by Terri Cheney
My choice was made. To defend Joe would be an act of solidarity with the disease—symbolic, subtle, but internally unmistakable. And I wasn’t about to sacrifice my future for something I didn’t really believe in, that might magically go away any morning now. So when the others laughed, I threw back my head and chortled. I listened to their jokes with apparent avidity for the next few minutes. And when Joe returned to the table I, like everyone else, avoided his eyes.
It took me a whole week to get up the courage to meet with Joe in my office and tell him the bad news. I didn’t mention the lithium. I made up a story about old-fashioned execs wanting old-fashioned experts. All the time I was lying, though, I wanted to warn Joe to be more careful, to remind him that high-profile jobs demand low-profile lives. But mostly, I think I wanted to confess: to obtain his forgiveness and absolution for the sin of hypocrisy that was still eating away at my hopelessly Catholic soul.
Instead, I offered him flowers: a glorious bunch of daffodils, fresh from the flower market that morning. Forced blooms, the florist had called them, trying to justify the price tag. Forced blooms: flowers made to bloom early, before their time. It sounded painful, but they were worth every penny. I would have paid anything at that point for a graceful good-bye.
Joe left with his daffodils. I grew sick of the sight of myself, day after day, pretending to join in the lithium jokes that continued to circulate around the office until they were finally succeeded by Prozac jokes. I began avoiding other members of the litigation team, coming in later and later until eventually I was doing almost all of my work at night. I started giving away my arrangements to the graveyard cleaning crew, first a stem or two, then a handful, then whole bunches at a time; until one afternoon I arrived at the office and discovered I was completely out of flowers and had forgotten to order more.
I picked up the telephone and dialed the florist, then put it down at the first ring. There weren’t enough flowers in the world, I realized, to beautify this office, this life, or this lie that I was perpetuating. I picked up the phone again and dialed another number: the headhunter who had been chasing me for the past six months. “Listen,” I said. “There’s something you should know about me before we talk, because it’s going to make a difference where I go and what I do. I have—” I checked myself. “No, I am manic-depressive. So what do you think about that?”
“So’s my cousin,” he said, not missing a beat. “And do you know…” he rattled off the names of three top lawyers at rival entertainment firms, with whom I had worked closely in the past. “But I’m not actually sure you should tell anyone you’ve got it,” he said.
“Of course I shouldn’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to.” Then I smiled, a real smile. Stories don’t always have to end happily, I realized. Sometimes it’s just enough that they end, to make way for new stories. I looked down at the legal pad next to my phone and realized that I had sketched a perfect daffodil.
3
I was sitting in the head and neck surgeon’s sleek art moderne waiting room, looking out his wraparound windows at an endless expanse of sun-flecked ocean, and feeling unaccountably happy. I’d never been there before, never met Dr. Cameron, had no idea what he was going to say about the mysterious swelling in my face and neck that had thoroughly baffled my internist and endocrinologist and resisted every antibiotic in their arsenal. The word tumor was mentioned, and in fact that’s why I was there, to talk about tumors and MRIs and CAT scans. Big, scary words, but I was focused on the small things. I noticed that when the sun hit the watercooler just right, it made rainbow wallpaper.
There shouldn’t have been any sun. It was half past four on the last day of November, but the sky was relentlessly, brilliantly blue. I could feel the sunlight through my clothes, dilating my pores and flushing my pasty, winter-white skin. I could feel the little hairs along my arms and the back of my neck start to ripple with pleasure like wind-stroked wheat and—
Oh my God…the little hairs.
Most of the time I barely noticed that I had any body hair at all. Like most redheads, mine was very fine and delicate, almost invisible to the eye and soft to the touch. I never had to worry about waxing or bleaching. I remembered to shave my legs only if I was feeling particularly sexy in the shower, which wasn’t very often or likely back then. Since my father’s death and my suicide attempt in Santa Fe, the depressions had become longer and deeper and harder to forget. But innocuous as the little hairs might have seemed, they were my manic trip wires. Inevitably, when the chemical balance in my brain started to shift, they were the first to alert me to it. As soon as I felt them come alive again, I knew that the depression was finally lifting. I knew that it was hypomania, heavenly hypomania at last.
