To my surprise, Robin and Pat are huddled closely together now, in the midst of what appears to be an animated conversation, Robin’s hand over Pat’s in a gesture of fellowship, it seems—or is it to keep her from interrupting? We’re closing ranks around Sally, I think, just like the Hasidim with their shoteh. We’re a monolithic family unit, united in our concern for her, harmonious, getting along.
“Just look at what they’re feeding her,” Robin is saying, pointing to the snack table laden with packets of sugar and cupcakes. “Can you feel how wrong this is? I mean, how do you divorce a person’s mental condition from her total organic well-being?” And to me, without skipping a beat: “This is exactly what dis-ease is, Michael. Dis-ease. How can anyone be at ease in this environment? Tell me.”
I think: this is the sound of Robin’s grief, her explanation for what none of us can comprehend. And I feel a rush of gratitude toward her for not pressing me for a detailed account of what led up to this. In Robin’s shoes I would be demanding clues, facts, I would want to reconstruct every calibrated shift in Sally’s behavior during my absence: When did she crack? When did she almost crack? What was the first sign? When did the eyes turn to polished coal and the words become incomprehensible? There had to be a critical instant, a turning point…
Pat, for her part, is attentive to Robin in the interested, appraising way of one watching a performance. Cheered by the apparent goodwill between them, I reach for Pat’s hand. It slides away impatiently. She rises abruptly—“I have things to take care of”—and walks briskly out of the dayroom, to the nurse’s station where Rufus is eating Chinese food in a take-out container and reading the Daily News.
By the time I excuse myself from Robin and go after her, Rufus has already let her out of the ward and relocked the doors.
SUPERMODEL MARGAUX HEMINGWAY TAKES OWN LIFE, reads the Daily News headline. “Was Reading Her Famous Grandfather’s Books at Time of Suicide.”
Sitting down again, Rufus tucks back into his meal. Politely, I ask him to open the doors for me as well. Aside from a barely audible sigh, he ignores the request, and I stand there waiting, holding my ground, until he rises in no particular hurry, his mystical thicket of keys dangling from the belt of his synthetic white nurse’s pants.
I catch up with Pat as she is about to cross First Avenue with her tilting, slightly combative stride.
“Why did you cut out?”
“There’s no reason for the three of us to cram ourselves into that room, staring at Sally like she’s some specimen under glass.”
“Robin could have warned us that she was coming,” I say.
“I don’t see why. She has every right to be here, more so than any of us. Why do you think they let her in before the start of visiting hours? They only do that for the mother, the sacred relation. Everyone understands this—except for you, apparently.”
“What I understand is the awkward position you’re in.”
“That would surprise me, Michael.”
A woman approaches and crankily demands a light for her cigarette. I’m almost certain I recognize her as one of the patients from the ward—on leave to wander the sweltering streets like the rest of us. Pat is kind to her; we have no matches. I want some of that kindness too. She says that she’s heading downtown to her studio to catch up with work that might slip away if left unattended—classes and hourly renters that provide the cash to keep the studio alive. I detect a reproach in this. I should be working too, placing calls, shaking the trees for a new writing assignment. We mustn’t allow things to fall apart. But I feel as if I’ve been struck with a kind of social amnesia, that my facility for casual conversation, for the necessary small talk that greases the wheel of reasonable cooperative exchange, has been lost.
“I canceled rehearsal,” she says, referring to the piece she is in the midst of creating with her dance company for a show in the fall. They are scheduled to perform at a well-known theater in September, a booking Pat worked hard to obtain.
“I wish you hadn’t.”
“It’s just as well. I’ve no idea what to do to the piece. Sally has managed to make the material I’ve been working on seem ridiculous. Suddenly it’s beside the point, whatever the point may have been.”
A picture comes to me of Pat in a solo dance I attended a couple of years ago, shortly after we met, when we were still sizing each other up, in the middle of a cautious mating dance of our own. It was the first time I saw her perform. Monstrous Dragon the piece was called, Pat reeling in a vest of tin cans, lit by car headlights at a club called The Gas Station on Avenue B on the Lower East Side. It was her aloneness in the white splash of those headlights that captured me, delicate yet unbreakable in her rattling dragon skin, with the power, it seemed, to evoke physical sensations that were transferable to the audience—or at least to me.
“Go back to the hospital,” she says now. “You and Robin need to work this out together. It’s from your life before me, I don’t really have a place in it, and I’m not about to compete for one.”
And with that she heads off toward the Lexington Avenue subway, in her signature walk—“ambivalent” was how I described it to myself the first time I saw it—self-regarding yet with an opposing wish to go unnoticed, to be left alone.
To be left alone. It was the first wish of Pat’s that I absorbed when we met three years ago and our wariness of each other prohibited anything more than the careful cordiality that marked our unavoidable daily exchanges. We had been thrust together by chance when she moved into two tiny rooms at the back of the apartment on Bank Street. My old friend and landlord, seeking to earn a little more from the place, had installed her there, and I found myself having to compete with her for solo time in the kitchen, which we had no choice but to share. Pat would startle me with her silent catlike appearances at precisely the moment when I had assumed I was alone. She moved about on tiptoe—on dancer’s point, I pictured her—with a self-effacement that seemed instinctive and refined. We conducted our territorial War of the Roommates in silence. Her shyness was practically a form of ostentation, and it seemed unlikely that we would manage even to strike up a friendship, much less become romantically involved.
