As a distraction, I rode my bike over the bridges into Boston and to the museums, where I enjoyed the art and the generous air-conditioning. For the first time, I came to understand what a New England summer really was. I hadn’t felt joy in many months, but once in a while, in front of a Sargent painting or while pacing the green of the cemetery at Mount Auburn, a tectonic plate shifted and I could think, Maybe I don’t have to die.
Nate still came up on weekends. I was ashamed how hard it was when he wasn’t present. To wind down in the evenings, I tried to read, but either from the antidepressants or the mono, my wonderful and expansive memory, the seat of my personality, had disintegrated overnight. Throwing down Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, I consoled myself, saying the philosophy wasn’t going anywhere. This is part of the process, I reminded myself, but what process I was in I did not know. And then, of course, this was mild depression! Imagine severe! My law school friends were consumed by their 2L summers, and the PhD students, while friendly, were not social, so I saw few people outside of class and between Nate’s visits. Mostly, I doodled, read magazines, and kept my apartment immaculate as if no one lived there. I did not sleep.
Latin was my sixth language. But I couldn’t write a conjugation for my shaky hand or complete a line of translation without resting. I tried to do whatever was the equivalent of blinking my brain into focus, but it remained intractable. What was worse, I found myself uncurious. When one especially ragged day I missed a Latin quiz, I knew that was it. If I couldn’t finish one six-week summer language course, then how could I possibly continue my studies in the fall?
I was in my midtwenties when I did my time in the Stew. I was beyond in loco parentis. I hadn’t told my parents yet what had happened, and Harvard had no responsibilities besides making sure I didn’t hurt myself or others. In an administrative building on Radcliffe Square, I handed the leave form to an office worker who didn’t bat an eye. Would she try to talk me out of my decision? Or would she agree this was right? But she didn’t utter a word. As she typed into the computer, I lingered on her profile. She didn’t look at all like Dean Kay from Princeton. Here, there was no Dean Kay, no one to encourage or deny me. The only person I had discussed the decision with was Nate, who was now my family, not through marriage or blood, but through struggle and common purpose.
On an unseasonably cool day in July, in a slight drizzle, I moved out of Peabody Terrace, where I had settled with optimism only ten months earlier. I drove the Penske down to New Jersey, following Nate in a car. He had subleased a furnished apartment on Princeton’s main square so that it would be more comfortable for me. The apartment felt grown-up, with black-and-white subway tile in the bathroom, a galley kitchen, herringbone floors, and a fireplace. On my twenty-sixth birthday, he threw a small party, and my college roommate, Eve, came in on the train from New York, where she now lived. We sat around the coffee table and ate the homemade pizza Nate had rolled out and baked on a stone. I had lost almost fifteen pounds, and through Eve’s eyes, I saw I was ashen and too thin. I hadn’t gotten used to the seizures, where the movie of my life skipped and I lost a nanosecond, zipping into the future. When Eve asked questions, I answered as thoroughly as I could but no more. For the first time in my life, I did not have the inclination to perform, and I saw that nothing bad happened.
The summer nights on the square were desultory and sweet, the breeze moving with something like the ambition of springtime. In the back was a courtyard where I sat with a watercolor book, scumbling the ferns with a bristle brush. The lights from the apartments threw slanted purple shadows onto the courtyard stones, and the reflecting pools glowed. In the deepening dusk, I painted the potted coleus, cool violet and open. Inside the apartment was Nate and the pacific stability he represented. During this time, he began his practice of loving me, because “it takes years to do anything good and worthwhile.”
It was from the courtyard that I finally called my parents to tell them about the Stew.
“I knew something was wrong from your voice when you called back then,” Umma said. When I told my parents about my leave from Harvard, I didn’t try to justify myself, nor did I lie and tell them it was “just for one year.” I would try never to lie to them, or myself, ever again. “Where are you going to live now?” Appa asked.
I told them. More lights blinked on above the courtyard, and I struggled to keep my voice low.
After the conversation, I walked into the apartment and threw my phone on the bed. “Not only did they not understand, they’re upset that we’re ‘living in sin,’ ” I told Nate.
