An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [52]
To my amazement, the ward psychiatrist came in accompanied by a very tall, good-looking man who looked at me and smiled wonderfully. He turned out to be a visiting professor, a psychiatrist on leave from the Royal Army Medical Corps, and we liked one another immediately. That afternoon we had a cup of coffee together in the hospital cafeteria, and I found myself opening up to him in a way that I hadn’t done in a very long time. He was soft-spoken, quiet and thoughtful, and didn’t push too hard against the edges of my still very raw soul. We both loved music and poetry; had military backgrounds in common; and, because I had studied in Scotland and England, had common experiences of cities, hospitals, and countrysides as well. He was interested in learning about the differences between British and American psychiatric practices, so I asked him to consult on one of my most difficult patients, a schizophrenic girl who believed she was a witch. He quickly saw through to the medical and psychotherapeutic issues that had been so slow to come out of her guarded and frightened mind. He was unbelievably kind to her, while remaining very much a doctor, and she sensed—as I did later—that she could trust him implicitly. His manner was matter-of-fact, but warm, and I enjoyed watching him gently phrase and then rephrase questions so as to win her trust and reach beyond her paranoia.
David and I frequently had lunch together during his months at UCLA, often in the university’s botanical gardens. He repeatedly asked me to dinner, and I, as repeatedly, said I could not because I was still married and again living with my husband, after our initial separation. He returned to London, and, although we wrote to one another occasionally, I was preoccupied with teaching, running a clinic, getting tenure, problems in my marriage, and another bad attack of mania, which, as day the night, was followed by a long, absolutely paralyzing depression.
My husband and I, although we had remained close friends and saw one another often, finally decided that our marriage was beyond the point of repair. I don’t think it ever really had a chance after I had impulsively left during my first manic episode. But we both tried. We talked a lot, and we discussed our mistakes and possibilities over many a meal and glass of wine. There was a great deal of goodwill and caring, but nothing could put our marriage back together after all that had happened in the wake of my illness. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I wrote to David that I had again and finally separated from my husband. Life went on, a blur of clinic meetings, writing papers, seeing patients, and teaching residents, interns, and graduate students. I lived in terror that someone would find out how ill I had been, how fragile I still was, but—oddly and fortunately—sensitivity and keen observation are not always the long suits of academic psychiatrists.
Then one day, more than eighteen months after he had left UCLA, I returned to my office to find David sitting in my chair, playing with a pencil, and smiling broadly. He said, half laughing, “Surely you’ll have dinner with me now. I’ve waited a long time and come a long way.” I did, of course, and we had several marvelous days in Los Angeles before he returned to England. He asked me to come stay with him for a few weeks in London. Although I was still recovering from a long suicidal depression, and my thoughts were so halting and my feelings so gray I could scarcely bear it, I somehow knew that things would be made better by being with him. They were. Immeasurably. We had long, late-spring evening walks in St. James’s Park,