illusion of voluntarism was rigidly maintained. All the nurses wore bermuda shorts, and the doctors wore sport shirts and corduroy pants and golfing hats. The patients were in similarly casual attire and wandered around in a setting which resembled a deluxe motel, complete with swimming pool and Ping-Pong tables. Everyone on the staff was determinedly cheerful and tried to pretend that Linda Bella was a kind of spa, rather than the place you went when nobody knew what to do with you at home anymore. The doctors advised against long parting scenes. Brian and I saw each other for the last time in the deserted O.T. room where he was viciously pounding a piece of clay into one of the table tops.
“You’re not part of me anymore,” he said. “You used to be part of me.”
I was thinking how painful it was to be part of him, and how I had almost come to the point of forgetting who I was, but I couldn’t say that.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“Why?” he snapped.
“Because I love you.”
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have brought me here.”
“That’s not true, Brian, the doctors said-”
“You know the doctors don’t know anything about God. They’re not supposed to. But I thought you knew. You’re like all the rest. How many pieces of silver did you sell me for?”
“I only want you to get better,” I said feebly.
“Better than what? And if I were better, how would they know-sick as they are. You’ve forgotten everything you knew. They’ve brainwashed you too.”
“I want you to get better so you won’t have to take medication…” I said.
“That’s shit and you know it. They give you medication to start with and then they use it as an index of your health. When the medication is high-you’re worse. When it’s low-you’re better. The reasoning is circular. Who needs the damned medication in the first place?” He socked the clay savagely.
“I know,” I said.
The thing was-I agreed with him. Certainly the doctors’ categories of health and sickness were almost crazier than Brian’s. Certainly their banality was such that if Brian were God, they wouldn’t know it.
“It’s all a question of faith,” he said. “It has always been a question of faith. My word, or the word of the multitude? You chose the multitude. But that doesn’t make it right. And what’s more-you know it. I feel sorry for you. You’re so damned weak. You never did have any guts.” He pounded the clay into a thin pancake.
“Brian-you have to try to understand my position. I felt I was going to crack under the strain. Your parents were screaming at me all the time. The doctors were preaching. I stopped knowing who I was-”
“You were under a strain? You! Who got locked up-you or me? Who got dosed with Thorazine-you or me? Who got sold down the river-you or me?”
“Both of us.” I said crying. Great big salty drops were running down my face and into the corners of my mouth. They tasted good. Tears have such a comforting taste. As if you could weep a whole new womb and crawl into it. Alice in her own sea of tears.
“Both of us! That’s a laugh!”
“It’s true,” I said, “we both got hurt. You don’t have the monopoly on pain.”
“Go,” he said, picking up the flattened clay and beginning to roll it into a snake, “get thee to a nunnery, Ophelia. Drown yourself for all I care-”
“You never seem to remember that you made an attempt on my life, do you?” I knew I shouldn’t say this, but I was just so angry.
“Your life! If you loved me-if you knew the goddamned meaning of sacrifice-if you weren’t such a spoiled brat, you wouldn’t give me this shit about your life!”
“Brian, don’t you remember?”
“Remember what? I remember how you got me locked up-that’s what I remember-”
Suddenly it dawned on me that there were two versions of the nightmare we had been through-his version and my version-and that they coincided in no way at all. Brian not only had no empathy for my unhappiness; he had no awareness of it.
He didn’t even remember the events which had sent him to
the hospital. How many other versions of our reality were there? My version, Brian’s, his parents’, my parents’, the doctors’, the nurses’, the social workers’… There were an infinite number of versions, an infinite number of realities. Brian and I had been through a nightmare together, and now it turned out that we had been through nothing together. We had entered an experience through the same door, but then wandered off into separate tunnels, staggered through separate darknesses alone, and emerged finally at opposite ends of the earth.
Brian s
tared at me coldly as if I were his sworn enemy. For the life of me, I cannot remember our parting words to each other.
My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana where we bought a slightly soiled pifiata-a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches.
My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence-as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake”… but if there was more-a childhood seduction or a primal scene-my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle-spaceship or submarine or poem-which will take us to them.