Love Sick Read online

  And didn’t Sondheim go to Yale?

  • • •

  Which leaves one man on that list, Gregory McCarthy, who is also the person most likely to really understand my raucous, doomed ballet with Eliot. Greg was straight, but more bookish and, most important, more theatrical than anyone I know. He’d understand about fag hagging and he’d understand why Bernstein is as shattering as Gounod. Gregory and I fell in love with each other . . . but at different times. I requested his friendship on Facebook but he didn’t respond. His page didn’t look much used, but I only have that silence to go on. I’m sure he would tell you I hurt him—as his literary agent and as a woman who wanted him to be the writer Eliot is, I should accept that accusation. No one enjoys her guilt as much as I do, but for whatever reason, I don’t accept it with Gregory. He got married, seems to have a going writing life and is beloved in his hometown, the metropolitan area of which is over five million people. Whatever hurt or setback I caused him, he has plenty of compensation. I have Daisy and thirteen dogs to walk. I deserve a five-minute pity party except that, the lack of a Facebook connection aside, I don’t think about Gregory much.

  I can’t think about any of these men for very long without feeling the pinch of rejection and, with some of them, competition. John Doe, Eliot and Gregory cut me off at the knees, while Dar, Sean, Andrew and Eric unsettle me too much. I felt enough kinship with Eliot, Gregory and Dar that they feel like phantom limbs or a fifth, bloodless chamber of the heart.

  Into the Woods begins with two words: “I wish.” It is a cautionary tale about going into the black forest in order to find the right way to love. Looking at the roster of men I have been truly foolish over, I can see I did not choose wisely—if love is a choice. I walked around with my ears full of “A Little Night Music,” daring Richard Strauss to out-magic “Perpetual Anticipation,” and wished I had a man to love and love me back, such a simple, human thing. I couldn’t choose the love me back part, but I didn’t have to waste time over drugs, Brahmins, alcohol and needing the sanity of the exact opposite of Johann Fichte either. Not wasting time is part of adulthood. But I’d gotten stuck in the forest with my wishes and my history and there was a terrible chance I was neither a grown-up nor alive.

  Ten

  Albatrosses take an eighteen-month break between mating seasons, in which some fly around the world once. Others twice.

  “When did this start?” Dr. Rosenblatt, my psychiatrist, asked. I’d been seeing her for my meds for the last ten years or so and it was a relief to get away from Dr. A-Cigar-Is-Not-a-Cigar, who always wanted me to talk to my child-self. I needed help and I needed it then. “Progress” was not an option in my current state.

  I could pinpoint the exact events. The disappointment over Jeremy, followed by an epoch of self-pity stemming from my inventory of failure. In those couple of weeks, everything except ice cream began to taste like tin and the world oozed humidity and gray. That was the bad news. The worse news was that I’d been assigned two composition classes and had to suck it up four days a week to act like I knew what I was doing. It was agony.

  “I think your meds have stopped working,” my psychiatrist said. She got up to study my file. “How’s your memory?”

  I sniffed back the next sob and thought a moment.

  “I-it’s hard to say. Depression kind of effaces everything.” Still, I’d been on a run of forgetting my keys, finding myself in the kitchen with no idea why, wondering what I’d worn the day before, a constant break in sentences while I searched for a word.

  “Zoloft can affect memory but it will come back. You’ve been on a high dose for eight years. This is as bad as I’ve seen you since you first came and we started the Zoloft. Sometimes this happens. It’s nothing to worry about, Frances.”

  Worry? I’d gone from Company to Sweeney Todd in two months, from wanting to feel alive to aching for a razor in my hand. I looked out her small window that faced a couple of dozen other small windows in the backs of the surrounding buildings. The gloom was the same every time I came here. It had taken me a couple of weeks to call her after I put a checkup on my to-do list. It was around Halloween that I found myself thinking things like, “I need to get coffee, stevia and kill myself.” It’s as close to psychosis as I’ve ever come because it didn’t feel like I was generating those thoughts. They appeared, like a hungry blackbird left behind by the flock in its fall migration.

