Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (25 page)

In our first couple of days, I fell into a dark, hopeless hole. But it was shallow. I looked sad but calm, not having raving, committable-type symptoms. Nico lay down on the floor with me that day, wrapping me up and saying, “If you can’t be happy with me, you can’t be happy with anyone.” Pretty quickly, I got it together. I drove him to Marin County, north over the Golden Gate Bridge, past redwoods to a rented house in a small town with sea-salt-and-eucalyptus-tinged air. I fed him Mission burritos and world-famous chocolate tarts. I turned crazy and started yelling at him bitterly, over an indiscernible trigger, in an Indian restaurant that I’d hoped would astound him. But because his self-defensive mechanism to his girlfriend’s becoming a quick bitch, like many people’s, was to shut down and become an asshole, our yelling ended up looking like both our faults, a couple’s misunderstanding, not something I had started with no cause.

On his birthday, which fell toward the end of his two-week trip, I rented him a motorcycle more powerful than the one he rode at home—with more horsepower than was allowed by French law—and climbed onto the back of it, giving him directions to Big Sur via California Highway 1.

I liked my guests to have a good time. But this time I also had ulterior motives.

Nico had sensed this from day two or three. Finally, a week in, he brought up his suspicions. “You just want I like California in case you want me later,” he said at my apartment. He meant that I was trying to convince him that California was great in the event that I later decided I wanted him to move in with me. Meaning I hadn’t decided that yet.

I got up from the table, where I’d opened an exorbitantly expensive bloomy-rinded California goat cheese with a line of ash through its center. I walked to the kitchen, opened a drawer, and came back with a jewelry box. I placed it in front of him on the table.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Open it,” I said.

It continued like this for a while, until he did. The box had a copy of my house keys inside it. My friends would mock me for this move later, but Nico’s eyes filled with tears.

“Excuse me,” he said.

It was the same thing he’d said the first time I’d seen him cry in person, which had been the day I’d brought him back from the airport. It was late, and after he’d eaten and showered, we lay down in bed. I was propped up on one elbow, looking at him, then pressed my face to his chest to breathe him in, and kiss his skin, and he’d welled up.

“Excuse me,” he’d said.

But emotionally overwhelming as my key-proposition was, it wasn’t an easy question. He didn’t answer me. He still hadn’t answered me when we got to Big Sur a few days later.

After checking into our 1930s inn and cleaning up, we headed to our dinner reservations in the dining room. In Montpellier, Nico had worked long shifts, so I’d still been able to lie down and read books all day by myself; in this cozy, rustic restaurant, five hours of motorcycling and eight days of tour-guiding down, my exhaustion was setting in. I was unused to socializing that much those days, and I had marshaled all my energy to do it. Along with the stressful uncertainty of my pending proposal, I was starting to break down. My agitation increased; by the time our entrées came, it was becoming unbearable to sit at the table. I was actively looking for distractions in the room when a woman appeared in the open top half of the restaurant’s Dutch door.

She was easily in her eighties, and holding a little white dog. She seemed to be talking, or complaining, to no one. Our table was the closest to her. When I made eye contact, she said directly to me, “In France, you can take dogs in restaurants.”

I smiled at her politely, but then stopped cutting up my duck. “Are you French?” I asked her.

She said she was.

“He’s French,” I said, nodding at Nico.

“
Vous êtes français?
” she exclaimed, bringing his attention suddenly to the conversation.

She had been a young woman during World War II, she told us, living in her town, trying her best to mind her own business, when the Americans arrived. One paratrooper fell in love with her immediately and started pursuing her. He asked her to tutor him in French, and she complied. As his lessons progressed, he asked her to marry him, and she refused. When the war ended, he went back home. But he returned, several times, to try to persuade her to come to America with him as his wife. Finally she consented. She’d been in California for sixty years, she said, given birth to some insane number of sons, gone on to live happily ever after.

“Oh, come
on
,” I whispered to myself, my breakdown achieving completion with the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future here. I turned my head while Nico chatted her up in French, swallowing hard to keep the tears that were escaping my eyes minimal and quiet. The woman either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and one of her middle-aged sons appeared in the window alongside her; he was in the instrumental band that had been playing in the restaurant earlier that night, the two of them explained happily.

