Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (28 page)

*   *   *

After this trip to France, we wouldn’t have to take long flights to see each other in various countries anymore. After this—hopefully just a month after this, if his temporary leave from the gendarmerie was granted—we would live together in San Francisco as I’d dreamed. For six months. But we didn’t want to wait that long to see each other after Guadeloupe, which had already been two months ago. Plus, I had to meet Nico’s mother.

I flew into Basel, the closest airport to Nico’s hometown, near the borders of Switzerland and Germany. He picked me up, and together we drove into his region of Alsace. Wine country, with rolling vineyards everywhere between the mountains. Lovely country, full of hills and quaint villages.

But in that country, on his own soil, Nico behaved more as he’d been raised. Harder. Harsher. He’d already been growing tired of our melodramatic, episodic interactions before I’d arrived, and in France, he was less forgiving. If I’d felt my own culture to be lacking in compassion, the last place I should have gone was to one that widely regarded my countrymen to be coddled, oversensitive pussies.

I got the flu almost the moment we checked into our chalet. Years later, after hearing stories from Nico’s French friends about how they lied when they got sick so their parents wouldn’t yell at them for whining, it would all make sense. But at the time, it was like being slapped in the face when I asked Nico, who was otherwise a decent human, to bring me food and he narrowed his eyes and said, “You want to be treated like a queen? You’re
sick
. It’s not your fucking birthday.”

I wasn’t in France long before I feared our relationship, for all our new grand plans, might not be sustainable.

When I got better from being one kind of sick, I was still the other kind. And sometimes that was OK. One time when I woke up agitated in the middle of the night and started wandering the room, he called me over to him and wrapped his arms around me, breathing slow serenity into my face. I fell apart another time, after the first time we had sex that trip. The moment I came, I became so vulnerable that the post-sex panting turned into some deep breaths followed by ragged sighs. The breaths got deeper and the sighs sharper, the remaining pieces of my togetherness breaking up, until I was sobbing.

“I’m here,” Nico said, holding me, waiting it out. He did the same thing several other times, once after we drove past a castle ruins—this part of France had endured heavy shelling during the First World War—and I asked Nico if he’d ever found any bombs. I’d recently been reading that more than 500 tons of unexploded ordnance were still collected and destroyed every year; more than 600 of the guys whose job it was to collect and destroy it had been killed. Nico said that he had discovered a big bomb in the woods when he was seven, yes, and though his friends had wanted to kick it, he had gone home to tell his parents so they could call the proper removal authorities, the way that they’d been taught in school. And then later when we were having sex I couldn’t stop crying for a long time about war. And he’d again assured me that he was there.

But as in Guadeloupe, my episodes didn’t always bring us together so cooperatively.

One morning when we woke up, he said something innocuous, but I instead heard that I wasn’t good enough to be his girlfriend, and I started a fight. Jet-lagged again, I woke him up in the middle of the night; he told me I traveled too much; the reason I traveled half the time was because of stupid him, I said, seething. We got into a fight. I took a bath and hallucinated that I had a deficient and monstrous body. I screamed at Nico for lying that I was gorgeous. I found an end piece of a baguette that we’d forgotten about and let go stale and lit up with rage, stomping about the kitchen with the waste and senselessness of our irresponsibility. I started bitching at him for using a tone that sounded sexy with one of his friends on the phone. We went for a walk in the forest where he’d buried his father’s ashes, and I was cold and mean. I went into a corner of the chalet bathroom to cry for hours. When Nico came in to drag me out, frustrated and worn down himself, I told him we needed to talk.

“This is what this is really like,” I told him, sitting on our bed. I explained how sometimes I didn’t have any feelings. And sometimes I had too many.

He became especially unhappy the night we had dinner plans with one of his friends and I couldn’t go. I was not well. I was embarrassed, but had no choice but to admit it, the way I was aching and shaking and scared. Many times when this happened, he tried to reason me out of it, to bring me around by explaining why things were OK, however many times I told him that wouldn’t work, still taking it personally when it didn’t. One time he just walked away from me and went to do push-ups. Sometimes, like this time, he tried to bully me out of it.

“You need to control yourself,” he said. “You need to work on yourself.”

“Maybe I’ll be fine at dinner,” I said. We both knew it was a lie.

He called his friend to cancel. He stormed off into another room of the chalet and called another friend to holler in French about how awful I was. Something like “What am I supposed to do with a person who’s acting like this?”

Alone, I closed myself in our bedroom and called Tana.

“We need to break up,” I told her. “I’m ruining him. I’m not fit to be around other people. He’s going to hate me because I’m insane.”

“Don’t make decisions on days when you’re failing the coffee-cake test,” she said. “Listen. No one does anything they don’t want to do, and if Nico wants to stick it out because of all the good things you give him, that’s his choice, and he’ll evolve and adjust.”

Nico and I had both called the right people.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Nico’s friend was telling him at the same time. She had suffered a bout of major depression in recent years, so she was possibly the most sympathetic person in France. People didn’t have control over their feelings, she admonished him, and especially not people who had medical conditions that were defined by a total lack of control over feelings, so if you’re sticking this out, which you should because of all the good things she gives you, you need to get it into your head that she can’t and you can’t just make her problems go away.

When I came out of the bedroom, I found Nico sitting in a chair near the Christmas tree that the proprietors had left in our rented living room a month and a half past its date. The lights blinked white. I sat on the floor near his feet. Crying—bleh, again, like always, but more softly for the moment.

“You cry too much,” he said, gently but sort of stunned.

I snorted, as I’d been telling him this all along. “True story!”

“I’m sorry I seemed mad. I didn’t want that. It’s not your fault.”

