Dream Catcher: A Memoir (66 page)

W
HEN MY GRANDMOTHER DIED
, she was kind enough to leave me sufficient funds that I didn’t have to worry about making a living for several years, and I was able to attend to my studies at Brandeis and, later, at Oxford with some peace of mind. It also permitted me during my junior year to do an unpaid internship with a labor lawyer with whom I’d worked on asbestosis prevention back at the Edison. I loved studying the law, but being a lawyer was another thing, seeing what they actually did most of their working hours. What a gift to find out what you
don’t
want to do before you commit yourself.

Another thing my grandmother’s generosity enabled me to do was to afford to go to therapy more often. I sat my mother down after my grandmother’s funeral and basically bullied her, shamelessly I might add, into seeking psychotherapy for herself. Good move on both parts. She has gone on to write books, earn her Ph.D., and make a real career for herself. She has also learned to be a good grandmother to her grandchildren. My aunt said of my mother, “I don’t know how she lived with Sonny all those years. He never should have married. She should be very proud of herself, making a successful career as she’s done, it can’t have been easy.”

M
Y SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE
was a struggle. I had won a scholarship to support my senior thesis research, on the history of the passage of the first Workman’s Compensation Act in 1897. It enabled me to spend the summer in London, working at the British Museum Library and the archives of the Trades Union Congress. I had come back with some pretty thrilling stuff (to me, anyway, and to my advisers) and wanted to do justice to the material. I also had a full load of classes. My intellect stayed intact, I could still study, but I was in big trouble. I did not blank out as of old; this was trouble of a different color. I had begun to suffer
from perceptual hallucinations. I was fully conscious that the physical sensations I was experiencing were not real—the library floor would feel as if it were pitching and roiling, and I felt as if I were trying to stand and walk in a wave-tossed canoe, or the stairs would suddenly appear to be two inches from my face and then ten feet below me—but as in a nightmare where you know you are dreaming but can’t make it stop, I was helpless. Often when I went to the library to study, I was hallucinating so badly I had to have a friend help me to my desk. It wasn’t pink elephants and that sort of thing, what happened were major perceptual distortions such that I couldn’t figure out where I was in relation to anything else. It was rather like walking along a sidewalk in the dusk and suddenly stepping off a curb when you don’t expect it and your body isn’t prepared to make the automatic adjustments it makes based on signals telling it where it is in relation to the environment. Chartless.

It wasn’t just at school that this happened. My friends took me out to the movies for a little rest and relaxation. I enjoyed the movie, but when the lights came on, I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to maneuver my body out of the theater. I knew I was in my seat, I could see the exit sign, but I simply could not put the two together and spatially orient myself. I sat in my seat sobbing, “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how to get out of here or where to go.” They led me out by the hand and got me in the car. The ride back to my apartment was terrible. I looked out the window at once-familiar streets, totally disoriented, scared, crying. All I could say was I don’t know where I am, but what I meant was I didn’t know where I was in relation to anything else. I knew full well I was in the car with my friends, the approximate time, date and year, who is the president of the United States—all those other questions they ask you at the admitting desk. It was I who was out of plumb with the world.

I don’t know why this started happening, whether it was the pressure, or perhaps the fear that the end was in sight, and I didn’t, as yet, know where I would go or what I would do after college. Breakups are always hell on me. Toward the end of the year, at crunch time when I was trying to finish my senior thesis and take five other classes at the same time, it got so bad that I couldn’t drive at all. The road and my car just wouldn’t line up in my mind. My friends Ted, Mitchell, Margie, Wayne, and Rachel took turns driving me home to my apartment each
night and often stayed the night curled up next to me on my bed, then drove me back the next day. I loved my classes and my work and wept thinking it all might be taken away from me by mental illness or breakdown. But everyone around me—my teachers, especially Professor Touster and Professor Barraclough, my friends, my doctor—was fighting as hard as I was for me to hang in there. I’m so, so grateful.

When I went up to the podium several times during graduation ceremonies to receive various awards I’d won, I knew exactly whom to thank. They were sitting in a row clapping and cheering, separating my parents at either end, my peacekeeping troops, to whom I owed my survival and success, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude.

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor—Tonight—

In Thee!

—Emily Dickinson

D
REAMING SPIRES
. In the fall of 1982, I went up to Oxford. I was a graduate student at Trinity College, Oxford, and had a beautiful bed-sitting room above Blackwell’s Bookstore overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre. From my desk or my bed alcove I looked out onto the dome of the Sheldonian and its wonderful gargoyles standing guard. Church bells from every college rang out across the city each evening calling students home for supper. Mornings, I walked past horses in a green and dewy pasture, a shortcut on the way to the Centre for Management Studies just outside the city proper. Afternoons, I studied, had tea with friends, played lawn tennis, went punting on the river (once), and took long walks through college meadows and gardens safely enclosed behind medieval stone gates.

