There in the bathroom, certainly, I felt well past tears, and made a point of not meeting my own eyes in the mirror. The minute you see yourself you’re forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other people’s stories. A mirror gives you perspective.
I didn’t want perspective. It wouldn’t help me do what I had come to do. For months I had felt increasingly out of myself—everything seemed to be happening about me, as opposed to to me, as if I were the still midpoint of a swirling cloud of trouble. I didn’t want to be convinced that my circumstances were otherwise. I just wanted to be back in control, calling the tune.
Had I been anywhere there was a chance that Johnny would find me, I don’t think I’d have tried it. As it was, I’d finally found a good use for the voyage.
At the bottom of my clutch, kept hidden for weeks, was a razor blade folded into a dollar bill. I unwrapped it, held it to my left wrist, and cut, remembering as I did so a supercilious young surgeon I’d met at a party some twenty-odd years before, who’d told me—to shock me, I’m sure, with his callousness—that the best technique was not across but rather up the arm, vertically. Him I paid little mind, but his advice I filed away, on the off chance it might come in handy someday.
He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t expected it, but the pain was astonishing—a feeling of total wrongness and distress that didn’t even register as pain—and the mess was immediate. My hands went slippery, and I wasn’t dexterous enough any longer to use my mutilated left to do the same to my right. I sank to the floor—clammy linoleum, the kind that was patterned to look like marble.
If I’d really wanted to be effective, I could have just jumped. Erased myself. Hart Crane’d off the ship, and that would have been it. It’s ugly, I know, to admit that part—just part—of why I did it the way that I did was because I wanted Max to see me. To witness, publically, how his affair with Julia had hurt me.
I tried to focus on my rage—my only source of warmth—as my teeth chattered and my head swam.
True, I had been no blanket-on-the-grass-in-the-sunshine picnic to be around during that last year we were together. But he didn’t have to do what he’d done. Not the way he’d done it.
He should have asked for the divorce first, before sneaking around. But for all his seeming nonchalance and joie de vivre, this was one area wherein he lacked courage: He would never risk a loss without a contingency plan, without assuring himself of a soft landing—in this case, in Julia’s much younger and less complicated lap. And now she’d be waiting to nurse him—and Johnny!—through this tragedy. Good luck, Julia! Can’t say I didn’t warn you.
Then the door opened, and Vivian found me. Crying, finally. Dress ruined. A bloody mess.
It is my understanding that because I had been gone a long time, Max had sent our new friend to fetch me. Typical Max! I could easily picture his gambit, outwardly concerned but actually cavalier, pushing off what ought to have been his responsibility with such charm that it would never have crossed poor Vivian’s mind to say no.
Something’s wrong, he would have said. She never takes more than two minutes in the bathroom. Could you go check on her?
And so Vivian unearthed the heap of me: such an embarrassment.
By the time Herb was sprinting for help and Max was manhandling me—crushing his thick thumb into my armpit, just the way the Army had taught him—I had blacked out, but I could still hear silly Vivian fussing innocently about, looking for jagged edges and smashed glass, trying to figure out what accident had befallen me. I’m murdering myself, you moron, I wanted to shout.
The shipboard medics rushed me to the infirmary, where the doctors stabilized me.
When we landed in Manhattan they checked me into St. Vincent’s.
I wasn’t glad that I hadn’t died. And I wasn’t sad that I hadn’t. I wasn’t anything.
*
Afterwards, when they were holding me, trying to figure out where to ship me next, making arrangements for residential treatment at Silver Hill, Helen came to visit.
She asked me—as a lot of my friends would ask, actually—why I hadn’t told someone. Why I hadn’t gone to one or another of them for help.
That was a fair question. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it coming.
I had always cultivated a magpie mind: Any and every shred of life’s ephemera could come to serve as an adornment, either for verse or for advertising.
For the past year or so, though, the only baubles I had noticed were articles on alcoholism and subjects of that ilk. I clipped and saved pieces on mastering one’s impulses and preventing suicide. I hardly recall reading any of them, only collecting them: the expression of yet another unmastered impulse.