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They refilled their wineglasses. Larry was in a good mood. The speed with which he’d gotten over Claire was stunning. Maybe he hadn’t really liked Claire all that much. Maybe he disliked Claire as much as Mitchell did. The fact that Larry could get over Claire in a matter of weeks, whereas Mitchell remained heartbroken over Madeleine—even though he hadn’t gone out with Madeleine—meant one of two things: either Mitchell’s love for Madeleine was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken, and the “emotion” he felt for Madeleine—somewhat increased by the flowing chianti—was only a perverted form of self-love. Not love at all, in other words.
But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked: football, cheerleaders, James Taylor, red meat. A friend of his, Godfrey, was into bands like Lucifer’s Friend and Pentagram, and for a while Leonard spent a lot of time at Godfrey’s house listening to them. Since Godfrey’s parents couldn’t abide the infernal racket, Godfrey and Leonard listened with headphones. First Godfrey donned the set, lowered the needle on the record, and began to writhe in silence, indicating with his blown-away facial expressions the depth of the depravity he was being treated to. Then it was Leonard’s turn. They played songs backwards to hear the hidden satanic messages. They studied the dead-baby lyrics and putrescent cover art. In order to actually hear music at the same time, Leonard and Godfrey stole money from their parents and bought tickets to concerts at the Paramount. Waiting in line, in Portland’s constant drizzle, with a few hundred other maladjusted teens was the closest Leonard ever came to feeling part of something. They saw Nazareth, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Motordeath, a band that frankly sucked but whose shows featured naked women performing animal sacrifices. You could be a fan of darkness, a connoisseur of despair.
For a while, the Disease—which was still nameless at the time—cooed to him. It said, Come closer. It flattered Leonard that he felt more than most people; he was more sensitive, deeper. Seeing an “intense” film like Mean Streets would leave Leonard stricken, unable to speak, and it would take three girls putting their arms around him for an hour to bring him back. Unconsciously, he began to milk his sensitivity. He was “really depressed” in study hall or “really depressed” at some party, and before long a group would form around him, looking concerned.
By the time he got out, three weeks later, the power dynamics had completely reversed. Now he was the needy one. True, he had Madeleine back, which was a wonderful thing. But Leonard’s happiness was compromised by the constant fear of losing her again. His unsightliness threw Madeleine’s beauty into relief. Next to her in bed, he felt like a pudgy eunuch. Every hair on his thighs sprouted from an inflamed follicle. Sometimes, when Madeleine was asleep, Leonard would gently pull the covers off her to stare at her glowing, rosy skin. What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency was what Leonard had guarded himself against feeling all his life, but he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d lost the ability to be an asshole. Now he was smitten, and it felt both tremendous and scary.
There was something about tennis—its aristocratic rituals, the prim silence it enforced on its spectators, the pretentious insistence on saying “love” for zero and “deuce” for tied, the exclusivity of the court itself, where only two people were allowed to move freely, the palace-guard rigidity of the linesmen, and the slavish scurrying of the ball boys—that made it clearly a reproachable pastime. That Leonard couldn’t say this to Madeleine without making her angry suggested the depth of the social chasm between them. There was a public tennis court near his house in Portland, old and cracked, half-flooded most of the time. He and Godfrey used to go out there to smoke weed. That was as close as Leonard got to playing tennis. By contrast, for two solid weeks in June and July, Madeleine got up every morning to watch Breakfast at Wimbledon on her portable Trinitron, which she’d installed in Leonard’s apartment. From the mattress, Leonard groggily watched her nibble English muffins while she watched the matches. That was where Madeleine belonged: at Wimbledon, on Centre Court, curtseying for the queen.
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.
lol. very similar vibes to IJ
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.
sad
The next morning, Madeleine drove him into Boston. She chauffered him every week, happy to spend an hour browsing the bookstores in Harvard Square. As they made their way along Route 6, under a low-hanging sky the same dull gray color as the saltboxes scattered across the landscape, Leonard examined Madeleine out of the corner of his eye. Under the leveling process of college, it had been possible to ignore the differences in their upbringing. But Phyllida’s visit had changed that. Leonard now understood where Madeleine’s peculiarities came from: why she said “rum” for “room”; why she liked Worcestershire sauce; why she believed that sleeping with the windows open, even on freezing nights, was healthy. The Bankheads weren’t open-window types. They preferred the windows closed and the shades drawn. Madeleine was pro-sunlight and anti-dust; she was for spring cleaning, for beating rugs over porch railings, for keeping your house or apartment as free of cobwebs and grime as you kept your mind free of indecision or gloomy rumination. The confident way Madeleine drove (she often insisted that athletes made better drivers) bespoke a simple faith in herself that Leonard, for all his intelligence and originality of mind, didn’t have. You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope. Leonard wasn’t giving up on it. Not yet.
Leonard stood rooted to the floor. His eyes were filling, but if he kept blinking fast enough, no tears fell. As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet. So there was at least that to be grateful for. The life that was ruined wasn’t entirely his.
There was no good way to describe any of this. Even Thomas Merton could only say things like “I have got into the habit of walking up and down under the trees or along the wall of the cemetery in the presence of God.” The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn’t have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
“You can decide without me. It’s your apartment.”
“It’s both of ours.”
“You’re the one paying for it,” Leonard said. “You’re the one who needs a place in New York.”
“You want a place in New York too.”
“Not anymore.”
“You said you did.”
Leonard turned and looked at her for the first time. These moments, oddly enough, were the ones she dreaded: when he looked at her. Leonard’s eyes had an emptiness to them. It was like looking into a deep, dry well.
:(