VIII. Hospital

VIII. Hospital

I knew that things were not going well, although  I still had no clue as to how badly they were actually going.  I had pinned many of my hopes on the Christmas vacation, during which we were all to be together, and we could work out some of our problems face-to-face, and  have some sort of healing.  Just before the vacation these hopes, too, were dashed.  

 I got a call  from Tina on a Wednesday night. She said she was going to kill herself. Now,  ladies and gentlemen of the jury, please attend.  Suicide was a subject we had spoken of so often, it was practically table talk.  We had been so depressed and so disappointed for so long, that,  over the years, we had discussed several plans for individual or group suicide.  This is not to say we treated the subject in a trivial  manner; far from it-- I know I was a very serious about it when I considered it, and one time when Tina was depressed I actually saved her, in the nick of time, from running out in front of a speeding car.  However,  I could not get my mind around the thought of her actually doing it, when she spoke of it in the exactly the same tone of voice she had spoken of it so many times before.  So I heard her cry “Wolf!” and did not believe the wolf was verily at the gates. “I’m going to kill myself!” “Sure, Sweetie, I know, you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

She maintains that she had said many times, "I feel like  killing myself," but she had never  before actually said, "I'm going to kill myself." In any case, I did not believe she was going to do it, but I made her promise not to do it until she had calmed down and called me the next night.  The next night she did not call me, and when I called her no one answered.  I still was not deeply troubled, because she hardly ever kept appointments, and I was not surprised that she was not where she was supposed to be when she said she going to be there.  I was actually relieved she did not pick up the phone, because that meant she was out with friends or something and had probably got over it. 

The next morning I got an emergency call from a mental hospital  in San Jose.  Tina spoke to me in a drugged voice and told me another lie.  She said that she had been out of the apartment for a while when her therapist called her, and the therapist, justifiably worried, had called 911.  She told me the police had arrived at her apartment minutes after she had arrived home from dinner with some of the other  Steinbeck fellows.  She told me that when there is  a reasonable suspicion on the part of a health-care professional that a person is going to hurt him/herself, the police have their course set out for them, and they have to take the person  into custody  for something like a 48 hour observation.  Thus, through a bureaucratic foul-up she had landed in the hospital. 

Little did I know, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that she really was going to kill herself.  She had a plan.  She had a note.  She had the pills.  She was calling all her dear ones to say goodbye, even me, although I didn't even know it. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it was not her therapist who had called 911, it was Dan Tucker.  I found all this out more than four months after it happened, so the rest of this tale must be told from two perspectives: the perspective of what I thought had happened, and the perspective of what had really happened.  

My first reaction was to be sympathetic for Tina, who had landed in something like a jail against her will,  due to the overreaction of a therapist, bullied by bureaucracies and white head-dressed nurses, a humiliating scenario at best;  my second reaction was to be pissed off about the whole thing; my final reaction was helplessness,  because I couldn't imagine what I was supposed to do.  Tina's sisters knew what to do--they came to visit her. They pampered her with chocolates and Chinese dinners, did her laundry, cleaned her apartment.  Somehow, they knew something serious had happened.  Tina never forgave me, and will possibly never ever forgive me for not coming to her in this crisis, even though her lie had made me think there was no crisis to attend.  

I wish to underline this point: I was operating based on an imbroglio of misinformation. Ignorant of the true situation I responded inappropriately. And Tina was mad at me for not responding appropriately to the true situation, even though she had surreptitiously hidden the true situation  from me.

Remember too, dear jury, that I, as yet, did not know about Dan Tucker, although everybody else and her cousin did.  It was guilt over Dan Tucker, at betraying me, that was at the heart of her suicide attempt; and she could not explain fully the nature of the suicide attempt, without confessing she was having an affair with the hermit fur trapper, who as far as I knew, was merely a friend who had taken her for a boat ride.  Whenever I talked to her on the phone, she appeared calm and confident, actually moreso than I had heard her in a long time. Then she dropped her other bombshell: she was not coming home for Christmas; her psychiatrist had forbidden her to travel, she had to stay put, how about me coming down to San Jose? This would have meant not  seeing the boys, and spending about a thousand dollars. I don't remember whether this was an additional thousand dollars on top of the plane ticket she had already bought, or was a total of a thousand dollars, which would have been maybe only five or six hundred dollars more than the ticket she had already bought.  Either way this plan completely exploded my dream of a family Christmas at home.  I couldn't understand why she couldn't take a taxi to the airport and fly home as we had planned.  I said, " Fuck it, " and hung up.

Thus, for the sum of maybe $600, I betrayed the love of my life, left her stranded and alone in a dangerous city at the supreme crisis of  her life, and practically handed her over to another man.