Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(79)

At the bottom of my clutch, kept hidden for weeks, was a razor blade folded into a dollar bill. I unwrapped it, held it to my left wrist, and cut, remembering as I did so a supercilious young surgeon I’d met at a party some twenty-odd years before, who’d told me—to shock me, I’m sure, with his callousness—that the best technique was not across but rather up the arm, vertically. Him I paid little mind, but his advice I filed away, on the off chance it might come in handy someday.

He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t expected it, but the pain was astonishing—a feeling of total wrongness and distress that didn’t even register as pain—and the mess was immediate. My hands went slippery, and I wasn’t dexterous enough any longer to use my mutilated left to do the same to my right. I sank to the floor—clammy linoleum, the kind that was patterned to look like marble.

If I’d really wanted to be effective, I could have just jumped. Erased myself. Hart Crane’d off the ship, and that would have been it. It’s ugly, I know, to admit that part—just part—of why I did it the way that I did was because I wanted Max to see me. To witness, publically, how his affair with Julia had hurt me.

I tried to focus on my rage—my only source of warmth—as my teeth chattered and my head swam.

True, I had been no blanket-on-the-grass-in-the-sunshine picnic to be around during that last year we were together. But he didn’t have to do what he’d done. Not the way he’d done it.

He should have asked for the divorce first, before sneaking around. But for all his seeming nonchalance and joie de vivre, this was one area wherein he lacked courage: He would never risk a loss without a contingency plan, without assuring himself of a soft landing—in this case, in Julia’s much younger and less complicated lap. And now she’d be waiting to nurse him—and Johnny!—through this tragedy. Good luck, Julia! Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Then the door opened, and Vivian found me. Crying, finally. Dress ruined. A bloody mess.

It is my understanding that because I had been gone a long time, Max had sent our new friend to fetch me. Typical Max! I could easily picture his gambit, outwardly concerned but actually cavalier, pushing off what ought to have been his responsibility with such charm that it would never have crossed poor Vivian’s mind to say no.

Something’s wrong, he would have said. She never takes more than two minutes in the bathroom. Could you go check on her?

And so Vivian unearthed the heap of me: such an embarrassment.

By the time Herb was sprinting for help and Max was manhandling me—crushing his thick thumb into my armpit, just the way the Army had taught him—I had blacked out, but I could still hear silly Vivian fussing innocently about, looking for jagged edges and smashed glass, trying to figure out what accident had befallen me. I’m murdering myself, you moron, I wanted to shout.

The shipboard medics rushed me to the infirmary, where the doctors stabilized me.

When we landed in Manhattan they checked me into St. Vincent’s.

I wasn’t glad that I hadn’t died. And I wasn’t sad that I hadn’t. I wasn’t anything.

*

Afterwards, when they were holding me, trying to figure out where to ship me next, making arrangements for residential treatment at Silver Hill, Helen came to visit.

She asked me—as a lot of my friends would ask, actually—why I hadn’t told someone. Why I hadn’t gone to one or another of them for help.

That was a fair question. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it coming.

I had always cultivated a magpie mind: Any and every shred of life’s ephemera could come to serve as an adornment, either for verse or for advertising.

For the past year or so, though, the only baubles I had noticed were articles on alcoholism and subjects of that ilk. I clipped and saved pieces on mastering one’s impulses and preventing suicide. I hardly recall reading any of them, only collecting them: the expression of yet another unmastered impulse.

That afternoon—visiting hours, the end of January—Helen was sitting at my bedside. My left hand was under the covers because seeing it upset her too much: She had always been one to faint at the sight, or even the thought, of blood. But she clutched my right hand and looked into my eyes and waited for my answer.

Part of me wanted to ask why she, why they, hadn’t asked me if I needed help. They surely had to have noticed. But I could not blame them—did not blame them, not really. I did what I did. No one else was responsible.

In a way, it was my own independence—I could see now, after the incident—that had caused the incident. The very compulsion that had driven my achievements for so long had somehow begun to work against me.

It had never been an effort for me to keep up my aggressive vivacity—until suddenly it was, and I didn’t know how to get it back or what to do in its absence. And so I did not do anything, and I did not tell anyone.

The answer that I gave to Helen was:

“I have never cared for those who treat their friends as they would a charity ward.”

“But we’d have wanted to help,” she told me. “You know I would have. You know any of us would.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you would have. And you’re helping now. And I’m grateful. And I’m sorry, Helen. What I did was incredibly rude, and I’m sorry for that.”

She protested, but I knew I was right. My long, fine streak of charm had ended: I had jumped the groove, gracelessly scraping everything in my path. I had become boorish, embarrassing, but worst of all I had become exhausting. I was sure I heard a sigh of relief every time someone trundled me away into a cab or train, or took their leave of me through a hospital door.