Your Voice in My Head (8 page)

He interrupts me. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, it was a transgression. If you’d been having sex for ten years, it would be rough sex. But it was the first.”

“Yep.”

The truth is: I lost my virginity. In an unpleasant manner. But I lost her too, and that felt worse. She had taken me to her favorite apothecary and I’d bought this moisturizer she used because it smelled of her. I took it home with me to London. I’d made myself a promise: I’ll use this every day, and when the bottle runs out, that’s the moment I’ll be over what happened in San Francisco. But I could never bring myself to use it. It’s still under the sink in my childhood bathroom at my parents’ house. I can’t imagine it smells any good; I’m too scared to open it. But, sometimes, when I go home, I look at it, and I can see that the moisturizer has separated from the oil. Something’s risen to the top.

“You could take that as a happy allegory.”

“No. Because I look at it and realize something in it is dead, that it must be made of whale fat.”

“It’s from San Francisco. The moisturizer was probably vegan.”

“OK,” I say. “OK, you win. Optimist.”

Time’s up.

DR. R AND I
keep plowing from the last session. I tell him about my first love, a man for whom I was most emphatically not his first love or, indeed, his love at all. It was a few months after San Francisco. He was in a rock band. I was a teenage music journalist. He sent me postcards, sometimes, not often, from tour. He sent me a couple of books.
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
by Victor Serge arrived, inscribed with elaborate indifference.

When I gave in to him he sighed and said, “We’re similar, Em. We’ll always be the least attractive people in the room.” A sort of postcoital contempt. After we’d make love, he’d tell me the reasons I wasn’t pretty and how he was special for wanting me. That’s when the cutting kicked off.

“I used to cut myself when I knew I was going to run into him, so I couldn’t take my clothes off. So I wouldn’t lose my heart to him. Though, of course, I already had.”

Dr. R looks very, very sad. “Did that work?”

“No. I wanted him so much, I’d go home with him anyway. And he didn’t see the cuts. He never noticed. If he did he didn’t say anything. He just fucked me anyway.” I start to cry, amazed that the man who I thought had vanished ten years earlier, like Brigadoon, can still have this effect. I don’t like saying “fuck” in front of Dr. R. I hate it. I feel like I sully this room.

Though, really, what am I sullying? I don’t know what stories came before or which will be here with the patient after me. Suddenly I want to cover my mouth, afraid of breathing psychological germs, and get out of there, leaving my lovelorn teenage self in London, on her knees, before a man who cannot stand her.

“I know you’re getting better because of how you coped with nine-eleven. Other patients didn’t do so well.”

I shrug. “Mental people don’t like apocalypse.”

He looks me dead on. “Many of my patients were triggered by it. Not you.”

As the day had unfolded, even my toughest friends had become hysterical. They said there were still planes in the sky. They said we were about to have bombs dropped from above. We all gathered at SB’s, and I persuaded the group that we had to go to the hospital and give blood. So that’s where we went. But there was no one to give blood to because nobody was alive.

“I realize,” I tell Dr. R, “that I’m really, really bad at navigating life’s pointless daily pain. And that I’m better at handling catastrophe.”

Living so close to St. Vincent’s hospital, I follow the outsider art that springs up on the walls of the building in the form of “Missing” posters. You see the families who could afford to laminate them, with five different phone numbers and contacts. And the barely legible ones that look like they were copied at the deli. When the rains wash away the badly printed ones in Spanish, I do sit down on the sidewalk and weep. I sit with them every day because there is nothing I can do but say “I’m sorry” and “See, you were loved. So much.” In life, there would have been times, maybe many times, that those people in the posters had felt misunderstood and alone. And now the lonely ache is someone else’s, forever.

It’s around this time that I start seeing a writer who is almost as famous for his tumultuous private life as he is his award-winning work. I watch Dr. R as I tell him the news.
Other people have been impressed. They cannot help it. Dr. R has talked about him before, what a fan he is. I am eager to watch him cover his excitement. Even my own mum couldn’t hide how tickled she was that he is interested in me. When I tell Dr. R, he doesn’t look excited at all. He looks crestfallen.

“I am concerned. I am very concerned about a relapse if you keep seeing him.”

And indeed the writer has me in knots for a year, and a hold that extends for many, many years. He’s so present in our sessions, I reckon he should split the check.

When Dr. R dies, this writer is one of the first people I want to tell. Because he was there for so many of our sessions. Because we battled over him.

It’s gotten to the point where, as soon as I mention him, Dr. R puts his head in his hands. I like very much when he puts his head in his hands because it means he noticed me, he really noticed me. This is the essence of my descent into cutting: you are caught between a terrible secret and a terrible secret that once revealed means people are looking, people are listening. Your pain can no longer be ignored or misread.

Dr. R takes a breath and sits up. “I don’t want you to see him again.”

“But I
cannot
stop thinking about him.”

“Write about it.”

“How?”

“Write a screenplay.”

