Madness: A Bipolar Life Read online

  It's the tech boom. San Francisco has done a weird wrenching metamorphosis over the past thirty years—that bohemian, tie-dyed, free-love, flower-in-the-barrel-of-a-gun era is finished, now the province of the leftover hippies and the kids who are searching for a cause with their beat-up guitars in hand, and with that era have gone the things that mattered: civil rights and feminism, which are of no concern to us—why should we care? Our rights, our educations, were handed to us on a silver platter. Women are as ruthless as men. And the men? They feel about women the way straight men have always felt about women: they want them hopelessly, they're scared to death of them, they want one to look good on the arm and make them look yet hipper, younger, richer, more successful, more on top of their game. What else is new? There are good men and bad men, as always, and good and bad women as well. The only difference is context, environment: San Francisco in the late nineties is a hothouse. Everything in it grows out of control.

  Including this crazed relationship. And certainly including me.

  It's a love affair, with all the drama and Sturm und Drang that phrase implies. It's growing wild in the heat of the San Francisco autumn, the only time of year when northern California gets sunny and hot, and it wraps itself around us, roping us together so close that it is becoming difficult to breathe. And so we live breathless, and no matter how close we get it isn't close enough. We want to share the little breath we have, pass it back and forth between our mouths. I have become inseparable from the way I feel about him. And maybe it really is love. Love's a kind of madness, isn't it?

  At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were—not particularly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less—and spits out the monsters we are becoming.

  Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.

  I've long since stopped taking my meds. On my way out of Minneapolis, I swept into Dr. Lentz's office, informing him that I was off to California, that I was madly in love, that I knew absolutely I was doing the right thing, obviously, how could he fail to see that? Marya, this seems a little sudden. It seems more than slightly ill-advised—what does he know? I left with the last of my meds and no refill prescriptions, and when I ran out, I thought nothing of it, because, at last, I was completely sane. At last I'm living the life I was meant to live, the right man, the right town, the right friends. I'm not just surviving, I'm thriving. Never been better. I'm on my way at last. The "mental illness" I supposedly had is gone, never to be heard from again.

  "Don't move," he says from across the room. I'm lying on my side on the bed, basking in the afternoon light. Through the bay window, the sun is a pure, transparent gold. The bay glitters, a saturated, impossible blue. The sheets are white, tangled and whorled and soft with sweat. Everything is still.

  "Why?" I say, half opening my eyes. Through the bedroom's French doors, I see him flung in a chair, naked.

  "You're perfect," he says. "You look like a cello. The dip from your chest to your waist to your hip."

  His cello lies on its side in the corner, untouched. He will not touch it the entire time we are together. I am enamored of his cello. It implies everything about him that I want to believe. I hold my breath, not wanting to break the moment open and spill it all over the floor. This time I will do it right. I will not let us fail.

  Time has slowly spun to a stop and hangs in the air. It is an effort to move one's limbs, turn one's head, due to the thick invisible fog of unmoving time. The lazy days bleed into one another like watercolors left out in the rain. And so I lie here on my side, heavily, pressed down by time. Stay here, says time. Don't move. If you move, time will pass, this will disappear. He will go up in smoke, leaving only the faintest shape of himself in the chair.

  "How long did you want me to lie here?" I ask.

  "Forever," he says, smiling his glittering, terrible smile. "Until I say."

  "But I have to get ready." The sun moves across the bay window. I feel it slide across my back. "I can't very well go like this."

  "Let's not go. Let's forget the whole thing. Let's get in the car and put the top down and drive up to wine country and eat at a little country inn and drink gallons of red wine. No, wait. Never mind dressing. Let's stay naked all day."

  "We've been naked all day. We haven't left the house. We've eaten nothing but grapes. Besides, I'm tired of sex," I say, smiling.

  "What? How can you be tired of it? I'll never be tired of it. I'll make love to you all day. Every day. Forever."

  "Forever?"

  "Forever." Suddenly he's all seriousness, all intensity. Is it real? "Marry me," he says impulsively.

  I laugh and launch myself off the bed and turn my back. "I'm getting dressed," I call over my shoulder. "I'm going to dinner and out to the club." He follows me down the hall.

  In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

  Everything this year is amplified: the colors, the sounds, the sense that I'm caught up in something much larger than I am, something fabulous, something grand. Everything is tactile, the taste of the wine, the feel of the excellent fabric, the heel of the fabulous shoe, the thrum of the road under the wheels of the car. And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.

  The sharp scent of eucalyptus and sea salt stings the nostrils and fills the lungs. I have to breathe deeply to soak it all in. I draw the deep breath again and again, and it is never enough. The breathing makes me dizzy. I stagger around, elated, half mad.

  The place is manic. The time is manic. I fit right in.

  For a few months, everything is perfect, crystalline, the heady bliss of new love rushing through every moment, every day. But then, without warning, the swings start again.