The little hairs loved hypomania: the world was suddenly all about textures and tastes and sensations, too many and too much to be ignored. It was all so wickedly delicious, actually the best part of being bipolar, until my nipples protested against a surfeit of silk and I felt like a blind man faced with too much Braille. That’s when the little hairs turned inward, prickling and burning at every sensation, until every nerve in my body was acutely inflamed and I winced at even the slightest whisper of wind against my skin.
But the little hairs were certainly happy that afternoon, content just to sit there soaking up the sun in the surgeon’s fancy waiting room. I wondered if I should remind myself of the gravity of the occasion, that this was neither the time nor the place to be feeling so good. Happiness is fine, in its season, but happiness out of season is a sure harbinger of doom. That’s why you should never trust a bright blue sky in November. It might tempt you out the door. It might lure you to forget, for a moment or two, that it is in fact the dead of winter—or will be tomorrow, or the next day, but definitely soon.
How could I ever hope to tell a normal person about the terrors of being happy? Unless there was a damned good reason for it, something objective and verifiable like a winning bingo card or a negative biopsy, happiness wasn’t a safe harbor for me. It was just another checkpoint on the road to mania. Stop, wait a minute, hold on there—was I happy? And if I was happy, for God’s sake, why? Was I doing something inappropriate, a manic precursor like singing show tunes under my breath in public, or breaking the ice in elevators, or winking at random just for the eyelash kisses? Was I enjoying life inordinately?
I had to ask, because what felt like happy now might well be too happy in a minute—and we all knew where too happy could lead. You get too happy, you go pick wildflowers in the middle of the night from your neighbor’s lawn, wearing nothing but a sneaky grin. You get even happier and you blithely make a left turn on a red light in Van Nuys in front of a couple of cops, with lots of prescription meds rolling around loose in your purse. In my case, it could definitely be illegal to be too happy.
So when the little hairs tickled, or the midwinter sun shone more brightly than usual, or I heard myself actually laughing out loud…I stopped, if I still could. I stopped just to see if I could stop. Then I ruthlessly pinpointed the moment on the mood scale, skewered it like a dead butterfly. Happiness management was a cruel science. It may have kept me safe from unexpected butterflies, but it killed all the flutter and delight.
And yet I was happy. Sitting there trying to remember the difference between a CAT scan and an MRI, I was happy. Stop, wait a minute, hold on there—why? I could think of a thousand reasons not to smile, but none of them really counted when the sky was pure delphinium blue at half past four in the afternoon on the last day of November. It was absurd, trying to talk myself out of a smile when smiles were so rare with me.
I summoned up the nasty IRS letter sitting on my kitchen table, the latest in a series of doomsday bulletins threatening garnishment, levy, and seizure of all my assets. I knew I didn’t owe the money they wanted, but I was having a hard time establishing why. My finances, so intermingled with my father’s, had fallen apart after his death. I had proof of nothing, except for my illness, and the IRS wasn’
t interested in that. Short of dousing my letterhead in blood, I had nothing left to say.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the problem, squeezed them tight and hard until a familiar acid moisture started to gather in the corners. I could still cry. That was reassuring, I thought, as a lone tear strolled down my cheek. Was I happy? No, but I was rather enjoying being unhappy for the moment. Leave me alone.
But I wasn’t alone. I was never alone. My nagging fishwife of a conscience was hissing in my ear, the same old mantra: “Stop. Wait a minute. Hold on there….” If I really was happy, God help me, and why? For once, I thought I knew the answer: generic aripiprazole, brand name Abilify.
Aripiprazole. Ari-PIP-ra-zole. It was a silly name, froth on my tongue. Just saying it made me giddy. I’d been taking the drug for two weeks, and I still couldn’t pronounce it with a straight face. AriPIPrazole! “Abilify” wasn’t much better. Was drug-induced happy still happy? Was it the right kind of happy? Did it count? As long as it didn’t land me in jail or in a strange man’s bed, I really didn’t care. I’d take happy any way it came—prescription strength, if necessary.
