Your Voice in My Head (19 page)

He and I continue to make small talk. It is small. It is tiny. It engulfs us like Lilliputians. Then there’s a moment when the Lilliputians are distracted by miniature cheeseburgers. We break our ropes and we find ourselves holding hands for a while, saying nothing, for probably five minutes. It is quiet and still, so quiet, it takes the actress a while to see and then she gets on her knees before us and says, “I am so mortified about what I said. You two are obviously together.”

“I …” I start to explain.

She puts up a hand, her nails pearlescent; our history glows in the dark. “There’s obviously something here between you.”

Somewhere very far away in the Buddhist field where we lay together, the waves are still crashing. There is another life there, where the love letters were not written in disappearing ink. Another life where Dr. R has an extra year, another five years, a life where he doesn’t die, a life where he just keeps healing and healing others, his family gets to keep him. It’s quiet in our Buddhist field, both of us, after lives of such self-inflicted tumult, gobsmacked by this thing called peace. We have worked so hard to get well and now we have each other to show for it, here, in the heather, on the edge of a cliff from which we feel no impulse to jump. One more moment, one more breath. But there aren’t any more. At New York—Presbyterian, behind a door of the Milstein Pavilion, Dr. R takes his last breaths.

As the industry party comes back into focus, and with it the sound of the heather and the sea replaced by the clink of champagne glasses, stilettos on marble, its own wave, GH lets my hand drop and looks the actress in the eye.

“No, darling. Nothing here. There’s absolutely nothing.”

When I come to the end of my life—when I come to the real end, at the right time, (even if like Dr. R’s it is an unfair time, it will be right)—my mind may flash with random images: pencil sharpeners and penguins. My friends who dotted the highway of despair, my father making up a song for a cat, dancing to gospel music with my mother, her straight spine and soft hands and sweet face. My sister’s self-stitched gifts. Listening to
Graceland
on car rides. Creating a universe out of reading in silence with your lover. And a man who, though I never saw him outside one small room, believed that life is vast and worth living. I am not being hopeful about this when I say my last thoughts will be of love. I remember it. If you have ever lost someone the way I tried to go, I can assure you to the best of my experience that as despairing as they were, the hell they were in, whatever caused them to swallow the pills or tie the noose, to fill their pockets with rocks and step into the water, before going under, their final thoughts are of love.

I wake to an e-mail from the love of my life.

MY PARENTS AND I
have taken a trip together, staying with SB and her family at their lake house, in New Hampshire. When we arrive there, the lakes and the trees and the gliding hawks are good enough for my soul. But my favorite thing is how every single license plate bears the New Hampshire state motto: “Live free or die.”

And, walking around the lake, with my mum and my dad and SB, it occurs to me for the first time, like the first time it dawned on me that cutting is a bad thing, even if it works:

Mum lets me slip my arm through hers. She whispers to me:

“You know the director David Gordon Green?”

“Yes,” I say.

“You know the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt?”

“Of course.”

“They’re different from each other.”

She waits for me to rebuff this.

“Yes, Mum. They’re different men.”

She mulls my response.

“No. Not acceptable.”

Dad, striding ahead of us with his John Cleese legs, begins to instigate a rousing round of songs from
West Side Story
.

“ ‘WHEN you’re a JET you’re a JET all the way from your first cigarette to your LAST DYIN’ DAY!’ ”

Dr. R would love this. He’d love to be on a lake with us, side by side by Sondheim.

Then Dad and I move on to “Jerusalem,” the English hymn we always had to sing at school.

“ ‘And was Jeroooooselem BUILDED HERE,’ ” sings my father, with all his might, “ ‘AMONG these dark satanic mills?’ ”

“What the hell is that song about?” I ask.

“Oh,” he shrugs, “Just general William Blake mentalism.” After all they’ve gone through with me, he is offhand in his description of madness and the power it can hold.

I know I’ll always have moments of panic that I might be going crazy. (I watched an hour of Rick Moranis clips on YouTube. I downloaded “Ride Like the Wind” by Christopher Cross. I once ate fifty pecans. By “once” I mean one hour ago. Sometimes, during sex, I fantasize about the scene in
Inglourious Basterds
when Shosanna burns down the room full of Nazis.) But the worries are getting further apart.

Dad and I start singing again. Mum is trailing behind us, because she is one foot tall and her legs are made of candy
mice. I’m still doing the Jets choreography, and Dad is reaching the crescendo of “Jerusalem.”

I say out loud, “I’m really fucking happy.” But nobody can hear me because of Dad bellowing the hymn’s final notes: “BA BA BAA BA BUUUUUUH!”

IT’S IN NEW YORK
, six months after our breakup, that a kindly journalist e-mails me a photo of GH hand in hand with his new Gypsy Wife, wearing a dress that reveals her to be in her second trimester of their pregnancy. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do. I know I’m supposed to cut myself. That’s the hotwire.

Here’s the sofa they lie on. Here’s his hand in her hair. Here’s his words on her page. Here’s how much he needs her. Here’s how he kissed her the first time. Here’s how she makes him complete
.

