Madness: A Bipolar Life

by Marya Hornbacher

  A desperate situation has arisen: I am out of wine. There is nothing left for me in this world. I look pleadingly at the bar, behind which the French barmaid stands, ignoring me as if she were an elegant cat. Two men enter the bar. Shit! More knees to navigate in my path to the bar. Everyone's shirt pleases me: they are all superbly ironed and have excellent cuffs. Eventually I manage to stand. I take deep, calming breaths. I take my wineglass and tiptoe up to the bar and point to the bottle of burgundy I like. In mortal shame, I lower my head as the barmaid pours me a glass. I want to tell her I am sorry I don't speak French. I feel horrible about it. She puts the bottle back and I crawl away like the bug that I am. I crawl up the leg of my chair, carefully balancing my fine crystal wineglass in my hand. I crawl across the seat. I crawl up the arm of the chair and sit perched there. I am a millipede. Elegantly, fooling everyone, I cross my million legs and sip my wine.

  I am outside and lost. I hunch over, pulling my black wings over my shoulders. I stay close to the buildings. I duck around corners, searching. There is a crepe stand around here somewhere, and I shall find it. I put my head in my hands and lean my back against a stone wall. I note the puddles running off into the gutter. I take a deep breath and carry on, old chap, buck up, old chum, tallyho, sally forth, and I continue skulking through the narrow alleyways of London. There is one safe place; that place is the crepe stand. There they do not humiliate me as they do in the other places.

  I am in a square. There are people all around, and thousands of pigeons. Mary Poppins! "Feed the birds, tuppence a bag! Tuppence, TUPPENCE, TUPPENCE A BAG!" I may have shouted it aloud. I have been walking through the square for years, never getting closer to the other side. Perhaps it is Trafalgar? Where is Trafalgar? Where is my bloody crepe stand? Where they give me a ham and cheese crepe and don't ask any questions and leave me to huddle into my plate, keeping an eye out for the watchers? My mother went to London once, and brought me the Mary Poppins hat when she returned. There is a picture of me holding an umbrella and wearing a fine little blue wool suit and my Mary Poppins hat. I am grinning my horrible grin. I hate the child. She is hideous. Her blue wool suit fit poorly. See someone about it.

  Trafalgar becomes Knightsbridge, Excuse me, where am I? Ire-main very polite so nobody knows. Occasionally I stop in a bar to refuel. The wine in London is highly satisfactory. If they knew who I was, they'd hasten to help me. But I dare not disclose myself. I cover my mouth with my hand, and demur. Piccadilly Circus, Mayfair, Harrods! Heavenly Harrods! The excellent people, the fine, fine people there! I make many purchases. I trot through London, hailing cabs, carrying my packages, Where to, Miss? Take me to the theater! No, take me to my hotel, and I recite the name and street number, which I have written down on the back of the business card of a literary critic with whom I recently had dinner, and behaved spectacularly well, and got hilariously bombed. I mutter my way up the stairs of my little hotel, my black thing over my head.

  I am on the phone to my agent, sobbing, pacing, I'm lost, I'm lost, I can't find the crepe stand, what am I going to do? I can't go out like this—I have fleeting moments of clarity during which I realize I am not doing well, and moments of abject terror as I pace around the hotel room, crying my head off.

  Then the escort comes and drives me off to the BBC for radio interviews. I comport myself appropriately. I sit in my little sound studio wearing headphones, being interviewed by BBC London, BBC Leeds, Belfast, Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh, Wales. Their accents are fascinating and I can't understand them at first but then I catch on and have to restrain myself from taking on the accent, which I like very much.

  I am running down a rainy street in one shoe. I dash into a shoe store, shouting, U.S. size six! Black heels! I'm about to be late for BBC TV! Which, absurdly, is true—it's just come to me, and I am running around trying to find my hotel, where the escort will be waiting to take me to the studio—the girls in the shoe shop are incredibly helpful, and hurry to find me the very black shoe—they urge me to take both, though I say I need only one—I arrive, somehow, at the hotel, and the escort, looking alarmed, steers me to my room, No, you must have a dry suit, and, agreeably, I defer to her wisdom. But how on earth did I get wet?

