A Really Good Day(35)
“So you threaten to leave because you think that’s what’s best for him?”
“Exactly. But here’s the problem. I can’t trust him.”
My husband cast his eyes to the heavens.
“He has terrible taste in women,” I continued. “He’s attracted to the neurotic and broken. He specializes in fruitlessly trying to fix the unfixable. I’ll never leave him, because there’s no point in leaving him. He’ll just go out and find someone even crazier than me.” If I died, he probably wouldn’t marry my actress friend, the one to whom I thoughtfully provided comprehensive Ambien-fueled instructions on how to take my place. He wouldn’t be into her, because she has her shit together.
“For God’s sake,” my husband muttered.
The therapist said, “Do you believe him when he says he loves you?”
“Of course! Didn’t you hear what I said? It’s his love that’s the problem! It’s proof of his terrible judgment.” Using the logic of Groucho Marx: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” Unassailable!
“Say it,” she said. “Tell him you know he loves you.”
I turned to my husband. “I know you love me, even though loving me is a terrible mistake.”
The therapist shook her head. “Just tell him you know he loves you. Leave off the rest of the sentence.”
I tried again. “I know you love me because your problem is that you are only attracted to awful women.”
“Try again.”
“I know you love me, but you shouldn’t.”
“Try again.”
“I know you love me, but I don’t deserve it.”
“Again.”
It took about a dozen attempts before I finally managed, sobbing, to bite off the rest of the sentence and let the five words hang in the air.
“I know you love me.”
My husband’s eyes filled. He pulled me close. I collapsed in his arms, crying so hard I soaked his shirt.
The hour was up.
He cried, he told me after, because it made him so sad to see how hard it was for me to say those five words.
Since then, all day long, I’ve been saying them lightly, almost as a joke.
“I know you love me,” I said in the car coming home from therapy.
“I know you love me,” I said when we walked up the stairs to our porch.
“I know you love me,” I said as we cooked dinner together.
“I know you love me,” I said as we made love.
Every time I said the words, I finished the sentence silently in my head. But maybe that’s just today. Things might look different tomorrow. Tomorrow, after I dose, maybe I won’t need to finish the sentence at all. Or, better yet, maybe “I know you love me” will finally feel like a complete sentence.
Day 16
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: Stomach upset.
Mood: Tired but good spirits.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Average.
Work: Productive.
Pain: Some minor pain.
I spent the afternoon with Jim Fadiman in Santa Cruz, at his modest work retreat, a small, unrenovated apartment with a million-dollar view of the Pacific. The surfers were out, bobbing and paddling through the swells, as seagulls pinwheeled through the sky. The view of crashing surf is so compelling that Fadiman has had to turn his desk to face the wall in order to accomplish anything. Maybe I should stop kvetching about feeling claustrophobic facing a wall in my husband’s studio and pretend that I have to sit that way because there is something behind me so breathtakingly beautiful that I could not do a lick of work if I faced the other direction.
Fadiman uses the apartment as a private space to work, away from the distractions of home and, presumably, of his wife of many decades, Dorothy, a documentary filmmaker. Together they have two daughters, both of whom are grown. He speaks of them fondly and with charming paternal pride.
His bookshelves are stuffed with many of the same volumes that I’ve been accumulating in my own psychedelic library: Hofmann’s LSD, My Problem Child, Tom Shroder’s Acid Test, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle. I wonder if, when his daughters were young, their reactions to the books were the same as my children’s, a puzzled frown, a rolled eye, a sniff that somehow manages to encompass both disgust and curiosity.
In addition to having a similar library, Fadiman drives the same car as I do, a silver Prius—which, to be fair, is the least coincidental of coincidences. We live in the Bay Area. I once parked my car in a row of half a dozen identical ones in the parking lot of my local Whole Foods.*1 Still, same books, same car, same psychedelic interests.
Over Chinese food at his favorite local restaurant, Fadiman told me the story of his life, from the time the government shut down his research and derailed the career for which he had been trained at Harvard and Stanford, until his recent work collecting narratives of microdosing. He is the most companionable of conversationalists. Even when talking about his own life, he makes room for questions and opinions. For a man who does so many interviews and speaks in public so often, he seems uninvested in listening to the sound of his own voice. He asks questions in a nonjudgmental way that encourages confidences. He seems trustworthy and, above all, interested. Though, honestly, how do I really know that? I’ve only interviewed the man a few times. Maybe his daughters complain that he monopolizes the conversation and never evinces any interest in what they have to say. For all I know he might have given them a box of tapes of himself droning on to his therapist about forced collectivization in the Ukraine.