When we returned from Big Sur, I could barely drag myself out of bed anymore. I only did so fueled by the knowledge that I just had to keep it up for two, then one more day. Nico could feel it. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know about my illness. But he was still managing to escape the majority of the everyday, real-world worsts of it.

That would end on our next trip.

*   *   *

In the two weeks between the Montpellier and San Francisco rendezvous, I’d written and turned in the feature I’d reported in Ohio; after Nico left San Francisco, I wrote the piece I’d reported in Uganda, then went to report another piece in a state I couldn’t publicly disclose because I was working undercover. At the same time, among that writing and editing and fact-checking schedule, I started doing some interior decorating.

When we got back from Big Sur, Nico had said yes. Yes, he said, he would move in with me, move to the United States for a while. He would take some time off work and get a six-month visitor’s visa so we could see how it was to be together. But he had to go on a three-month deployment to Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, first.

I wished I didn’t have to wait so long, because I was a disaster, and dealing with our long-distance relationship in tandem with my emotional problems was more than I could manage. In the meantime, I tried to divert my longing into readying the apartment for a man with European-high standards for charm. Which is to say I got rid of all the furniture I had taken from other people’s garbage. Which is to say I got rid of all my furniture.

The only problem was that I had total psychological paralysis around buying furniture. During the hurricane season after the hurricane season that had brought us Hurricane Katrina, my husband and I bought a couch. By this time, my relationship with my mistress was in full swing, and it was becoming ever clearer that my marriage wasn’t sustainable. Given its vulnerability to natural disasters and homemade ones, I could not handle owning this couch. The day it was delivered, I locked myself in my bedroom with my dinner, refusing to look at the sofa I’d so painstakingly picked out, and called my father in hysterics. I remember him laughing at me. Was I being ridiculous? I suppose I was being ridiculous. I was having a hard time explaining to him why hysterics were warranted.

“It’s just a couch,” he kept saying.

“It’s not,” I kept saying. “It’s really not.”

I’d never wanted a ton of belongings, having worked at a moving company in high school and college and seen how much shit people had that they didn’t need. Hurricane Katrina didn’t help my aversion to possessing household goods. That was further validated later during the summer that I bought the couch, when I lived in Thailand with the refugees from Burma, whose explanation for not owning normal things like family photographs was invariably “I lost it when soldiers attacked and burned everything down.” So here I was in San Francisco with garbage furniture. But lots of other underpaid transplants to San Francisco furnished their places with street and thrift-store junk. At least I went to Bed Bath & Beyond when I needed new sheets and cookware. Post-PTSD, though, my anti-furniture eccentricity crossed over into the purview of psychosis.

“I saw you try to buy furniture before,” Nico said over Skype, laughing at me skeptically when I told him I’d paid a decorator to force me to prepare the tiny studio apartment we’d share.

“That wasn’t even furniture,” I pointed out. After Nico had told me he was going to move in, we went into a Sur La Table together before he went back to France. He wanted to buy a celebratory teakettle. Our couple’s first houseware. As we stood in front of the selections, I refused to pick a color. All I could see looking at the teakettles was the dollars we would need to fund our uncertain future after all of our belongings were destroyed in a great earthquake or fire. Why couldn’t I just keep making water for my tea in a frying pan?

“I can stay here for two hours if you want,” Nico said after twenty minutes.

“Great. Let’s go get some lunch and bring it here and eat on the floor in front of this rack of teakettles,” I said, hoping to wear him out of his interest in the mission.

He said he was prepared to do that, and he wasn’t bluffing. He pointed at the black one for the fifth time with the patience of someone doing it for the first, saying, “Zhis is classic, I think. Isn’t it? Yes. It is.” He got me to admit that I liked the blue one. When he picked it up, I stopped breathing. He hugged it to his chest and petted it. “Yes, zhis is lovely,” he said. Then he grasped the floor model more protectively, looked at me sternly, and said, “I take zhis. If zhey say zhey don’t have zhis one still because we take too long to decide, I will die.” And walked away from me toward the counter.

