Manic

by Terri Cheney

  I woke up in St. John’s Hospital three days after my attempt, in a private padded room on the locked ward. Nobody told me about Dr. R.’s indictment, so I wondered why he wasn’t there and hadn’t called. I wondered why I was strapped down to the bed, since this wasn’t the room where they did the ECT. Mostly, I wondered why I was still alive.

  They tell me my exterminator found me. I love the irony of that. He comes once a month to spray for spiders. He has a key to my front door and enters at his own discretion. Instead of spiders, he found me, sprawled on the living room carpet, with blood and foam coming out of my mouth. I don’t know what the foam was all about, maybe all the plastic capsules dissolving in the tequila. But the blood I understand: I bit halfway through my tongue. You’ve never discovered how loud you can scream until they give you twenty stitches in your tongue without an anesthetic.

  Who knows what went wrong during that last ECT session? I personally think it was some strange kind of gift from the gods. I emerged from that chaos a different person, with a different identity. No longer depressed, but bipolar. The label mattered. It made sense of my erratic life. I had never before understood how, for several weeks or months at a time, I could function at such a high level of competence, only to be followed by equally long periods of hiding under my desk, under the covers, in the dark.

  To be honest, I’d never really been comfortable with the concept of “depression,” no matter how articulately I defended it to my family and friends. I had never disclosed my diagnosis to my colleagues. I still thought depression was something I should be able to control. God knows I’d heard it often enough—just pick yourself up by your bootstraps, or run five miles a day, or avoid all forms of sugar, and you could lick this thing. Everybody gets the blues.

  But manic depression is just too crazy for most people to identify with, or have comforting platitudes for. There’s a certain liberation in being so out there, beyond the norm. The layman rarely argues with you: your conduct speaks for itself. So I am genuinely insane every once in a while, but at least it’s genuine insanity. It occupies a whole different space in the DSM-IV.

  I’m still ashamed of having a mental illness. Perhaps I’ll always be ashamed. But now it’s mostly of the consequences, not the condition itself. I believe in this diagnosis. It’s as true to me as being a redhead. Despite the constant shifting of the earth beneath my feet, I feel grounded at last.

  13

  My sins are greatest against those I never wished to harm. Sins against the innocent never go unpunished, and they always leave their mark. Look closely enough in the mirror, and you’ll see a whole new spate of crow’s-feet, or a crinkle in your forehead where it once lay smooth. To this day, I see the furrows etched around my mouth, and all I can think is: Linda.

  Linda was the first real girlfriend I ever made in law school. We bonded over a particularly sexist constitutional law professor, who insisted on calling all his female students “Missy.” I was sick with depression most of the first semester; and when I came back to class a few weeks before finals, Linda voluntarily offered to lend me her notes. It was the first—and little did I know then—the only act of kindness I was ever to receive at UCLA Law. And it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted long past graduation, into the wilds of our professional careers.

  Linda and I talked on the phone every day, sometimes two or three times if a crisis was in the offing. Crises ranged all the way from what do I wear to federal court to I think I’m falling in love with a senior partner. We shared shoes and sweaters, blind double dates, and even went bathing suit shopping together, which is surely the truest hallmark of intimacy and trust that can exist between two adult women.

  I’d had girlfriends before, but it had been a long, long time since I’d felt this close and connected with another woman. All my other female friendships had gradually fallen to the wayside, one by one, as my manic depression got worse over time. I can hardly blame them: when I was depressed, I never returned phone calls. And when I was manic, I simply had no use for women. All I wanted to do was flirt, and flirting with women was no fun.

  But Linda weathered the bipolar storms with patience and understanding. She didn’t get angry with me when I was too depressed to call her back, or when I canceled long-standing plans over and over again. And while she didn’t particularly like how I acted when I was manic, over time she learned how to handle that, too: she simply refused to go out in public with me. Instead, she would cook dinner at her house and we would rent old black-and-white movies, or she would come over to my place with her needlepoint and keep me company while I climbed the walls.

