Prozac Nation (27 page)

I became rambunctious with tears every time I left Rafe. I cried on the bus from Providence to Boston. I cried on the T from Boston to Cambridge. I cried as I walked from Harvard Square to my apartment. I cried when I arrived home and found that my roommates had all gone to sleep and there was no one to cry to. I kept crying on and off for hours. I'd sit at my word processor and type my Space, Time, and Motion papers for the week, since this was the only class I was still bothering to keep up with, and I cried some more between thoughts on Kant and a priori knowledge, or Hopi dialects and the space-time continuum, or non-Euclidean geometry and light rays.

I'd wake up in the morning still crying and I'd start to wonder if it was possible that I'd been crying in my sleep all night long. The only way I could doze off on nights like that was by sneaking one of Alden's Halcion pills out of the bottle she kept in her desk drawer. Inevitably, as soon as I'd wake up in the morning, with that sudden post-Halcion jolt, I'd run for the telephone. I'd call Rafe to tell him that I couldn't stop crying, that I didn't know why, even though he was never sure what to do or say.

 

I am crying about the elusive nature of love, the impossibility of ever having someone so completely that he can fill up the hole, the gaping hole that for me right now is full of depression. I understand why people sometimes want to kill their lovers, eat their lovers, inhale the ashes of their dead lovers. I understand that this is the only way to possess another person with the kind of desperate longing that I have to take Rafe inside of me.

 

After a while, it got so that even when I was with Rafe it was not enough. He was always too far away. Even when we were having sex, even when he was as deep inside of me as a living person could be, he was still so far away, he was still on Mars, on Jupiter, on Venus, as far as I was concerned.

I spent a lot of my time away from Rafe crying, and I spent most of my time with him doing the same. When I explained this to Dr. Sterling, when I told her that Rafe was the best boyfriend I had ever had, that as far as I could tell he was completely devoted, and still I cried and cried and cried, she was not sure what was wrong.

“I think the closeness that you're able to experience when you're with Rafe is something you've been deprived of and something you've needed for so long that it's causing you to go to these extremes of emotion every time you feel him slipping away,” Dr. Sterling suggested. “I just think the contrast between being with him and being away from him is too much for you to handle.”

“But a lot of the times I get all upset I
am
with him,” I answered. “It seems like no amount of reassurance from him can convince me that he's really mine.”

“There must be a reason you feel this way,” Dr. Sterling said. “You're not a completely irrational being. Something he does must be tipping you off.”

I felt the flood packing water behind my eyes. Hot water and hot blood and hot salt. I felt the tears welling up as I started to talk about everything I did to be with Rafe and the way he made no effort to be with me, taking it for granted that I would arrive, gift-wrapped, with a big bow tied around my neck, each and every weekend like I was put on earth just to love and serve him. I knew I had created this situation, but I still hated him for letting me be this way. Hated him for not doing more. Hated him for never coming to see me in Cambridge, for always begging off because he had a play to attend or a paper to write. Hated him because he made me drop everything without even asking me to.

“It's just that, all his words, all that he says about loving me so much, they all don't seem to matter when I feel like this relationship would not be happening at all if it weren't for my efforts,” I cried.

“What does this remind you of?”

“My father, of course.” Why did she even ask? Did she think I was new to therapy? Did she think I couldn't make these connections on my own? “Of course it's like my dad who never did anything, who never visited, who never called, who never bought me presents, who never invited me to see him, but would still swear to me on the rare occasions that he turned up that he really did love me. Rafe keeps telling me he loves me, but for all I know it's just words.”

“I think you need to tell him that,” Dr. Sterling suggested. “I think it's very important for you that he come to Cambridge sometime soon, and I think you need to let him know that.”

“Do you think he really loves me?”

“I don't know,” she answered, beginning to look impatient because she hated my habit of asking her to be omniscient about the feelings of people she'd never met. She sighed. “All I know is that he says he does, and he has no reason to lie.”

 

“You're going to leave me, aren't you?” I asked accusingly when Rafe finally came to Cambridge and all I could do all weekend was cry. “You've had enough of me, haven't you? You're probably so tired of all this crying and all these moods, and I've got to tell you, so am I. So am I. Sometimes it seems like my mind has a mind of its own, like I just get hysterical, like it's something I can't control at all. And I don't know what to do, and I feel so sorry for you because you don't know what to do either. And I'm sure you're going to leave me.” More tears.

“Why don't you let me decide about that,” he said as he handed me a plate. He'd taken it upon himself to cook some dinner for me—pasta with Bolognese sauce, nothing too complicated, he claimed—because he thought it wouldn't be bad if, just once, I had a home-cooked meal in my apartment. “First of all, I think what you really need to do to feel better is to eat something, because you haven't had a bite since I got here; and second of all, I think I can handle you pretty well. I'm completely sturdy. I'm just worried about you. I'm worried that you can't handle yourself. I love you Elizabeth, I really do. I love you even when you get like this. But it just scares me. It scares me for your sake. Whatever negative effect you're having on the people who love you, I'm sure it's not half as bad, I'm sure it's not a small percentage as bad, as what you're doing to yourself. You're going to drive yourself crazy.”

“I know.”

“What does your therapist say?”

“Oh, you know.” You know, all the usual stuff therapists say to their crazy patients, all the usual things about mothers and fathers and early childhood trauma. “I don't really want to talk about that right now. I just, I don't have the energy.” I sighed. I was exhausted. I sat up and reached for the plate he'd brought for me and start twisting strands of spaghetti around my fork. “I want to make sure that you're not totally sick of me.”

