The Marriage Plot (39 page)

The clinical psychologist, Wendy Neuman, was at least interested in Leonard’s emotional history, but he saw her only for group therapy. Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse. There were older white guys with M.I.A. tattoos and black dudes who played chess all day, a middle-aged female accounts clerk who drank as much as an English rugby team, and one small young woman, an aspiring singer, whose mental illness took the form of a desire to have her right leg amputated. To stimulate discussion, they passed a book around, a battered hardback with a split spine. The book was called
Out of Darkness, Light
and contained personal testimonies of people who had recovered from mental illnesses or had learned to cope with a chronic diagnosis. It was borderline religious while professing not to be. They sat in the unkind fluorescence of the meeting room, each reading a paragraph aloud before handing it to the next person. Some people treated the book as if it were a mysterious object. They mispronounced
deity
. They didn’t know what
cur
meant. The book was badly out of date. Some contributors referred to depression as “the blues” or “the black dog.” When the book came to him, Leonard read off his paragraph with a cadence and diction that made it clear he’d come to the hospital straight from College Hill. He was under the impression, those first days, that mental illness admitted of hierarchy, that he was a superior form of manic-depressive. If dealing with a mental illness consisted of two parts, one part medication and the other therapy, and if therapy proceeded faster the smarter you were, then many people in the group were at a disadvantage. They could barely remember what had happened in their lives, much less draw connections between events. One guy had a facial tic so pronounced that it seemed to literally shake coherent thoughts from his head. He would twitch and forget what he’d been saying. His problems were physiological, the basic wiring of his brain faulty. Listening to him was like listening to a radio tuned between channels: every so often a non sequitur came barking in. Leonard paid sympathetic attention as people spoke about their lives. He tried to take comfort in what they said. But his main thought was of how much worse off they were than he. This belief made him feel better about himself, and so he clung to it. But then it was Leonard’s turn to tell
his
story, and he opened his mouth and out came the most nicely modulated, well-articulated bullshit imaginable. He talked about the events that led up to his breakdown. He recited swaths of the
DSM III
that he’d apparently committed to memory without trying. He showed off how smart he was because that was what he was used to doing. He couldn’t stop himself.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the
worse
it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up. As he was speaking, for instance, Leonard noticed Wendy Neuman cross her arms over her chest, as if to defend herself against the blatant insincerity of what he was saying. To win her back, Leonard admitted to this insincerity, saying, “No, I take that back. I’m lying. Lying is what I do. It’s part of my disease.” He eyed Wendy to see if she was buying this, or if she regarded it as further insincerity. The closer Leonard monitored her reactions, the further he got from telling the truth about himself, until he trailed off, feeling embarrassed and hot-faced, an eyesore of denial.

The same thing happened in his sessions with Dr. Shieu, but in a different way. Sitting in the scratchy armchair in Shieu’s office, Leonard wasn’t self-conscious about his educated manner of speech. But his mind kept up its play-by-play analysis of the contest under way. In order to be released from the hospital, Leonard had to make it clear that he wasn’t suicidal. He knew, however, that Dr. Shieu was on the lookout for any attempt to disguise suicidal ideation (suicidal people being brilliant tacticians when it came to obtaining the opportunity to kill themselves). Therefore, Leonard didn’t want to seem
too
upbeat. At the same time, he didn’t want to appear to be not getting better at all. As he answered the doctor’s questions, Leonard felt as though he were being interrogated for a crime. He tried, when he could, to tell the truth, but when the truth didn’t serve his cause he embellished it, or outright lied. He noted every change in Dr. Shieu’s facial expression, interpreting it as either favorable or unfavorable, and shifting his next response accordingly. Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet’s back.

Visiting hours provided no relief. The friends who showed up divided into two groups. There were the emoters, mostly girls, who treated Leonard gingerly, as if he might break, and there were the jokesters, mostly guys, who thought the way to help him was to make fun of hospital visits in general. Jerry Heidmann brought him a saccharine get-well card, Ron Lutz a smiley-faced helium balloon. From the things that came out of his friends’ mouths during visiting hours Leonard gradually understood that they thought depression was like being “depressed.” They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it. People brought him chocolate bars. They urged him to consider all the good things in his life.

