by Terri Cheney
The guard’s lips tightened when I swore at her, and she grabbed hold of my elbow, hard, as if to guide me down the hallway. But it wasn’t that kind of a touch. It hurt, and no guidance was necessary. We were already there, at the blessed phone booth. I was crying full out while I dialed. When the phone didn’t ring, I just hung up and redialed more carefully. And when it didn’t ring again, I went even more slowly, saying each number aloud as I pressed it. But when I tried again and there was no dial tone, something exploded inside me, and I lost all control.
When I burst out of that booth, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was a lawyer, a manic lawyer, and there’s no scarier beast on earth. I assailed the room with words: “Egregious violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, not to mention 42 U.S.C. section 1983 and intentional infliction of emotional distress. You assholes—don’t you know that even the union won’t save you from this?”
There were at least ten cops in that room behind a glass partition, and I think I must have insulted them all, as a class and individually, by the time they noticed where the screaming was coming from. I saw a vacant phone on a nearby desk. It took me ten seconds to lunge in that direction. It took the guard five seconds to knock me to the floor.
And then she was all over me, all two hundred pounds of her. She forced my head to the floor. It was sticky with what I later realized was my own blood. She jammed one knee against my back, and started hitting. Not with her fist, with the club that hung by her side, next to the cuffs and the keys. I was shaking so badly by then I don’t know how she managed to land a solid blow, but she must have been thoroughly trained, because my ribs were exploding one after another, a most thorough and systematic attack.
What was I feeling at that moment? Was I still howling legal curses? All I remember were the sounds, round, hollow, knocking sounds from inside, that might have been my ribs or might have been my head pounding against the floor. I felt no pain, not until later, when the bruises welled up and a thick, itchy scar began to form. Mostly I was worried about the butter. I wondered what she’d do if she found it. I wondered how much longer this would last, if she’d ever get tired. I was tired. The floor was smooth and cold, and I just wanted to lie down and sleep, sleep forever, or until it was over. Sleep and wake somewhere else, in a field of wildflowers, safe and warm.
She stopped at some point, or I fell asleep, or I fainted. It doesn’t matter. The butter was still there when I was tossed back into my cell, and I tried to spread it on my bleeding forehead. It had congealed and was turning rancid.
Some time later, they wheeled a cart with a phone on it into my cell. I connected with my lawyer at last. He told me to wait there—again, wait there—and he would be over within the hour. After posting a bond, I was finally released. It was fourteen hours since I had been pulled over.
My lawyer later told me that the Penal Code mandates that a prisoner be allowed to contact his attorney within three hours of his arrest and that any medication request has to be reviewed by the doctor on call. It didn’t matter. The thing inside that used to care—that got indignant, outraged, that insisted on its rights—had been beaten out of me. It just didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing has ever been the same for me since that endless moment on the cold stone floor. Nothing ever will be. I know now that I am touchable, that I am not immune. You grow up separated from the people on the bus, or the people on the street, by a glass wall of money, education, a profession. You never think it could be you when you watch that poor black guy being beaten up by the cops. It’s just TV. You can barely remember his name now—Arthur King? Robert King? Rodney. You are Rodney King, and it doesn’t even show in the mirror.
Maybe it’s worse when you’re a lawyer, and you know what rights are being violated. Maybe it’s not, because when you get out, there’s another lawyer waiting to defend you. I ultimately got off with a reduced sentence—a “wet reckless,” which cost me a bundle but didn’t really inconvenience my life. But I still hesitate to take my shirt off and reveal my scars to a new lover. I hesitate to bare myself at all.
5
I knew I was getting a little bit manic when my next-door neighbor’s drums started driving me mad. Even though I wasn’t practicing law full-time anymore, I still had to pay the rent. I’d taken on a petition for habeas corpus, and the deadline was looming. But for the past two hours, I’d been assaulted by an incessant thump-thump-da-thump, so loud it made my bedroom windows shiver. I’d been lenient so far about the late-night jam sessions, the early-morning piano scales, and the White Album playing over and over in an endless homage to the 1960s. I’d been lenient because I’d heard that my neighbor was a big-time songwriter and record producer, and I loved living next door to a big-time songwriter and record producer. Somehow it made my own rent seem a bit less obscene.