  The alarm goes off. I jerk awake, heart pounding. Jeremy lies beside me, peacefully asleep. I fall back into the bed, feel myself sink like a stone, turning slowly through the water toward the bottom, where I rest, staring at the surface a long way above. The cavern that opens up in my chest is here. I fight it, distracting myself with anything, Jeremy, writing, parties, friends, and fountains of wine, but morning comes and it's back, and I lie here, the pressure of emptiness inside my chest crowding my lungs, making it difficult to breathe.

  I drag myself out of bed, stand with my head against the cupboards in the kitchen, pouring coffee, trying to shake the cobwebs out of my brain. I go into my office—a glorified closet—and sit down at the desk and stare at the computer screen, dreading the day.

  A few hours later, my fingers are racing over the keys, my head spinning with words, I'm elated, laughing out loud, jabbering to myself—this new life is beauty itself, it's heaven, I'm finally happy, in love, blessed, and I race through the hours, unaware of time's passage, ears ringing, alive.

  Two o'clock. I feel it coming. My fingers slow, then stop. I stare at what I've written, slump in my chair. Where did it come from? Where did it go? My mind drags itself around in a circle and finally lies down. My chest empties out. I push back from my desk, go into the bedroom, crawl under the covers, and curl up in a ball, praying that Jeremy doesn't come home and catch me like this. I swear to myself that I'll be out of
bed by five. But the idea of ever getting out of bed again exhausts me and I close my eyes, wanting to sleep, but sleep doesn't come. I lie there, hating myself, for hours.

  My eyes snap open. I must have dozed. I throw the covers off and swing my legs out of the bed, glance at the clock—it's five! It's evening, the day is done, the night is here, it's time for a drink! I leap up, race for the shower, stand there singing, the cold water shivering me out of my fog. I leap out again, run through the house into my closet, what to wear, what to wear? I must look like I've been up all day, productive, working, just like everybody else, and I race into the kitchen, open a bottle of wine, and start chopping things for the fabulous dinner I'll make for my fabulous boyfriend when he comes in and we begin the fabulous evening, which will never end.

  But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.

  The fights start. I'm getting crazier, day by day. And Jeremy? He's a small-town boy who landed in the big city, and now he's possessed by an attempt to find an identity. The game of the pretty player is suddenly not enough, seems fake to him, and he is consumed with the idea of the genuine, earnestly becomes a vegetarian, is indignant and superior about my smoking, idealizes Che Guevara for reasons that are unclear, reads books about the civil rights movement, identifying with the oppressed (he is a vice president at one of the biggest software companies in the country, and makes six figures at twenty-five), teaches himself guitar, goes to hippie jam sessions (the only one there in carefully torn Armani jeans). He can't decide whether he disdains my work—Rupert Murdoch, The Man, owns my publisher, for God's sake!—as an utter failure of moral character, or likes to shine in its light. In private, he criticizes everything I do and everything about me. In public, he shows no objection to the parties we go to, or the glad-handing, cheek-kissing, martini-drinking crowd—he's my biggest fan, brags about me, keeps a hand at the small of my back, likes the attention and the praise just fine.

  He's the most amazing man I've ever met, fascinating, beautiful, glamorous, and I will do anything to keep him. I'm obsessed with him. We're in love.

  He's a run-of-the-mill, insecure, pretty-boy asshole. We hate each other and want the other one dead. We fuck and fight, and dress up and go to the parties, the perfect couple, witty, laughing on cue. Then we head home, screaming at each other in the car, speeding through the city, me drunk, he horrid, and the door shuts behind us, we kick off our shoes, hop in our corners of the ring, and when the bell goes off, we fly at each other, swinging blind. We have sex constantly, when we're not fighting, and it's always fantastic, and it persuades us, every time, that it's meant to be, that we are made for each other, that if we'd just stop with those silly fights, everything would be perfect again.

  And then it's perfect for a few days. He brings me flowers. I wear lacy lingerie. We stare into each other's eyes over dinner at a fancy restaurant, our love renewed.

  But no matter how many times we make up, there's the fact of me and my mood swings and my drinking. Even if Jeremy were perfect, even if we weren't trying to destroy each other's lives, my mood swings would still be there. And I'd still be drinking myself to death.

  The fact of the matter is that Jeremy likes my drinking. And he likes the fact that I'm crazier than hell. This pattern is now an old one with the guys I get involved with, most recently, before Jeremy, with Julian. For one thing, when it's good, life with me is a constant party. We drink all the time. He fills my glass as fast as I can empty it. I'm excited, exciting, full of ideas and energy, great to be around. And then I go too far—I drink too much, he holds me up, laughing, as I stagger, go into deep funks, and he comforts me and makes it all go away. My drinking and my crazies are my weakness. He exploits this to the hilt. It gives him something on me. When he comes home after work to find me lying in bed, Oh, honey, are you all right? And he strokes my hair. Why don't you have some Klonopin. Here. Even better, when he's not playing the savior, he's playing the saint: whenever we fight, it's my fault. I was drunk, or I was crazy, or both. He's untouchable. He screams at me until I'm a crumpled mass on the floor. I give in. He's right. I'm a fuckup. I'm sorry, I say. I'll get better, I say. And suddenly he's all care and kindness, bent over me, picking me up, rocking me in his arms. There, there. I cling to him, pathetic, humiliated, grateful that he's still there. I don't deserve him. He's too good.