  “If . . . anything, you know . . . happened to me,” I asked Will in a shaky voice, “you’d take Daisy, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’re depressed, aren’t you, Francie?”

  “Not really. I just want to make sure Daisy has backup.”

  “Well, she doesn’t from me,” he said angrily. “I’ll give her to a kill shelter.”

  I began to cry. “Honey,” he coaxed. “Daisy loves you the same whether you’re depressed or not. Just like me. You’re going to get through this.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “I know it’s hard, Sis, but you can’t do that to me.” Jimmie had inherited a Maltese along with his mother-in-law’s decline into assisted living that came on top of taking care of our father for the half a year he spends in Montana.

  There was no one else I would either talk about my depression with or ask for help if something happened.

  If it wasn’t about Daisy’s future, I couldn’t talk anymore. I couldn’t bother Kevin, who was busy with school and working hard to stay sober. Even if I could put words to my feelings, they would surely make him want to drink. I’ll wait until I have something to tell him, I told myself, but the world only got grayer and darker and colder.

  And Daisy, until Dr. Rosenblatt pinned the problem on Zoloft, was the main thing I worried about.

  She described how I would titrate off Zoloft, a drug with hideous withdrawals, onto Prozac, the first antidepressant I’d taken, way back in the early ’90s. “We decided against Prozac when you first came in because one of its side effects is loss of libido,” she warned me.

  I laughed harshly. The last thing I needed was a libido.

  “How bad off am I?” I wanted to know. It’s easy to give into diagnoses, second dates, my clothing size, the number of Christmas cards I receive in order to know who I am.

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to minimize what you’re going through,” she said carefully. “But you have to remember I have patients who need to be hospitalized, to have ECT. I would say you’re going through a medium depression.”

  I smiled to myself. Maybe I was already getting better because my own diagnosis was a lot different. If I’d had the money or insurance, and someone to take care of Daisy, I’d be first in line and waving my hand for admittance to the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  • • •

  On the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, one of my best students—a flawlessly beautiful Scandinavian who had an A average in my class and sat with a bevy of other smart, beautiful friends from home—climbed over a ten-foot wire fence and jumped twenty stories.

  Kadlin Ahlquist, at the age of twenty-one, effectively ended that errant voice in my head. I found myself wondering to my class about whether I should have discussed my depression with them. I was angry that the young woman who sat smiling serenely in front of me for five hours a week, who had everything, could throw her future away, could throw the faith of her friends, family and teachers away.

  But I admired her, too. She was determined. She didn’t make a mess for her roommates to find and deal with. She had kept this despair to herself, uncomplainingly. On Thursday she brought chocolate cake to the potluck Thanksgiving dinner with her fellow Nordics, and seventy-two hours later the group reassembled in shock.

  “If anyone thinks Kadlin had a good idea, I will personally come to your apartment and smack you,” I threatened my class of twenty-year-olds. They cried as I cried, shocked that someone was talking about such violent feelings. When we we
re hauled into a counseling session straight out of a high school parody, I spoke when they would not, then heard my words parroted back when the counselors forced answers from students. “I want to know,” a Norwegian hipster fumbled, “you know, when—like she”—he nodded at me—“said, when will it not be the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.”

  “No one can tell you that,” one of the counselors said, and I wanted to stamp my foot and retort, “For everyone who was not a roommate or best friend, ten days. For the others, a month or two. You can start counting down now.”

  I believe in such lies. Stated authoritatively enough to kids who are desperate enough, they can become truth.

  Later, when she called to ask if the Prozac was kicking in, Dr. Rosenblatt congratulated me. “Kids that age don’t have the vocabulary to express the finer points of their emotions. You gave them the words they needed.”

  I tried. That seems often to be my job: giving people words. When a counselor called to discuss an incomplete for one of Kadlin’s friends I was both sympathetic and adamant about the need for the right words.

  “We’re working hard to keep these kids in school and safe,” she said.