  But Linda’s tolerance was finally tested to the breaking point several years after law school, when I experienced a depression unlike any I had ever known before. It struck at the worst time possible, when I was under considerable professional strain, and also on the brink of being romantically involved with a senior partner at my new law firm. Night after night I called Linda and sobbed: How could I face another day of this? And she proved her friendship, again and again, by listening and not proffering advice.

  “I can’t move,” I’d say. “All the gravity in the world is fixed on my body and it’s pinning me down to the bed.”

  “I know,” she’d answer, softly.

  “I can’t breathe,” I’d say. “All the air in the world is being sucked out of my lungs and I don’t have the strength to pull it back in again.”

  “I know,” she’d say. “I know.”

  And so on and so on: I recited my endless litany of woes like a nightly confession, and she absolved me simply by breathing, calmly and gently, into the other end of the phone.

  But like everything that is innately evil, the depression grew more loathsome with each passing day. Despair, until now shrill and pleading, grew quiet and crafty. I began to secretly fantasize about guns and knives and pills and nooses and open, empty veins. My nightly phone calls trickled down to three, then two, then one a week, at which point Linda became alarmed.

  “You have to do something,” she urged me one night. “I don’t care what, or how much it costs, but you have to do something, now.”

  That’s when I finally agreed to allow Dr. R. to perform electroshock therapy on my brain. Ultimately it was my decision, but in my mind I held Linda partly responsible, too. She had been so adamant, so convinced that twelve sessions of ECT, spread out over the next couple of months, would be the solution we had been praying for. She couldn’t have known about the psychotic break it would trigger midway through the treatment, or the wild manic episode that followed that break, or my subsequent suicide attempt. All she knew was that I was suffering, and she wanted the pain to stop. ECT was the only way, she was sure.

  Eventually, her confidence seemed justified. By the twelfth and final round of the ECT, I looked decidedly better. I was able to get up, get dressed, and groom myself. Although I wasn’t sleeping much, it was enough so that the desperate, haunted look went out of my eyes. I could see the improvement myself in the mirror, but I was wary. The mirror couldn’t show me my mind, and my mind felt decidedly strange.

  The ECT may have kicked me out of the depression, but it kicked a little too hard. Not only did I lose most of my inhibitions, I lost a good part of my memory, too. I could remember some things well enough, usually arcane trivia like which of the Brontës wrote Wuthering Heights, but I completely forgot basic essential info like what different utensils were for. I happily ate my ice cream with a fork, my fish with a spoon. I forgot standard social etiquette, too, like the custom of shaking hands upon meeting someone. If they pleased me, I kissed them—full on the mouth. It’s the only way I can explain what happened next: I forgot the very rules I was violating.

  Linda was so happy at my apparent recovery that she decided to throw me a party, a “welcome back” party, as she called it. I hadn’t socialized in almost a year, and I was just manic enough to long for an occasion—any occasion—to talk, to flirt, to express my opinions about
everything under the sun. Linda was especially eager to introduce me to the brand-new man in her life: Jeff, an artist and photographer who taught art history on the side. “He’s James Dean handsome,” she whispered to me one night on the phone.

  The party was on a steamy August night, and I was feverish with anticipation and mania. Linda’s garden was tolerably comfortable, but nonetheless the guests all came dressed in as little clothing as possible. I had, of course, completely forgotten the contents of my wardrobe. So I’d assembled an outfit out of disparate odds and ends: a lovely white silk scarf that I fashioned as a halter top, and a brightly checkered red-and-white sarong that might have been a tablecloth in my pre-ECT existence.

  I thought I looked fabulous. But then I thought everyone and everything looked fabulous that night: Linda, the other guests, the cunning little carved ivory napkin holders, the tuna carpaccio canapés. I was acutely aware of the extent of exposed flesh all around me—not just my own, but the other women’s—and it suddenly seemed to me the most natural thing in the world. I’d never realized until that moment how much of the world is naked under the bare-ass moon.