But when you’re heading up toward mania, the slightest sensation hotwires your nerves. Sound is noise, sunshine is glare, and it takes all of your self-control not to just slice that mosquito bite clean off your ankle. That morning the prick of the hairbrush against my scalp had been so excruciating I’d thrown the brush in the toilet. I’ve thrown a lot of things in the toilet on my way up to mania—not all of them visible, or easily replaced.
Forty-two more minutes of thump-thump-da-thump, and the little hairs along the back of my neck and arms were bristling with outrage. Something had to be done—now, this instant, before the blood started pulsing out my ears in rhythmic spurts. Anger spun me into action before I could even ask myself why now or what if. Between beats, between breaths, I made up my mind to confront the bastard face-to-face. In retrospect, it must have been that dizzy, precarious moment when my chemical balance starts to topple, when almost stable turns into almost not. One minute I was contemplating soundproofing the windows with Scotch tape, the next I was pawing through my closet, looking for the sexiest confront-your-neighbor outfit I could find.
You get beautifully and painfully thin on the road up to mania. Eating simply doesn’t occur to you because there are too many other thoughts occupying your mind, important thoughts, thoughts that could change the world if only you could stop long enough to jot them down. So I was thin enough that day to wear those sleek black jeans. They were a bit trashier than my usual attire, but they made the perfect foil for my favorite green silk shirt, the one that looked so delicate against my fair white skin, that is, until the light hit just right and the silk became completely transparent.
“Nipples are natural,” I said to myself as I buttoned up the cuffs and slipped into my shoes. I’d settled on a pair of plain black flats as a concession to propriety, which means that I couldn’t have been all the way manic. True mania never steps out the door in anything less provocative than spike heels or sling-backs.
Tight jeans, visible nipples, and sensible flats: an odd assemblage of personalities, but it wasn’t what I was really wearing when I marched up the street to my neighbor’s gate. In my mind’s eye, I was dressed for battle, in the cruel gray suit that I wore only to federal court, and then only for do-or-die cases; and the black patent leather pumps that I purposefully bought a size too small, just to keep me mean.
Facing the enemy gate, I smoothed my hair, straightened up, and squared my shoulders. It was an odd, echoing sensation. The motion was as automatic as my speeding pulse. It was all too familiar: I was standing in front of the courtroom door.
My body simply won’t forget it, no matter how hard my mind tries: the trickly sweat exhilaration of high-stakes litigation. It had been well over four years since I left the fast track, and much as I missed the money, I knew that I could never safely return to the full-time practice of law. I knew it absolutely; and yet like an alcoholic who remembers the high and never the hangover, my body still craved the pure adrenaline drunk of always playing to win. Winning was what I’d been trained for. It was where I belonged. And through no fault of my own, it was what I did best. So I savored, just for a moment, the pinch of those black patent leather pumps that had never
really fit me, not even when I won. Then I steadied my hand and pressed hard on my neighbor’s doorbell, just a second or two past polite.
He answered the door. His “Hi there, how ya doin’?” was so soft and sweet and mellow it sounded like he was singing. Or stoned? And then I saw the green eyes. Green-eyed men do something to the cartilage in my knees, always have, always will.
“Um, I live next door.” I pointed in the wrong direction. “I’m a lawyer.”
He nodded, waiting for more. More was not forthcoming. More was jammed in the back of my throat, afraid to come out with something even stupider than “Hi, I’m the lawyer next door.”
“Well, thank you, I’m very happy with my representation right now, but I’ll certainly keep you in mind,” he said. “Why don’t you just drop off your card with my housekeeper one of these days, okay? Nice to finally meet you.”
