Your Voice in My Head (9 page)

After that, though we are frequently separated by work, we never leave each other. Whilst I am working on my issues, he has buried his past, but he has buried it alive. Simon isn’t white, and he doesn’t want me to be either. It’s summer, I’m tan, and when we meet he thinks I am Latina. I don’t correct him.

“Fine,” I say to Dr. R, “I’ll go with that. So what?”

But when he realizes I’m not, this is a problem. I have to stay tan or he thinks his friends might judge him. After we break up I go bloodlessly pale. But first we have a one-year long-distance relationship. We meet every month in L.A., usually at the Chateau Marmont. We wanted each other like drugs. He’d tear and scratch at himself, thump his chest, on the phone. There was always a crisis, always a drama, hysteria.

We just wanted to consume and to subsume, have it all, to make it all go away. It was terrible. He’d talk about the common well of pain he felt we shared and how much he admires the Jews for the pain they’ve suffered.

We cut together, several times. Sometimes he goes too far, sometimes I do. I remember he calls Dr. R from the other side of the world. I am in the back of a car and Dr. R is on the phone, I don’t quite understand how. It is the next day there. Or the day before. “Help me?” I ask, pathetic. Suck me down the phone and spit me out on East 94th Street.

“You’re OK,” he says. It sounds like he is convincing himself.

Back in New York, we have a disastrous session where I introduce them to each other.

I explain that Simon has yesterday refused to leave for a meeting unless I promised not to swim whilst he was gone. He didn’t want other men to see my “perfect” body. It made me nervous, I tell him, because I would not always have this body, so it was wrong for him to focus his obsession on it.

Simon looks at the ceiling, sniffs, and cracks his knuckles. “I think you’ve misunderstood me. You have stretch marks on your arse and your tits sag. What I meant was that your body is perfect
to me.”

I look intently at the carpet.

Dr. R asks, “Are you OK?” But I can’t answer.

I excuse myself to the bathroom. I lose it. I get it back together. I return to the office and knock. Dr. R peeps his head around the door. I can’t look him in the eyes.

“Have Simon leave,” I say.

Simon does. I can’t look at his face as he passes me, but even his feet seem apologetic.

I sit back in the swivel chair. I can’t look up.

“Emma?”

I am silent.

“Emma?”

If I look at the carpet, then I have not gotten myself into this situation with this man and I don’t love him and I’m safe. I finally make eye contact. I can see he wishes he had not heard Simon’s outburst. I’ve embarrassed him. Simon has broken some kind of fourth wall in this room. Dr. R takes a deep breath. Though it makes no sound, I hear his tic without seeing it. Finally, he speaks.

“This is not good.”

He’s never said that before. He looks at the door. I’ve asked him a million times if it’s really soundproofed. But he’s looking at it like Simon can hear. Simon can tell when I’m lying. “I know the rhythm of a lie,” he says, and he does.

“This is a very angry man.”

“Mmm.”

Through sobs, I say the most redundant thing ever. “He really upsets me.”

“That’s why he said it. He felt cornered and he lashed out.”

I listen to Dr. R. I don’t just talk at him, because I can’t talk, so I have to listen.

I leave East 94th Street. I go back to my apartment. I break up with Simon.

It’s done. I’m free.

Ten days after we break up, I find out I am pregnant.

I ALWAYS SEE MONICA LEWINSKY
when I’m crying in West Village cafés, drinking ginger ale to tamp down my pregnancy nausea. She appears before me like a genie from a bottle. This is not hallucination. She never comforts me, but she does eventually ask for diet tips after we strike up a conversation. She pains me greatly. I would flash my thong at the president. Obviously I would. What she is, what she represents, young female sexuality, the fear of it, and then it genuinely does cause the downfall of the Western world. I feel a note of anti-Semitism to the “Ick, why her?” editorials. She is like Glinda, the Sad Witch.

There are victims, not just of murderers, like Chandra Levy, but of fucking and lust, of love. Poor Monica.

I remember what I was wearing when I met Simon and I remember what I was wearing when I aborted what could have become our child. The former was white jeans and a cropped floaty top with gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, and hoops. I was thinking I was a gypsy and could tell my own
fortune, or a J. Lo, just Emma from the block. I rattled as I walked, but not so loud that I couldn’t feel his eyes on me.