I gave chase and grabbed his arm. “No!”

He let me drag on his shirt like a toddler, but didn’t slow his progress toward additional merchandise. He wanted bowls. Big silver bowls. “I love your big bowl,” he’d told me his first day in the States, the one I ate popcorn out of or mixed cake batter in. “What is it?” he asked. “Silver? Everyone in American movies has bowl like zhis.”

He picked out a whole set of them, nesting sizes, the “brothers and sisters” of the one I already owned. I panicked at the counter as the gal rang the stuff up and Nico handed her a debit card. The whole way home, I repeatedly pointed at his shopping bags full of teakettle and “American bowls,” saying, “I don’t think you should have bought that stuff. Are you sure you want that stuff?”

He tried to blanket me with superhuman tolerance. “It’s fine,” he kept saying. “We will enjoy zhese bowls. If we lose zhe bowls zhat is fine too.”

I shook my head to the contrary, choking on anxiety, choking back tears, as we got farther from the store and closer to my apartment.

“I’m so proud of you,” Nico said over Skype, therefore, when he heard the decorator was on her way with swatches of couch fabrics.

There were two interceding months in our plans to see each other in person. I would go visit him over Thanksgiving in Guadeloupe. Before then, between each moment of mightily gathered and embarked-upon functioning, mostly what I did was, as Denise put it, “suffer.”

My battle never to be able to feel anything at all won, I waged deeper into my new battle: dealing with my feelings. Keeping defense mechanisms such as dissociation from getting overwhelmed and kicking in—or, still, keeping from wishing I was dead. Like most other people, I never in my life had spent any time trying to ground myself, find my center, and feel the entirety of my emotions. To revisit Boulanger’s
Wounded by Reality
, “As the psyche matures [after childhood] and self-regulation consolidates, the core self [of a normal person] becomes the unarticulated and unformulated ground against which the figure of experience is projected. Normally completely taken for granted and operating out of awareness … it is ‘the primitive underbelly of experience,’ like a heartbeat or regular breath.” That was my life before. But: “catastrophe disrupts the core self, quite literally fixing it in place, changing biological and psychic experience. The ‘bare autonomic faith in the body’ … is lost. In its defensive retreat into dissociation, the psyche has broken faith with the consistency and resilience of its core. It is as if the core self’s psychological support systems, agency, continuity, cohesiveness and affect—all of which were temporarily disconnected by dissociation during the actual trauma—cannot be reconnected seamlessly. The self has lost the familiar ground on which it stood.”

I continued to try to practice groundedness and connectedness daily. When I got there, I continued letting my mind and body do whatever they needed. But none of those things felt good. The uncontrollable, intrusive images of things that did happen, in Oklahoma, or in my twenties, or in Haiti were now joining images of things I had never even seen. I woke up from a nightmare to have a picture of a girl on her back with dead eyes suddenly enter my mind. Her head was moving against the ground to the rhythm of whatever someone was raping her with. To stop thinking about that wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be made to go away. So then there came all the girls who were on their backs with dead eyes everywhere, maybe at that very moment, and I had no choice, however hard I closed my eyes, but to look at the hundreds of them all crowding into my vision in a collage.

Please start screaming
, I asked them when I couldn’t take it anymore.
Maybe you’ll feel better if you resist at least that much
.

And they opened their mouths and scrunched up their eyebrows and started screaming, a thousand screaming faces. But then all I wanted them to do was stop.

I felt better briefly when I was reporting undercover. I was doing manual labor at an online-retail distribution center, hard hours and even harder productivity quotas, stress and adrenaline coursing through my limbs and propelling them along. Alex could hear it in my voice when we checked in over the phone. “You sound … shaky and amped up,” she said.

When I got back, I explained my body’s reaction to this combination of exhaustion and overstimulation to Denise as “Holy fuck this is terrible—and thank God,” relieved for it, the familiarity of it, my comfort in its specific kind of productive, awful momentum.