“Vlad is so sick of my moods, he’s so fed up with my ‘mental health’，” she continued. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “I’m sick of it too. I’m fucking sick of it.” Her voice rose with a soft press of emotion that she swallowed. “So then he told me that you already knew we weren’t a normal family—that everyone knew—and then he told me—I didn’t know this—I didn’t know this until Saturday—I sat in faculty meetings and fucking potlucks and I didn’t know this—he told me that he told the hiring committee about my suicide attempt.” She stopped herself. “Were you there?”
“I was not,” I said, “but—” I lowered my head, hesitating.
“You heard.”
“I heard.”
She turned and looked out at the view again. “He said that’s probably why he got the job, because when they asked him why he wanted to move all the way up here, something set him off and he started crying, and it all came out in a burst, and he told them how I had tried to kill myself when our child wasn’t yet one year old, and how his responsibility was now to keep me alive, and they could hire me, that I was brilliant, that we were still living in the same apartment where he had found me foaming at the mouth, having shit myself in the bedroom, with a note to keep my daughter away.”
At this I might have made a slight noise, because she glanced over to me as though daring me to say something. I held her gaze and nodded slightly, and she turned back to the window.
“I was surprised when they hired me for the memoir-writing class. It’s not like a college to just—offer a job. Maybe I should have guessed. He said that when he left he felt ashamed of himself—so unprofessional—but after so many rejections, the offer came within the week.” She paused and shook her head. “I mean, students are on that committee, right?”
“They sit in on the interviews, yes.”
She pursed her lips and closed her eyes. I felt deeply sorry for her. Before I met Vladimir, when I heard that he divulged Cynthia’s suicide attempt in his interview, I had felt a rush of distaste, like I feel when any great writers, or people, really, who have committed suicide are mentioned in the context of that act before their work. I had pitied her position at the college, coming into our small, gossipy department predefined as “damaged.”
After he told her this, the morning before they were due to come swim at our house, she had retreated into what she called “the howl,” which she described as feeling like one has been caught up in a wave—all sound a roar, all vision static, an ache in every part of her body, a wild pain everywhere. He actually had an injection for her, that’s how sick she was, she told me, laughing, “That’s how sick I am. He keeps a shot like Nurse Fucking Ratched,” she said. “Like Nurse Ratched, like Girl, Interrupted, like The Bell Fucking Jar, like every seventies and eighties mental-hospital TV movie of the week. Like Frances,” she said. “Like fucking Frances, have you seen Frances?” she asked me. I said I hadn’t and she said, “Oh, never mind, like every crazy person I’ve got a morbid fascination with crazy people.” She held up a hand to an imaginary objector. “I’m allowed to say ‘crazy’ when I’m talking about myself. Anyway, I slept for eighteen hours. So I’m sorry I didn’t show up.”
She took a breath after all of it was finished and laughed, not the laugh of a disturbed person, but the deeply ironic laugh of someone who has never lived without the company of pain. She had fallen inside of and then climbed out of her pain so frequently and for so long that she could not cherish it or give herself any sympathy. I couldn’t know the depth of what she had felt—she had gone so much further than I ever had—but I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.
Could it be because we simply weren’t sentimental, or we were too intelligent or too sensitive or too watchful? Was that mere self-flattery? What made us sad, and guilty of our sadness, what pit us in this battle against ourselves? And why couldn’t we release the way some did, and say, yes, well, depression is a medical condition, I’m just wired a little poorly, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, as all my students said. （Which is not to say that Cynthia Tong didn’t take antidepressants—I’m sure she did.） Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?
“I like you,” I said. And it was true. She even looked less unapproachably beautiful after she was finished. I wanted to sit with her and talk about all sorts of things. I was thrilled that she loved my books （or said she did）。 I wanted to ask her what other writers she liked, what other experiences she’d had.
“I like you,” she replied. When I told her she didn’t know me she said, “I’ve read your books. I like you. I can tell you have sharp elbows and rough edges. You’re prickly, like me. I like prickly people—I trust them. I hate nice people. I like Vlad because he’s Russian, at heart, he’s Russian. He’s brutal and he can’t hide anything. I’m a mess,” she said, and rose. “Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your husband,” she said to me. “I wish Vlad would fuck other people but he doesn’t want to. He barely wants to fuck me.”
I told her to give it time, that maybe he would.
“Fuck other people or me?” she asked.
I told her maybe both.
“Here’s hoping,” she said. “What time is it? I have to pick up Phee from the day care at three.”
It was five till. “Quick, go,” I said. “They charge by the quarter hour after pickup time.”
“Shit,” she said.
And she was gone, leaving only the light indent of her tiny ass on the cushion of my office couch.
* * *
There is a straight two-mile path that cuts through a grove of tall fir trees in the state park at the edge of our town. After I had finished up my administrative duties for the day and forced myself to sit at my desk until my posted office hours ended, I drove over to walk it. If my body is doing something that my brain doesn’t have to process, then I am free to think and to work through things. Often, when I am working on a book or an article, I come to this path.
As I would do when I was working on a book or an article, I tried to force myself not to think about Cynthia Tong and Vladimir Vladinski until I had walked the first two miles—one way to the end of the path. Once I turned around, I would allow my thoughts free rein. The first stretch though, I would attempt to discipline my mind. Every time they popped into my consciousness, Vlad, talented, flirtatious, eager, Cynthia, dark, honest, with what seemed like two lifetimes of trouble behind her eyes, I would catch myself and refocus on what was happening in that moment—the sights, the sounds, the smells, my body—an exercise I learned in a mindfulness course the college had offered to the faculty a few years ago.