This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  Having come to the same conclusion as the previous time I’d stood there, I would get back on my bike and ride home.

  About a month into analysis, I put all my medication into an envelope addressed to Dr. P. I just stopped taking everything, not even taking the precaution of weaning myself off. And nothing happened. I never went back to the psychiatrist who was prescribing my medication; she didn’t seem to notice. I held on to the envelope for a few more months, though. I wasn’t yet prepared to give the arsenal away.

  I was living in a room of a friend’s house, closing my door and working on my thesis most of the hours of the day. When I wasn’t working on my thesis, I was writing letters to Dr. P. Sometimes I was writing the things that I found too hard to say aloud. Other times, I was writing the story of a life I might have otherwise had.

  At first that was the life of an inanimate object. A rock in a cave. It’s hard to imagine that there is much to say about a rock, but I had plenty. Dr. P held that rock in her hands for some time. She had the ability to take the risk of being tender with what was hardest about me. She held that rock for long enough that it began to yield and shift shape. At some point it became a human. A baby at first, a baby in her arms on a bright and crisp fall day, leaves scattered across the ground. It was the most intimate moment I had ever shared with anyone and yet it occurred in an imaginary world.

  Dr. P and I built a house together, where we lived just the two of us, and a cat. It was always a bright and crisp fall day; windows open, curtains fluttering in the wind. I was six months old sometimes, five years old, eleven. I cannot explain the process exactly, just that over the course of three years we created an alternative childhood, one that was loving and attentive. That story, the fantasy of it, couldn’t replace the original, but it could exist as a counterweight: a parallel world where I could live and thrive and cultivate a different sense of self, one who wasn’t crazy, one for whom depression was not the norm.

  I sent Dr. P the letters I wrote to her. She didn’t respond or refer to them in our sessions, but their essence was there in the room. I put the envelope full of pills in the mail to her eventually as well.

  Ted responded to the letters I wrote to him. He was loving and angry in reply. We weren’t ready to let go of each other. But the more time I spent in therapy, the more I began to feel that we belonged less to each other than to a common state of mind. And I wanted to be something other than depressed.

  Depression blankets feelings, dulls senses, kills words. I came to know this only because once analysis began to free the feelings, out came the words. Words and feelings arrive, for me, in the same moment, as if they are one and the same.

  I wrote to Dr. P every day. I also found myself writing poetry and fiction again while I was finishing my thesis. I hadn’t done any creative writing since the end of high school; I’d turned my attention to academic work to the exclusion of most other things. Writing stories felt rebellious, liberating, an act of defiance against everything that was expected of me. I finished my thesis and began applying for academic jobs, but I was daydreaming about other things.

  I took an administrative job at my undergraduate college in order to earn some money. I would sit and write in the college quadrangle over my lunch break, and then type my notes up at night. I had even begun sending some stories off to journals and magazines—the start of a fine career in rejection.

  Sometimes I would have company in the quadrangle: a friend of one of the professors whose office was near mine. He was a disenchanted businessman who was learning Mandarin in his increasingly spare time, listening to tapes on a Walkman, repeating certain phrases aloud. He would sit down with me sometimes, ask me what I was writing, tell me about his travels.

  One day, apropos of nothing, he asked me why I always looked so unhappy. I told him I felt ambivalent about an academic career, conflicted, despondent, even hostile. He asked me what I’d rather be doing, and I told him I’d rather be writing stories. He asked me what was standing in my way.

  To me it seemed obvious: I couldn’t just throw away something I had invested in for so long, give it all up to do something I’d never studied, embark on a profession that probably has the least chance of success or of generating income than any other profession I could possibly choose, except perhaps that of poet. I couldn’t say no to a job when I had thousands of dollars in student loans to repay and absolutely nothing in the bank.

  I couldn’t throw everything away, most importantly, because what if I just wasn’t any good?

  “How would you know if you were any good?” the man learning Mandarin asked me.

  I thought that if I took some time to really apply myself, to focus on writing to the exclusion of other things, I’d know either way, or the world would tell me.

  “How much time would you need?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe six months.”

  “How much would it cost you to live for six months?” he asked.

  I added up my rent and expenses in my head. I could live on a thousand dollars a month.

  “What if I were to give you six thousand dollars?”

  What? No. He couldn’t be serious. But what would he expect in return?

  “No strings attached,” he said, as if he could read the tickertape in my head.

  And he meant it. He gave me those six thousand dollars in cash the following week. The bills were in a paper box with a note reading “no strings attached.”

  More than the practical means, this man, a relative stranger, gave me the shove I needed. If someone eliminates the obstacles you believe to be in front of you, then you have no choice but to try. Fail spectacularly, if you will, but try.

  At the beginning of the summer, I quit my job, gave up my apartment and moved to my brother’s trailer. I wasn’t going to squander a second or a dollar. The trailer sat amidst two dozen others in a small park with a beautiful view of rolling sand dunes and a lake. Micah used it only on the weekends; during the week, the trailer was mine. I plugged a laptop into the outlet above the tiny stove and set myself up in a lawn chair outside. I typed while my neighbours played horseshoes. I didn’t look up from my keyboard, I talked to no one.