  “You want to do that? Call in the staff from the Swedish Seaman’s Church.” It is one of their gathering places, where they can indulge in comfort food and meet new people.

  “Really? You think they would appreciate religious guidance?”

  “No. I think they’d appreciate talking about it in Swedish.”

  • • •

  I don’t trust the words I answer myself with. “If I was my best friend, what would I tell me?” has gotten me in trouble by saying things like, “Of course you need ice cream. It’s been a terrible day” or “Invite him over. It’ll be an experience.” I wish I had someone as strong as the woman sitting in my chair in that counseling session to tell me it would take five days to get over a man I’d talked to for a week or that I needed to see my psychiatrist then.

  I had long stopped looking at emails from How About We, BabyBoomerPeopleMeet, Brainiac, EZmatchup, Chemistry, Match, BBWCupid, eHarmony, OkCupid, BBPeopleMeet, Nerve, SeniorPeopleMeet, Untrue and AmateurMatch as I bumped down the Zoloft stairs ten milligrams at a time, but as the Prozac began to take hold, first with its Technicolor dreams and then with a bit of its special gift of each morning being a new chance, I began to study dating.

  One of the problems I found in my research is that one is thrown to the wolves with an information system at odds with itself. On the one hand there is so-called reality television, where average is okay, if you’re a man, and on the other hand there is the Internet, which promises the perfect match for everyone. I’ve caterwauled about the fat people sites so I Googled other people VH1 and Bravo would reject and found sites for “cancer patients dating,” “amputee dating,” “burn victim dating,” “gigolo dating,” “Aryans dating,” and “depressives dating.”* Even “ferret owners dating” brought up a lively discussion on a general dating site.*

  More magazine, which caters to the over-forty female, features dating advice from Patti Stanger, who sizes up the people who pay her with wince-inducing cruelty: “He’s never been laid, has he?”* Among the dozen or so books devoted to the fifty-and-over set, one is faced with Getting Naked Again, which seems to me to jump the gun, or my gun, at least. My ambitions had dwindled to staying dressed, going to the new Woody Allen movie and he buys the popcorn, and working up to being on each other’s speed dial. There is much advice for us oldsters on sex techniques, reviving that gung-ho teenaged enthusiasm and priceless but pointless factoids like, “More seniors are golfing today than ever before.”*

  Is any of this helpful? I wondered as I spent my birthday alone with Daisy, two dozen research essays, an Entenmann’s something and a queue of Hulu House episodes. Don’t twenty-five-year-olds need more advice on sex while women with back fat and lumpy veins need a Steve Ward to tell them what to talk about in a seventeen-floor elevator ride with single men whom they haven’t been introduced to?

  My father spends the winter in Arizona, so I headed off to the Land of Gated Communities for Christmas. That autumn he’d begun to keep regular company with Dot, the widow of one of his best friends. Dad and her deceased husband, Uncle John, were two of four med school lab partners who became a clique. Sharing a corpse for dissection can do that I guess. The other guys and their girls went to my parents’ wedding and my mother was Dot’s matron of honor when Dot married Uncle John.

  I encouraged the little romance. I knew my mother would have loved seeing people she loved together, and it was Dot I sat down with and didn’t leave at the little gathering in Sun City after my mother died. I didn’t think of her as a surrogate mother but as someone fine and fragile and feminine, who already knew my parents had been married for sixty-five years.

  When Dad and I went to her house for Christmas Eve my hopes of something more, er, codified were dashed. I knew from the number of photos of John in her living room that he was her one and only, despite the boyfriends she’s had since he died. The white and gold Madonna pronounced her an old-timey Catholic, which would have made my father snort in derision. Thank God, sometimes, he’s blind. Her home, in fact, was white and gold, spindly satinwood china cabinets full of pale Lladró, brocade Queen Anne chairs and chandeliers. It was lovely, but someone would have to put his or her personality in hiding if they lived together because my parents’ house was leather club chairs and couches, Southwestern art and about two million CDs.

  How would Dot react to one of Dad’s experiments in Debussy? How would she react when he spilled spaghetti sauce on the carpet? How would he survive Fox News?

