Your Voice in My Head (2 page)

I asked if it was really wise to ticket himself and my mother like that, and he replied, as if it were out of his hands:

“Under the new homeland security rules the ticketed names
must
be a combination of how they are printed in your passport and your likely appearance at check-in.”

I like to think my parents have complementary eccentricities, two perfect jigsaw pieces of neurotica. It’s all I ever wanted for myself.

I have one sister, Lisa, younger than me by three years. She had an invented childhood friend she called Poofita Kim. Her imaginary friend, as she explained in a drawing, was on the run for drowning six kids. Lisa, then five, was sheltering him. This is the same time frame in which she penned a letter to Margaret Thatcher:

I used to pour cola on Lisa’s piano and take all of the stuffing out of the toy seal she slept with, so it would look like he’d deflated. Throughout childhood, she surreptitiously kept a diary of my transgressions:

She’s had the same boyfriend for twelve years. I haven’t.

Lisa gave me
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and sewed me underpants with a picture of Jon Stewart on them. I love her like crazy—unless Mum sets one foot in the room, and then we cannot abide each other.

My grandma is ninety and has recently adopted a Yiddish accent that creeps in when she’s tired or tipsy. Otherwise she sounds just like Prunella Scales in
Fawlty Towers
, except with curse words. One year, during Wimbledon, I said I thought Stefffi Graf was attractive and my grandma shrieked, “She’s an ugly bitch!” Lauren Bacall is also on her list of enemies, though the backstory remains murky.

Perhaps because my family are how they are, it took a little while to realize—settled in Manhattan at twenty-two, on contract to the
Guardian
and about to have my first novel published—that my quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives. They were in England. They didn’t know I was cutting my body with razors—my arms, legs, stomach—and they didn’t know I was bingeing and purging six, seven, eight times a day. Even through the darkest times, even knowing how much they loved me, I was afraid to tell them.

I was scared they’d make me leave New York, whose own eccentricity brought me the splashes of joy I still felt. Once, as I was walking on Avenue B with my friend Angela Boatwright, a bike-riding boy, of maybe eight or nine, said as he cycled past: “I’m going to fuck you in your asses!” He said it industriously, proudly, like a man with a work ethic. Later that day came the most genteel catcall I’ve ever received,
when a construction worker yelled, “Damn, girl! I’d like to take you to the movies!”

I was incredibly lonely. I imagined accepting the construction worker’s invitation and us going to the movies together, me putting my head on his shoulder and him squealing, “Eww! Get off me! I said I wanted to take you to the movies! I didn’t say you could touch me!”

I did have a boyfriend—the Bad Boyfriend—and he was a huge part of the loneliness. In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And … that’s it, I think. They were high. He didn’t want to meet my parents (“I’m not really into parents”). Also on his list of dislikes:

I really like those things. I am even quite good at making them. All I can say is: I was new in the city. I barely knew anyone. He was tall and handsome and had all his own teeth.

The first time I went to see Dr. R was in 2000, a good year to have your life turned around. I’d ridden the 6 train from the emergency room, where I had been all night. I had become so numb, in my life, that sex didn’t register, unless it hurt, and then I very distantly could see that it was me on the bed. Despite the cutting and bulimia, I couldn’t work fast enough to harm myself, so the boyfriend was helping out. This night he’d gone too far. Though the train car hummed with schoolkids, I felt
myself in a dinghy far at sea. I could feel the blood still trickling, there in Dr. R’s waiting room, as I perused an old
New Yorker
. The red staining my cotton underwear made me think of someone bleeding to death in a snowy maze, which was how I had started to feel. There was a cartoon in the
New Yorker
that didn’t make sense. In the state I was in, it made me feel so lonesome, so lost and disconnected, that I started to cry. And that’s how Dr. R found me, bloody and weeping, finally acting on a recommendation I’d been given months earlier.

Opening the door, like a debutante appearing at the top of a staircase, Dr. R was a slim, balding man with a turtle-neck sweater tucked into corduroy trousers, belted high, which is partly why I was shocked when his wife, Barbara, told me he was only fifty-three when he died. His wisdom and his belting style: they made him seem much older.

My eyes floated around his room. The book he’d written on cocaine abuse. Three Tiffany lamps. And a framed photo of his two little boys (Andy and Sam; I’d know their names only after, from the obituary). A courtyard (open in summer unless there was too much noise from the school across the street). The best thing in the room was an art piece: a wooden cabinet of turn-of-the-century pharmaceutical medicines, including arsenic.

Dr. R settled back into his swivel chair, like a cat arranging itself on the sofa.

“You’ve been crying,” he said.

“It was a long subway ride,” I replied, assigning the blame for my tears to the 6 train, which had never done anything worse to me than roll in smelling of McDonald’s.

