Every evening, I go to my twelve-step meeting and mumble my name as we go around in a circle. While I sit in my little group, I rack my brain for something to say, but nothing comes. I think I will shatter if I speak. There will be pieces of me everywhere. I sit with my arms wrapped around my knees. I do this for three months. Then, one day, I say something, and everyone stares at me in shock, as if they hadn't been sure I could actually talk.
Fall comes. I brace myself for the blues, but the days pass and they don't come. The meds are working. I'm sober. I'm going to be fine.
One evening, I watch a man from my meeting lie on the ground, staring up at the red and yellow leaves on the trees.
"I'm in a world of hurt," he says to the sky.
I fall in love with him with a thud. Not because he's in a world of hurt, but because he's lifted his face from the ground and caught me looking at him, and smiled. Because his face is kind. I look away, and look back. He's still looking at me. He sits up. "But I'm all right," he says "This will pass."
I'm in no shape to be in love. It's a terrible idea. I'm already engaged, for God's sake, and less than six months sober—the usual suggestion is that you stay out of relationships for a year. But for some reason, in whatever haphazard fashion, it works.
I break off the absurd engagement to the bar guy and move into an apartment by myself. It's not lost on me that the one-room studio is half the size of my one-time living room back in California. Gone are my silk curtains and my velvet couch and four-poster bed. Gone are the fancy job and the limitless credit cards. My room contains a mattress, a desk, and a chair. I eat with my plate on my knees, sitting on the edge of the bed. I write, the novel now starting to take shape as I finally have the discipline and clarity to work on it every day and the focus to write well. And I start seeing this man.
His name is Jeff. His wife just left him and his mother just died. He's been diagnosed with depression, and his meds aren't working yet. He's a complete disaster area. I walk around his house in wonder. There is a dining room table, but no chairs. Dust covers every surface, an inch thick. There is no food in the refrigerator. Every room in his house is painted a different, hideous color, the doing of his ex-wife, who apparently liked to paint. The basement is packed full of dozens of boxes of useless things, jars and shot glasses with obscure logos and coffee cups and crock pots and ugly vases, the shelves on which the boxes sit sagging and covered with mold. It's the house of someone who hasn't been out of bed for months. In fits of energy, he has bought himself two midlife-crisis cars, three deluxe mattresses, and a set of copper pots and pans. He's trying to buy enough things to stave off the stifling depression he's under. It isn't working.
I stand in the doorway to his bedroom. He's in his suit, all the way under the covers, including his head. His dress shoes peek out. It's three o'clock in the afternoon.
"Hi," I say. The room is painted insane asylum green.
"Hi," comes a muffled voice.
"How was your day?"
"Not good," he says.
"Sorry to hear it." I lean against the door frame and jingle my keys. "Do you want to come out of there?"
"I'm being a walnut," he says. He sticks his nose out of the covers. "You could come get in."
"No thanks. I think you should get up and at least change your clothes. If you're going to be depressed, you shouldn't be wearing a suit. You should be in your pajamas."
This gets a muffled half laugh.
"Do you want me to go away?" I ask.
"No!"
"Then I'm going to make something to eat. And then you're getting out of bed and eating it. And then you can get back in bed if you want, but I'm going home."
"Don't go home!"
"If you don't get out of bed when I make dinner, I'm going home." I turn around and pick my way through the rubble and go into the kitchen and unpack the groceries I've brought.
A minute later he's standing in the doorway, his hair standing on end and his tie askew. He's taken off the shoes. "I'm out of bed," he says.
"Now will you stay?" He sounds so small I want to fold him up and put him in a little box and keep him in my pocket.
"Sure," I say, and hand him a cutting board and a knife. Bewildered, he looks at them. "Carrots," I repeat.
"Oh," he says. "Right."
I have never been the sane one before. It is so nice I don't mind that he's in his own kind of madness. I know mad. I can handle mad. It's just a matter of feeding the mad thing, and getting it out of bed, and opening the curtains and letting in the light, and you do it over and over until the madness fades into the background and the person emerges again.
And since I seem so sane compared with how I've been all my life, I begin to believe I am. I do tell him I have bipolar, and jokingly say that he might want to think twice about getting involved with me. In fact, I give him a list of a hundred and one reasons not to date me, and bipolar is at the top of the list. I feel like I'm poisonous. So I give him my disclaimer, and hope for the best. But I also tell him it's all in the past.
He takes a leave of absence from work, and we fly to Florida for a month. We've been dating only a few months, and everyone thinks we're completely nuts. Lentz worries that it's yet another of my impulsive acts, a debacle waiting to happen. But it isn't.
In Florida, Jeff lies on the couch most of the time. I cook and write until he staggers up and needs to be fed. When he starts feeling better, we start going for drives. Soon, he's laughing, and I begin to find out who he is.
He's the kind of man who wouldn't have come near me with a ten-foot pole even a year ago. He has no time for flashy scenes. He wears green wool sweaters and sensible brown boots. There is no other word for him than kind. He's exactly who he says he is. He fascinates me. I watch him while he sleeps, wanting to take him apart and see how he's made. He snores like a freight train. He is tangible, solid. He holds down the bed. With him here, the roof isn't always flying off. With him here, needing my presence, I understand for the first time what it means to be good to someone. It's the first time I have ever been unselfish in my life. He needs something I have, so I give it to him.
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. We tumble into a life together just like that. We go from starry-eyed to angry to companionable in the space of a few weeks. In February, we go back to Minneapolis. His depression has lifted. In April, we buy an old Victorian near one of the city lakes. One Sunday, we're sitting at breakfast and decide to get married. So we do.