Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (31 page)

But there was no managing Nico’s exposure as my housemate. I obsessively worried about its impact on him. He couldn’t help feeling bad when he’d sidle up next to me without my hearing him, the surprise detonating a terror bomb in my guts that left my heart racing and me shaking and sometimes crying for ten minutes, saying, “You
scared
me.” And he couldn’t have been thrilled that he’d had to devise a time limit for how long he’d let me pace and pant and sob in the shower before coming in after me, startling me through my weepy, hallucinatory fog, and sometimes having to carry me out.

“I can’t do this,” I told Denise after probably the third time I’d sent Nico leaping up out of his sleep when I started screaming during a nightmare. “I can’t take care of myself and someone else at the same time. I want to live in a cave by myself.”

“Can you change that story to being that you just haven’t
figured out
how to take care of yourself and your relationship at the same time
yet
?”

I did try telling myself that. But my self wasn’t convinced. Because to further complicate matters, I was not the only troublemaker at my address anymore.

The second thing that Nico and I had overestimated was how well he was going to handle being an immigrant.

Sure, I’d seen him become frustrated before. But considering what he’d been through generally, and what I put him through specifically, Nico struck me as a walking reincarnated Buddha. He was a man with a stable foundation. Not to say he was unshakable. I’d seen that he had cracks, like everyone else. He had unresolved grief about his father. And he, too, had some issues about Haiti. I’d first noticed it in Montpellier, when he’d been flipping through pictures on a digital camera and come to an innocuous shot of a displacement camp. His reaction lasted just a second, but long enough for me to catch it: He winced and turned his face away.

When his unit had embarked to Port-au-Prince, Nico had been excited. Unlike many of the other guys, he wasn’t upset when the brass told them, as they were leaving for the airport, that instead of staying one month as planned they’d be staying three. To Nico, his mission in Haiti was the same as the personal mission that had made him join the gendarmerie: to save lives. He arrived in a country where a lot of people did need help, but where many of those people saw MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, as pampered occupiers—some from former invader and slave master
France
—come to enforce the interests of the wealthiest, whitest class by tamping down legitimate unrest and keeping the masses in check. Haitians, including those in the camps MINUSTAH was dispatched to protect, protested their presence. Especially after a deadly cholera outbreak was linked to infected foreign peacekeepers. Nico was part of a force that created unrest as much as it calmed it, a literal plague on the country.

It wasn’t true that grunts such as Nico lived luxuriously—their tents leaked on their faces at night when it rained and blew down in storms, and they showered six at a time under a horizontally strung hose with spouts stuck into it—and Nico knew his unit was made up of good working-class dudes trying to do a good job while doing what they were ordered. But he couldn’t disagree with at least one of the protesters’ accusations against them: that they were worthless. The moments when he intervened in machete fights or ran madly through camp under the weight of his guns and gear in the heat to detain a guy trying to kill his wife were, for Nico, outweighed by the ones where he and the rest of the troops ate their UN lunches in the back of a truck, in front of a bunch of hungry camp kids to whom they were forbidden to give any leftovers. When they returned their leftovers back at the compound, they were thrown away.

And then, after ninety days, they left, everything exactly the way it’d been when they arrived.

Maybe it wasn’t surprising that for Nico—who’d seen his dad crying one afternoon, hadn’t said anything about it, and had found him hanging dead the next night—there was no sin greater than uselessness. The most upset I’d seen him was one of the many times he couldn’t pull me out of an episode. “I just want to feel like I’m helping you,” he’d yelled. “I just want to feel like I can help you, I make it better for you. That’s all!” He’d started weeping so hard, he shook. He started screaming at me. “
That’s all!
”

I had learned that not being helpful or useful, which to him seemed to equal not being a good person, was Nico’s primary issue. Its coincidence with my unhelpable disorder was the cause of nearly all of our real fights. “Ridiculous,” I’d told Tana when we talked about this. “He sounds like a superhero. ‘He gets really mad sometimes, but only when he can’t help enough.’ If I ever write about him, I’m going to mention how he thinks women are bad at parking so I’m not like ‘Mleh, my boyfriend’s perfect!’ I’ll have to include unflattering things about him so I don’t sound like a total lunatic.”