  Suddenly, Julian is here, and we are lost on a sunny residential street in some city or another, and it's very spring-like and sunny out, and I am in a rage, and I am kicking a garbage can and howling, when out of the blue with no warning, there is my friend Jo! At the end of the street! What is she doing here? Has she been sent to collect me? (She has.) She looks as if she is moving quickly but the air has obviously become liquid, impeding her progress. She arrives. I fall against her chest, sobbing with relief. Her sweater is pink and very soft. Her earrings brush the top of my head. She is real. I am saved.

  Hypomania

  July 1998

  It was a mixed episode, Lentz tells me when I come down from the rafters around April. Brian's gone, and after pushing it away for all of tour, it hits me in the gut when I get home. I pace the halls at night, doubled over myself with grief. My parents have finally split up, after twenty-five years. My own marriage, well—Julian and I alternate between screaming at each other and ignoring each other completely. Suddenly I'm not just his crazy wife. I'm his wife with one book out and a novel in the works. More than ever, I am everything that is wrong with his life. I am the reason he can't hold a job, I am the reason he's not in school. I'm never home, I just left him and went tooling around the globe. His resentment poisons the air.

  I try to make it work. I'm attached to him. And I said I was going to be married, and so, goddammit, I'm going to be. I don't want everyone else to have been right. But eventually, in May, Julian slams out of the apartment. When he comes back, I'm in my robe, sitting on the couch in the dark, having a drink. I offer him one. He sits down in his armchair, twirling the ice in his glass. We have a remarkably civil midnight conversation, and a few days later, he moves out.

  It's obvious. This whole business of marriage—what was I thinking? I'm not suited for marriage! It's too slow, too settled, too sedate for someone like me! I'm a girl of the world! I've got places to go, things to do, people to see! And why not? Apparently people like my book. It still hasn't really registered with me that the past months spent talking day after day to strangers about something as raw and frightening as a life-threatening eating disorder has left me a little shaken, a little unstable, and desperate to forget the whole thing. So I'm flush with money from its publication and the sale of a novel. I'm the successful single girl, not a care in the world, I'm Mary Tyler Moore, tossing my hat in the air. It's summer, and I'm on a roll.

  Here's how you make absolutely sure that you'll keep getting crazier by the day:

  Ignore everything your psychiatrist tells you. Disregard all his warnings about the way you're living your life—in fact, do absolutely everything he tells you not to.

  Don't always take your pills. They're a hassle, and what if they make you dull? You don't need them. And if you're going to take the pills, take them with a glass of wine. It will make the mood swings even more exciting.

  Don't sleep; you've got to make sure your body clock is as fucked up as possible. The less you sleep, the more manic you'll get, until soon you'll go completely over the edge.

  Drink caffeine. Tons of it. Take your morning pills with coffee. It can't hurt.

  Work around the clock—it's important to put yourself under as much stress as possible.

  Eating normally would stabilize your blood sugar, so don't do that; it's better to keep your body in as unstable a state as you possibly can for maximum results.

  And, above all else, drink like a fish.

  Me, I drink up all the liquor in the world, all the booze in several men's liquor cabinets, all the wine in my own collection and then all the wine in the collection I buy to replace the first one, all the wine and martinis in the bars in the city. Anything I can get my hands on. There is never enough.

  I am absolutely convin
ced that the booze helps me control my moods. It raises the volume and heightens the colors and fills me with a sense of happiness when I want to come up, and when I need to come down at the end of the night, it blunts my thoughts, my perception of the shrieking world around me, and lets me black out, or sleep, whichever comes first. I have worked out an elaborate system of just how much to drink, at exactly what time, to keep my mood humming along at the perfect high. It doesn't cross my mind that the booze itself is one of the reasons the highs and lows are so extreme.

