‘You OK?’
‘Trying to be.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘Then why are you out here in the cold?’
‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years.’
Sally pulled back and looked at me long and hard, and finally asked:
‘Are you going to leave him?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘And I’m not stupid. Are you going to leave him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t stay for me.’
Hugging me again tightly she then left for school.
An hour or so later I had to head back south to Portland and get Ben’s paints into the hands of his professor. Heading south meant passing through the town of Bath. I still had Richard’s business card, and had earlier unpacked his leather jacket from my suitcase and put it in the trunk of my car. I also still had his glasses in my shoulder bag. No, I wasn’t going to do anything dramatic like drop them both off personally at his office. Though I also toyed with the idea of putting them both in a box and mailing it to him with a simple one-line note, ‘I wish you well’, I instinctually knew that the best thing to do now was to do nothing. So I got to Portland and dropped the paints in with the receptionist at the Museum of Art, who assured me that she’d get them to Professor Lathrop. En route back to the car I texted Ben, telling him the Tetron Azure Blue had been delivered to the museum and should be with him tonight. Then I passed one of the many homeless men who always seem to line Congress Street in Portland and always ask for a handout so they can eat that day. The guy I saw just a few steps from the museum looked around fifty. Though he was unshaven and clearly downcast I could see from the soft way he asked if I could help him out that he was someone whom life had banged up badly. The morning had turned cold and gray. He was just wearing a light nylon jacket that wasn’t providing much in the way of insulation. Walking on to my car, I retrieved the leather jacket from my trunk, then returned to where the man was crouching by a lamppost and handed it to him.
‘This might keep you warmer,’ I said.
He looked at me, bemused.
‘You’re giving me this?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘But why?’
‘Because you need it.’
He took the jacket, and immediately tried it on.
‘Hey, it fits,’ he said, even though it actually swam a bit on his lanky frame.
‘Good luck,’ I said.
‘Any chance I could hit you for a couple of bucks as well?’
I reached into my bag and handed him a $10 bill.
‘You’re my angel of mercy,’ he said.
‘That’s quite the compliment.’
‘And you deserve it. Hope you get happier, ma’am.’
That comment gave me pause for thought all the way back home. Was I that transparent? Did I look that crushed? Though the man’s observation got me anxious, it made me force myself to present a cheerful face to my hospital colleagues when I returned to work the next morning. By the end of the week Dr Harrild also discreetly asked if there was ‘something wrong’.
‘Have I done anything wrong?’ I asked.
‘Hardly, hardly,’ he said, slightly taken aback by my tone. ‘But you’ve seemed a bit preoccupied recently. And I’m just a little concerned.’
So was I, as I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night since returning from Boston, and was beginning to feel the instability that accompanies several nights of insomnia. But I also understood the message behind Dr Harrild’s voice of concern: Whatever is going on in your life that is so clearly vexing you, you can’t start letting it affect your work.
I called my primary physician that evening – a local woman named Dr Jane Bancroft who is very much an old-school local doctor: straight talking, no nonsense. When I phoned her office and told her receptionist it was a matter of some urgency – and could she ring my cellphone, and not the land line – I got a message back five minutes later, saying the doctor could see me the next morning if that would work.
I changed plans and decided to drive over to Farmington and spend the day with Ben there. Texting my son and saying I would now arrive around one p.m., I made it to Dr Bancroft’s office, as arranged, at nine a.m. – after another night where sleep only overtook me around five. Dr Bancroft – a woman of about sixty, petite, wiry, formidable – took one look at me and asked:
‘So how long have you been depressed?’
I explained how the sleeplessness had arrived in my life only a few days ago.
‘Smart of you to get in here fast then. But the insomnia is usually a sign of larger long-term difficulties. So I’ll ask you again – how long have you been depressed?’
‘Around five years,’ I heard myself saying, then added: ‘But it hasn’t affected my work or anything else until now.’
‘And why do you think the sleeplessness has arisen this week?’
‘Because . . . something happened. Something which seems to have crystallized a sense that . . .’
I broke off, the words swimming before me but unable to find their way into my mouth. God, how I needed to sleep.
‘Depression can be there for years,’ Dr Bancroft said, ‘and we can function with it for quite a long time. It becomes a bit like a dark shadow over us that we choose to simply live with, to see as part of us. Until the gloom begins to submerge us and it becomes unbearable.’
I left Dr Bancroft’s office with a prescription for a sleeping pill that was also a ‘mild’ anti-depressant called Mirtazapine. One per day before bedtime, and she assured me it wouldn’t leave me feeling groggy. She also gave me the name of a therapist in Brunswick named Lisa Schneider whom Dr Bancroft considered ‘sound’ (and that was high praise from her), and whose services would be covered by my health plan. I got the prescription filled at my local pharmacy. I drove the two hours to Farmington. I was relieved to see Ben looking far better than I had seen him in months. I viewed the work in progress. It was astonishing in its scale – a huge nine-foot-by-six-foot canvas – and in its ambition. Seen from afar it was boldly abstract: wave-like shapes, contrasting blue and white tonalities, with an energy and a ferocity to the brush strokes that called to mind the anger of the coastal waters which so defined Ben’s childhood and also (I sensed) a reflection of so much of the turmoil that had characterized the last year of his life. Maybe it was my lack of sleep, my own personal turmoil, and seeing how Ben had articulated his own recent anguish into this clearly remarkable work (all right, I am his mother – but even given my natural maternal bias, this was such an impressive and daring painting), but I found myself fogging up again.