  What a difference a few months had made. Before the ECT, the world had been a dull and muddy gray, with strains of funereal black. Now it was raucous and bright as a tropical parrot, and just as exotic. I seemed to hear things I’d never really heard before: one leaf rustling up against another, the insinuating whisper of the wind. And the smells…I closed my eyes and inhaled the night-blooming jasmine so deeply I got giddy. I staggered back a few steps and tripped over the dinner table, falling to my knees and sending an assortment of silverware clattering to the ground.

  “Gravity is conspiring against you,” I heard a voice say, and when I opened my eyes there was Linda’s James Dean, smiling down at me. He held out his hand. “You must be Terri,” he said. “Linda never told me how graceful you were.” I reached up and took his outstretched hand, aware all at once of a surge of heat passing between our palms.

  “Thank you,” I said, discreetly adjusting my sarong. “But I don’t believe in gravity.” Which was true. Since the ECT, natural laws no longer existed for me.

  He asked me what I had meant, and I explained myself, carelessly. I knew the particular words I used didn’t matter. What mattered was the sound of my voice, snaking into his ear. Besides, he wasn’t really listening, just looking at me—staring, in fact. He interrupted me: “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring? The high forehead, the round face, the pale lashes and brows…”

  Damn the ECT. I remembered Vermeer, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall his Girl with a Pearl Earring. But all Vermeer’s women were lovely, I thought, so I decided to take a chance that the remark was a compliment.

  “Thank you?” I said, with a rising inflection.

  “In fact, I’d really like to photograph you one of these days,” Jeff said, and there it was: the unmistakable declaration. He was interested, and I—I was half a dozen different emotions at once. Flustered, flattered, triumphant, shy, excited and lascivious. Definitely lascivious. Due to the depression, it had been at least a year since I’d had sex.

  “Yes” was on my lips and inches away from the air when a small, nagging doubt seized hold of me. Something was wrong here, terribly wrong, but what that thing was I just couldn’t remember. He was gorgeous, I was available, what else mattered? And this is where I plead to God to consider the mitigating circumstances: that between the mania-induced lust and the ECT-induced amnesia, I honestly forgot that there was anything more essential at stake, i.e., the unwritten rules of friendship. In particular, Rule No. One: stay away from your best friend’s boyfriend. I took a good long look at Jeff’s gold-flecked eyes and Roman nose and chose to believe in the law of the moment.

  “I’d love to,” I said. “When did you have in mind?”

  We spent the rest of that evening not ten feet apart (Linda had thoughtfully seated us next to each other at the table). Somewhere between the vichyssoise and the cold poached salmon, the guilt finally hit me. But by then I was too deep into the flirtation to get myself out of it. Nor, I will admit it now, did I really want to. For the first time in ages, I felt alive. I knew, without articulating it into words, that this was what life was really about, that this was what we are here for: to seduce and be seduced.

  By the time the party finally broke up, an hour or so after midnight, Jeff had my telephone number and we had made a date to get together tomorrow at his studio. I didn’t, of course, tell Linda about this, either that night or the morning after, when she called to rehash the party with me. “So what did you think of Jeff?” she asked. “Nice,” I replied, then I quickly changed the subject. I could tell she was a little bit miffed, but I didn’t trust myself.

  When I finally managed to hang up the phone, a good hour later, I was thoroughly exasperated with Linda for making me feel guilty when I hadn’t done anything yet. Plus she had completely fouled up my schedule: I was supposed to meet Jeff at his studio at one o’clock, and here it was already a quarter past twelve. I tore through my closet, quickly trying on and discarding a half dozen outfits before settling on a pale pink sweater and jeans. The sweater had a flattering sweetheart neckline with white eyelet trim: it clothed me in innocence. To look at me, you’d never know what I was really thinking.

  Being both manic and in a hurry is hardly conducive to good driving. I sped down the hill at twice the speed limit, honking my horn all the way through the intersections. My mind was racing far ahead of my car: what would I do if and when Jeff actually tried to touch me? I didn’t know the answer. I couldn’t get past the moment of contact. How lovely it would feel to be touched again by any man, but especially by Jeff.