  I wake up in the morning, running through the day in my head—the work, the cleaning, the laundry, the party tonight. I fling the covers off and make the bed with absurd precision, hospital corners, get it right, get ready, pour myself a liter or so of coffee, land in front of my desk, and start tapping away without so much as a thought about what I'm going to write. I go for a few hours, then run off to throw in the laundry, hop up for more coffee, write a million e-mails, call my agent for no particular reason and babble for a while. I get a flash of inspiration and grab one of the dozen or so yellow notepads that litter my office to scribble down my ideas for the next several books, and back to the laundry, in with the whites, then back to the desk—I flip madly through books, looking up obscure facts that are suddenly absolutely crucial to the making of my point, the central point, the one that clinches everything, drop the books in a pile on the floor, scribble notes on yet another notepad, and then I need something I wrote on one of the notepads three days ago, I need it right this second, and I rip through the notepads—but wait, the laundry, and I'm flying downstairs and staggering back into the apartment under the weight of piles of every piece of fabric I can find, clean or dirty, the point is the excellent efficiency of washing and the necessity of absolute cleanliness, dump them on the living room floor, and now it's time for a glass of wine, the very thing, white wine goes perfectly with laundry, who would drink red for laundry? Twenty-six floors above the city, in this apartment that Julian has recently vacated, I stop for an instant to soak in the gold late-morning light streaming through the windows. Then I haul out the ironing board and iron everything, the socks, the sheets, I pull down the curtains and iron them too, and since I'm on a roll, I get down on the floor and iron the carpet, Oh, Marya, stop being weird, I chastise myself, and then I fold everything with perfect sharp creases, creases that would do my grandmother proud, wait! I am inspired! And I dash back into my office and whip off another few pages, an excellent day, two chapters, I go out to the kitchen and pour another glass of wine, toss it back, grab my purse, and zip out into the sunny summer afternoon.

  The days tumble over one another, each full of obsessive shopping for my perfect apartment, for the perfect dinner parties, perfect evenings out with friends, each day turning my head toward man after man so quickly I can hardly keep their names straight. The nights are all the same, a party or a date. They end with me getting out of bed and putting on my clothes, You're leaving? Or they end with me getting out of bed, putting on my robe, and telling them to leave, Do I have to? Or they end with me fumbling with the key in the lock and letting myself into my apartment, kicking my shoes off on my weaving way down the hall.

  The doctors call it hypersexuality. It's one of several typical goal-seeking behaviors that are common in mania, all of which involve rabid energy and a total loss of impulse control—this game I'm playing involves risky one-night stands, a compulsion to seduce, but no real interest in the sex itself. The sex isn't the point. The point is to shut off the maelstrom in my head.

  Someone catches my eye: my mind empties out of everything but the need to get him. My heart thumps, and there's a dull, mute pounding in my skull. Sound fades, and I am only aware of my single-minded mission—I must catch him, I must win. It's a rush, a pure, clean high, uncomplicated by thoughts. A few words, a few glances, a brush of the back of the hand, and he's mine. I am no longer anxious, no longer fearful, finally neither low nor high. I find myself in unknown beds or my own, staring at the ceiling, drumming my fingers on their backs. I feel the weight of their bodies, crushing me, pinning me down. They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.

  And then the game is over. I've won, and I want them to take their sticky, heavy bodies and go home.

  I litter the city with unsuspecting, nice guys, drawn in by the same things every man has ever been drawn in by—the over-the-top everything, the whirlwind that my hypomania creates. They call me "passionate." Only certain men are interested in women like this, and somehow I find them all this summer, and eat them for a snack. It's endlessly entertaining, when it isn't boring as hell.

  Jeremy

  Later That Summer

  It's night. I'm in San Francisco visiting a friend. We're in a bar, for a big change. There's a crowd.

  Nice to meet you, he says, and extends his hand. He holds mine a little too long.

  Likewise, I say. I am suspicious. So far he is sharky. All he needs is a gold chain. I dislike his goatee. He looks like the devil.

  You're Marya, he says. He looks at me intensely, as if he means to communicate some important bit of information that I urgently need to know. The bit of information is that he is a player, and that he wants to play. The bit of information is the bait.

  I always bite.

  As far as I know, I say.

  I've read your work, he says. (My work? I think, raising an eyebrow. He means Wasted. Work seems a little grand.)

  Really, I say, and look away. I glance around the bar, through the haze of bluish smoke. We are very young and very hip. We are arrogant beyond belief. We never stop performing. Someone climbs up on the table and does an impression of someone we don't like. We live to be liked. We will absolutely die if we aren't adored.

  I love it, he says.

  What? I lean forward to hear him.

  I love your work, he shouts.

  Ladies and gentlemen, there they are! The magic words!

  Oh, I say, and wave my hand.

  No, really, he says. I've been reading up. You're amazing.

  Folks, can you believe it! Bonus points! He said it! Amazing! My head grows to the size of a watermelon, making it difficult to hold up.

