Dream Catcher: A Memoir (68 page)

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. Rather like being a letterman in America. At Oxford and Cambridge one is awarded a “Blue” for excellence in some sports, such as rugby and cricket, “half-Blue” in others that aren’t quite as “British.”

I
STAYED ON IN
O
XFORD
to staff a summer program for American labor arbitrators. My title was “dean,” but my duties were far from impressive, attending to my fellow Yanks’ complaints about hard pillows, lack of air-conditioning, and so on. But I did get to sit in on the classes and discussions and meet some terrific people in the field. Toward the end of the course, I was offered a job as an apprentice to an arbitrator in Boston.

When I arrived back in the States, the arbitrator who had offered me the apprenticeship told me that her current apprentice’s new job had fallen through so she would be staying on, terribly sorry, but I wasn’t needed. I had expected to move back into my old apartment on Marlborough Street, but my landlady said I’d have to wait several months at least because the tenants were suing her about something or other. She would have called me, but she had lost my number and couldn’t remember where in England I was staying. I thought that under the circumstances, I might go to New York for a while and stay with my boyfriend, who had just started a big job with an investment bank. Well, when I called to see what he thought, he told me he loved me dearly, but I couldn’t come and stay with him. He just couldn’t be with me anymore with the level of Sturm und Dräng, or as the Rolling Stones song says, “Nothin’ I do don’t seem to work, it only seems to make matters worse . . .” Marc was quite right, but I wasn’t prepared to see it that way at the time, nor any time probably. No job, no apartment, no beloved; three strikes and I was in free fall over the edge.

Just after my twenty-ninth birthday, and right before Christmas, I nearly died. Sig and Joel (my old friends from ski camp and Woodstock, Liza’s brothers) were living in Cambridge and they invited me to stay with them as long as I needed. After a few weeks of staying with the boys, I moved to a dumpy apartment down the street where I was a “tenant at will.” I was not doing well alone. One night, at around two-thirty in the morning, I called Marc, woke him up, and tried to convince him that he was making a terrible mistake breaking up with me. Screaming down the phone “I can so be normal!” in the wee hours of the morning is not, as we say in business school, a strategy with a high probability of success. I knew it, but I was in such pain without him that I couldn’t stop myself; like a panicked person drowning, I gripped his neck so tightly, I threatened to take him under with me. I felt as though a large piece of me had been ripped from my side, and my head was swimming as if from a severe loss of blood.

I had felt that before when I was eight and I carried my broken arm, across a wide field, staying awake as long as I could, cradling my arm, until too much blood had drained away and I fainted. Imprinted on the deepest parts of my mind as a child was the idea that hospitals are where you go when the pain is so bad you lose consciousness, and there are clean white sheets and people take care of you. Even your mother is nice to you in the hospital.

That night, some twenty years later, when I got off the phone with my boyfriend at three in the morning, knowing I’d driven another nail into the coffin of our relationship, my homing instinct took over. The pain was so bad I couldn’t stand it. I felt myself losing consciousness and I knew I had to get to the hospital. But this time there was no blood to show for my pain. So I had to swallow the bottles of pills or they’d be mad at me and call me a liar and send me home. With the “adamantine logic of dreamland,” this made perfect sense to me. Never tell a lie.

The first call I made was to Boston City Hospital; I think it was the emergency room. I wanted to know, at 3
A.M
., drowning in pain, if someone swallowed a lot of pills and wound up in the hospital, could the newspapers find out the name of that person. I was frantic that the papers might learn that I was Salinger’s daughter. My first instinct at this desperate hour was not to protect myself, but to keep my father’s secrets,
to obey the family creed and avoid anything that might bring the attention of the press.

If, in the midst of telling me not to do anything stupid, the nurse hadn’t told me that the papers had no access to that type of information, I don’t think I would have taken the pills. I dialed 911, told them I had taken a lot of pills, gave them my address, and then,
after
hanging up, swallowed two bottles of different prescription medications and washed them down with scotch. So they wouldn’t think I’d lied to them, and I wouldn’t get in trouble.

The ambulance arrived, not what I’d imagined, sort of a square paddy-wagon-looking thing. It was the fire department rescue squad. They let me collect some stuff, which surprised me. They picked up the remaining pills off the floor and put them in their bottles, which I thought was very tidy of them. I realized later that the doctors needed a pill count. I took a small stone carving of an African head that Marc had given me the previous Christmas, and a handkerchief that had belonged to my grandmother. That’s all. I was too afraid my teddy bear would get lost. I walked partway downstairs and was then carried on a stretcher. The last thing I remember was a man in the ambulance in my face and yelling at me, “Stay awake, stay with us!”

I
T WASN’T CLEAN WHITE SHEETS
. It was a metal table and blinding spotlights in the emergency room. It wasn’t like waking up; it was like being struck by lightning. I was sizzling and felt as though I had bees inside my veins. Bees and a thousand cups of coffee. I guess they give you some kind of stimulant to counteract the depressants after pumping your stomach. Something bloody was going on behind the green plastic curtains next to me. Then came the charcoal.

