by Terri Cheney
So the Ferrari analogy hit home. Maybe that was exactly what I needed—a little fine-tuning at the cautious hands of experts. “How much would three days cost me?” I asked, and my therapist quoted a ridiculous sum. And yet, it was the price that cinched it. I figured anything that cost that much must be the best. Plus it must be beautiful, the sort of thick-wall-against-the-world kind of beauty that keeps ugliness from seeping in.
I took three days off work the next week by claiming a death in the family. I actually felt surprisingly good driving there with the late-afternoon sun streaming through the windows. The only thing that was really bothering me was how I’d packed: hastily, at the last moment, and in considerable confusion. What do you wear to a loony bin? Coco Chanel, who had something to say on everything, was silent on this.
The sign to Casa Pacifica was so discreet I almost missed it. I made a quick right turn onto a graveled road marked Private Access Only. I liked the sound of that. At the end of the bougainvillea path was a large, white-shuttered building, in front of which grew the biggest weeping willow tree that I had ever seen. A swarm of attendants came out to meet me. They were not, I was relieved to see, wearing institution white, but rather a gentle shade of blue that reminded me, quite pleasantly, of the ten-milligram dose of Valium. One took my bags, one took my car, and a third, a tall, patrician-looking lady with good teeth and white hair, smiled and held out her hand. “Welcome to Casa Pacifica,” she said. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”
I followed her into a cozy lobby all decked out in chintz and flowers. Casablanca lilies, my all-time favorites. I stopped in front of one and inhaled. The woman said, “You’re a fan of Casablancas?” I nodded. “We can have some sent to your room, if you like.” I nodded again. I wasn’t ready to let my guard down yet, although from everything I’d seen so far, this place might just turn out all right.
Half an hour later, I was sitting in the woman’s office having tea and biscuits while she went over the rules. All two of them. “You must meet with a therapist once a day. And you have to keep a journal.” Neither sounded onerous, and then came the kicker: “I hope you’ll be all right on your own. It will just be for one night. Your roommate isn’t expected until tomorrow.”
Roommate? What roommate? I’d never had a roommate in my life, not even in college, and I certainly didn’t intend to start now. Roommates could be messy and noisy and ugly, and you couldn’t control them, not even with a credit card. I explained to the woman, softly but emphatically, that I preferred to be alone, that I’d be happy to pay a premium if that’s what it took to get a single room. She smiled at me and shook her head. “I’m sorry, dear, but everyone here at Casa Pacifica is expected to have a roommate. We consider it therapeutic.”
Mistaking my silence for acquiescence, she offered to show me my room. In spite of all my misgivings, I couldn’t help but be charmed by the slanting roof, the huge bay window and the daisies in a blue Delft vase on the bedside table. The sun was just beginning to set, and the room glowed yellow and white. It wasn’t until I knelt down on the window seat to look at the view that I noticed the fine mesh steel on the windows.
“These windows don’t open, do they?” I asked.
“Well, no, not really. You have to have a key.”
“Speaking of which, no one has given me a room key yet.”
“You don’t need a key. The staff will lock things up at night, so you don’t have to do a thing.”
“You mean the staff will lock me up at night, don’t you?”
“Technically, yes. But it’s just for your protection.”
I wanted to be left alone, so I dropped it. I thanked the woman for all her help, and told her I wanted to take a stroll around the grounds.
“Just so you know, the gardens close at dusk.”
She left. I rifled through my suitcase for a sweater, then headed outside. Part of me was already starting to panic at the thought of being locked in for the night, but I breathed easier once I was outdoors. The sun was setting in earnest by then, so I sat down in a thick patch of grass and rolled onto my back. God was painting with the big box of crayons, and beauty, as always, worked its magic on me. I forgot who I was, where I was, how I got there. It wasn’t until I noticed a pale crescent moon in the corner of the sky that I remembered that I had to be back by dusk. Which meant I really ought to get up and get going.