‘You OK, Mom?’ Ben asked.
‘I’m just so impressed, overwhelmed.’
The tears now began to flow – despite my ferocious efforts to curb them and the sobs that suddenly accompanied them. To his immense credit, my son did not blanch in the face of such raw emotion. On the contrary, he put his arms around me and said nothing. I subsided quickly, apologizing profusely, telling him I hadn’t slept well the past night or so, and I was just so incredibly proud of what he had achieved, how he had bounced back from such a difficult moment in his life.
Ben just nodded and said that I was the best mother imaginable. This set me off crying again, and I excused myself and found the bathroom off his studio. Gripping the sink I told myself that all would be better after a night’s sleep.
Once I pulled myself together Ben and I went out to eat at a diner.
‘We could have done something a little more fancy,’ I told him as we slipped into a booth.
‘Why drop money on restaurant food? Anyway, this is my hangout – and even though it’s cheap I’ve yet to get food poisoning.’
A waitress came by. We ordered. As soon as she was out of sight Ben looked up at me and said:
‘Sally called me the other day.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Well, I just didn’t think you guys were in much contact.’
‘We speak at least twice a week.’
And why hadn’t I figured this out? Or noticed their closeness?
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘And you sound a little amazed because you thought my cheerleader sister and her arty-farty brother could never be close.’
‘I stand corrected.’
‘She’s a little worried about you, Mom. As am I. And she told me about the other night when you got back from Boston and she found you asleep on the porch. It’s a little late in the year for that, isn’t it?’
‘I was having a bad night, that’s all.’
‘But you told me earlier that it was the only last night or so when you hadn’t been able to sleep. Sunday was six nights ago – and judging from the rings under your eyes . . .’
‘All right, I’ve been having a bad week.’
‘Why?’
‘Stuff.’
‘Stuff with Dad?’
I nodded.
‘Sally told me that too. Do you want to talk about it?’
Instinctively I shook my head. Then:
‘I do . . . but I also don’t think that’s fair to you. Because it means you’re hearing my side, not his side.’
‘Not that Dad would ever dream of telling me his side of anything.’
‘I know you have your problems with him.’
‘Problems? That’s polite. No communication whatsoever is more like it. The guy and I just don’t connect. Haven’t for years. I get the feeling he doesn’t really like me.’
‘He loves you very much. It’s just that he’s become so lost over the past few years. That’s not making any excuses for him. I think he’s genuinely, clinically depressed. Not that he would ever acknowledge that, or seek help.’
‘And what are you?’
‘Functionally depressed.’
‘That’s news to me.’
‘And to me too. But this sleeplessness I’ve been having recently . . . my doctor feels that it’s as if the depression, which I’ve kept so submerged for years, has finally found some sort of physiological outlet to let me know I am really not in a good place.’
‘So you are getting help for it?’
I nodded.
‘That’s good,’ Ben said, putting his hand on my arm and squeezing it, a gesture so sweet, so benevolent, so grown-up that I found myself choking back tears again.
‘Sally also hinted that there was something which triggered all this.’
‘I see,’ I said, thinking: My children really do discuss their parents when they are out of our field of vision.
‘Did something happen?’ Ben asked.
I met my son’s gaze and said:
‘A disappointment.’
Ben held my gaze – and in his eyes I could see him registering this, considering its deliberate vagueness, its multiple possible meanings, its implications . . . and eventually deciding not to push the matter further.
‘Sally told me you’ve been very much elsewhere all week – that she was cutting you a wide berth you seemed so withdrawn.’
‘No sleep does that. But I have some pills to help me now. And I am determined to do what you did – get myself out of the dark wood.’
Some hours later, in the little motel room I had taken for the night (there was no way I was dealing with darkened Maine back roads on no sleep), I found myself crying again as I replayed my conversation with my wonderful son. I also made a mental note to call Sally first thing in the morning – which, for her on a Sunday morning, meant sometime after twelve noon.