I look at the razor in my wash kit. “Tell me what to do.” The razor stays silent. “Tell me!” I can hear my own breath. Which is to say: I can hear me. There are no voices. Not him. Not Dr. R. Not the Internet crazies. Not even my mum.

I walk out of the bathroom.

I put on my headphones.

I take the 1 train to the Staten Island Ferry.

I’m riding the ferry because it’s something I’ve never done before. The sky is open and vast, it’s crisp but sunny,
that NYC blue sky, I’m listening to the Velvet Underground singing “Pale Blue Eyes,” and since there’s no one in my life who has pale blue eyes, I’ll have the sky be my muse for the song’s duration. The deck is open. There’s no one except me. I dance to the music alone. I’m Gypsy Wife. I’m Jeffrey and Judy’s Baby Emma. I’m Lisa’s sister. I’m the mother of a six-year-old child. I’m a patient on a psychiatric ward. I’m the girl eating crisps to push down the crisps. I’m the girl in the painting. I’m despairing. I’m elated. I am Jane Eyre—I have rescued him from himself! I have finally set him free!—until there is a new Jane Eyre and I am Mrs. Rochester. I have lived in the house. I have lived in the attic. I am a loose end fashioned from a Gordian knot that cannot be untied. I didn’t hang myself. I am not sorry.

There are touches of Israeli folk and some of the belly dancing I learned in Istanbul, a little flamenco in my feet. I dance my ass off, up and down the deck. I can do what I like, because I am alone.

The ferry rounds the corner and the Statue of Liberty makes me want to stand up and cheer—I’ve always been that way about female beauty; I once saw Debbie Harry in a doctor’s waiting room and shouted “Hoorah!”—of course the symbol of liberty and hope is female. A little boy is outraged to hear he can’t go inside her. “Look at her? That’s it? You don’t do anything? You just look?”

Homeless people ride the ferry because it’s free; there’s a sign that says “Are you bipolar?” and ticks off a list of possible symptoms, and at the top of the stairs, like a high-concept advertising teaser campaign, there’s a man who is bipolar or at least very down on his luck, but I’m not afraid.
I think of what Dr. R would have done with him, what he would have seen in him, seen in this. Leaning on the deck, a woman accidentally jabs her arm into me because she is being kissed. Whatever becomes of these lovers, she will always remember this moment, and it may cause pain, maybe for a long time, but then one day it will be the sky and the kiss, and having been loved in the long shadow of liberty.

I get it now. It’s really very simple:

That wasn’t my baby. That wasn’t my husband
.

There will be someone. It wasn’t him.

Ophelia is looking at the blue sky and she’s floated from a patch of cold water to a warmer one. Then something unusual happens. She moves her arms into a backstroke. It’s a sunny day and in her head she’s listening to Mavis Staples sing “Eyes on the Prize,” which goes better with the Velvet Underground than you ever could have guessed. Everywhere Ophelia looks there are prizes to keep her eyes on. These flowers, the way the sun bounces off the boats, even the people waving. She doesn’t know where to focus first, but it’s a gift.

I can see her from the top deck of the ferry. The water feels good and she turns on her side and, without thinking about it, starts swimming towards the land where she sees this statue, green, arm upstretched, and beneath the statue, tiny but unmistakable, a middle-aged Jewish man with his pants hiked up too high, not the first Jew on Ellis Island, but maybe the smartest, maybe the kindest, maybe, just maybe, the one who changed the most lives. When she gets to land, he isn’t there anymore, but she pulls herself up, anyway. She’s stronger than anyone knew. Her wet clothes cling to
her curves and, as the water ripples out, anyone who saw her from the ferry would not think her broken or damaged, ruined or mad.

But there’s no one around for miles, and that makes her happy and calm, as she shakes out her hair.

Thank you:

Felicity Rubinstein. Kim Witherspoon. Elinor Burns. Cliff Roberts.

At Bloomsbury: Alexa von Hirschberg, Anna Simpson, Holly MacDonald, Victoria Millar, Jude Drake, and Alexandra Pringle.

Judith Gurewich and Corinna Barsan at Other Press. Anne Collins and Kylie Barker at Knopf Canada.

For getting through to me and getting me through:

Lisa, Andrea, SB, Teeter, Bianca, Barbara, Shannon, Nat, Sass, Dorothy, Shaye, Maayan, Danielle, Kat, Min, Link, Seamus, Michaela, Shalamar, Asa, Gilah, Elishia, Tendo, Ali, Cleo, Clare, Gary, Indira, Talia, Petra, Lucy, and a special thanks to Rabbi Wolpe.

I’m very grateful to my longtime landlord, Scott, for the Laurel Canyon solitude.

And to: Susan Gelpke-Doran (innkeeper and inspiration)

Not to mention: Sara Hawys Roberts (my girl Friday)

Finally, I’d like to thank the anonymous psychiatrist and author behind the website
fxckfeelings.com
.