The latter I put a lot of thought into, laying it out the night before as if for school. As if I were my own mother. Or an echo back from a parallel universe where I was someone else’s mother, protector of this thing that was making my stomach roil every morning from eight to ten and making my breasts ache every afternoon from three to five. That autumn morning at 9 a.m. I slipped on battered Converse sneakers, a thin orange T-shirt, jeans, a Marc Jacobs sweater with hearts on it—love, love, childish love that, for us, had not been contained in a perfect heart shape but had spilled, instead, into disappointment, rage, and jealousy and was now irrevocably broken just as the fetus materialized.

I was showing very early. Six weeks and you could tell. I wanted him to see it before it was stopped (the date was set in stone, my body shifting). “I bet you look beautiful,” he said from the other side of the world. He was always on the other side of the world. “I do.” So what? I knew from the start he was the first man I had let inside me because I loved him—however inexplicable it seemed to my friends and family, who only ever saw us fight—and not because I wanted to be told I was beautiful.

We didn’t speak after that. I cried on the day, in the changing room, when I tied my surgical gown in the mirror. (Why a looking glass, why there?) “You look … young,” said Margaret, my gynecologist, pulling tenderly at my ponytail. She was a deeply glamorous woman in her mid-fifties, perpetually in a tight skirt and high heels, amazing cleavage, blown-out red hair. That she asks her patients to
call her by her first name gives her the air of every bad kid’s one cool teacher. I always felt like a most unwomanly, unsexy waif in her presence, and now that suited me just fine because sex had gotten me into this mess. A holiday with a twenty-one-hour time difference had confused me and I’d screwed up my pill. When I first went to Margaret she examined my test and declared, “You are faintly pregnant.”

“Faintly pregnant? Isn’t that like being sort of a Nazi?”

“You are pregnant. And, since you don’t wish to continue with the pregnancy, we have to wait a few weeks to operate.”

And so I marked Bush’s second inauguration by awaiting my first abortion. Truly, for me, it was no big deal physically. No, I am not sorry I did it. Simon suffered worse, I think, especially as he couldn’t be there. Just as pornography makes women hate men every bit as much as it makes men hate women, abortion raises dreadful antiwomen feelings in men. Perhaps it is as simple as their lack of control over something they have helped create. But, by his own admission, Simon went absolutely crazy when I had the termination, even though he didn’t want the child. “Hey,” said Margaret. “I see it all the time.”

My friend came out to stay with me, a woman the same age as me, going through a divorce. We lay in the curious post-summer sun and prayed for the rays to bleach away our sadness, our failure. I slept each night with my hands on my stomach. My cats, smelling not a baby but hormonal flux and drama, fought to sleep on my tummy. I talked and talked to the clump of cells. And they never once talked back.

I run into a skate-kid I knew vaguely around the time of my suicide attempt. He looks at me wide-eyed and I know what he’s not saying is, “Oh, I couldn’t remember whether or not she survived.”

“No. Just pregnant.”

If ever there were proof that our lives have alternative narratives, this is it. I would have a five-year-old child? Be in this same terrible relationship, stretched like taffy?

I know I will write about the abortion, and I do. While it’s in me, when it’s gone, the writing breaks my fall. I give a short script to the photographer Nick Knight and he gives it to the Italian actress Asia Argento and they make a demented short film. She leaves me messages like a sexy Italian version of Selma and Patty from
The Simpsons:
“Hi, this is Ah-see-ah.” When I see the finished product, she has chosen to talk direct to camera.

She likes my writing because I seem unhappy. But there’s a disconnect somewhere now. I am happier than my writing will let on, especially once the surgery has been scheduled. After all this abstract, pulpy love pain, here is something real. A list of postsurgical procedures to follow from the doctor. Friends who are required to be there to check you’re still breathing.

“Your mom’s coming over?” asks Dr. R, before I go in for the procedure.

“Yes.”

He seems terribly sad. It’s the first time I’ve sensed a paternal feeling from him. I am sad I’ve made him sad. I determine not to do that again.