  I arrived at the studio intact and on time. I knocked on the door and within a few seconds, Jeff answered. He was even more handsome by daylight. The whites of his eyes were even brighter against his dark tan, and traces of silver shot through his hair. He ushered me in and led me to the kitchen, where a pitcher of margaritas lay waiting on a tray, with two frosted and salt-rimmed glasses. How could he have possibly known? When I’m manic, tequila is always my drink of choice. The only problem is, tequila exacerbates every urge. The tiniest flicker of mania becomes a full-blown fire.

  I hesitated for just a second or two before wrapping my fingers around the ice-cold glass. Ignoring all echoes of reason and restraint, I slowly, deliberately thrust out my tongue and lightly traced the salt-flecked rim, my eyes fixed on Jeff’s all the while. “Bring your glass,” he said, and he led me down the hall into his studio proper, a large, barren room with a cathedral ceiling, enormous skylights and a bank of mirrors all along the back wall. “It used to be a dance hall,” he explained, waving a hand toward the mirrors. “Now I use them for trick shots and special effects.” He sat me down on a three-legged stool, facing the mirrors. Then he spent a few minutes adjusting the lights, before he finally looked at me through a small, handheld camera. “What do you want me to do?” I asked, suddenly nervous and shy. “Do nothing,” he said. “Just look in the mirror and think Vermeer.”

  So I looked in the mirror and thought Vermeer. But the image staring back at me looked nothing like his women: calm, serene, and eternally still. The woman in the mirror fidgeted; she was restless; her eyes kept darting back and forth. I was exceedingly ill at ease, uncomfortable in my own skin.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Jeff said. He set his camera down, walked up to my stool and gently smoothed my hair down with his fingers. I was still staring into the mirror, and at the instant he touched me, I could see myself shiver. Apparently Jeff could feel it, too, because he turned around and looked up. Just for a moment, our eyes met and locked in the mirror.

  And that’s when I knew: I owed my dear friend Linda allegiance, but I owed the woman in the mirror something more. It was a miracle that I was still alive, after a year of bone-crushing, soul-starving depression. It was a miracle my brain still functioned well enou
gh to flirt. I thought back to the face I’d seen in my bathroom mirror before the ECT: sullen, sallow, the smile muscles slack from disuse. And I looked at me now: pink-cheeked and blooming, trembling with anticipation, every pore, every freckle alive and alert.

  Funny, I thought, I never pictured myself as one of “those” women—one of those heartless harpies who could steal a man right from under her best friend’s nose. But try as I might, I just couldn’t feel guilty. Much as I loved Linda, I realized now that my loyalties lay elsewhere. I owed it to myself to snatch at happiness however I could. Who knew when or if it would come again?

  I reached up and stroked Jeff’s cheek with my finger. He leaned down and kissed me once on each eyelid, then on my forehead, then on the tip of my nose, hovering just above my lips until I finally couldn’t stand the tension a second longer. I grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him long and hard.

  And so it became part of our relationship mythology that I kissed him first. Hence I was responsible for breaking whatever vows either of us may have owed to Linda. I questioned this reasoning, at least at first: even assuming arguendo that I was the seducer, wasn’t he also at fault for being seduced? Shouldn’t he have been more cautious, more wary? Or did part of him really want to be caught? Jeff invariably shrugged off these questions with an exasperated sigh. What’s done is done, he said. You dwell too much on the past.

  He was wrong. If I dwelled on anything, it was the future, my future with Jeff, to be exact. I knew deep down that I had committed an unpardonable sin, and the only way that I could live with that fact was to somehow keep the sin alive. So I refused to settle for a one-night stand. I did everything in my power to make Jeff care. Fortunately, the mania helped: I was charming and vivacious in spite of myself. I didn’t tell Jeff about being bipolar, he knew nothing about the ECT, and he was just smitten enough in our early affair to find my frequent memory lapses an adorable quirk.