My body rebelled against the thought. “You are not bound by such rules. They’re intended strictly for the mental patients, and to be a mental patient, you first have got to be mentally ill. And you are most certainly, categorically, not mentally ill.” How could I be? I, who was voted Most Likely to Succeed, who graduated Vassar College with honors and represented major moguls and movie stars—how could I be crazy? Crazy people acted strange. When they spoke, their words betrayed them. Whereas I used words as weapons. No one would ever think, to look at me, that I spent so much of my time either holding back tears or engulfed in them. But still, that wasn’t mental illness. That was plain old-fashioned misery. The wrong profession, a lackluster love life, a chronic lack of sleep…
I ran back toward the building, stumbling across the uneven grass. I paused just out of sight of the lobby to shake the hair out of my eyes and freshen the crease in my pants. Further proof that I was sane, I thought. Crazy people are frayed at the seams. I needn’t have bothered: no one was there. At dinner, perhaps. I had no interest in food. Not food per se, but the drudgery of picking it out and cutting it up and lifting it over and over again from fork to mouth to fork to mouth to fork to mouth and so on. Life was already far too full of mindless repetitions, like the endless droning monotony of drawing breath or pumping blood. It seemed like such a waste of time. One breath, one beat, was just the same as any other. Air was air and blood was blood and no matter what you ate for dinner, it all wound up as shit.
When I got to my room, to my surprise, the air was suddenly rich and sweet. The daisies had been replaced by a huge ceramic pitcher filled with Casablanca lilies. They were so beautiful, I knew that nothing very horrible could happen in their presence. I lay down and closed my eyes.
Eight hours later, I woke to a knock at the door, reminding me, “Therapy in fifteen minutes!” I kicked myself free of the canary yellow sheets and ran to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, dragged a comb through my hair and slipped into a pair of neatly pressed jeans.
When I opened the door, an attendant was there, waiting to escort me. “You’ll like Dr. Han,” he said, leading me down a long series of halls. “He’s one of our best.” Best. Not the word I would have used to describe him. Everything about the man was gray: from his snagged and rumpled cardigan to the circles underneath his eyes to the salt-and-pepper hair combed carefully across his head. Even his voice sounded gray when he told me to sit down, we were going to take some tests. He asked me to fill in the captions for a collection of outlandish cartoons. Then he asked me to finish a series of statements with the very first answer that popped in my head. A typical exchange:
Q. “If I could be anything in the world, then I would be…”
A. “Invisible.”
Q. “If I could do anything that I liked, then I would…”
A. “Disappear.”
I must admit, I was actually enjoying myself. I’ve always enjoyed taking tests, not for the sake of the tests themselves, but for the glory of the good grade afterward. So when I asked Dr. Han how I did, I expected what I had heard most of my life: praise. Instead, he said: “These really aren’t that kind of test. They’re not like, say, the SATs.”
Bullshit, I thought. Everything, up to and including life, was exactly like the SATs: you either scored well or you didn’t. But the question I really wanted to ask him was, “Do you know what’s wrong with me?” Although the words were tugging at my tongue, I couldn’t set them free. Just seven simple words, but I was afraid the silence afterward would stretch into eternity. Or else—God forbid—he’d actually have an answer.
Dr. Han
stood up and clapped me on the back. “I know just what you need,” he said. I looked at him, expectantly. “A good hot cup of soup.”
I followed him as he led me back through the maze of halls to the dining room, where he left me. There were a dozen or so people gathered there, mostly at one table. At first I thought they might be staff. They looked decidedly normal to me: laughing, chatting, eating their food. But as I looked a little bit closer I noticed one woman was actually attacking her steak, sawing at it savagely, as if it might be still alive. A fat young man in khaki shorts was jiggling all over, legs and arms and double chins all independently a-tremble. And three or four of the rest of them kept wiping their mouths to dislodge, I noticed with a sudden shudder, quite copious amounts of drool.
I grabbed my journal and retraced my steps toward the garden. I flopped down and began to sketch. Nothing was as I remembered it, though. The clouds, so fine and wispy the day before, had grown thick and gray, obscuring the sun. Drops began to splash down onto my page. The sky had betrayed me: it was no longer shelter. I buttoned up my sweater and got to my feet.