So let me take this opportunity, here, to say that when Nico got to San Francisco, he was a real dick.

*   *   *

Nico had adjusted to life just fine on his deployments. He’d shat in holes in the ground in French Guiana for months, breathed the gasoline-and-poop fumes as they burned the waste during breakfast, worked twenty-four-hour shifts, drank water full of iodine tablets and been away from his family, his girlfriend, his cocker spaniel.

But he did not adjust to this glittering American city. When Nico arrived in San Francisco that March, he was unit-less. He was comparatively language-less. He didn’t belong. He was alone with his girlfriend, who did belong, nervous about using English with Americans aside from me, finding that other Americans weren’t as good as deciphering his accent when he tried. In these circumstances, Nico could not help me, no. He could not call the phone company, or order in restaurants, or make conversation at parties. He could not even help himself.

Now he was a blind and staggering baby, too.

At this point, for me, with all the therapy and self-awareness-tuning and opening and purging, my response to being triggered was mostly to start crying. It was inconvenient, annoying, and maybe distressing—but not cruel. As a man, and a Frenchman, and a soldier, and a child whose father told him not to cry, who didn’t cry after his father’s death because he was busy holding his mother together, Nico’s response to being very upset was not to cry.

It was to be a fucking asshole.

Cold, shut down, mean. Uncooperative and rude. Knocked way off center, lost from his own foundations, he was quick to argue or just stop speaking to me, even in public. I told Denise that he was ruining my life. I’d spent eighteen months wishing for nothing more, aside from my sanity, than to be close to him. Now that I was, I just wanted to get away.

He wasn’t like that all the time. He was often delightful, everything I’d fallen in love with. He invited me to lunch; that was how he would say it, even though we lived together and were always sitting in the same studio apartment, “I would like to inveet you to lunch.” He was adapting to my episodes—he’d stopped telling me to calm down or suck it up, and started waiting it out with me, supporting me through it.

Overall, though, his moods were unpredictable and extreme. I’d been in a relationship like that before and hated it, so I was extrasensitive to the dynamic, along with being extrasensitive to everything in general. In a way, his episodes were worse than mine. He hadn’t been practicing acute self-awareness for a year. So another difference between us when we were being monsters was that he had defensive denial that wouldn’t allow him to know he was being a monster. That knowledge cannot be pointed out to someone from the outside. And he did not have a coffee-cake test.

“You’re being a monster,” I would say to him when he’d turned hard and angry, snapping at me at breakfast, using that seething, scathing tone maladjusted spouses sometimes use.

“No,” he said. “It’s you.” He could keep it up for hours, or days, or a week, that frightening hostility, before recognizing what had upset him (he hadn’t been able to call the doctor to schedule a checkup for himself) and coming clean about his real issue (he felt like an impotent loser) and turning into his old self. Sometimes, his issue turned out to be the same as my issue: fear that we would lose each other. After one rough, mean weekend, he broke down, saying just, “So many bad things have happened in my life.”

Your feelings are not for show
, his father used to tell him when he was growing up.
Lock them into your belly, and you keep them there until you die.

We took turns ruining things.

One day, we went for a sushi lunch, and Nico was happy and affectionate and sitting close to me and kissing my cheek. Since we were sitting at the sushi bar, the sushi chef—some hipster with a mustache and tattoos—couldn’t avoid seeing that; I could sense him watching us out of the corner of his eye.

“Please get away from me,” I said quietly to Nico, burning with agitation. He didn’t move fast enough. “Get away from me!” I whisper-yelled. Outside, and back home, my anxiety at stabbing-fantasy levels, I barked at Nico. That kind of PDA, I hollered, didn’t swing in America.