The 6 train is also called the Lexington Avenue Line, and it has 1.3 million riders daily. It is the only line in Manhattan that directly serves the Upper East Side, running from downtown Brooklyn through lower Manhattan and finally north to 125th Street in East Harlem. It opened on October 27, 1904, and on my darkest days on my way up to Dr. R’s office, I would say to myself, “A century later and this train is still running.” There are twenty-seven stops and only twenty-three are in use, which humanized it somehow. As the train hurtled, averting its eyes, through the darkened 18th Street station, I imagined the 18th Street stop had simply retreated, too sensitive for life. The truth was, the new ten-car trains were too long for its platform. But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

After Dr. R’s death, I found there were many he had saved. It’s a funny feeling, like growing up and realizing that other people have read
The Catcher in the Rye
, not just you. I knew he was the director of the cocaine abuse program at Columbia-Presbyterian. I found, after his death, that he had also established a groundbreaking post-9/11 mental health program for firefighters. On the
New York Times
obituary guest book, most patients’ testimonies say, “He saved my life.”

During my eight years as his patient, Dr. R came to my book readings, though doctor-patient guidelines meant we couldn’t talk. Still, I’d look out and see him there. His widow recently sent me a letter saying how proud he’d been of my achievements and that I held a special place in his heart. It’s possible she sent letters to other patients
saying “My husband really didn’t like you. You bored him very badly in your sessions, largely because he thought you were beyond help. P.S.: your book was shit.” But I don’t think so. I know that he bought paintings by a patient who was struggling financially, and hung them in the office. I found an e-mail from 2005 asking if he could hire a sweet surfer boyfriend of mine, who he knew was trying his best to stay sober, to teach surf lessons as a birthday present for a friend’s daughter.

He was cheerful. He was an eternal optimist. There was nothing I could tell him that he’d tell me was as bad as I’d decided it was. “Oh, and then I murdered a drifter. I stabbed him twenty-two times.”

“Only twenty-two times? That’s fewer than twenty-three.”

I trusted him. And I liked how he saw me. It’s that simple.

I’ve a mother to whom I’m so close that we sometimes have the same nightmares. I tell her everything. My dad doesn’t really take things in when it comes to personal matters of great importance. One parent who loves me but doesn’t listen, one who loves me but listens too hard. The point of psychiatry, as encapsulated by Dr. R, is the outside observer. The person to whom you can tell your secrets, because you will never have to face them at the dinner table.

Climbing up from rock bottom, I started going to Dr. R weekly. Then fortnightly. Then monthly. Then only as needed. My psychiatric medicine was halved in dose. I moved out to Los Angeles and we’d do phone sessions. I’d do a session in person the three or four times a year I went back to New York.

This March, I called to make an appointment when I knew I was flying to New York to meet up with a man I’d been seeing for only a few months, though it was already hard to imagine a time when we hadn’t been together (he named himself my “Gypsy Husband” and I call him “GH”). I was going to tell Dr. R: “I’m in love, with someone good and kind, gentle, and he’s seen the darkness too but somehow we’ve become each other’s light. You made me well enough to be somebody’s light!”

I also planned on talking to him about adjusting my meds, bringing down the dose a little more, since I’d been feeling so calm and so happy for so long. I’d even written a
Guardian
essay about my recovery from a nervous breakdown, in which I’d lavished praise on my doctor. I thought it was a little odd he hadn’t e-mailed me to say he’d seen it. But I knew he was busy.

With my hotel waiting and my underwear packed, I called to make the appointment where I’d tell him my good news. I’ve met “The One.” (“Do you mind me writing in my book that you’re ‘The One’?” I ask GH, typing on the porch as he makes salmon for dinner. “I’d love that,” he answers, “because it means that we’re ‘The Two.’ ”)

Dr. R’s machine picked up but with a new greeting:

“Due to a medical issue this office is closed. This machine will not take messages.”

None of his patients had a clue he was sick, let alone that he had lung cancer. He kept the truth from us for the eight months from his diagnosis up until his death, going straight from chemo to appointments. He canceled sessions because he was “feeling under the weather.” Our final conversation
was when I called to warn him that, as happened so many times during our time together, my check might bounce (hypermanic people: bad at handling money).

“I’m not worried about it, Emma,” he said. He had maybe three weeks to live.

When I got back from visiting GH in New York, I remembered to check the e-mail set up so that readers can write to me through my website.

Later that day, I got an e-mail from my dad. It was not in the shape of a triangle:

After Dr. R died, I called that ansaphone that would not take messages, and called it again, over and over, like opening and closing the fridge door in search of food that isn’t there. If I called enough times he might be. I called until, one day, it was disconnected and there was nothing on the line but my own breath.

I’
M WRITING FROM MY OLD
New York City apartment on the seventeenth floor. From the window I can see the hospital where I was taken after I tried to kill myself, just a few weeks after I started seeing Dr. R. With me hooked up to a monitor behind them, my mother handed him the suicide letter, which he read once, then handed back.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I thought she was getting better.”

It’s important to me that my savior made a misstep at the very beginning. It humbled and humanized him in my head. Having put me on Zoloft that first, bloody day and monitored my progress, he had deemed me not a danger to myself. He was wrong.

St. Vincent’s Hospital is where the ambulance men deposited me after my roommate found me unconscious. She didn’t see me at first because I’d passed out in an open suitcase of yet-to-be-unpacked clothes. I hadn’t unpacked it for three months. After they pumped my stomach I was put on suicide watch and a drunken volunteer nun had to come
with me into the stall whenever I needed the toilet. “Jesus loves you!” she trilled. I imagined a toilet-bound Christ as Peeping Tom, all unwashed hair and heavy breathing.