Unfortunately, I was also throwing away precious amounts of time with my old false friend bulimia again. This problem, however, vanished into thin air the moment my body met a body in a green English meadow. He was a tall, dark, and very handsome New Yorker (half-Jewish, half-Spaniard) who was studying economics at Magdalen College. He had a reputation, well earned I believe, for being rather a Don Juan—going from pretty señorita to señorita in rapid succession. Girls didn’t seem to mind his reputation; in fact, they pursued him. Not this
girl. Our first month of “dating” consisted of study dates in the college library, after which I’d walk him to the Trinity gate, in full view of the porters’ lodge (the guardians of the gate and protectors of the students inside), and bid him good-night. He invited me to a black-tie dinner held at his college, and I was surprised at the looks of curiosity, and occasionally outright hostility, I received from his group of male friends who hung out together in the M.C.R. (graduate student lounge) encouraging one another’s avoidance of work. (To be fair, it is quite hard for many students to handle the amount of independence one is given with regard to one’s work at Oxford. There is almost nothing in the way of external pressure and accountability to help you get your thesis written.) One of his friends even asked me, quite bluntly, what I had done to him! It was a bit of a betrayal to the boys to get started on one’s work, and, I think, they quite missed the vicarious pleasure of the exploits of their handsome companion.

For the next two years we were inseparable. Even when I went to San Francisco for spring break to see the city and stay with my mother, who was living there at the time, I received letters from Marc every day, sometimes twice a day. No one had ever reached out to me that way before, held my hand in his across oceans. I began to trust in the solidity of his presence, that he wouldn’t, like de Daumier-Smith’s fickle joy, seep through my fingers in the morning and be gone. Often, this solidity could take on a mule-like obstinance that drove me crazy, which, in turn, drove him crazy. “You’re so
picky,”
he’d say like a solid plow-horse to an obnoxiously skittish, neurotic thoroughbred. Traveling together was a source of constant friction and passionate, stupid arguments over accommodations, driving, radio volume, temperature controls, where to eat, and what to do. But at Oxford, “Rowing in Eden,” the lion lay down with the lamb, and most of the time, it was lovely. His college rooms were in an old mill house where C. S. Lewis once lived, behind Magdalen College, down a lane in a field of flowers by a stream. His bedroom was directly over a small waterfall where, on occasion that spring, I was awakened in the morning by the sound of a pair of swans and their eight little cygnets who made their home beneath the old mill.

I wrote to my father “a day in the life” sort of letter, and he wrote back thanking me for my good news and said it made good sense that I
was savoring it. He suggested I read a book—which as usual I filed in my overflowing bin of books I “should” read but didn’t—by Joanna Field called
A Life of One’s Own,
in which she tried, on paper, he said, to take a close look at her life to discern the underlying reasons for what she called the “fat moments,” moments of contentment close to bliss. He said it might be both fun and instructive for me to undertake a similar look at the real whys and wherefores of why Oxford seemed to suit me to a T. What there is about a certain Oxford street or land or hall or room that excites pleasure or well-being in me. Or makes me feel tranquil or wonderfully independent or full of goodwill.

I had also mentioned in a letter, rather delicately and obliquely, that I was happy in a love affair that was not his prescribed “like with like.” He said it was duly noted that I have a big, good-looking boyfriend who doesn’t take long walks by himself or do or say anything particularly sensitive, but nonetheless suits me. The business of pairing off, he said, of alleviating solitariness, is a problem that can’t be solved satisfactorily short of nirvana.

In my thoughts I underestimated Marc’s sensitivity, but my body didn’t; it knew this was someone it could trust. My skin began to thaw after a lifetime of numbness and retreat. He noticed it first and put it into words,
sensitively,
I might add in belated admission. In fact, I think he understood something about me that I wouldn’t know for years to come. In one of his letters to me in San Francisco, he told me that he had felt a momentous change in me. He said simply that on a certain night, just before I’d left for vacation, we were making love as usual when suddenly, without warning, he felt me open up to him. I guess he met my body for the first time. I know I did.
¹

I wrote to Holly telling her about Marc. Always on the lookout for my well-being, and having reached that certain age, most especially my financial well-being, she was not pleased with me. “You go all the way to Oxford, England, where guys have titles and
castles
for God’s sake and
you fall for a New Yorker!” I, however, had had enough of reclusion in four gray walls and four gray towers.

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two lovers lately wed:

“I am half sick of shadows,” said

The Lady of Shalott