  I ate very little and I started to like the dizzy, dissociated feeling this gave me; it made me feel my body was a participant in this endeavour—quite different from the brain-in-a-box alienation I had experienced at Oxford.

  Feeling the urgency, I wrote a first draft of a novel in just eight weeks. Feeling Dr. P’s absence, I wrote it for her. A story of a messed-up girl who eventually finds enough companionship and sense to give her life meaning.

  The experience spoiled me. Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding. And to put these insights into practice—to embody and enact them through character—rather than theorizing about them in an academic way. It was the perfect marriage of head and heart.

  By the end of the summer, I was quite certain I wanted not just to write but to be a writer. Dr. P advised me to stick with the pursuit of an academic career—not unreasonable advice, and certainly the sanest course of action. But although analysis had allowed me to find a voice, I wasn’t looking for reasonable advice from my analyst. I would have to leave Dr. P in order to become a writer. I would have to divorce myself from anything that might stand in my way.

  1

  I was fulfilled by writing and relieved by publication. After my first novel was published, I was able to leave the academic world in a sensible way. I had an income from writing, a contract for another book and the prospect of a career doing something I loved, work that completely suited my personality.

  I didn’t have to talk. There was a text: concrete evidence that I did have something to say even if I wasn’t speaking. It was grounding to have a tangible ally. And when I was speaking I didn’t feel the pressure to sound smart. I could just be myself.
A sense of self had emerged and developed through an intense combination of analysis and writing, a three-year period of incubation, and I found myself looking forward, excited by all that was new in my life, by all the unknown possibilities ahead.

  In the fall of 2000, I was invited to attend a fundraising dinner in support of Canadian writers. I took the subway in a borrowed dress to an event where the people with money wore designer clothes and had their cars valet parked. I sat at a corporate-sponsored table, beside the host, a businesswoman. I assumed we would have little in common and would exhaust the pleasantries soon enough. Much to my surprise, we spent the whole night talking.

  Anna was exceptionally generous company: smart, worldly, caustic, animated and engaged. I was surprised. Not only had she read my book, she’d made everyone at the table read it too. And she hadn’t simply populated the table with begrudging colleagues; she’d carefully selected a group of interesting people from an array of backgrounds. She’d been particularly thoughtful about an evening that most would have approached as yet another obligation.

  At the end of the night, she said she would love to stay in touch. Perhaps she was just being polite. We inhabited such different worlds, so little in common between them, that it was difficult to imagine the grounds for friendship. In no other context would our paths have ever crossed. But she seemed genuine, and I did, in fact, hear from her the next day. And so began a correspondence by email.

  I was finishing a draft of my second novel at that time. I wanted to kill off the character of the father at the end of the story but, feeling superstitious about it, I had first hired a private detective to see whether he could locate my father, dead or alive.

  For five hundred dollars I’d learned that my father was living three thousand kilometres away, in Calgary. And so, at the end of the novel, the father dies. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have felt too unsettled by mowing down my character on a lonely highway. I had taken all sorts of other imaginative liberties—filled in those missing years with fantasy, conjecture, all manner of crimes—but I could not, somehow, manage to kill him.

  The last I had known of my father, he’d been squatting in the basement of a warehouse on Cherry Beach. He slept on a camp cot set up on a cement floor. There was electricity but no source of heat, several broken windows and an open channel of water running the length of the space. I visited him there only once. My brother went frequently, taking him food, and beer and clothes. He took him a pair of his own dress shoes when my father said he had a job interview. He took the shoes back when my father didn’t go to the interview. An Indian giver, my father called him. Around the same time as he disowned me.

  He blamed the world for betraying him. He blamed us. He disappeared altogether shortly after that.

  A couple of weeks after receiving the information from the private detective, I got a phone call from my father, the first time I had heard from him in twelve years. It was creepy: he introduced himself using the name of the father in my first novel. A private detective had been sniffing around, he said. Had I hired him? And if so, why?

  I told him I had simply wanted to know whether he was still alive.

  But that didn’t mean I had wanted to be in touch. I didn’t answer his questions about whether I was married, where I lived. I vowed I would never have a listed number again.

  Anna emailed to ask if anything was wrong after not having heard from me in a while. I told her something about my father. I was raw, more honest with her than the depth of our acquaintance probably warranted; she was sympathetic, attentive, more thoughtful than it warranted too.

  She soon invited me for lunch downtown, in the giant tower where she worked. I was so unfamiliar with corporate geography that, rather than navigate the underground pathways, I got off the subway and made my way above ground through snow hurtling horizontally down the wind tunnels between buildings. I was wearing my most respectable and conservative black dress, but the effect was rather compromised by my boots, thick and clunky, built for weather.