I knew that having weeks to wait would give me time to fantasize about keeping it, letting it develop into a baby. And I did succumb to that fantasy. Where I was financially stable. Where I had a partner. Where the father didn’t live on the other side of the world.

Shannon and Bianca were there for me. It was, in that it brought everyone who loved me together, from my friends to my parents, one of the most touching experiences of my life. But then I have the luxury to find inspiration in the pain because I am a middle-class girl with a tight-knit family.

I recovered fast, instantly. I woke up, had five minutes of slight cramping. I didn’t throw up. Went home, got into bed, slept for twenty minutes. When my mum arrived from England an hour later, I was making Bianca toast.

For me, my abortion was an ending in that my relationship with the father could not survive it. He didn’t want a child but he wanted me to want his child. I understand this: I didn’t want a child but I wanted him to want my child. And we did. In a parallel universe. Which is not
Daily Mail
pictures of “This could have been a human being!” but something more abstract in its sadness. Our romantic tumult was a conversation between two adults. Declining to involve a child was my first act of protectiveness. It was sad. It was right. Our first, and only, act of being loving parents was not to have it. It was the only kind thing we had ever done for each other.

A MAN SITS DOWN
next to me on an airplane to the Sundance Film Festival. It is 10 a.m., and he’s been killing time at the bar whilst our plane was being cleaned. I might mind the smell of alcohol he carries to the center seat if he weren’t my favorite playwright. His talent looms over anyone our age who wants to be a writer. It seems fitting that he is so immensely tall. After the plane ride, Loom sends me a copy of his new play and signs it: “If you don’t think this play is brilliant, you must be mental.”

We layover in Chicago but don’t lay together. This is mainly because I come downstairs to the hotel bar in footie pajamas to look for him and find the lobby transformed into a nightclub. “Miss,” snaps a bouncer, “that is
not
appropriate wear.” Women are literally in fur bikinis. When I reminisce about our near miss, Loom frowns: “I was never going to sleep with you that night.”

“Oh,” I say. “I was.”

“Oh,” he says. “Tramp.”

On returning to New York, I find Simon is in town and following me, this being my month off following him. I ignore him.

Loom and I go to dinner. What I don’t know is that whilst I was out, Simon broke into my computer and read my old e-mails. One, from Loom, says, “Do you suppose we’ll ever sleep together?” I know him well now and can hear his intonation. The intonation is akin to “Do you suppose the new David Lynch film will be any good?”

Loom and I go to see
Spamalot
.

The lights dim. And as they do we see that—Simon is sitting in front of us.

I understand that, because of me, the greatest playwright of our generation may be about to get punched in the face. During the opening number of the Monty Python musical. This is an unusual situation to be in. And I understand it is my life. Loom pulls himself up to his full height. Simon realizes that he wouldn’t win this fight. Cut to several hours later: Loom has smartly removed himself from the situation, and Simon and I are in my bathroom. He locks the door.

“Shall we do it?”

“What?”

“Kill ourselves?”

I look at Simon. For the first time I see how much taller he is than me. It’s strange, as a self-harmer, to feel afraid of someone harming you. I don’t know what to do, and I remember the dream about chewing off your own foot to stop the rat from chewing it. I take the nearest razor and cut my stomach, deeply. The blood surprises him. It surprises
me. He unlocks the door. We lie on the bed. I hold him to me because I am afraid of him. How often do we keep people close so they can’t get in striking distance? I do not want him anymore and I will hold him until I can get him out and then I never want to hold him again.

THE NEXT DAY
, Dr. R observes my stomach cuts. Like an actual doctor, which of course he is, though it’s funny to me.

“Have you cleaned it out properly?”

“Yeah.”

“And used Neosporin?”

“Bacitracin. I really screwed up.” I am surprising myself when I add, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

“You had a reminder.”

He will never say: “You fell off the wagon.” He always calls it “Having a reminder.”

He adds, “It’s over for a reason. You’re looking out for yourself.”

“I am?”

“Sure. I think it would be a very good idea if you would attend an SLA meeting.”

I stare at him.

“You want me to join the Symbionese Liberation Army?”