  Next, we are standing in the living room, separated by a coffee table, screaming at each other, Fuck you! No, fuck you! Someone overturns the coffee table. Something breakable is thrown, and, predictably, breaks. He punches the wall, his face the color of a tomato. I collapse on the floor and thrash my arms and legs.

  No, wait! Not yet. Sorry about that. I skipped a part.

  Can I call you? The crowd is thinning out. Only the die-hards and the drunks remain. It's two or three or four A.M. Everyone staggers out onto the street, heading for one-night stands or empty beds.

  Depends, I say, picking up my purse.

  On what? he asks, smiling his sharky smile.

  If you can find my phone number, I say, and smile, and go.

  I win this round.

  Now, the trick is to get rid of him before he finds out what a fucking freak I am.

  Because, of course, I'm mad, and he doesn't know it yet. I haven't gone crazy right there in front of him. The crucial moment hasn't come—the moment when he's standing in the middle of the room, his arms dangling at his sides, staring at me in disbelief, unsure what happened and when it will happen again. And he hasn't said it yet: You crazy bitch. You crazy fucking bitch.

  But he will. They always do.

  His name is Jeremy. He lives in California, getting rich on the tech boom. He is alarmingly beautiful—bronzed skin, light brown hair, liquid brown eyes the size of saucers—the women of his family tssk, Those lashes are wasted on a man. He's the original pretty boy, gorgeous and knows it and flaunts it shamelessly, and he's smart enough and funny enough, and he'll do in a pinch. It's the nineties, and I am all of twenty-four. Everyone in San Francisco has too much money and too many credit cards and is drinking too much booze. There's quite the little scene. And so Jer
emy and I hit it right off.

  In a hypomanic leap, we fly off to New York, whirl through it, have sex continuously and drink up every bar in the city and go to parties and clubs and generally do what you'd expect two very young, very arrogant, pretty little kids to do. We decide, a day or two in, that we're in love. We destroy the hotel room. We make a lot of ridiculous promises and grand statements and a hell of a mess.

  A week later, I'm back in San Francisco, moving into an apartment on Nob Hill.

  It's taken me exactly two months to leave my husband, find a new playmate, and move across the country to my brand-new life.

  It's a carnival, California in these years. The neon lights that blur in the rain and seem to smear across the sky; the open doors of bars spewing out laughing, shouting people and sucking more of them back in; the thundering, pounding bass in the clubs that seems to shake the street outside. And the parties, and the darling little restaurants, and the spectacular lofts, with their to-die-for views of the city and the bay, and the gorgeous clothes, the witty dinner guests, the third man, the hipsters, the scene, the endless, ever-present players playing their incessant little games, the stakes as high as a fortune to be made or lost overnight, or as small as getting the haughtiest woman in the room into bed or just getting the man of the hour's card, Call me sometime, and the academics with their scruffy beards and their incestuous fucking and fighting, and the poets and the writers, and the suicidal musicians, and Starbucks and eyeglasses so ugly they're fabulous, and the knighting of nerds, and the ever-shrinking cell phones, and the endless strings of degrees, Harvard? Berkeley? Yale?, and the money—good God, the money, rents skyrocketing, people paying their rent in stock options, IPO parties every night, twenty-two-year-olds driving around in identical black BMW convertibles, and the coup de grâce, the stunning success, the hot new kid, the spidery bodies, the buffed-up shoulders straining at too-tight black T-shirts, worn with fabulously ironic pants, and the terribly cool clunky squaretoed shoes, and the fat wads of cash, the sterling silver money clips, the limitless credit cards, and the weekend trips up to wine country, in the convertible, with the gang, and the wine tastings, and the wine collecting, and the art scene, and the hot new artist, and his lover, and their debacle, and the spectacle, and the debauch, and the grabbing at more, more of anything, everything, give it to us, we want it, all of it, where is my server, my dish is cold, drop by for drinks, we'll lunch, call me, she said she'd call me, he'll call me, shoot me an e-mail, I'll shoot you an e-mail, hey, good to meet you, glad-handing, kissing the trembling air near the eye, let's go down to the club, crowd in, scoot over, this is so-and-so, we should play squash, murmur to the waiter, Bring a round, slip him a hundred, and now the gang's all here, and we are going to do what we do, which is dance, and drink, and devour one another whole.