  She’d chosen the restaurant, high up in the tower, for the view, but all we could see out the window that day was the white heart of a storm. She ate a lobster sandwich, delicately removing the lobster from between the slices of bread, while I couldn’t have eaten more than a forkful of the plate of tri-coloured fusilli in front of me because, much to my mortification, my hands were shaking.

  After lunch Anna showed me the boardroom. We stood there, looking at the storm swirling outside, and she suddenly said: “I don’t know if I’m shaking because I’m cold or I’m nervous.”

  That was all she said. That was all she needed to say. In that instant I saw beyond the tower and the title and the suit, beyond stereotypes and my own preconceptions. I saw a vulnerable and courageous heart and I was moved.

  Later she would say I was the person for her. That she would wait for me for ten years.

  She didn’t have to.

  There was something fierce and knowing about the love that grew between us, something clear and absolute and deep, and I knew, very early on, that I would love this person for the rest of my life. I hadn’t known it was possible to feel conviction in love. My love for her felt thorough, pure, unassailable.

  Anna told me I was easy to love.

  I was quite sure I never had been. Not as a child, or an adult. Ever since my first love, David, had vanished so abruptly from my life, I’d become a disappearing act myself. I was shape-shifting, malleable, moving into the worlds of others, bringing little with me, sleeping in beds they’d slept in with previous partners, cooking with their pots and pans, enjoying the company of their friends who would come over for dinner, living in rooms painted and decorated in ways I had had no part in creating, planting nothing in their gardens, perhaps having a pot of basil by the kitchen window, that was it, a pot of basil that would last a season, if that.

  I shared the cost of groceries and utilities but made no investment, took up no room, changed nothing, asked for nothing to be changed. I did not belong there. I disappeared and left no visible mark. But I left plenty of invisible ones. I was not a good person to love.

  And yet, Anna believed otherwise. There was something redemptive in that. I owed too many apologies to others, some of which I would find the occasion to offer over the next few years, but the best thing I could do was love Anna well. We were a good complement to each other. Being porous allowed me to absorb some of Anna’s calm and stability. And I, in turn, softened some of her harder edges. We were better for knowing and being loved by each other.

  We built a life together, that loving nest I had missed in my first family, that one that gives you a sense of belonging and buffers you against the bruises of the world.

  But then, Anna made being in the world easy. She took my hand early on and said: You, too, deserve to be here, participating, not just observing. Her confidence protected me, and she recast sad places in radiant light.

  The first Christmas after my parents separated, my father had driven from Long Island to Buffalo to pick up my brother and me. We got to Buffalo in the back of a van without seats, a red-haired man named Bernie at the wheel. My father couldn’t enter Canada for some undisclosed reason and so a stranger had driven us over the border. We waited for my father at a Howard Johnson’s and then he drove us along the interstate through the night. He ordered four cups of milk at a drive-thru window, chain-smoked and told me not to fall asleep—he needed the company, he needed to stay awake.

  He told me New York was the greatest city on earth, a place of giant skyscrapers and lights and art and limitless possibility and he said we could take a helicopter ride over the city, see the sights, asked me if I would like that.

  We arrived at a new housing development on Long Island in the middle of the night. There was no furniture in the townhouse, just a couple of blow-up mattresses and a table lamp on the floor. The whole place smelled of new carpet and, soon, cigarette smoke. We woke up to a grey morning. There were no trees outside and n
o other people living in the development from what I could gather—most of the townhouses were still under construction and I didn’t see any other cars.

  We went out to buy some food. All I remember him buying, though, were spices—one of every kind on the shelf—and a Christmas tree. I didn’t want my father to go to the expense of a tree. We had no decorations. He bought pounds and pounds of nuts—almonds, pecans, walnuts and hazelnuts—and poured them around the base of the tree. I remember thinking: But we’ll never be able to eat them all.

  My father drank himself into a stupor on Christmas Eve and sat by the tree and wept. I watched him from my mattress on the floor of the living room. On Christmas morning he gave us each a canvas bag with I NY printed on it. I knew the meant love, not a word in his vocabulary. The bags were filled with freebies he’d picked up at trade shows—paper and pens and notebooks and stickers and buttons and catalogues—and cheap little puzzles and games. I wanted to be brave for my father. I tried not to and failed not to cry.

  We went for a walk on a deserted beach and I found a little dead seahorse that I slipped into my pocket. We ate Christmas dinner—turkey and all the fixings—in a diner by the side of a highway.

  We never saw the city, the sights. From the ground or from a helicopter.

  I had fictionalized that story in my first novel. Anna was the first person I ever actually told.

  I saw New York with Anna instead. She promised me it really was the greatest city on earth and set out to prove it to me. We made several trips to New York over the years. On our last, at a book launch, Anna made a passionate speech about the privilege of living with a writer. We were standing in front of a grand piano in an even grander room high above Park Avenue. I was standing on top of the world, proud partner of a proud partner in the greatest city on earth.