  “By living in separate rooms, just like he and Mom did,” my brother laughed when we talked on Christmas Day. Except that it was taste, not politics and religion, that kept my parents apart. Mother’s addiction to Wheel of Fortune was a long way from Sean Hannity, and Hannity was a very, very, very old universe away from Stephen Hawking and The Nation.

  My parents’ marriage had its times of union and times of deep disconnect. Mother turned to the Vatican II Church like it was Heathcliff, but Dad lives on his own planet of books and music and a hundred interests and he can be indifferent where other people would be angry or hurt or sympathetic. Once, in Rome, when I was bleary-drunk, they jitterbugged to a Big Band orchestra and the dance floor cleared for them, they were that good, that synchronized. But then there was my mother, after her stroke, being admitted to a nursing home and screaming that she’d spent her life being Mrs. Kuffel and her name was Marie. She resented my father’s intelligence and probably feared his sarcasm. She also refused a heart valve procedure that would have prolonged her life on the questionable “if” of its success. She was adamant. “I want to be here for my husband.” My father was blind and she was tethered to oxygen and between them they were almost one healthy body.

  Individually, however, I not only loved them, I liked them a lot. They were stoic, funny and strong. For three days in a row, a social worker asked my mother if she understood what going into hospice care meant. Mom couldn’t remember the conversation from the day before but she understood the concept. “It means I’m dying.” The social worker then repeated the question of how she felt about that and each day Mom said the same thing: “Shit happens.”

  Dad was listening to a book about Magellan’s voyage to the Pacific while I made Christmas dinner for him, Dot and me. My mother’s disinterest in his books-on-tape was such that he either would have put his earphones on or retired to their bedroom to listen. One nice thing about being alone with him was getting to hear the story of Magellan’s death, the price Europeans would pay for the cloves and cinnamon I was using liberally, how the fleet hobbled home in one ship with eighteen of the original crew of 270.

  I wouldn’t mind being married to a man like Dad, I thought. He’s curious, a fact-collector, prone to tangents (“Giggle—Goo
gle; whatever—sixteenth century Brunei, wouldja? Were they Moslems then?”), a foodie and a traveler. He even loves to shop. I thought about that afternoon five months later when I signed an over-the-top Father’s Day card, “And that’s why I never got married.”

  I haven’t gotten married because I haven’t met the right man who wants to marry me. But there may be some truth in the sentimental excesses that my brother must have rolled his eyes at while reading that card to Dad. Three thousand miles away, my father was still a great boyfriend because we are who we are to each other. He never put me to bed with a fairy tale when I was a kid, preferring to answer any questions I’d come up with lately. My questions tended to be about the atom bomb and cancer and how one dies from poisonous mushrooms, which made for some bad dreams but possibly also prevented me from being too much the little princess who sprouts into the beautiful bride. Maybe I dashed too far down Dad’s road less taken and never learned the arts of girlishness with him, but he nourished my authenticity, my selfness.

  Likewise, I was purely myself with my girlfriends, and in my sneaky bad-girl giggles with Kevin and Will. And if Will and Dad had known me all my life, I’d gotten close to Celia in chance meetings with our dogs at night, and meeting Bette or Jean and Ben had been like seeing parts of myself in a mirror for the first time. And each time I talked to Kevin, it was the first oh-my-God-where-have-you-been-all-my life feeling that bubbled up from deep in my belly. Intimacy, I thought as the three us sat down to roast duck and stuffed squash, is possible and as simple as nectar from a petunia, and it deepens with time. No fake cheerfulness, no denying the demon depression, no reason not to think I will be enjoyed.

  • • •

  As I thought about first meetings, I couldn’t escape Dar, although he was the other living proof that deep understanding between two people can be terminated. I hadn’t spoken to him in more than half a year, but I sent him one of the couple of dozen Christmas cards I managed to write between final essays and failing to wrap or send gifts to my family. He hadn’t emailed me either, so I wondered if we were at a mutual impasse or if he was busy and trusting.