The receptionist opened the door, called out my name, then led me down the hall into an exam room. The doctor’s surgical instruments were laid out in neat, gleaming rows on white linen, a perverted place setting. But this was no picnic. This was serious business, and the man who could pronounce my doom was about to walk through the door.
But the door opened and doom entered, and I was once again unaccountably happy. Nobody ever told me that Dr. Cameron was a dead ringer for Montgomery Clift. You’d think they would have mentioned a little thing like that when you scheduled your first appointment. It certainly would have made the long wait more tolerable. I’m waiting for Montgomery Clift, you could have told yourself as the quarter hour stretched to a half, the half to a whole, and so forth, until it was nearing the end of the last day of November and you were the only patient left in the waiting room.
Dr. Cameron apologized at once for the long delay. An unexpected hospital admission, emergency surgery, something like that. I wasn’t listening. His handshake was as warm as his smile and almost as kind as his eyes. This was not at all the cursory “me doctor, you patient, where chart” type of greeting I’d come to expect from first appointments. He held my gaze, and my hand, a half-dozen heartbeats longer than I was prepared for. Not necessarily an inappropriate amount of time, but long enough for the little hairs on the back of my neck to crackle and for a deep, rosy flush to spread from my neck to my chin to my cheeks. Thank God I’d been running a fever, and I could blame the heat on that.
Or could I? Dr. Cameron didn’t take my temperature. He didn’t even look at my chart. He looked in my eyes, then reached out and smoothed my hair back behind my ear. He picked up one of the utensils (a medium-sized one, somewhere between a shrimp fork and a speculum) and blew on it. “To warm you up,” he said with a wink as he gently inserted it into my ear, and I tried simultaneously to tame my pulse and to place his familiar aftershave.
“Beautiful,” Dr. Cameron said at last, returning my hair to its original place. I didn’t know whether he meant my inner ear or my hair or me or the moment, and I really didn’t care. I tried to concentrate on something totally asexual and sterile like the acoustical ceiling tiles or the autoclave, but then he was tickling the cilia in my nose and it was all I could do not to snort with rapture.
The little hairs were far too happy. I knew that I should stop and worry about that, but I also knew that the throat exam was coming next, with all its symbolic portent, and I needed to stay in the moment. So while Dr. Cameron explored my mouth and tongue with his long silver probe, his lips just a fraction of an inch away from mine, I rid my brain of all extraneous thoughts and multiplied ceiling tiles fast and furiously in my head until he was done.
“Good news,” he said, stepping back and beaming down at me. “I don’t think it’s a tumor. The inflammation’s too symmetrical—here, and here.” He stroked both sides of my face, from earlobe to midthroat, as he talked. “No doubt it’s all the medications you’re taking. They’ve kept you so dehydrated that your body is trying to hold on to all the fluids it possibly can. Which would explain this swelling in your parotid and submandibular salivary glands—here, and here, and under here.” More strokes. Who knew Montgomery Clift had such a delicate touch? But then, wasn’t Montgomery Clift gay?
I looked closely at Dr. Cameron, who had finally stopped stroking my face and throat and was jotting down notes in my chart. He was awfully good-looking—not just movie star handsome, gay movie star handsome. Could it be that the heat between us was only in my imagination? I’d like to think that at forty-two my body was wise enough to know, viscerally, when sex was in the air. A few extra seconds of handshake, eye contact that lingered just a bit beyond necessary, a touch gentle enough to be a caress in other circumstances: these were all excellent clues. But the real mystery wasn’t whether Dr. Cameron was actually gay. It’s whether I was actually manic. Maybe the electricity in the room was just manic fallout, the residue of my supercharged sensibilities. Maybe the heat was just a fever, and strictly my fever, at that.