When I reached my room, I was thoroughly wet and longing for my lilies. But something was standing between me and them—a figure, human enough until it turned around. I gasped. Her face was a patchwork of scarlet and white, shiny in some spots and mottled in others. Her features on one side had melted and blurred. Her left arm was a stump, although her right was intact, still freckled and fair. She looked at me, then turned away.
I cursed myself for that embarrassing gasp. As a lawyer, I was trained to keep my feelings under wraps. I held out my hand. “You must be my new roommate,” I said, and I hoped my smile hid my trembling. Part of me was downright scared, part of me was furious, not with the poor woman in front of me but with the institution. They should have prepared me for this.
She mumbled her name, then got into bed. Her face was hidden in the pillow, but I could tell by the shuddering of her shoulders that she was crying. I thought longingly of the garden I had just left, the wide-open expanse that made no demands of me. Fighting the urge to throw open the door, I crossed the room and stood over the bed.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” I asked.
“Wish I was invisible,” a quivering voice replied. “Wish I could just disappear.”
I was utterly unnerved. I recognized her language. It was the language of suffering, and I knew it well. We were one and the same, the girl and I. The only difference was that my scars were on the inside, where they didn’t show.
The instinctive aversion to her appearance was drowned out by a sudden flood of empathy, and to my surprise, I reached down and gathered her up in my arms. Her skin felt thin and wrinkled, like crumpled tissue paper. At first she tried to pull away, but I hushed her and started stroking her hair, rocking her back and forth in my arms.
Her long blond hair was healthy, luxurious even, in my hands. I wondered at the irony of this ornamentation: of what possible use was such hair to her now? But beauty, true beauty, is never wasted. In fact, her hair was all the more glorious because of the contrast with her damaged skin.
And that’s when it hit me: I had been going about it all wrong. It was futile to try to deny the existence of ugliness—either in the world, or in myself. God made light, and God made monsters, and there must have been a reason for that. As Saint Augustine said, “Even monsters are divine creatures and in some way they too belong to the providential order of nature.” Without the darkness, how can we ever hope to understand the light?
I started to cry. True beauty, I realized, is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it. And I knew then what I had refused to admit all along: that I was indeed mentally ill.
I welcomed the monster. I gave it a home.
It was March 22. I remember the date because, every year, I send an anonymous card to Phoebe, for that was the young girl’s name. It’s a simple card. There are only two words printed on it: “Thank you.” I send it anonymously because I don’t know how to explain. I only know that my greatest victories have always been surrenders.
7
We were the Gatsby couple, or so our friends called us. We made a martini look good. It was the eighties, and he was as essential to me as shoulder pads. His intellect gave me breadth; his beauty gave me symmetry. I was never so complete as when I stepped into a crowded room as his other half.
But bipolar disorder always chooses the most inopportune times to remind you that remission is just a respite, not a cure. I’d had several bad episodes of both mania and depression while Rick and I were seeing each other, back when I was in college and law school. To his credit, he had been kind and gentle, if a bit bewildered by it all. But then all at once the floodgates broke loose, and a depression of biblical savagery swept over me. I could barely move, let alone make it to class. What little energy I had was devoted to deceiving the people around me into believing that I simply had a lingering case of the flu. I had neither the time nor the inclination for romance. The care and feeding of a lover was completely beyond my capabilities.
I knew that I was losing Rick. Our phone calls became fewer and shorter each night, until they basically consisted of the same three sentences: “Any better?” “No.” “That’s a shame.” It was a shame, a damned shame, but the breakup wasn’t the worst of it all. What really tortured me were the dreams that visited me night after night, when I would remember in full sensory detail the exact expression of Rick’s gray-green eyes when he told me I was beautiful; the timbre of his voice when he called me sweetheart; and his sigh when he held me in his arms after making love. The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever.