I had enough residual anger in me, and more than enough manic irritability, to hear a deliberate insult in even the most innocent remark, no matter how sweetly it was spoken or how green the speaker’s eyes. I may not be able to afford this neighborhood anymore, I thought, and no doubt my poor ramshackle little house reflects it. But I’ll be damned if anyone’s going to insinuate that I’m peddling my J.D. up and down the street like some overeducated Avon Lady. So I summoned forth The Voice I used to use for such polite venom as “my worthy opponent,” or “Your Honor, I respectfully dissent.”
“Look,” said The Voice. “I’ve got a major filing deadline coming up, and there’s no way I’ll make it if I don’t get a break from those god-awful drums. I mean, no offense, but it’s been going on for hours now. I’ve tried everything—ear plugs, headphones, you name it, but—”
I was interrupted by another chorus of thump-thump-da-thump. The noise was even louder at the source, I noticed, and out of the corner of my eye I saw with satisfaction that my neighbor’s windows were shaking, too.
There was nothing but vibrations between us.
In high-stakes litigation, you have to be fast on your feet, always two beats ahead of your opponent. So I was ready, rattlesnake ready, for whatever the next few seconds might bring. Ready, as always, for battle—but not for laughter. Laughter has no place between proper enemies. And yet he laughed. He leaned back against the gate post and laughed, an honest-to-God, deep from the diaphragm laugh. I think it must have been a stoned laugh, too, because within a few seconds I had caught the high. And for the first time that day, probably several days, the sounds that emerged from inside me had no tinge of anger or irritation.
He reached over and put his hand on my arm. “God, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought you were…I thought you wanted…. Anyway, I swear I never even heard those drums until now. I’ve been in the record business so long I just tune it all out, you know? It’s my little boy’s birthday today, and I’ve only got him for the weekend, so I’m probably overindulging as usual. But don’t worry, he’ll be taking the drums with him tomorrow when he goes back home to his mother. A little unexpected present for her….”
It wasn’t really funny, except in a sitcom kind of way, but it set us off again. Silly was such a tremendous relief that I never even stopped to wonder at my sudden and radical shift of mood. At some point, without my even noticing it, defiance had melted away.
“Actually, this is perfect,” my neighbor said. “We’re having a party right now for Trevor—that’s my little boy—and we’ve got tons of food. Amazing desserts. We’ll just have to throw it all away tomorrow, unless you come in and help us out. And you can take some home, as much as you want.” He held out his hand. “By the way, my name is Julian.”
“I’m Terri,” I said, and I slipped my hand into his, trying my best to clasp it like the girl next door and not a lawyer on the make.
Although we were next-door neighbors, the only thing Julian’s house and mine had in common was a ZIP code. My bedroom would have fit inside his foyer. His kitchen sink would have swallowed up my bathtub, if I’d had one.
But the real difference between us wasn’t size: it was light, light that gleamed and glinted from every direction, caught up and ricocheted around the room by high-tech chrome fixtures and rows of copper-bottomed pots and pans. Light like the light in Julian’s house is a luxury few can afford. So I knew that the dozen or so people hanging out in his kitchen were probably high-priced, too. You wouldn’t have guessed it from their clothes—in fact, casual bordered on disheveled here and there. But if you knew competitive pretty, and I knew it well, then res ipsa loquitor: the evidence spoke for itself. I knew that those practically seamless hair extensions pulled back any-which-way in a plastic barrette must have cost upwards of a thousand dollars. I knew what it meant to have teeny-tiny locked-ring logos imprinted all over your scuffed-up backpack: the teenier the Chanel icon, the loftier the price. But most telling of all was what I didn’t see. Not one of the six women in that kitchen, all in their forties and up, had any frown lines between their eyebrows, or laugh lines around their mouths, or little fissures above their lips. Ergo: Botox injections at four hundred dollars to start; collagen, at least five hundred a fix; and maintenance essential every three to five months.
