Fear Of Flying

We drifted apart. Not all at once, and not through my meeting someone else. I didn’t go out at all while Brian was in the hospital. I was shellshocked and needed time to recover. But gradually I began to realize how much happier I was without him, how his frantic energy had sapped my life, how his wild fantasies had deprived me of any fantasy life of my own. Slowly I began to prize hearing my own thoughts. I began to listen to my own dreams. It was as if I had been living in an echo chamber for five years and then suddenly someone let me out.

The rest of the story is mostly denouement. I loved Brian and it made me feel terribly guilty to realize that I liked living without him better than living with him. Also, I think that I never quite trusted him again after the attempt he made to strangle me. I said I forgave him, but something inside me never did. I was afraid of him and that was what killed our marriage in the end.

The end dragged on. Money, as usual, was a precipitating factor. After three months at Mount Sinai, the Blue Cross coverage ran out and Brian had to be transferred. Either he had to go to a state hospital (something which terrified us both) or to a private hospital (where fees were about $2,000 a month). We were up against a money-green wall.

His parents stepped in then, not to help but to harass. If I’d let him go to California, they’d pay the cost of private treatment. Otherwise, not a pe

In September we made the pilgrimage to California. We “lit out for the territory” not by covered wagon, but by 707, and we had my father and a shrink in tow. The airline would not fly Brian home without an attendant psychiatrist-which also meant that the four of us had to travel first class, munching macadamia nuts in between Libriums.

It was a memorable flight. Brian was so agitated that I forgot my own fear of flying. My father was popping Libriurns by the minute and admonishing me to be brave, and the shrink (a sweet-faced twenty-six-year-old resident who identified with us to the point of total incompetence) was jittery and needed my constant reassurance. Mother Isadora-I took care of all of them. All the gods, the daddies, who had failed.

At the Linda Bella Clinic in La Jolla, the illusion of voluntarism was rigidly maintained. All the nurses wore bermuda shorts, and the doctors wore sport shirts and corduroy pants and golfing hats. The patients were in similarly casual attire and wandered around in a setting which resembled a deluxe motel, complete with swimming pool and Ping-Pong tables. Everyone on the staff was determinedly cheerful and tried to pretend that Linda Bella was a kind of spa, rather than the place you went when nobody knew what to do with you at home anymore. The doctors advised against long parting scenes. Brian and I saw each other for the last time in the deserted O.T. room where he was viciously pounding a piece of clay into one of the table tops.

“You’re not part of me anymore,” he said. “You used to be part of me.”

I was thinking how painful it was to be part of him, and how I had almost come to the point of forgetting who I was, but I couldn’t say that.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“Why?” he snapped.

“Because I love you.”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have brought me here.”

“That’s not true, Brian, the doctors said-”

“You know the doctors don’t know anything about God. They’re not supposed to. But I thought you knew. You’re like all the rest. How many pieces of silver did you sell me for?”

“I only want you to get better,” I said feebly.

“Better than what? And if I were better, how would they know-sick as they are. You’ve forgotten everything you knew. They’ve brainwashed you too.”

“I want you to get better so you won’t have to take medication…” I said.

“That’s shit and you know it. They give you medication to start with and then they use it as an index of your health. When the medication is high-you’re worse. When it’s low-you’re better. The reasoning is circular. Who needs the damned medication in the first place?” He socked the clay savagely.

“I know,” I said.

The thing was-I agreed with him. Certainly the doctors’ categories of health and sickness were almost crazier than Brian’s. Certainly their banality was such that if Brian were God, they wouldn’t know it.

“It’s all a question of faith,” he said. “It has always been a question of faith. My word, or the word of the multitude? You chose the multitude. But that doesn’t make it right. And what’s more-you know it. I feel sorry for you. You’re so damned weak. You never did have any guts.” He pounded the clay into a thin pancake.

“Brian-you have to try to understand my position. I felt I was going to crack under the strain. Your parents were screaming at me all the time. The doctors were preaching. I stopped knowing who I was-”

“You were under a strain? You! Who got locked up-you or me? Who got dosed with Thorazine-you or me? Who got sold down the river-you or me?”

“Both of us.” I said crying. Great big salty drops were ru

“Both of us! That’s a laugh!”

“It’s true,” I said, “we both got hurt. You don’t have the monopoly on pain.”

“Go,” he said, picking up the flattened clay and begi

“You never seem to remember that you made an attempt on my life, do you?” I knew I shouldn’t say this, but I was just so angry.

“Your life! If you loved me-if you knew the goddamned meaning of sacrifice-if you weren’t such a spoiled brat, you wouldn’t give me this shit about your life!”

“Brian, don’t you remember?”

“Remember what? I remember how you got me locked up-that’s what I remember-”

Suddenly it dawned on me that there were two versions of the nightmare we had been through-his version and my version-and that they coincided in no way at all. Brian not only had no empathy for my unhappiness; he had no awareness of it.

He didn’t even remember the events which had sent him to

the hospital. How many other versions of our reality were there? My version, Brian’s, his parents’, my parents’, the doctors’, the nurses’, the social workers’… There were an infinite number of versions, an infinite number of realities. Brian and I had been through a nightmare together, and now it turned out that we had been through nothing together. We had entered an experience through the same door, but then wandered off into separate tu

Brian stared at me coldly as if I were his sworn enemy. For the life of me, I ca

My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana where we bought a slightly soiled pifiata-a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches.

My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thi