True to form, neither of his parents flew out to see him. Frank called once, having been given his number by Janet. In the course of the short conversation (other patients were waiting to use the community phone), Frank told Leonard three separate times to “hang in there.” He invited Leonard to come to Brussels when he was feeling better. Frank was thinking of moving to Antwerp now and living on a house boat. “Come on over and we can make a little boat trip on the canals,” he said, before hanging up. Rita cited her herniated disk (the first he’d ever heard of it) for her inability to travel. She did speak with Dr. Shieu, however, and one night called Leonard on a phone at the nurses’ station. It was late, about ten p.m., but the night nurse let him take it.

“Hello?”

“What am I going to do with you, Leonard? What? Just tell me.”

“I’m in this hospital, Mom. I’m in the psych unit.”

“I know that, Leonard. That’s why I’m calling, for God’s sake. The doctor said you stopped taking your medicine.”

Leonard admitted this by remaining silent.

“What’s the matter with you, Leonard?” Rita asked.

Anger flared in him. For a moment, it felt like old times. “Well, let’s see. First of all, my parents are alcoholics. One of them is probably manic-depressive herself, only undiagnosed. I inherited my condition from her. We both suffer from the same form of the illness. We’re not rapid cyclers. We don’t go from high to low in a few hours. We ride these long waves of mania or depression. My brain’s chemically starved for the neurotransmitters it needs to regulate my moods and then sometimes it’s oversupplied with them. I’m messed up biologically because of my genetics and psychologically because of my parents, is what’s the matter with me,
Mom
.”

“And you still act like a big baby whenever you get sick,” Rita said. “I remember how you used to go on and on whenever you had a cold.”

“This isn’t a cold.”

“I know it isn’t,” Rita said, sounding chastened for the first time, and concerned. “It’s serious. I talked with the doctor. I’m worried about you.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

“I am. I am. But Leonard, sweetheart, listen to me. You’re a grown person now. When this happened before, and they told me you were in the hospital, I rushed right out there. Didn’t I? But I can’t be rushing out there the rest of my life every time you forget to take your medicine. That’s all this is, you know. It’s you being forgetful.”

“I was already sick,” Leonard said. “That’s why I stopped taking my lithium.”

“That doesn’t make sense. If you’d been taking your medicine, you wouldn’t have gotten sick. Now, Leonard, sweetheart, listen to me. You’re not on my insurance anymore. Do you realize that? They took you off my policy when you turned twenty-one. Don’t worry. I’m going to pay for the hospital. I’ll do it, this time, even though I’m not swimming in money. Do you think your father’s going to help? No. I’ll do it. But when you get out, you have to get your own insurance.”

As Leonard heard this, he felt his anxiety spike. He clutched the phone, his vision growing dark. “How am I supposed to get insurance, Mom?”

“What do you mean, how? You graduate from college and go find a job like everybody else.”

“I’m not going to graduate!” Leonard cried. “I’m taking three incompletes!”

“Then complete your incompletes. You have to start taking care of yourself, Leonard. You hear me? You’re grown-up now and I can’t do it. Take your medicine so this doesn’t happen again.”

Instead of coming to Providence herself, she dispatched his sister. Janet arrived for a weekend, flying out from San Francisco, where she’d taken a marketing job at Gump’s. She was living with some older, divorced guy who had a house in Sausalito, and she mentioned a birthday party she was missing and her demanding boss to impress on Leonard the extent of the sacrifice she was making in order to come and hold his hand. Janet seemed genuinely to believe that her problems were more significant than whatever Leonard had to deal with. “I could get depressed if I let myself,” she said. “But I don’t let myself.” She got visibly freaked out by some of the other patients in the dayroom and kept checking her watch. It was a relief when she finally left on Sunday.

By now final exams had begun. Leonard’s stream of visitors tapered to one or two a day. He began to live for smoking breaks. In the afternoon and evening, the head nurse handed out cigarettes and other tobacco products. Chewing tobacco wasn’t allowed, so Leonard took what the other guys his age, James and Maurice, were into, these thin little moist cigars called Backwoods that came in a foil pouch. They descended in a group, accompanied by either Wendy Neuman or a security guard, to the ground floor of the hospital. On a blacktopped area surrounded by a high fence, they passed a single lighter around and torched up their smokes. The Backwoods were sweet-tasting and delivered a nice kick. Leonard puffed away, pacing back and forth and staring up at the sky. He felt like the Birdman of Alcatraz, only without any birds. As the days passed, he began to feel measurably better. Dr. Shieu attributed this improvement to the lithium kicking in. But Leonard thought it had a lot to do with good old nicotine, with going outside and watching a single cloud sail across the sky. Sometimes he heard cars honking, or kids shouting, or, once, what sounded like a fastball being cleanly clobbered on a nearby baseball diamond, a sound that soothed him instantly, the solid
plonk
of wood against rawhide. Leonard remembered what it felt like to be a Little Leaguer and hit a perfect pitch. That was the beginning of his recovery. Just to be able to remember that, once upon a time, happiness had been as simple as that.