Nico wasn’t buying that outburst. He’d been told that public Frenching wasn’t normal but had seen plenty of other couples cheek-nuzzling. We fought about it, and I stayed tight and irritated, for days. A few nights later, lying next to him, I woke him up after he’d fallen asleep to fume, “You’re always TOUCHING ME,” with my jaw locked and my body tense and my fists in angry balls.

Had Denise been there, she would have pointed out that in that state of rigidity—against the world, against my own truths—whatever I was thinking was likely to be a defensive self-lie.

But Denise wasn’t there. So.

“You’re fucking SUFFOCATING ME,” I said. “You can’t just touch me in public whenever you want because you’re fucking EUROPEAN. That’s not how it fucking works here! I’ve
TOLD YOU
.”

Eventually, another day—after days of this!—worn out and in his arms, with his warmth surrounding my rib cage in our bed, I softened up enough and there the truth was, sitting in my mouth.

“I didn’t want the sushi guy to know that I’m in love,” I said suddenly, out of nowhere for both of us.

“What?” Nico asked. “Why?”

“Because. Then he would know that I needed you.”

Nico made a face. “And?”

“He would think I couldn’t take care of myself,” I said, and as the realization came together, I started crying. “And then he would think I would be easy to kill.”

Wheeeeee!

Then I took Nico out for a rousing bout of karaoke one night, and he struggled to make English conversation and fit in, but decided that his problem instead was that he hated me. He spat rude answers at my friends when they tried to engage him. He stood apart from me in the bar, however I tried to draw him in and soothe him, continually moving away as I interacted with others so he could glare at me from a distance.

“I think we’re the right people for each other, but it’s just not the right time,” he said. It was after another time he’d been pissy and mean, over an entire weekend trip with Tana. “I can’t help you, and you can’t help me.” He was in a tailspin. The guy who’d waved away our language difference and all other obstacles was now suggesting that we call it quits and write it off as bad timing.

He was right. About the timing. There was a reason they told you not to date or make any major changes for the first year in AA. The stress of new recovery is too hard on a relationship, and the stress of a new relationship is too hard on recovery. The path of my healing was complicated, inching onward but then doubling way back on itself, constantly surprising me with how much worse
all the way worse
could keep getting, or staying at previously reached depths of worse but then moving in a new direction, toward ground that hadn’t yet been covered. But there could only be one trajectory for our relationship. It was forward or nothing. We were already in love. We couldn’t live without one another as long as we were in touch, and maybe even if we weren’t, and we couldn’t take it slow or casual even if we wanted to, which we didn’t, because we lived in different countries. We were going to make it through this together, or we weren’t going to make it together.

I didn’t think Monster Nico was the real him, at his boiled-down essence. I considered it a layer of temporary maladjustment and unresolved pain. Underneath, I was certain there was his shining, perfect core. And I was hardly one to be accused of schoolgirl optimism. Somehow, generously, Nico believed the same thing about me. Even when I couldn’t anymore.

Submerged as we were in it already, we were getting ready to dive deeper still into the PTSD pool. Since before my own PTSD essay had come out, I’d been laying the groundwork for a story about the impact veterans’ PTSD had on their relationships. Though I’d intended to focus on sex, the spouses I talked to were eager to get the word out about something else: that living with someone with PTSD was giving them PTSD, too. “Secondary trauma.” After regular phone and e-mail check-ins over nearly a year, I was finally going to meet Brannan Vines, founder of Family of a Vet. And I was taking Nico, who’d been in the United States just a month, to her Alabama hometown with me.

T’inquiete pas
, he had always said to me.
Don’t worry. I won’t stop to try to understand.

Trying out our relationship full time, and trying to do it in tandem with our issues, we tested the limits of Nico’s promise. Lately, we couldn’t ignore that it was more easily whispered than kept.

13.

Navy SEALs are screened carefully for vulnerability to PTSD. They’re resistant to it.

—
FBI S
PECIAL
A
GENT
D
AVID
R
OSSI,
C
RIMINAL
M
INDS,
Season Seven, Episode Three

My first morning at work on the secondary-trauma story, I was already taking to dramatic journaling while I sat on the sidewalk outside my hotel.