  I put my head down on the table and cry. Because it's happened again. I'm found out. I'm damaged. Fucked up. Broken. A fraud. I knew he would figure out sooner or later that I was impossible to love. And now he has, and I love him, and I'm certain he has tried, really tried, to love me back. But trying to love me is too much for any sane person to bear. I watch their backs, one by one, as they walk away.

  Right now — here in the middle of an endless breakup, close to deadline on a book that isn't half finished, soaked in booze, partying all the time, taking off on sudden cross-country trips without telling anyone where I've gone—right now is the perfect time for me to go back to college.

  I never graduated during those years I was studying in Minneapolis and Washington. I was working too much, and spent too much time crazy. I'm embarrassed by my lack of a degree, and I hear about a tiny little school with a degree in poetics. Perfect. As weird and obscure as possible. And it's all about books.

  If there's one thing that mania is good for, it's school.

  Racing off to the funky, rundown pink building in the Mission District every morning, I'm happy as can be, clinging to this lifeboat, something that shakes me out of my creeping afternoon torpor, evens out—at least a little bit—my careening moods. I can bury myself in centuries of poetry and philosophy, I can write hundreds of papers, do research, I can pour out poetry, I can argue and debate and critique. Given the fact that I've been in college for about a hundred years, I'm taking all graduate classes, and they hire me to teach a few undergrad classes. Here, outside the terrifying San Francisco scene, it doesn't matter if I'm playing the player well enough. There is no kiss kiss. I can just be a crazy writer. And I can get caught up in the drunken, roaring, arguing, fucking, scribbling bunch of lunatics who go to this school. Out with the martinis. In with the bottle of whiskey, no glass. In with the day full of lectures, workshops, writing, the evenings spent at dive bars where we get plastered, shouting and laughing and pompously quoting at length, in with the all-night weekend parties, the tumbling conversation, the impromptu poem, the fucking in the back room, whoever's nearby, the empty bottles that litter the place, the promising writers, the next generation of poets passed out on the floor.

  I love it. I love the school, the work, the way it's making my poetry better, the piles of reading I carry home every night and spend hours poring over in my closet, the pages stained with ashes and red wine. I work like mad. I spend less and less time with the old shiny scene or even my close friends. I work so hard I think I'll die. My brain physically hurts at the end of the night. It's an incredible high. This is how it should be. Once again, I have a future. The hours writing and in school let me ignore, for a little while, the lifelong feeling of failure. Because, no matter what other people might think when they look at my life, I can't see, have never been able to see, anything like success. It doesn't matter what I do, what I publish, what the critics say, what people tell me. None of it feels like mine. Nothing I've ever done feels real. It's as if books and articles have just sprouted up in my house one morning, someone else's, mistakenly bearing my name. That's one of the reasons I've gone back to college. Finally, maybe I'll believe I can really do something. I want a degree. Then I'll feel real.

  And finally, here at this weird little school, with these people who fancy themselves mad geniuses, I'm not about to be exposed as a fuckup, a hopeless crazy freak.

  High-functioning is a qualified term. At school, sure, I'm functioning at a very high level. Nonfunctional would better describe the rest of my life. By now, J
eremy has moved out, and left to my own devices, I've completely devolved. I haven't done laundry in a month—scared of the laundry room, for some reason—and the pile of laundry in the closet towers over my head. Cleaning products are scary lately, so can't clean the house. The overdue bills pile up on my desk, unopened. I am afraid of all grocery stores except one, so I skulk through that one to the deli, buy two kinds of pâté and several kinds of cheese—eating anything other than these two things is somehow complicated and intimidating—and then rush out to the parking lot, dive into my car, and drive home as fast as I can. Often enough, though, I get lost in a city that's not even fifty miles square and just not that complicated, but my mind starts racing, repeating street names in a singsong in my head, the stoplights and flashing WALK signs confuse me, one-ways confuse me, and I wind up crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and back several times before I shut the door behind myself and pour myself a drink, shaking, wild with relief. Jeremy comes over every now and then; we fuck, fight, part screaming and are broken up again. I cry, laugh my head off, race around the apartment, organize my books by color and size, reorganize them by genre, try on all the clothes in my closet and throw them on the floor, jet into my closet-office and pour out a furious poem, laugh with triumph, shred it up in despair—I drink heavily throughout—write again, whipping open the books I'm supposed to be reading and flipping through the pages until I find the one quote, the perfect quote, and, crowing with glee, e-mail it to a friend, who writes back, Where the hell are you? Where have you been? But I'm currently occupied by studying the grain of the wood floor on which I am lying, face-down, consumed by a fog of self-hatred. All is darkness and desolation. Drunk as a skunk, my mood swinging down fast, I stumble to bed, crawl in fully dressed, and squeeze my eyes against the parade of bloody images that fills my head until I fall asleep.