“Elizabeth, for God's sake, I said I'm not.” He inhaled dramatically and shook his head. “I love you. I don't know how I can convince you of that. And you know, up until this weekend, I think that maybe things could have gone either way, they could have maybe worked out, they could have just fizzled. But now, tonight, I realized with you getting so upset that I am completely here for you. That we're in this together. Whatever else is bothering you, I don't want you to be worried about me. I realized that this is really serious and important and I never want to leave you, no matter what.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

 

We try, we struggle, all the time to find words to express our love. The quality, the quantity, certain that no two people have experienced it before in the history of creation. Perhaps Catherine and Heathcliff, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Hero and Leander, but these are just characters, make-believe. We have known each other forever, since before conception even. We remember playing together in a playpen, crossing paths at F.A.O. Schwarz. We remember meeting in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember greeting each other at the Forum, at the Parthenon, on passing ships as Christopher Columbus sailed to America. We have survived a pogrom together, we have died in Dachau together, we have been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan together. There has been cancer, polio, the bubonic plague, consumption, morphine addiction. We have had children together, we have been children together, we were in the womb together. Our history is so deep and wide and long, we have known each other a million years. And we don't know how to express this kind of love, this kind of feeling
.

I get paralyzed sometimes. One day, we are in the shower and I want to say to him, I could be submerged in sixty feet of water right now, never drowning, never even fearing drowning, knowing I would always be safe with you here, knowing that it would be okay to die as long as you are here. I want to say this but don't.

 

Rafe tells me we won't see each other at all during his four weeks of winter vacation. He says he needs to look after his deranged dowager mother and his eleven-year-old sister, who is going through something awful, some other version of crazy in the head, and might need medical attention.

And I think, Why are so many people Rafe is close to going crazy?

And I think, I don't care about his mother and sister or anyone else in Minneapolis or anywhere else on earth. I know only that there's me and that I won't last a month without Rafe.

I cry so hard and so much after Rafe tells me this, I cry all weekend long without surcease. And I keep screaming, You're going away and you're not coming back! You're going away and you're not coming back!

And he just shakes his head and holds me. He says, Four weeks isn't that long.

And I cry even harder after he says that because I see that he has no idea how long and hard and palpable time is for me, that even four minutes of feeling the way I do right now is too long.

 

When I first got home for vacation, I had dinner with my mother and talked to her about school, about Rafe, about ordinary things, but it was clear to me by late that night that there was no way—
no way—
I was going to survive without him. This heavy sense of not-okayness suddenly leapt on me after dinner, and I didn't know what to do. Because the awful feeling was all over me, I was like a farm covered in locusts, being destroyed. I went out for coffee late at night with my friend Dinah. In some little dive on Amsterdam Avenue, all I did was talk about Rafe and how painful it was to be without him.

Dinah and I had been friends since we were both four, since we met during rest period in kindergarten, and she'd told me her father was a magician and I'd told her my dad was a jeweler-astronaut. She would fill empty 7UP bottles with water and tell me it was a magic potion, and I would promise to bring her an emerald necklace or a piece of the moon next time I saw my dad. We were best friends after that, all through elementary school and all through high school. Even when we went off to different colleges, we were still in constant contact. She knew me better than anyone practically, she'd seen me through my earlier bouts with depression, so she knew the signs. Listening to me talk about Rafe, Dinah looked distressed.

“But, Elizabeth,” Dinah said, employing a logic that was cruelly alien to me. “Elizabeth, you're going to see Rafe in a few weeks. People get separated from each other all the time, and then they come back together.”

“I know. I just don't think I can bear it.”

I spoke of the intolerable pain, though even I could see that I should have been happy to be so in love with somebody for the first time since high school. But I couldn't be. I kept imagining the end, the despair I would suffer when it came, and it made any happiness I had in the present seem not merely ephemeral, but doomed. Because the happier I allowed myself to be now, the more miserable I would be later.

I was like an addict being deprived of my drug of choice. As I sat there without Rafe, desperate for a fix of him, I was certain that heroin withdrawal was not so much different because I ached for him and cried for him and shook for him and got down on my knees and threw up from missing him, as if I were in detox.

I convinced myself that he was lost on the planet or lost in the solar system and that I would never find him. I wouldn't be able to reach him by phone, he'd become inaccessible and I would lose him. I would have to contact the F.B.I., whose agents would be unable to locate him. I imagined living out a fate like that of Horacio Oliveira in Julio Cortázar's novel
Hopscotch.
I thought pitifully of the man who must spend the rest of his days searching for his long lost La Maga, his lover, who has disappeared in Montevideo or into some more disheveled part of Uruguay, a country where the missing probably outnumber the found, a country where you can lose somebody for good, a country that lends itself very well to the vagaries and paranoias of fiction because life and death is everywhere in Latin America.

I explained my fears to Dinah, my conviction that Rafe would fade away or fall into a black hole. And she just said things like, This is crazy, this is crazy, and I had to agree with her. But I couldn't stop it. I couldn't.

 

There was nothing to my days except roaming the streets of the Upper West Side and thinking about Rafe. I tried to do other things. I meant to see
Fatal Attraction,
but I couldn't get it together to go to the movie theater, knowing that once I was there I'd have to stand in line and it could feel like forever. Dinah took me to a Paul Klee exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, but I couldn't concentrate on all the abstraction. I had schoolwork to do, but I couldn't do it. I had to write a semiotics paper on motorcycle culture and biker conventions, but every time I picked up
Easy Rider
magazine, it seemed like a herculean effort just to turn the page. I'd fall asleep in the bathtub and lie awake all night in bed. I couldn't even wash my face in the morning, my hands were too tired.