Of course there was the little matter of sleep. Dr Bancroft had put me on a strong dose of Mirtazapine, 45 milligrams. And she told me that, if possible, I should take the first dose and not set the alarm clock: just let chemically aided sleep finally wash over me, and wake up when my body decided it wanted to resume consciousness. So I took the pill just after ten p.m., thinking: If anything the drugs will take me away from this fifty-dollar-a-night motel’s fifty-dollar-a-night decor. Then I crawled into the somewhat mildewy bed with a copy of the book I’d brought with me: a collection of poems by Philip Larkin, whom Lucy had been raving about for a while. Shortly after that evening when I ran to her house after Boston, a package from our local independent bookshop in Damariscotta arrived on my doorstep. A new American edition of Larkin’s Complete Poems, with a note from Lucy:
From all accounts, he was the worst sort of Little Englander. But as a poet, the gent really knew how to cut to the heart of the matter and address all that big four-in-the-morning stuff we don’t want to contemplate. If you don’t mind a recommendation, start with ‘Going’ on page 28. Always know you have an escape hatch and a friend here. As you wrote me a few days ago, you’re not alone. Courage and all that. Love – Lucy
The book arrived on Thursday. Though hugely touched by the gesture, and the immense kindness of her note, given the nature of the week I didn’t have the reserves of stamina to tackle anything so clearly close to the emotional bone. But I still packed it in my overnight bag before leaving today. Downing my prescribed dose of Mirtazapine I opened the volume. As suggested by Lucy I turned to page 28 and . . .
GOING
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to sky? What is under my hands
That I cannot feel?
What loads my hands down?
I read the poem once. I read it again. I sat even further up in bed and went through it a third time. So that’s where I’ve been for the past few years. The shroud of despair which I mistook for everyday vestments, and which I had pulled over myself, thinking it was my destiny to wear it. I had become convinced that sadness was a condition I simply had to bear. As much as I still ached for Richard – thinking back that, around this time last year, we were making love in that big hotel bed in Boston – I also knew, after reading that extraordinary Larkin poem, that Richard was very much someone who, given the prospect of happiness, decided the hair shirt of ongoing sorrow was one he simply had to wear. He broke both our hearts by making that choice. But what the Larkin poem told me – that the veil of sadness is always there to enshroud us, should we so choose it – was strangely comforting. Because it reminded me that, yes, I wasn’t alone . . . even if I also knew that the wake of grief trailing me wouldn’t dissipate for some time to come.
Then I felt the ether of grogginess drift over me. I switched off the light. With the blackout came, for the first time in days, that vanishing act from life’s harder realities. Sleep.
* * *
The pills worked wonders. They knocked me out every night and ensured that I stayed knocked out for at least seven hours. The ongoing sleep – coupled with (what Dr Bancroft called) the mild anti-depressive properties of Mirtazapine – seemed to let me get through the day without falling victim to the deeper recesses of my sadness.
But I was still sad. I was still not getting over it. Around a week after I’d started taking the pills, Dan surprised me by making an amorous move in bed one night (his pre-dawn schedule and my silent melancholy had, until now, kept us even more on our respective sides of the bed). I didn’t push him away. Pulling up my nightshirt, he began to make gruff, needy love to me. He was inside me within moments. He came around three minutes later. He rolled off me with a groan, then spread my legs and started trying to arouse me with his index finger. I closed my legs. I rolled over. I buried my head in the pillow.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I whispered.
‘We don’t have to stop,’ he said, kissing the back of my neck.
‘I’m tired,’ I said, shifting myself furthe
r away from him.
‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘Goodnight.’
And there we were, alone together again in bed.
The next evening he came on to me again – a little more tenderly this time, but still with that undercurrent of rushed gruffness that had characterized our lovemaking for years. I can’t say that I was attempting to augment things – as I remained quietly detached throughout. I felt bad about my dispassionateness, because my husband was trying to re-establish a connection so long lost. All I could think about was love found, love lost – and how I was back treading domestic water with a man with whom there had been no love for years.
After our ten minutes of sex, Dan kissed me goodnight and promptly fell asleep. It was still early – around eleven p.m. – and tomorrow was Sunday. Sally was out for the evening. The house was quiet. Disquietingly so. This was the future sound of silence that would become quotidian when Sally left for college next year. The deep silence of an uneasy marriage now devoid of the necessary clamor of children, with the left-behind couple wondering how to fill the void between them.
I went down to the living room, poured a glass of red wine, and found myself reaching for The Synonym Finder – omnipresent on the small desk I had set up in a corner of the room. As I sipped the wine, I turned the pages until I came to the word I was looking for: Unhappiness. There were – and I counted them – over one hundred and twenty-two words listed to denote the dissatisfaction that is such an intrinsic part of the human condition. Flipping back to the listings under the letter H I noted that Happiness only contained eighty-one synonyms. Could it be that we search for more words to describe our pain in life rather than the pleasures we can also experience? Would I, a few years from now, on the cusp of my half-century, be sitting here late one Saturday night, flipping through the thesaurus yet again and wondering why I had forced myself to stay put?
I closed my book of synonyms. I opened the front door, I stepped out on the porch. We were now deeper into October. The mercury was on a downward curve. So I could only stand outside, covered just in a robe, for a minute or so. But in that time I resolved to end my marriage just after Sally finished school in June.
Five Days Page 30