And then Madeleine appeared in the dayroom, missing graduation, and all Leonard had to do was look at her to know that he wanted to be alive again.

There was only one problem. They wouldn’t let him out. Dr. Shieu kept playing it safe, putting off the day of Leonard’s departure. And so Leonard continued to go to group, and to draw pictures during the craft periods, and to play badminton or basketball during gym.

In the group sessions, there was one patient who impressed Leonard deeply. Her name was Darlene Withers. She was a fireplug of a person and sat with her feet up on the folding chair, hugging her knees, always the first patient to speak up. “Hi, I’m Darlene. I’m an addict and an alcoholic and I suffer from depression. This is my third time being hospitalized for depression. Been here three weeks now, and Ms. Neuman?—I’m ready to leave anytime you say.”

She smiled broadly. When she did, her upper lip curled back, pushing out a glistening band of its pink underside. Her family’s nickname for her was “Triple-lip.” Leonard spent a fair amount of time in group waiting to see Darlene smile.

“I can relate to this story because the writer she say her depression come from low self-esteem,” Darlene began. “And that something I’m dealing with on a daily basis. Like lately I been feeling bad about myself because of my present relationship. I was in a committed relationship when I come into the hospital. But since I been in here? I ain’t heard from my boyfriend once. He didn’t come to visiting hours or nothing. I woke up this morning feeling real sorry for myself. ‘You too fat, Darlene. You not good-looking enough. That why he don’t come.’ But then I start thinking about my boyfriend—and you know what? His bref stink. It do! Every time that man come near me I have to smell his stanky old bref. Why I be in a relationship with someone like that, never brushes his teeth, bad oral hygiene? And the answer come back to me was: That how you feeling about yourself, Darlene. Like you worth so little you got to be with anybody take you.”

Darlene was an inspiration in the ward. Often she sat in a corner of the dayroom singing to herself.

“Why you singing, Triple-lip?”

“Singing to keep from crying. You should try it too, instead of moping like you do.”

“Who says I’m moping?”

“Moping doesn’t cover your sorry ass! They need to come up with a whole new diagnosis for you. Prune-face disorder. That what you got.”

According to the stories she told in group, Darlene had dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. She’d been abused by her stepfather and had left home when she was seventeen. She’d worked, briefly, as a prostitute in East Providence, a subject she was surprisingly candid about at one meeting and then never mentioned again. By the time she was twenty she was addicted to heroin and alcohol. To get off the heroin and alcohol, she’d gotten religion. “I was drugging just to dull the pain, you know? Got so doped up I didn’t know where I was. Pretty soon I lost my job, my apartment. Lost everything. My life had got to where it was unmanageable. Finally, I moved in with my sister. Now, my sister, she have this dog named Grover. Grover a pit bull mix. Some nights, when I had came back to my sister’s apartment, I used to take Grover for a walk. Didn’t matter how late it was. When you walking a pit bull don’t nobody bother you. You come down the street and everybody like, Ho, shit! Me and Grover we had this cemetery we used to go to, because they had grass over there. And so this one night we back behind the church, and I’m drunk, as usual, and I look at Grover, and Grover look back at me, and all of a sudden he say, ‘Why you killing yourself, Darlene?’ I swear to God! I know it was just in my mind. But still, it the
truth
. Out of the mouth of a dog! Next day, I went to the doctor, and the doctor sent me over to Sunbeam House, and next thing I know they’re admitting me. Didn’t even let me go home first. Put me right into a room to detox.
Then
, when I had got myself clean, the depression hit me. Like it was just waiting for me to get off the smack and the alcohol so it could fuck me up good. Excuse my language, Ms. Neuman. I was in Sunbeam House for three months. That was two years ago. And here I am again. Things have been a little hard lately, financial problems, emotional problems. My life getting
better
, but it ain’t getting any easier. I just need to keep working my program in terms of my addictions and keep taking my medications in terms of my illness. One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain’t something you just get
off
of. You can’t get
clean
from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your
mind
. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though. That’s all I have. Thanks for listening. Peace.”