Her existence was a paragon of simplicity: she seemed as free of material ties as she was of emotional ones, and devoted herself exclusively, as far as I could tell, to asceticism and art. Before leaving on tour with her dance company, she made me promise not to change the locks while she was away. When I expressed surprise—and annoyance—that she would think me capable of such an act, she said, without a hint of contrition, “It’s ridiculous of me, I know. But worse things have happened.”
What things? I wondered.
By the landlord’s decree, I was to collect her rent and hand it over to him, which cast me in the unattractive role of her exploiter. She appeared to take pleasure in her position, and developed subtle ways of reminding me that morally she held the upper hand in our arrangement. It confirmed her pureness in her own eyes, I thought, and it was further proof of her stoicism, her regard for her life as some kind of ideal that she had to measure up to—irksome qualities, yet ones that despite myself I felt drawn to and admired.
More than anything else, her possessions were what fascinated me. Because they were so few they took on a charged air—her mother-of-pearl chopsticks, for instance, and her painted Chinatown bowl from which, after returning from marathon rehearsals of her dance company, she ate her late-night meals of tofu, angel hair spaghetti, and chard. More often than not she had to contend with a pile of dishes I’d left. She was a vegetarian, and my fried chickens and veal roasts were a philistine oppositional force.
One night, I caught her sliding her fingers through the drippings of a leg of lamb I had prepared. Bending forward so as not to stain her clothes, she sucked the crumbs of meat from her hand, blushing when she saw me, then withdrawing any hint of embarrassment as she grabbed her chopsticks and returned to her rooms in the back of the apartment, her chin shiny w
ith pan grease.
The hypocrisy thrilled me. I decided that she was in the throes of a private war, with renunciation on one side and sensual pleasure on the other. I thought I saw evidence of it in her favorite garment, a coarse woolen sleeveless vest that sheathed her torso while baring her shoulders and long balletic arms; in the sternly hedonistic nights on the town to which she occasionally treated herself like a sailor on shore leave; in her impeccable yet vaguely self-mocking posture gained from years of Alexander Technique and martial arts; and in the torn green leather jacket that hung on her like a rag, pointedly unbeautiful, but with a certain ravaged glamour. With her ragged clothes and heavenward posture she gave off competing emanations of anarchy and control, elegance and disarray.
Her chief concern, and the one that eclipsed all others, was her dance company, for which she choreographed a series of gorgeous, enigmatic creations. Wyoming the company was called, because of the sense of “emptiness” and “space beyond” that the word conjured. One of her heroes was Joseph Beuys, whose “art actions” included locking himself in a New York loft with a live coyote, a pile of hay, a felt blanket, and old copies of the Wall Street Journal. “Beuys reconnected us to what we are,” she explained to me. “Flesh and blood. Violent. Tame.” Her dancers seemed literally to throw their bodies away for no apparent reward other than the ecstasy of performing her work. One maxed out her credit card for the privilege of tumbling among the stones of the Trajan Market in Rome (a site-specific performance). Pat, for her part, kicked in most of her salary from her day job managing an off-Broadway theater, as well as the modest grants she received, and sporadic donations from a handful of devoted fans. I admired this sense of mission, but I was also a little wary. At its heart, I suspected, was a religious, possibly self-destructive hunger that I had no hope of comprehending. I wondered if Pat, an Irish Catholic by upbringing, was mistaking monasticism for art.
Austerity seemed to apply to her emotional life as well. She seemed unsullied by intimacy, free of messy relations, and this appeared to be a point of personal pride. She kept everything streamlined, in check. With her dancers she was intense, and strategically distant. Occasionally a lover climbed the stairs to her room like a slotted visitor, departing after a few hours.
Our first date was at the Metropolitan Museum to see the paintings of the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera, in town on a visiting exhibition. An hour before we were to meet, Pat phoned to cancel the date, then fifteen minutes later called again begging me to forgive her for her “foolishness” and announcing that our date was back on. We walked through the galleries, taking in Ribera’s tenebrous assembly of martyrs on the cross. We came to a painting of Saint Bartholomew, wrinkled and naked, about to be flayed alive. “When I was seven a group of kids on the street tried to steal my hat,” she said, laughing at the memory of herself. “I took off my overcoat and gave that to them too. I had just been taught the Sermon on the Mount and believed this was what I should do in the situation.”
Now her life is entangled with mine, tainted by madness, and what is called for is a different kind of renunciation—one in which the rewards of self-expression are absent. I wonder if she is having second thoughts about our marriage, laden, as it is, with precisely the sort of distractions she had been avoiding before I came along. I want to tell her that Sally has reconnected us to what we are: Flesh and blood. Violent. Tame. Not from an “art action” but from the material core of her being, of her life.
But I’m not sure I believe it myself.
