Chapter-6

One Sunday afternoon, I showed up at Edward’s apartment with a pound of raw squid from my favorite fish market in Newark. We both knew it was a pretext to visit him, and the tears started soon after I crossed the threshold.

He didn’t seem at all surprised. “I wish there was something I could do to help you, darling,” he said. “But if I interfere, it will just be worse for you.”

“Friction, competition, confrontation, impatience, and distraction.” It was the first sentence of my horoscope for that weekend. The rest: “For the next few days you will have a shock. You are very sensitive in your relationships and everything will result in irritation. For this reason, it would be good to avoid complicated negotiations.”

It was a Sunday morning, my husband and I were fighting, and in order to avoid “complicated negotiations” I had taken New Jersey Transit to the Ironbound section of Newark, the Portuguese neighborhood where I went regularly to buy salted cod and olive oil—the foods from childhood that made me feel grounded. I often took my daughter to a seedy barbecue joint on Ferry Street, the kind of place frequented by muscled cops and construction workers, that grilled chicken and ribs on charcoal. We would leave with our clothes infused with the smell of barbecue but satisfied with our meal of tender chicken, mounds of french fries, and a vinegary salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and bold slices of raw onion.

On this day I felt better after eating chicken at the Formica table of Ferry Street Barbecue and wandering the aisles of the nearby Portuguese supermarket, sampling olives, goat cheeses, and buying chorizo, but I knew I couldn’t stay away forever. When I returned home the fighting started again. That’s when I escaped to Edward’s with my pound of squid.

Edward took the mollusks and stashed them in his refrigerator. Then he offered me a seat on his sofa, walked over to the hutch in his living room and divided the last of his Kentucky bourbon evenly between two glasses. He didn’t bother with ice, or tonic or pastis, or even a squeeze of lime. He limped over to the sofa, shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and handed me my glass.

“How about a bourbon?”

He needn’t have asked. I inhaled the soothing liquid heat and soon after that everything came pouring out of me. I told Edward about the horrible arguments, dishes crashing on the floor, a family dinner that became so bitter and nasty, my daughter left the table in tears and hid herself in her room.

“I’ll never forget this dinner as long as I live,” she cried. Nor, I thought, would I. But now on Edward’s sofa I could no longer recall what had been so terrible that it resulted in platters laden with food being hurled across the dining room table and red wine splashed violently against a white wall, an appropriate abstract rendering of my marital discord that I hadn’t bothered to clean up.

Perhaps it was a sign that our dysfunction was now alarmingly visible. The “melancholia,” to borrow a nineteenth-century phrase the New York Times used to describe the maladies of patients shuttered in the asylum where we now lived, had been let loose within the confines of those walls. It was now sure to spill over to the outside world. Maybe friends had already noticed the sharp tones we used to address each other. At work, Melissa probably suspected. Why else was she so respectfully silent during my very uncomfortable phone calls home—conversations (could I even call them that?) that involved screaming on the other end and me trying unsuccessfully—in the middle of the newsroom—to calm the drama du jour in strained sotto voce.

In some ways, I identified with Nellie Bly, the investigative reporter who went undercover at my madhouse in 1887 and wrote a series of exposés for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. After ten days at the psychiatric hospital, she documented forced meals of spoiled food and ice-cold baths where prisoners were required to stand in long lines and wash themselves in the dirty water left by their fellow inmates.

Bly wrote about how prisoners from the nearby penitentiary even doubled as orderlies, keeping inmates in check through savage beatings. Among Bly’s observations, recorded in her book Ten Days in a Mad-House, which I had recently read, “From the moment I entered the insane ward on the island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.”

Well, maybe things weren’t as bad as all that but, like Bly, I was an investigative reporter who had also entered The Octagon undercover—when we moved in I was pretending that everything was all right with my life. But as soon as I began to get a grip on reality and reclaim myself, “the crazier I was thought to be.” When I brought up divorce with my husband, I was taken aback by his response. Was I mentally ill, menopausal? Had I had my thyroid checked lately? Perhaps I needed a psychiatrist, antidepressants? What about yoga? Bly’s statement ricocheted through my brain.

I’m not sure I did a good job explaining any of this to Edward. On that fateful Sunday afternoon I spent a lot of time crying my way through the bourbon, sounding incoherent even to myself. Edward listened and, at one point, rose to refill our glasses, having forgotten that we had already consumed the last of the bottle. I looked out his living room windows at the lights in the buildings across the water. It was already dark and I knew it was time to go home. Even in my leave-taking, though, there was something comforting. I guess I knew that after the drama, Edward would always be there. As he escorted me to the elevator, holding the door open with his outstretched cane, he said, “Let’s have dinner soon, OK?”

A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Valerie. Edward had told her everything about my crisis. She told me he was distraught, mostly because he felt there was nothing he could do to help me. As I listened, I became upset with myself for having put Edward under so much stress. “He’s very worried about you,” said Valerie.

But Edward never conveyed his worries to me. He never dwelt on my situation, rarely offered any specific marriage advice, never interfered. On occasion, he would sigh and shake his head. “It’s a bloody shame,” he would say, knowing that I was the only one who could solve my problems.