For two weeks, I am that person in a café with a laptop. And after two weeks I have a screenplay. And because a writer threw me out of a speeding car and broke my heart, Dr. R told me to write a script and I do and it gets me signed by
William Morris and then I have a new accidental career that only really starts to blossom after Dr. R is too sick to know.

He knew I signed with William Morris and moved out to L.A. That’s as far as he got.

Your child should not die before you. Your shrink should not die before you. When I tried to kill myself, my mum went uptown to see her old shrink, her old therapist from when she was my age. Some people look into the future and imagine themselves at their daughter’s wedding. I always had this romantic dream: that when my daughter had a breakdown, I’d go uptown to see Dr. R.

There is a very long break in cutting after that stay at the Mondrian. I’m there, courtesy of Sony Music, interviewing the very gifted, very troubled soul singer Macy Gray for the
Telegraph
. In talking to her over several days, I have the strong sense, as she talks to the wall, as she mumbles into her hands, that she is never coming back to land. This throws me. This is the first time I am conscious of being the sane one in the conversation.

To summarize: Are you an alcoholic/extremist/narcissist and/or lusty-voiced shtetl dweller?

I love you.

Lay readers would surely, like Dr. R before them, say that men, and the pursuit of them, are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn’t anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record.

At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don’t want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.

After a month of waking with this thought every single day, I persuade Dr. R to let me adopt a shelter cat. This is a big deal. I’m allowed to look after something other than me. Odd though it may sound, it’s the biggest step I’d ever taken towards my mental health. It takes me out of the realm of men, makes me stay healthy, makes me a modicum less selfish, loads more responsible. Of course, I get a boy cat.

Perry’s owner was killed on 9/11. When we meet, he is in a cage, at a pet store, having been passed on from a shelter when nobody claimed him. Now, with his backstory revealed, everybody wants him. He is also a very good-looking fellow, cream with apricot splashes. I’ve noticed that a lot of Americans prefer their tragic survivors when they’re not
physically disfigured
by the tragedy.

Perry comes home with me. It’s clear from the moment he walks in the door that he’s not my pet, nor I exactly his, but that we are each other’s soul sibling. That night he sits on the lid of the toilet and watches intently as I take a bath. I keep trying to detect a note of lasciviousness or judgment in his gaze. That’s what I’m used to. But there is none.

Every 9/11 we stay in New York after that, Perry always loses his bearings. Going round and round the apartment in mad circles, as if chasing dust. Howling at the moon, whether it’s visible or not. I’ve heard similar stories from people who took in 9/11 animals and, later, dogs and cats from Hurricane Katrina. Companion animals have scratches in their grooves too.

After ten months of successfully caring for Perry, I’m allowed to get Junior. Junior is a short-haired ginger and not nearly so good-looking as Perry, but infinitely softer (his fur, head, and heart).

The adoption group has outlined in detail how to introduce the cats to each other:

“You carry Junior home in the crate. You leave the crate in the middle of the room and keep him in there for a few hours and just let Perry sniff him.”

The problem is, it snows on us whilst I’m carrying him home and Junior arrives in the apartment a sad, wet thing, and I’m not allowed to let him out. I cave and pull him out to dry him with a towel. Perry looks at me with a combination of shock and hatred.

Then I have to shut Junior in the bathroom for twenty-four hours so they can paw at each other under the door. This means I can’t get in there to cut, and the bathroom is where I do my cutting. I have a day off and that breaks the spell, like going on a cleanse. Plus, Junior has a social-licking problem. He licks me. All the time. His tongue hurts quite a bit, but not as much as the razor. It’s like being transferred to a halfway house.

Eventually, Perry and Junior sit at other ends of the sofa,
looking straight ahead, like guests at a dinner party who’ve run out of small talk. That’s how they remain to this day.

The pet store told me a brick fell on Junior’s mum and maybe a little shard landed on him because he’s not all there. It’s interesting because it makes him so loving. Not long after I get him, he vanishes and is brought back by another cat, who lives on the basement floor. That cat’s owner said it couldn’t stop batting at the storage closet, and that’s where Junior was living, for several days. This is around the time of the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. When Junior comes home, Dad sends me a reworked version of a
Time
cover of the miraculously returned teenager, in the veil she’d been made to wear. It’s a pop-up cover Dad has constructed. When you lift the veil, instead of Elizabeth Smart’s face beneath the veil, it is Junior.

“I am so happy to have him back,” I tell Dr. R. “I wish I didn’t have to have a boyfriend ever, ever again.”

Famous last words.

I MEET SIMON
at a rooftop barbecue on the island of Manhattan. Everyone around us is wasted. I walk across the roof watching the sunset, knowing he is watching me. He spills a dot of guacamole on my white jeans. To show him I don’t care, I take a palmful of guacamole and wipe it over the entire length of my leg. Mum will say I was an asshole whilst I was with Simon, but it’s only events like this that corroborate her theory in my mind.

“Your husband is so wonderful with children,” a partygoer tells me as Simon, whom I met an hour earlier, carries someone’s baby stroller down the stairs. I look at her and say the only thing that seems right: “Thank you.”