Some of the women gave me the up-and-down look. I knew that look; I was giving it back. But with Julian at my side, shepherding the introductions, I felt no need to defend myself. His friends got to meet the girl next door, in the slightly slutty black jeans and the green silk shirt, which had dissolved the moment I stepped into the kitchen light. The men didn’t seem to mind my appearance. In fact they were very, very interested in my story about the drums. I don’t know what the women thought. After a brief hello, they all went off to a separate little dining nook on the other side of the room.
Julian hadn’t been kidding earlier when he said there was way too much food. I counted at least ten different desserts for less than a dozen people, plus a doggie bag or two. I had to admit that they were, as Julian had said, amazing: lemon tarts topped with edible flowers; a bottomless bowl of English trifle with real crème fraîche on the side; raisin pudding so steeped in rum it made my eyes water just to smell it.
Julian sat me down on a bar stool at the center island right in the middle of all the guys, under a double row of copper-bottomed cookware (a nice backdrop for a strawberry blonde). He stacked a plate with helpings of each dessert, and told me to try one of everything. I wasn’t the least bit hungry, although I knew I should be, who wouldn’t be when faced with passion fruit sorbet and white chocolate–covered strawberries as big as a fist? I realized that I hadn’t eaten a thing that day, or, come to think of it, the day before. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I ate. I knew what that probably meant, sort of, kind of. I knew that it probably meant I had reached a certain milestone on the road up to mania: at least three-quarters of the way.
It would have been rude for me to refuse the plate, but I didn’t want to waste any talk time, smile time, laugh time. The early stage of flirtation demands complete attention; it can’t be diverted by English trifles. But Julian insisted, and the guys kept telling me which dessert I should try first, so I grabbed an enormous strawberry. It was far too big for one bite, so I started licking away at the white chocolate peak: casual, deliberate, unhurried licks. Next I nibbled just a second or two, delicately, around the stem. Then I smiled (knowingly) and bit (thoroughly) into the ripe red strawberry flesh. A droplet or two of nectar ran down my bottom lip, and I didn’t wipe it off until I felt sure that my intentions were as transparent as my green silk shirt.
There’s a fine line between almost manic and mostly manic, when charmingly indiscreet turns into just plain indiscreet, and seductive becomes obnoxious. For me, that line always gets fainter and fuzzier the closer I get to mania, until eventually there is no line, there never was a line, and any line that might have been disappears altogether, along with all of my discretion and judgment.
The angle of the sun had changed since I’d entered Julian’s house. Midday had mellowed t
o early evening, but I could still see the line there in Julian’s kitchen. True, the damn thing kept moving on me, but I could still see it. I knew it was there. I knew that my little strip-tease act with the strawberry had come perilously close to the edge; and that any more foreplay with my desserts would surely push me over.
I had to shift the focus, fast. There’s no telling what manic lips might say, although you can be sure it will be laced with profanity and innuendo. I didn’t know any of these men well enough to be vulgar in their presence. So no more nibbling; no more licking; no more lip action, period. I pushed my plate away with a big stage sigh, tossed my napkin on top and declared I couldn’t possibly take another bite. Which naturally didn’t help at all because then the word bite hovered over our table. There was only one thing to do: I had to shut up altogether.
Anyone who lives on the sane side of mania can’t possibly imagine the agony of enforced silence. The urge to talk gets greater and greater as you head up the mood scale, until finally it’s as irresistible as a sneeze in a dust storm. The clinical term for this is “pressured speech.” “Pressure-cooker speech” is more like it, because unless all those unspoken words are somehow released, silence explodes into screams; and screams are not so easily ignored.
I’ve seen manic people use all sorts of creative ways to divert the pressure to speak. Leg jiggling is by far the favorite technique. I guarantee that in a roomful of ten manic-depressives, at least two of them will be madly jiggling away. Then there’s the compulsive yawners, the twitchers, and the tappers, who will tap on anything within reach—the chair, the wall, even the person sitting next to them. I particularly admire the people who manage to talk without ever making a sound. They just form the words on their lips and chew.
