Breakdown

I was mortified when Gail Breyer walked into the treatment room and said she was the attending psychiatrist assigned to my case. My first impulse was to head for the Chief of Psychiatry's office and demand a change of therapist. Why couldn't I stick with my admitting doctor, a sympathetic Austrian in a tweed jacket who had talked about Parsifal and didn't think I was nuts for being on a "spiritual quest." I was loath to give up such a find and, after voluntarily admitting myself, and being put on suicide watch, fearful about being labeled and sealed away for life.

The first week was a nightmare. They took my clothes, my shoes, my watch, my wedding ring, leaving me with only my underwear and a loose, belt-less smock that snapped at the back, and a pair of flannel slippers. A nurse led me up to the closed ward, clanged the steel door shut behind me, and brought me to my room. After depositing me, she likewise clanged the door shut and locked it behind her. A far cry from the luxurious Lying-In wing of the hospital where I had my miscarriage two years ago, the rooms for potential suicides here are furnished with only a bed and a wooden dresser. No mirrors, no door on the toilet, no shower or bath, and no windows. The door to the room has a barred transom at eye height, through which a patrolling aide may peer at all hours, startling you awake by shining a flashlight in your face at three in the morning to make sure you haven't found some ingenious way of using the sheets or towel to do the deed.

The initial interview was to be my last encounter as a "civilian." From the moment the nurse escorted me out of the Admissions Office and up to the ward, I had become a "patient." I didn't think of myself as a patient. Yes, I had intended to jump into the East River. No, it wasn't just an "idea" I’d entertained; I'd actually gone there. But I hadn't jumped, or heard any voices; I knew who the President was and what day it was and what city I was in. I even got them to call my soon-to-be-ex-husband Ira’s office and see that I wasn't delusional claiming to be a well-known psychiatrist's wife. What disturbed me most was that, although the admitting psychiatrist, the resident on duty, and the social worker didn't seem to think I was crazy, didn't humor me or talk to me in that condescending singsong voice people use with children or crazy people, once I was herded upstairs and deprived of my clothing, lured past the front door by their apparent belief in my normalcy, I was no longer to be trusted. It reminded me of the wounded feral cat my brother Chris and I once rescued and kept secret from our parents for fear they'd say she had rabies and would have her put down. She was a thickly pregnant tabby with amazing golden globes for eyes; skittish and talkative. We lured her for three days with bowls of sugared milk and sardines on a plate. And when she finally let us near her after she'd lapped the last bit of milk, we coaxed her into the garage. The cat eventually grew so dependent on us for love and food that she even let us handle her kittens when she gave birth. Needless to say, we betrayed her by giving them up for adoption.

I remember sleeping a lot the first week. And having no dreams. The resident who came to see me every day was a plump woman of about thirty who favored triple gold chains and blue eye shadow. She sat on a chair opposite me, taking a meticulously detailed history, which, it seemed to me, placed undue emphasis on my “hostility” toward Ira. She asked me almost nothing about my childhood. On the third day she said I wasn't being given any medication because I was being "assessed" by a panel of doctors, psychologists and a social worker. They had to be sure, she confessed candidly, that I was no longer suicidal before they commenced on a course of treatment. What was I, then? I asked her. Depressed? Delusional? Had I had a nervous breakdown?

The resident toyed with the outermost of her gold chains. "We don't use that terminology," she said.

Nothing I related changed the impassive expression on her face. But at our third session, she did say that the hospital had contacted Ira and that, although he had immediately left his conference in San Diego and was on his way back to New York with the intention of signing me out of the hospital, the staff had unanimously agreed to prevent him from seeing me. The resident, whose name was Susan, said Ira had threatened to sue and whatnot, but that for the moment they wouldn't even let him talk to me on the telephone. I felt strangely comforted by that last bit of information.