But Rick was a rescuer, and I hadn’t been properly rescued yet, although I was getting tremendous help from a new medication regime. The drugs knocked the depression to its knees, but they kept me just this side of manic. So the next time I saw Rick, several years later, I was definitely high—not so high that I looked or acted inappropriate, but high enough that I sparkled, I glittered, I was as charming as the quicksilver moon.
I ran into Rick again while I was waiting for my car outside a fashionable restaurant, the kind of L.A. hot spot that we used to frequent together in our Jay and Daisy era. I was a full-fledged entertainment lawyer by then, and my job required me to waste a lot of time in such places. I remember I was feeling chilly and bored that night, and my feet hurt. I was standing alone by the door, looking for the valet, when a red Lamborghini roared up to the portico. Ever since I was given a 1965 Corvette for my sixteenth birthday, I’ve been a sucker for sports cars, and this one was a full-throttle work of art. I let out an involuntary “Wow!” and heard a familiar voice behind me say, “Thank you.” Sure enough, it was Rick, looking every bit as handsome and sexy as I remembered him.
We started talking so fast we were almost talking over each other: me, because I was practically manic, and Rick because I think he was genuinely glad to see me. The Lamborghini turned out to be his reward for selling a screenplay. I was so proud of him, I started to cry. Just like old times, I thought, except now they were actually tears of joy.
After fifteen minutes of catching up, Rick said, “It’s a beautiful night. Why don’t we go for a drive?” and our relationship took off again from there. He careened up Benedict Canyon Drive with one eye on the road and the other on me. “I can’t get over how good you look,” he kept saying. “It’s like the old you, come back to life.”
I was perfectly happy to be the old me, especially when we parked on Mulholland Drive and looked out at the sparkling city below. “It’s your town,” I whispered to Rick, and before I knew it his arm was around me and he was kissing me again, with lips that still remembered every curve and nuance of my own. And I was kissing him back.
We saw each other the next night, and the next, and the night after that. At that point, Rick told me the truth: he was living with someone. �
�It’s a rotten relationship, and I’m not in love anymore,” he confessed. “But she needs me—she’s had a rough life, and I’m the only thing she’s got.” I was devastated, but incipient mania got in the way of my better judgment. I didn’t stop to ask myself whether I should be in this relationship at all. I only asked myself how I could manage to stay. I was determined to pummel the relationship into submission. Either that, or pretend there was no problem at all.
Pretending worked pretty well for a while. For the next six months, we saw each other several nights a week. Rick’s girlfriend either didn’t care very much, or she didn’t expect to know where he was. Then one night, long after I’d gone to sleep, Rick called me and said, “Sarah’s going to see her sister in Connecticut this weekend. It’s our chance to finally get out of town. What do you say to La Valencia?” He knew how I loved La Valencia Hotel—a little pink paradise just north of San Diego, in the immaculate seaside village of La Jolla.
Much as I loved La Jolla, I didn’t say yes immediately. The increasing volatility of my mood had been bothering me. I was no longer reliably three-quarters manic. When I was under too much stress, particularly deadlines, I began to plummet into something that resembled depression. It wasn’t full-blown depression, but it was close enough to make me nervous about going away. My mooring lines had slipped. I wasn’t quite sure in which direction I might suddenly find myself headed.
I tried to explain all this to Rick, but he was having none of it. “I’ve never seen you so stable,” he kept reassuring me. Rick could sell sand in the desert, so it didn’t take long before I finally agreed. I packed for emergencies.
We took off late that Friday afternoon, and arrived at the hotel just as the sun went down. Rick had a craving for abalone and went to talk to the concierge about restaurants. I was sticky and tired after the long drive, so I ran a warm bubble bath in the Jacuzzi tub, and sank down to my shoulders in lavender-scented bliss. But the second I closed my eyes, thoughts started swarming my brain: this isn’t right, I shouldn’t be here, this is stolen time. I didn’t know Rick’s girlfriend, Sarah, but by all rights these were her lavender bubbles, this was her tub, and that was her man coming through the door, whistling “There’s a Small Hotel.”