Rufus lets me rap on the door for a few minutes before admitting me back onto the ward. I get nowhere trying to engage him in a brief exchange—about the heat, the broken air-conditioning unit, the trials of summer. Big-bellied Rufus, Cerberus of the five-foot space between the elevator and the bolted ward, punishing me for having earlier interrupted his lunch.
Sally is in the manacled sleep that appears to have become her new way of being—the opposite of what she was just a week ago, which itself was a distortion of what she had been before. Robin is sitting at the foot of her bed, shut out from her just as I am shut out, but calmer than me, I think, with her enviable air of acceptance.
I half-expect her to accuse me of putting Sally here, of turning her into a mental patient, of betraying her in some fundamental way by robbing her of her epiphanies and branding her “vision” as insane. But she does not accuse, and gamely we endure our awkwardness with each other. We haven’t spent so much time together since Sally’s brother Aaron graduated from high school three years ago. Sally was there too, of course, twelve years old, proud of her brother yet overlooked at the table herself where we ate our celebratory meal and pretended for a day that our family was intact. She sat next to me with her head on my shoulder, enduring the meal, wishing for it to end.
“Have you spoken with Aaron?” Robin asks.
“Not yet.”
“He’s such a wonderful young man.”
It feels oddly treasonous to be congratulating ourselves about Aaron in this way: our “bright spot,” our trouble-free child, who has just completed his junior year at college and is currently away on a research trip for a summer fellowship he received.
“He’s staying at a hotel,” I say. “I don’t have the number. I’m sure he’ll call. It’s strange to be out of contact with him. Especially now.”
“I know.”
With a shiver, Sally opens her eyes.
“Did you bring the artichokes, Father?”
“Artichokes?” asks Robin.
I explain that on leaving the hospital yesterday I had promised Sally I would bring some, cooked, of course, along with a bar of chocolate, Sally’s other wish. I didn’t think the request was serious, and at any rate doubted that she would remember. Another surprise. Maybe her memory now is keener than ever, imprinted with mania’s branding iron.
I assure Sally that she’ll have her artichokes tomorrow, but she gives no indication that she has heard me or cares.
“Tell me what I’m doing here,” she says, puzzled and childlike, her eyes as black as malachite, magnified and sharp.
“You’re here to feel well again.”
“I’ve never felt better. I’m perfectly fine.”
“You haven’t been acting fine.”
“Everyone’s acting, Father. You most of all.”
“Sally, you’re sick.” I hear the flat insistence in my voice.
“Sick. Mmm. Does it make you feel safer to think of me that way?”
“We just want you to be yourself again.”
“Your father doesn’t mean that you’re not yourself right now,” says Robin. “He means, you’re here, in the hospital to…recover.”
Sally seizes the word. “Recover,” she repeats. “But what have I lost? Or am I someone you want to cover up again. Someone you want to put a lid on.” Her voice hardens: the dreaded inquisitional tone. “You’ve always wanted to lock me up, Father. Now you’ve succeeded. You must be very satisfied with yourself.”
She lets out a soft groan, then almost immediately bolts up from the bed as if yanked by a rope. Her arm shoots up at an oblique angle from her body, where it freezes in what for all the world looks like a Nazi salute. Her neck is locked in an upward tilt too. She is standing by the window, unable to move, it seems, astonished by her predicament and by the startled look on our faces, unaware, it seems, of the bizarre statue she has become.
Robin lets out a quiet gasp, as I lead Sally back to the bed and sit her down. She tries to lower Sally’s arm as if it were a pump handle, but it springs back up again to its permanent “Heil!”
Gently, I attempt to unlock her neck, but it too is fixed in this drastic tilt, like a mechanical toy. It looks unbearable, but Sally appears unperturbed.
“What have they done to her, Michael?”
Robin rushes out of the room and returns with Nurse Phillips, who casually slips her copy of Jet magazine into the pocket of her nurse’s jumpsuit as she enters. “Black Hi
story Makers Honored at Gala Reception in Detroit,” reads the cover.
“Feeling a little stiff, sweetheart?” she asks. She instructs Sally to “sit tight—no pun intended,” and returns to the room a minute later with a syringe that she jabs into Sally’s arm like an experienced cook tending to a pot that has boiled over: quick removal from the flame with no more than a flicker of annoyance.
“Cogentin,” she informs us. “A muscle relaxant. Sally’s a tad rigid right now. A side effect of her medication. It’s completely normal.”
“Shouldn’t a doctor look at her?” asks Robin.
“That’s unnecessary, dear. Believe me, this happens all the time.”
Alone with Sally, Robin and I look at her as if she has been executed in front of our eyes. “They do everything but cure,” I say of her myriad medications. The haloperidol has so thoroughly suppressed Sally’s production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that promotes quickness of wit and limb, that her body has entered a kind of rigor mortis. One phase of the war against mania has officially been won: a resounding victory over the riot in the frontal cortex of the brain’s limbic system.
Less than five minutes after receiving the injection, Sally is able to straighten her neck and flex her arm. She flops across the bed in a melted state that is as excessive as the stiffness it has replaced. Only her hair, spread out in a tangled mass on the mattress, remains electrified and wild.
Hurry Down Sunshine Page 6