I was allowed to walk around in the locked ward to take my meals and to sit in the dayroom in front of the mammoth-sized television set watching soap operas all day long if I wanted to. I did not want to. The other patients, also in smocks and shuffling along in flannel slippers, were as mute as Trappist monks. They too ate in silence and refrained from eye contact. It took me a couple of days to realize that they weren’t meditating but drugged. Only once did someone talk to me: a two-hundred-pound Black woman in a paisley muumuu, who had wandered into the day room and insisted I’d deliberately changed the channel on her favorite soap opera. She snarled at me and curled her lip, but before she could get rambunctious, a nurse came between us and humored her out of the day room with a promised slice of marbled chocolate cheesecake.

It was on the Wednesday of the second week that they took me off suicide watch and loosened the restrictions on my comings and goings. Dr. Susan said the panel was still deliberating on the course of treatment, but that they had agreed to let me talk to Ira on the telephone. That first conversation was awful. Ira broke down and cried as soon as he heard my voice. I thought he was crying because I'd wanted to kill myself. But he immediately launched into a tirade. How could I do this to him? How aggressive it was of me to sign myself into that particular hospital's psychiatric ward and place myself in the hands of his enemies. I couldn't have done better to ruin his reputation, he said, than if I'd actually jumped!

The next day I told Dr. Susan I didn't want to talk to Ira on the telephone, I didn't want to talk to anyone on the outside just yet. She gave an approving nod and jotted a note on my chart to that effect.

Gail and I reminisced today about her psychiatric residency at this hospital when she and Ira were in training together. I was surprised to see how open she was about her feelings (nothing like Ira’s strictly impersonal Freudian back-of-the-couch approach) telling me she’d loved the department as much as Ira had hated it and always looked forward to coming back as a full-fledged staff psychiatrist one day. Eased into offering a few revelations myself, I told Gail how much I'd envied her perfect breasts and pouty lips and brilliant reputation. No sign from her that she’d taken what I said as a compliment, which, given my low self-esteem, left me feeling a bit testy. So I added that I didn't think she was as beautiful now, that her breasts were already beginning to sag with age and she was starting to get thick around the midriff. Gail sat in her brown leather armchair with her long, slim legs crossed and eyed me coolly. "I can't say the same for you, Fay. You don't look a day older than the first time we met. You were . . . in your early twenties, right?

“Twenty-seven . . .”

“You’ve kept your dancer's body, that's for sure," she said.

Gail started me on a new regimen: a combination of Active Imagination and Hypnotherapy that she says she hopes will let my imagination guide me to my long-lost home. It starts off a little like meditation, watching the breath and relaxing into it without trying to think about anything special, only it's guided by Gail's instructions. At first, I found her voice intrusive, and I told her so. Fortunately, unlike me, Gail is flexible, and she didn't insist on directing the exercise but left it up to me to raise one finger when I was ready to speak. This being the first session, I was more than a little self-conscious. It took me the better part of the hour to relax into it. My first impressions were strictly scenic, no people: an autumn country road with lots of falling leaves and morning ground mist. I strained so hard to fill in the details that I got a headache and Gail suggested we quit. Hopefully, it'll go better tomorrow . . .

The “treatment room” is actually a glassed-in sun porch with a view of Riker's Island. There's a droopy potted palm in one corner and a couple of brown leather armchairs, like the ones Gail and I sit in, facing each other during our therapy sessions. Unlike Dr. Susan, she doesn't wear a white coat or take notes. She wears tailored suits, lots of navy and mauve, and a variety of beige or black or oxblood-colored mid-heel pumps. She's much more relaxed than she was as a resident; wears only lipstick and a bit of blush, but her nails are professionally manicured and, though her black hair is streaked with grey, it is fashionably cut. No more Dutch boy bangs. I asked her if she was married, and she said she's divorced, has a ten-year-old son named Harry, and that she dates but is not seriously involved with anyone. Her ex-husband is a stockbroker.