That night, he’d given me a debit card to his checking account. After paying for the moving truck down from Cambridge, I had less than forty dollars in the bank. If I hadn’t had Nate, I would have had to return to Houston, since I wasn’t strong enough to hold a full-time job. I put my head in my hands.
“They find out you were in a psychiatric hospital and that’s their reaction? They should be getting on the next plane,” he said, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. Nate didn’t go into lab after dinner anymore. His life before me had consisted of waking up before eight; eating something ascetic for breakfast; cycling into the physics department; after a light dinner, relaxing before heading back to lab, where he worked until one or two in the morning. But now, because of me, he stayed home.
His uncharacteristic judgment surprised me and confirmed that I had to leave my parents behind. I had already started with the Stew. Could I finish it? I had tried so many times, and it was always too painful. It was easier to embrace them while it pricked, a flower with thorns. I reached for them in my weakness, toward some time, perhaps in my imagination, when I felt entirely loved and content. But the memory was a mirage, shimmering and distant.
2.
WHEN OUR SUBLET ENDED, WE moved to a shabbier apartment above a bakery. Nate had spent most of his savings supporting his parents the year before, and me now, so we lived on a budget. We had no idea the attic apartment—a Puccini-style bohemian garret—was infested with chihuahua-sized rats so audacious I woke up to one scurrying across the bedsheets. The ceiling sloped down at the edges of the apartment, so we knelt on a stool to do the dishes. One warm day, I smelled shit and discovered the wastewater line had been routed with the sewer, which off-gassed into the shower.
Despite all this, I remained hopeful. The import of the Stew was dawning on me, and I realized I had nearly died. Reentering life, I was propelled by the dramatic change in environment, and I vowed I’d never return to any place like McLean. Whatever allowed me to survive—and perhaps thrive—was what I would do, even if it meant going off script.
I tacked a note with my phone number on tear-away strips to the neighborhood coffee shop corkboard, plastered in business cards and yoga flyers. “Two Ivy League Tutors, Educated at Princeton, Harvard,” the note advertised. That afternoon, our first client called, a billionaire from the next town over. The friendly, easygoing man—if self-made billionaires can be at all easygoing—was originally from Boston and wanted to know how I had liked the town. “It was okay. The summer was best,” I said weakly. Over the weekend, I drove to his home and began to tutor his children.
Nate took up odd jobs, like setting out the daily department tea and cookies for the faculty and graduate students for seventeen dollars an hour. A star in the department, he shouldn’t have been washing coffee tins and picking up after the other students, but he did everything without complaint. In the meantime, I brushed up on the SAT and GRE and was hired as an instructor at the Princeton Review. I also got an internship at a catering company that paid seven dollars an hour. I didn’t mind—the wage was a windfall; I simply wanted to work, learn, and be creative. I re-created every recipe at home for Nate. I learned how to make a ganache, tie a filet mignon, bake a roasted pear and almond tart, and cook anything with blue cheese, because it was the rage then.
Besides groceries, I spent my earnings on painting classes and art supplies. I painted eight hours a day in a corner of our attic apartment which I turned into an art studio, a real—not dream—iteration of the white room I’d been searching for when I’d left college my sophomore year. In the late afternoon, I tutored. In the evening, I cooked and baked. Soon, I quit the catering company when I realized I preferred painting and could make up the money teaching. Three mornings a week, I took painting classes at the arts center in town. When the assignment was to make an abstract self-portrait, I went to the library and read about Abstract Expressionism and Cubism before I made the paintings. For every assignment, I did four or five more paintings to experiment. I also took classes at the community college, where I was the oldest among the eighteen-year-olds getting associate’s degrees, while at the arts center I was the youngest in a sea of retirees. Wherever I was, the painting never felt like work. It only felt like difficult, freeing play.
I had intended to keep up with my Latin and ancient Greek, but month after month, the texts remained untouched. One day, as I moved my old grad school notebooks to another shelf, the drawing from the Stew fell out.
“Make a drawing,” the therapist had said. “Show where you are in life and what you want in the future.” Show what you want.