But then he looked up from the chart and flashed a great big movie star grin at me, all gleaming white teeth and charisma, and I knew that I didn’t give a damn whether he was gay or straight. He was gorgeous. I’d just have to work all the harder to win him over, that was all. I used to be pretty good at persuasion. Over the years I’d developed quite a repertoire of tricks, little subtleties of voice and eye and carriage that I could usually count on to sway a hesitant jury, or soothe a recalcitrant judge. This wasn’t much different. I leaned forward in the chair and looked into the far back reaches of Dr. Cameron’s eyes. Then I smiled, ever so slowly and gradually, without saying a word—an old ploy that usually made the other person smile back in anticipation. Everyone loves to hear a secret, the more secret the better. So I dropped my voice down low and conspiratorial, and said, “You know, of course, that you look exactly like my all-time favorite movie star?”
He laughed. “Montgomery Clift? Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”
“And not just any Montgomery Clift,” I continued. “Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun—you know, the one where he kisses Elizabeth Taylor in that incredible close-up that goes on and on for what seems like forever, until you can’t believe it ever got past the censors.” I tried to restrain myself, but my eyes wandered down to his lips and waited there for his reply.
“Not only do I know it,” he said. “I actually have a copy of his original screen test with Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a real collector’s item. My ex gave it to me for my last birthday.”
My ex. He didn’t have to say that. My mind quickly calculated the possibilities in that prehyphenate. Not married; possibly not involved. Or, not married but still very good friends with his ex, which was not as good as not involved but was certainly better than married. My eyes moved to his ring finger: bare, no tan line, no telltale indentations on the flesh. A very uninvolved finger.
“Wow, that must be fantastic,” I said. “Does he look like you in the screen test? Does he kiss Elizabeth Taylor? Does he kiss anybody? Does he talk about kissing? Wow. I’d sure love to see it sometime.”
He put down my chart. “I can tell you’re a real fan. I’d be happy to lend it to you—if you promise you’ll bring it back next week.”
“But…aren’t we through? I thought you figured out what was wrong with me. Do I have to come back?”
“You don’t have to come back,” he said, and the emphasis stopped my heart. “But I hope you will. At least come tell me what you thought of the tape. I’m in surgery on Mondays and Wednesdays, but Fridays are usually light, especially Friday afternoons after four P.M. Actually, try to come then if you can. You can usually see the sunset from here around that time. It’s been absolutely incredible lately. It goes on and on forever—just like the kiss, I suppose.” Another pyrotechnic smile.
I started to tell him that there had been no sunset that day, at least none that I had seen; that the waiting room was in fact still relentlessly, brilliantly sunny and hot at half past four that afternoon. I was seriously smitten, and I wanted to tell him, to warn him, that it was a bright blue sky in November and we should both be very, very careful…but he’d already excused himself and left the room to get the tape.
Stop, wait a minute, hold on there. I didn’t even have to ask if I was happy, I was terribly, terribly happy and what had just happened? Was terribly happy too happy? And scariest question of all, whatever had I done this time to deserve it? Damn damn damn. If there was one sure sign of mania’s approach, it was this secret conviction I got that I was the ultimate arbiter of other people’s sexuality, this sudden rush of confidence that no man—or woman, if I so desired—was beyond my jurisdiction.
I pulled out my mirror and started to reapply my lipstick, then I willed myself to stop. No. I resisted the almost physical need to comb my hair, straighten my skirt, check my breath. No, no, no. I didn’t have to succumb to the manic whirlwind in my ear, which was urging me to seize any happiness in my grasp because tomorrow I could be worse than dead—I could be depressed. No, I said. I didn’t want to grasp at happiness anymore. For once, I wanted happiness just to float gently down and settle on my shoulder.
Dr. Cameron would be back any minute, and I was painfully aware that the part in my hair was crooked, I could feel the asymmetry along my scalp. Looking down, I noticed a little snag in my stocking that I could have easily hid if I had just stood up for a second and tucked it under my skirt. I was pretty sure there was a scuff mark on my left shoe, too, that I would have probably buffed out with a quick spit and polish. But manic seduction with me is all about fixing smudges, pretending that I’m perfect in all the places I’m most flawed. So I forced myself to sit stock-still, and I tried hard not to picture how pale my lips must have looked in the naked light.