She never once alluded to my "ideational suicide", and therapy sessions with her are more like friendly chats between girlfriends. Nothing traditional goes on here. I don't have to lie down or talk about myself if I don't want to. I ask her questions, and she answers them if she feels like it, doesn't if she doesn't feel like it. I look forward to our casual encounters and have grown to trust her. Gail asked if I'd mind if Dr. Susan sat in on occasion (Gail's her training analyst), and I said why not, the more the merrier—but only if she didn't take notes.

"That's a good sign," said Gail, looking at her watch and ending the session.

Susan has dropped in twice since then; she's got a patient load of eight and is kept busy on the floor throughout the day and every other night when she's on duty.

Last night I had my first dream since I got here; or at least it’s the first one I remembered. They still haven't put me on drugs; Gail said she'd recommended holding off on medication unless I was having trouble sleeping, which is no longer the case since the aide stopped waking me at three in the morning by throwing the flashlight beam in my face. I volunteered quite spontaneously to tell Gail the dream, I don't know why. I read once that patients match their dreams to the kind of therapy they're in: Freudian patients dream about sex; Adlerian patients dream about power; Jungian patients dream about myths. Gail calls herself an "eclectic" analyst with a preference for Karen Horney. Since I've never read any Horney and know nothing about her, I can't say that I've had a Horneyian dream. I told this to Gail, and she laughed. "Stop trying to please me," she said. "It's your dream."

An impulse to enact my dream made me get up from the chair and walk around the room.

I stopped in front of Gail and crossed my arms over my chest. "I know it's perverse, but I have to tell you that I dreamed Ira was exposed to the incurable strain of TB while treating an old schizophrenic man in the locked ward, who was really his best friend Sam Rubin. And we had to wear masks and rubber gloves around each other and could no longer make love. Ira told me the situation was hopeless, that I’d better not see him anymore. And I don’t know what happened after that because the dream ended, and although it was an eerie dream, I woke up feeling better than I have since I got here."

* * * * * *

1/12/2009

Patient: Faye Corman

Ward 6 Staff Physician: Susan Redlich, MD

Patient is an attractive childless woman of forty, a principal in the Jessie Kane Dance Company, who stopped performing two years ago after a miscarriage but remains with the company as a part-time teacher and assistant choreographer. Patient states that she, and her husband, Ira Corman, a prominent psychiatrist turned self-help guru, are “on the verge of divorcing” because of problems she attributes to her husband’s friendship with Sam Rubin, the internationally celebrated writer and film director. Patient suspects the two may be homosexually involved, though she offers no evidence for what she calls her “gut feeling.” Patient traces her suicidal ideation to an assault she suffered on Lexington Avenue on the night of January 4, two hours before voluntarily entering the hospital’s psychiatric emergency room and admitting herself. She describes the events leading up to, and including, her assault in a matter-of-fact tone that clearly belies her repressed rage against her husband. Inserted here is the patient’s handwritten description of the events leading to her admission, which she presented to me at the end of our last session.

Dear Susan,

Since you keep referring to my ‘preoccupation’ with Ira’s relationship to Sam Rubin, I’m providing some essential background info that might help clarify the situation:

Two weeks before we were married—after all the wedding invitations had been sent and RSVP’d, the hall and caterer and photographer and band hired—Ira announced that, on Sam’s advice, he’d decided to take a time out before “sealing the deal.” He said Sam thought early marriages were doomed, and who should know better than he, having been married and divorced twice—the first time at nineteen and the second at twenty-two. At first, I treated the whole thing like a joke and went along with the postponement saying I was only marrying Ira for his money anyway. I didn’t think Ira would go through with it. But I was wrong. Our wedding was saved only the last minute by Ira’s parents, who threatened to cut him out of the family trust fund if he didn’t marry me as planned.