“This is me, right now, in the darkness,” I had shared with the group. “I’m trying to get to the other side of the bridge.” I pointed to where Nate and my family waited. Behind them was a star. Now that drawing was stuck between The Metaphysics of Morals and What We Owe to Each Other on a shelf in the rat-infested apartment.
You are not an artist, I had reminded myself in the Stew. You are a philosophy student, and philosophy is hard. Law school had been hard, too, but in another way; it had been about rules, like the rules of my mother, and so, too, had philosophy, except the rules were about living and thinking. In art, there were no rules, just the chance to listen to myself and express what came. In it, I found a sacred space for my idealism and the visibility I’d always yearned for.
As I embarked on an artistic life, from time to time I revisited the drawing of the black bridge, which appeared so crudely rendered now. In the Stew, I thought depression was on one side and health on the other, but maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was oughts I was stepping away from and something else I was moving toward. And what was the star? Worth, but perhaps not based on previous notions of success and external visibility. It gleamed yellow and bright, but in reality, it was mysterious. Nate said someday I would realize the Stew was not the end, but rather the beginning. Maybe that was part of the star, too.
Jon Peter had one magnificently long eyebrow hair that shot up out of the rest in a decorative flourish for his face. Unlike Salvador Dalí, for whom a similar ornamental stroke added frisson and focus, it served to soften Jon Peter and rendered him more approachable.
In some ways he was the art teacher with whom I had the most in common. Unlike my other painting instructors who were decades older, Jon Peter was my age. He wasn’t a hippie who pitted art against academia. Nor was he a Freudian like my portrait instructor, a curmudgeonly Russian who loved scandalizing his students’ suburban sensibilities by declaring that all painting was sex. Jon Peter was also the first person I grew close to in the world who hadn’t attended a traditional college, which of course was a religion in my family. After high school he trained at a small art school in Minnesota where he learned how to make a realistic portrait out of just four colors. This alchemy was what he was trying to impart in “Techniques of the Old Masters.”
I felt tremendously capable in front of my paints. At twenty-six, I was young enough to possess some blind confidence, but old enough not to take for granted any opportunities, since I had a share in creating them. When I painted, I heard only my voice, no one else’s. The feeling of completion and utter wellness that accompanied drawing when I was a child pierced through like a pinprick of light. I laid out my palette with generous squeezes of paint. From Jon Peter’s table of still life objects, I selected a vase, a platter, and two clusters of red grapes. I arranged the objects as artfully as I could in the black box he had us construct, and clamped on a light which threw a shadow onto the back in the shape of a midnight crescent. I unpacked a large canvas and, using my hog-hair brush, etched out the world that was darkness from the world that was light.
The class broke midway into the three hours. The other students milled about with coffee, but I wasn’t tired—I never was when painting.
“You might rest. You only have one arm after all,” Jon Peter said, coming up behind me. A couple of months earlier, I’d hurt my right arm while scoring stained glass.
“One arm, which I need to save for painting, feeding, and washing myself,” I said.
“Looks great though.” He pointed at my painting, which was all reds and magentas. Because I couldn’t blend finely with my left hand, I placed each brushstroke down as decisively as I could, letting it sit on the canvas, and the strokes together formed a sculptural texture.
“The grapes are good,” he went on. “I see you got the form shadows on each one of those. The highlights are going to be less pronounced because the fruit is fake, not wet and juicy.”
“I’m going to set this up when I get home and buy some real grapes. See what the difference is.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jon Peter studying my bandaged arm.
“Are you a righty or a lefty?” he asked with mock suspicion. “I wouldn’t have guessed you weren’t a lefty except for the sling.”
“Righty. I am getting better at painting with my left. I can be more precise once my arm heals.”
He furrowed his brow, and that one dramatic eyebrow hair drooped. “You seem fearless,” he said. “My guess is you don’t require instruction from me, I just need to get out of your way. Whatever you need, tell me, and I’ll make sure you get it.”
The long hair popped up again.
3.
A YEAR AFTER THE STEW, I opened my eyes, and the clock next to the bed read seven thirty. I had slept through the night.
I was healing myself.