“Drink it. All of it.” Quarts and quarts of gritty charcoal in water. Black ashes vomiting out of my nose and mouth, my asshole spewing charcoal. I got some on my grandmother’s handkerchief. The stain never came out.

I was shocked to find out how close I’d come to killing myself. Apparently I would have been hard-pressed to pick a more lethal combination than what I happened to have around the house.

I called my soon-to-be–ex boyfriend in New York from the hospital and told him I had kidney stones and not to worry. I called Wayne, one of my best friends from Brandeis, in Washington. He canceled a State Department reception, caught the next plane to Boston, and brought me a blanket because he remembered that I’m always cold. He called our friend Margie in Philadelphia, and she was there a few hours later.

I hadn’t seen my therapist since I’d left for England. He came to see me and said, among other things, “Hey, next time use the phone, okay?” Point taken. He was glad to see me but sad to see me there. After some discussion, they let me go home the next day.

When I left the hospital, I went home alone in a cab feeling lousy, but pretty sobered by the near miss. When I opened the door to my apartment, a lovely sight greeted me. Wayne and Margie, both Jews who wouldn’t know a Christmas tree from a cactus, had bought a tree and set it up in my room. One of the most oddly decorated Christmas trees I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful.

I
HEARD THROUGH A FRIEND
that a major international consulting firm, based in Boston, was doing so well that year that they were taking on midyear hires. (Usually these things go with the business-school cycle; if you’re not settled by September, forget about it till next year.) I sent them a résumé, and they called me for an interview. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I told them that my areas of interest and expertise were industrial relations and organizational behavior, I.R. and O.B. as they are known, the “soft” side of business. They said great and placed me on a case team that was evaluating accounting software packages for a Fortune 500 computer firm. I didn’t even know how to use a computer, let alone evaluate anything to do with one. At Oxford, although I hear this changed dramatically over the next few years of the program, we had barely switched over from quill pens when we wrote our essays, longhand, on the philosophy of human resource accounting. I spent my first week trying to learn Lotus 1-2-3 on my own without attracting too much attention from the computer whizzes I was supposed to be supervising. Nightmare.

I spent a year trying to “get up to speed,” in various traditional “hard” MBA areas such as finance and accounting, but everyone around me had been on a serious fast track from the start. When I had to take some time off to have surgery, it was a relief. The chief of urology at Mass General had examined me for chronic bladder inflammation and pain and told me my urethra was gapped wide open and some other
things I didn’t quite understand. He brought in another doctor, who asked me some questions about my sex life, all of which I could answer in the negative, half of which hadn’t even occurred to me as possibilities. Then she’d like a family history. I called my mother to ask her if I’d had trouble with bladder infections as a child. She said yes, that after she was allowed to take me to real doctors, she was always taking me in for pain “down there,” because, she said in a sort of exaggerated whisper, “you
mas
turbated so much.”

All I can recall to date is a flashback I have, of sitting in the bathtub, alone, young enough that I was scared to be alone, because usually my mother gave me a bath. I was feeling absolutely excruciating pain in my peepee. I thought maybe I got some soap inside it by mistake when I washed and it was burning me, like soap in the eyes. It hurt so much I couldn’t cry. I made a harsh noise in my throat as I drew in each breath, to try to distract my mind from the pain. I sort of rocked myself until the water went cold. Then, my memory goes down the drain.

My father appeared at Mass General the morning of my surgery. I was very surprised, to say the least. He looked green and worried. He said, “You shouldn’t have to go into surgery alone.” He and Sig and Joel took me home afterward. I was back in my old apartment, the landlady was finally rid of the awful tenants, and there I stayed put till it went condo some ten years later. Daddy liked my apartment. He’d never seen it before.

A few weeks later, I received a call from a headhunter asking me if I’d be interested in a certain job they’d been hired to fill. To make a short story even shorter, I didn’t get the job, but the executive search firm for which the headhunter worked offered me a job as a consultant. Same great pay, but decent hours, and talking to people instead of crunching numbers. God, what relief.

My dad came down to visit me at my new job and to take me out to lunch. He liked my business attire a lot, was suitably impressed by my office, which was in a beautiful old building overlooking a splendid courtyard where people could sit outside at little café tables in the spring and summer for drinks and Madame Robert’s wonderful French food. Over lunch, Daddy told me how glad he was that I had learned something practical and gone into business. He worried a lot about my brother choosing to be an actor and wished he had gone into some sort of business as well. I felt proud of myself and my position, and I could
not have asked for a nicer boss or colleagues; nevertheless, it all felt a lot more like playing dress-up and acting than my father could ever have imagined. I still missed my trucks and cars and work boots, I still missed my libraries and writing, but I was doing the “responsible” thing, being a grown-up and using my degree instead of saying, to misquote a country song, you can take these nylons and shove ’em.
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