But that was only the beginning. Ira and I had been married for five years when Sam came to live with us after being thrown out of his apartment by his second wife, Charlene. It was supposed to be a “temporary” arrangement until he found his own place. But Sam arrived at the start of what became the worst winter in two decades, so what began as “temporary” soon threatened to become “permanent.” It had already started snowing heavily the day he arrived, and it didn’t stop for the next five days in a row. None of us wanted to venture outside, so we’d order Chinese take-out for supper every night from the greasy hole in the wall around the corner, which, amazingly, continued making deliveries when every other restaurant had closed down. After supper, I’d clean up the leftovers and throw the garbage into the chute down the hall. This went on for a couple of nights, until I announced that I was no longer on clean up and someone else would have to do it. Since neither Ira nor Sam volunteered, the apartment soon became littered with leftovers in little white cartons covered in blue mold, which, as a feminist, I refused to deal with. They didn’t seem to care because they were too busy playing poker—for hours on end. Once or twice, they’d ask, half-heartedly, if I wanted to join them, and I would say I didn’t, and they would turn back to their game and ignore me. By the end of the week, I was sick of being ignored. Sick of Chinese take-out. Sick of Sam, whom I’d hated from the first day I laid eyes on him. Though I never told this to Ira. Not that he ever asked me; he just assumed I liked Sam because he was his best friend since childhood.

Sam has always been, and still is, the most important person in Ira’s life. I’d almost grown to accept the fact—but having him live with us was simply more than I could take. To begin with, I was seriously tired of playing along with them for the sake of being “a good sport”—as if, coming from a family of four brothers, I was the kid sister Ira always wished he had—and not his wife. And the fact that the two of them had turned the apartment into a pigsty and didn’t seem to care about it didn’t help, either. Now, taking out the garbage may seem like a small thing, but it has been known to break up marriages. Or at least represented the last straw in a marriage on the verge of breaking up. I read somewhere that it’s what caused Mary McCarthy to divorce Edmund Wilson—his refusal to take out the garbage, that is. Like Mary, I was once a Vassar girl and a Catholic, and I’ve always been a big fan of her writing. With this in mind, I asked Ira if he couldn’t think of anything better to do than sit around, eat Chinese takeout, play poker every night and expect me to be his scullery maid. That’s how I put it: “scullery maid,” hoping it might remind him that I danced the part of Cinderella in the last performance I gave before my miscarriage.

Sam looked up at me and, in that by then famous snide way of his, said, “See, Ira, she’s making a case out of it, as usual.”

Ira said nothing, only gave me a ‘What-can-I-do-he’s-nasty-short-and-ugly-but-he’s-my-famous-best- friend?” look.

“I’m addressing Ira, not you,” I said.

Egged on, I’m sure, by Ira’s silence, Sam now turned on me fully. “Quit being such a pain in the ass, Faye.”

Suppressing the urge to stick my finger down my throat and spew my undigested General Tso’s chicken all over Sam’s two-hundred-dollar Nikes, I waited in vain for Ira to intercede on my behalf. Maybe if I’d actually vomited all over Sam’s two-hundred-dollar Nikes, Ira would have interceded on my behalf, just to shift the focus a little. But I didn’t stick my finger down my throat, and Ira didn’t intercede. I think we were both too mesmerized by Sam’s fame to do anything to defend ourselves against him. (Besides, I was too young and naïve then to realize that moving in with us was a ploy, what the older and wiser me sees as ‘Part Two,’ of Sam’s multiple attempts at preventing, and failing that, breaking up Ira’s marriage.) In any case, I just stood there, and all Ira did was emit a sycophantic chuckle, the latest in his lineup of reverent responses to Sam’s wit. I suppose you could say that the media’s partly to blame for Ira’s continuing idol worship by referring to Sam as a ‘genius,’ since the release of his wildly successful first feature length film. Since then, everything Sam says is not only uncontested but sacrosanct—like a papal pronouncement. But even more than that, deep down, I think Ira believes that, anointed by Sam’s celebrity, he’s due to become rich and famous himself; that he’ll be able to give up being a psychiatrist to pursue his life’s dream of playing jazz sax; that Sam will buy a whitewashed villa somewhere on the Aegean and the three of us will move there together and become a ménage à trois, like in “Jules and Jim”—but only if I quit being a pain in the ass. . .