I rested my head against his legs and breathed. “You won’t get rid of me like that, just because you have a problem,” he said. I’d taught him that phrase,
to get rid of
. He’d said the same sentence four other times already that day, and his resolve to not leave me remained unchanged. “If you want to get rid of me, try something else.”

*   *   *

The next day, we were watching a Michael Jackson DVD on his aunt’s couch when he half-proposed to me.

I was feeling better. I generally felt better after a day as bad as the previous day. My crazy seemed to work in a cycle: a bad day, then a worse day, then a couple of days so bad they were intolerable. After that, a little bit of a reprieve, maybe two or three days. Then it started all over again. That particular day, a week after I’d arrived in France, I was stable enough to leave the house. Easily.

And thank God, because Nico’s favorite aunt and uncle had invited us over for lunch. They’d made a mountain of choucroute, a cabbage-based dish piled with sausages. It was sauerkraut by any measure, but in this region, which had been lost in the Franco-Prussian war and not given back to France until after World War I, people did not take to having their food called German.

At a table for seven crammed into a kitchen with just enough space for the chefs to squeeze their asses past en route to the stovetop, I sat against the wall. I was force-fed wine while the food finished, though it was ten-thirty in the morning. Nico’s uncle’s mother-in-law sat next to me and held my hand. In this part of France, rural and eastern, no one feigned pretentious non-fascination with America, so mostly Nico’s family spent the morning asking me to explain every American custom they’d ever heard or didn’t understand.

Was it true, Nico’s uncle had him translate to me, that most Americans didn’t drink wine around breakfast time?

“Not really,” I said, and seeing me shake my head, the kitchen erupted in cries of
Why, why
, distressed for the state of American life. We stuffed ourselves with greasy meats, and then they invited me into the living room to watch Michael Jackson videos.

Nico and I took the futon, lying down close. With the proximity, and without the distraction of the five hollering French people, the peace I generally felt around Nico arrived. A gravity in my abdomen. A sense of being not lost. I could feel it even when we were fighting and in the midst of my most episodic and strongest convictions that we wouldn’t make it. On the couch, chests together, limbs entwined, the inevitability and permanence of him spread a warm weight I could actually feel through my midsection.

Nico was petting my hair. His lips close, he kissed my head. I could feel his breath when he said quietly, “Do you want to make your life with me?”

My warmth was interrupted by fear. Was he nuts? Did he really want me to make his whole life as shitty as I’d made his past week?

“Maybe,” I said.

When we got back to the chalet that night, Nico and I stayed close, positioning ourselves on another couch there. We pulled it over in front of the small wood-pellet stove, starting a puny fire.

“I didn’t understand you before really when you said you cry all day sometime,” he admitted.

“I know,” I said. How could he have? What an adjustment! He’d started out with a girlfriend who, when he’d met her in Haiti, had seemed a capable professional and party gal, and now he had a mess who couldn’t even pick herself up off his bathroom floor.

“I told you,” I said, “that you didn’t understand how bad it was. And I can see how it’s impacting you.” I started crying. (Obviously.) “I know what happens to couples like this. I know what happens when you expose another person to this all the time.”

By then it had been months since I’d started talking to Brannan Vines and other military spouses. I told Nico about how they picked up depression and distress and hypervigilance—the heightened state of stimulation one develops from watching for danger all the time—from their veteran husbands. I told him about how one of them was recently having dinner at the Olive Garden when her husband’s anxiety and her own new habit of waiting for the incoming, of waiting for something to happen, overwhelmed her right into a nervous breakdown. She was just trying to eat her Zuppa Toscana, and she could not stop the tears from coming.

“I could destroy you,” I said.

By then, he’d pulled me on top of him and started kissing my cheeks, all his fingers tangled up in my hair.

“You can,” he said heavily. “I don’t care.”

I turned my face away from him, crying harder. French people were so dramatic. There was nothing romantic about this. I shook my head.

“You’re my life,” he said. “I don’t want to make it without you,” even if it meant being dragged into my emotional world so deeply that he had to share it. But he didn’t know what it felt like to feel like me, and knowing it myself, I knew this was a bad call. Tana was right; he was a grown-ass man who could make his own decisions, so I wasn’t going to martyr myself by ending the relationship to save him, but maybe he would change his mind, I thought. I hoped he would change his mind, for his sake.

Instead, on the couch again another night, after more hours of more crying, after I exploded again because I couldn’t uncoil any of that horrid winding-up in my torso—“My friend really likes you”; “I don’t give a FUCK what your friend thinks!”—Nico slid to the floor and got on his knees in front of me.

He hesitated first, setting his face into resolve, anticipating resistance from the start. But he opened his mouth anyway and said clearly, unwaveringly, “Do you want to marry me?”

My midsection got hot and panicked, sending sparks up and all over. Perhaps I was going to throw up.

“I understand now this is as bad as it gets,” he pressed on. “But I still want to make my life with you. You tell me this is what you’re really like. And I tell you I’m still here. Nobody is better to do this with you than me.”

“I should do it by myself,” I said. “Where no one else has to go through it too or get hurt.”

“No,” Nico said. “I’m here. I’m ready.”

That night, Nico’s question unanswered, I woke up and watched him sleep. I convinced myself that I shouldn’t touch him. That I should stay away from him. Though silently chanting to myself how poisonous I was achieved that goal, it did little to make me feel as if there were much reason to live.

At the end of every single session with Denise, she told me to call her if I needed her. I had never once invoked this right. I took it to mean “Call me if you are seriously about to kill yourself”; if I called her every time I needed psychiatric assistance, I would call her several times a day. Tonight, though, I
needed
her. It was three in the morning, but given the nine-hour time difference, it was only early evening where she was. I got out of bed and went to the chair next to the blinking Christmas tree. I called her up, and got no answer. Unsure what else to do, I wrote her an e-mail, then climbed back into bed, spending the rest of the night staring into darkness.