It was a mixed episode, Lentz tells me when I come down from the rafters around April. Brian's gone, and after pushing it away for all of tour, it hits me in the gut when I get home. I pace the halls at night, doubled over myself with grief. My parents have finally split up, after twenty-five years. My own marriage, well—Julian and I alternate between screaming at each other and ignoring each other completely. Suddenly I'm not just his crazy wife. I'm his wife with one book out and a novel in the works. More than ever, I am everything that is wrong with his life. I am the reason he can't hold a job, I am the reason he's not in school. I'm never home, I just left him and went tooling around the globe. His resentment poisons the air.
I try to make it work. I'm attached to him. And I said I was going to be married, and so, goddammit, I'm going to be. I don't want everyone else to have been right. But eventually, in May, Julian slams out of the apartment. When he comes back, I'm in my robe, sitting on the couch in the dark, having a drink. I offer him one. He sits down in his armchair, twirling the ice in his glass. We have a remarkably civil midnight conversation, and a few days later, he moves out.
It's obvious. This whole business of marriage—what was I thinking? I'm not suited for marriage! It's too slow, too settled, too sedate for someone like me! I'm a girl of the world! I've got places to go, things to do, people to see! And why not? Apparently people like my book. It still hasn't really registered with me that the past months spent talking day after day to strangers about something as raw and frightening as a life-threatening eating disorder has left me a little shaken, a little unstable, and desperate to forget the whole thing. So I'm flush with money from its publication and the sale of a novel. I'm the successful single girl, not a care in the world, I'm Mary Tyler Moore, tossing my hat in the air. It's summer, and I'm on a roll.
Here's how you make absolutely sure that you'll keep getting crazier by the day:
Me, I drink up all the liquor in the world, all the booze in several men's liquor cabinets, all the wine in my own collection and then all the wine in the collection I buy to replace the first one, all the wine and martinis in the bars in the city. Anything I can get my hands on. There is never enough.
I am absolutely convinced that the booze helps me control my moods. It raises the volume and heightens the colors and fills me with a sense of happiness when I want to come up, and when I need to come down at the end of the night, it blunts my thoughts, my perception of the shrieking world around me, and lets me black out, or sleep, whichever comes first. I have worked out an elaborate system of just how much to drink, at exactly what time, to keep my mood humming along at the perfect high. It doesn't cross my mind that the booze itself is one of the reasons the highs and lows are so extreme.
I wake up in the morning, running through the day in my head—the work, the cleaning, the laundry, the party tonight. I fling the covers off and make the bed with absurd precision, hospital corners, get it right, get ready, pour myself a liter or so of coffee, land in front of my desk, and start tapping away without so much as a thought about what I'm going to write. I go for a few hours, then run off to throw in the laundry, hop up for more coffee, write a million e-mails, call my agent for no particular reason and babble for a while. I get a flash of inspiration and grab one of the dozen or so yellow notepads that litter my office to scribble down my ideas for the next several books, and back to the laundry, in with the whites, then back to the desk—I flip madly through books, looking up obscure facts that are suddenly absolutely crucial to the making of my point, the central point, the one that clinches everything, drop the books in a pile on the floor, scribble notes on yet another notepad, and then I need something I wrote on one of the notepads three days ago, I need it right this second, and I rip through the notepads—but wait, the laundry, and I'm flying downstairs and staggering back into the apartment under the weight of piles of every piece of fabric I can find, clean or dirty, the point is the excellent efficiency of washing and the necessity of absolute cleanliness, dump them on the living room floor, and now it's time for a glass of wine, the very thing, white wine goes perfectly with laundry, who would drink red for laundry? Twenty-six floors above the city, in this apartment that Julian has recently vacated, I stop for an instant to soak in the gold late-morning light streaming through the windows. Then I haul out the ironing board and iron everything, the socks, the sheets, I pull down the curtains and iron them too, and since I'm on a roll, I get down on the floor and iron the carpet, Oh, Marya, stop being weird, I chastise myself, and then I fold everything with perfect sharp creases, creases that would do my grandmother proud, wait! I am inspired! And I dash back into my office and whip off another few pages, an excellent day, two chapters, I go out to the kitchen and pour another glass of wine, toss it back, grab my purse, and zip out into the sunny summer afternoon.
The days tumble over one another, each full of obsessive shopping for my perfect apartment, for the perfect dinner parties, perfect evenings out with friends, each day turning my head toward man after man so quickly I can hardly keep their names straight. The nights are all the same, a party or a date. They end with me getting out of bed and putting on my clothes, You're leaving? Or they end with me getting out of bed, putting on my robe, and telling them to leave, Do I have to? Or they end with me fumbling with the key in the lock and letting myself into my apartment, kicking my shoes off on my weaving way down the hall.
The doctors call it hypersexuality. It's one of several typical goal-seeking behaviors that are common in mania, all of which involve rabid energy and a total loss of impulse control—this game I'm playing involves risky one-night stands, a compulsion to seduce, but no real interest in the sex itself. The sex isn't the point. The point is to shut off the maelstrom in my head.
Someone catches my eye: my mind empties out of everything but the need to get him. My heart thumps, and there's a dull, mute pounding in my skull. Sound fades, and I am only aware of my single-minded mission—I must catch him, I must win. It's a rush, a pure, clean high, uncomplicated by thoughts. A few words, a few glances, a brush of the back of the hand, and he's mine. I am no longer anxious, no longer fearful, finally neither low nor high. I find myself in unknown beds or my own, staring at the ceiling, drumming my fingers on their backs. I feel the weight of their bodies, crushing me, pinning me down. They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.
And then the game is over. I've won, and I want them to take their sticky, heavy bodies and go home.
I litter the city with unsuspecting, nice guys, drawn in by the same things every man has ever been drawn in by—the over-the-top everything, the whirlwind that my hypomania creates. They call me "passionate." Only certain men are interested in women like this, and somehow I find them all this summer, and eat them for a snack. It's endlessly entertaining, when it isn't boring as hell.