So, back to that fateful night . . .

Immobilized by frustrated rage, I stood there watching them play poker. Then Sam started tapping his nail against a poker chip, and for some reason that set me off, so I came around from behind and faced him and asked him to kindly stop, his tapping was making me nervous.

“See, I told you she was going to be a pain in the ass tonight.” Sam sent me a spiteful grin.

To calm myself down I took a room inventory, noting the scattered decks of cards, Baby Ruth wrappers, and coffee-smeared mugs surrounding Ira’s laptop. Had the apartment ever been this messy before Sam came to live with us, I wondered?

“Come on, honey . . .”

“That’s it, Ira, pamper her. Give in . . . go on.” Sam pulled an ace of clubs out of his sleeve and executed a perfect magician’s pass.

Instead of calming me down, the inventory had had the opposite effect. My hands were shaking. Now I had to stand there and fight the urge to rip Sam’s glasses from his face and toss them out the window sixteen floors down into the snow.

“Why don’t we just watch Sam do card tricks all night?” I said, redirecting my fury at Ira.

Ira finally seemed to come alive, and was about to make a conciliatory gesture, but Sam quickly cut him short.

So, I left.

I went to the closet, grabbed my coat with the fake stone marten collar and put it on. Then, stepping into my boots and pulling my navy wool beanie over my head, I stomped out of the apartment. Outside, the snow was still falling. I stood looking up at the swirling snowflakes illuminated by the streetlight in front of our building until my eyes blurred over. There were snowdrifts forming on the sidewalk, which the janitor had shoveled clear that afternoon. My feet were getting cold, so I started walking East on Lexington Avenue. I passed a florist, a cocktail lounge, and a Gristedes supermarket—all of them closed. I was the only person on the street. But then, out of nowhere, a figure appeared, walking toward me. I wasn’t sure if the person coming toward me was a man or a homeless woman in an oversized man’s jacket. I wanted to avoid whoever it was, so I crossed the street.

As I approached the apartment building on the corner, I spotted a security guard behind the revolving door sleeping on a chair near the radiator with his head on his chest and a newspaper in his lap. I remember every detail because it was then I saw that the person who’d appeared out of nowhere had crossed over to my side of the street and was walking toward me much faster than before. I thought of going into the building and asking the doorman for help but that would entail moving quickly and the entrance to the building was shiny with ice and I was afraid I might fall and break an ankle. (FYI: All dancers are terrified of breaking an ankle. Even if you’re young, it can finish your career.) I soon found myself face to face with my pursuer, now visible as a teenager, about sixteen at the most, with porky cheeks and long, soft black hairs growing like mistakes over his upper lip and along his temples. He and I stood there looking at each other for a few seconds before he suddenly reached out and, pulling me up against him, started rubbing my breasts through my coat with his hands. I could feel his cock harden against my thigh and, I don’t know why, but at that very moment I was certain that Ira and Sam were lovers. It came to me, just like that! And that gave me the strength to push the kid off me. One big push, and he fell over backwards, and that was when I started running . . . toward the East River . . . intending to perform the grand jeté of a lifetime.

As you have probably deduced, I changed my mind. Which is why I am here talking to you. Let me assure you, I am no longer ‘suicidal’—if I ever was, really. A dramatic gesture was all I intended. Something that would get Ira’s attention.

************

Ira came back and got me out of the hospital. And no mention was made of my breakdown. It was as though it never happened. Or that, maybe, I’d dreamed it up just to get Ira to pay attention to me. Or maybe it was because Sam moved to Hollywood and married the sixteen-year-old star of his next film, and he and Ira never saw each other again.