“You’re going to be fine. You can go back to sleep on the plane and Lawrence will be waiting for you at the airport.”
His eyes still looked empty. They were two black holes. I’d been the one who had succeeded in killing whatever life they’d had, thanks to my tiny increments of poison. He was no longer manic, but now he was crushed. And now I knew I had done the wrong thing.
“I’ll come see you in Paris, I promise. You’ll be fine,” I said, holding him tight.
I walked away and I didn’t turn back. I just couldn’t bear to see him hunched on that plastic chair, so small and scared, but they were already calling my flight.
Almost twelve hours later I was home, back into the other universe.
* * *
I had been away only a handful of days, but the time I’d spent in New Mexico seemed like weeks. I was frazzled, confused and overwrought. Lorenzo asked me about Teo, but I could tell he did so more out of obligation than real concern. I gave him a brief report, perceiving an undertone of impatience in his questions. He must’ve sensed that the trip to New Mexico had been a journey into my past, and I could tell he couldn’t wait for us to move on with our life as a couple. He listed what was going to happen in the next few days: his brother’s birthday party, a new exhibition at the modern-art museum he wanted to see, the Sunday farmers’ market, and maybe a short trip to Tuscany, where he wanted to rent a house for the summer. I was jet-lagged and emotionally drained and wished I could just stay in bed for three days, but I told him I was happy to do every single thing he had planned.
I resumed my work in the veterinary clinic, where, instead of the injured wild animals of the past, I was now treating mostly cats and dogs that lived in city apartments. I didn’t go to Paris as I had promised, but I kept in touch with Teo. I called him once or twice a week. He was still living in his brother’s apartment in the Marais—an arrangement he didn’t like very much, he said—and was once again seeing a psychiatrist. I could tell he was taking his pills because he sounded calm yet depressed, as if he had no spark, and he never had much to say.
Eventually our calls began to thin out; a month or so later Teo mentioned he had moved out of his brother’s flat and had sublet a small apartment near Place de la Bastille. He was planning to stay there for a while, and he was seeing Daphne again, on and off. A friend of his, a photo editor for an online art and culture magazine, had offered to give him some work as a photographer. Teo still sounded joyless, but at least I felt that he was beginning to resurface. I called him again a few times but he never answered and didn’t return my calls.
I thought it was a good sign.
* * *
It was spring. Early one morning I was at the clinic dealing with a feisty Siberian cat that needed a shot and was giving me a hard time. Lorenzo called once, twice. I didn’t pick up the phone until I was done and my client had left. Then I called him back.
“I wanted you to hear it from me before you read it in the paper. It’s about Teo.”
“What happened?”
Once again my knees gave way. So this was it—the call I’d always feared. Lorenzo had just seen the headline on the La Repubblica website: WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER SUICIDE IN PARIS. Teo had jumped off a bridge into the Seine, a few blocks from his brother’s apartment.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I know how close you two were. Please come home. I won’t be going to the studio; I’ll be here if you need me.”
I was devastated and I was angry too, as one always is when someone leaves us like that, without warning, without even asking for help.
So many questions I had no answers to haunted me for a long time. Why? Had he stopped taking the meds? Was that the reason he had plunged into such a hopeless depression? Why had I not tried harder when he had stopped answering my calls? Was it because I wanted to believe he was feeling better so I could stop worrying about him and live my life in peace? It seemed so cruel that his only options were reduced to manic euphoria or deepest gloom. But bipolar disorder meant exactly that: it was either North Pole or South Pole, with nothing in between. He must’ve been exhausted living like this, like a pendulum constantly swinging from one excess to the other.
With time our last encounter in Taos acquired a sort of magical tint, a strange adventure that to me now, years later, seems more like a dream: Teo’s new eyes; our mission to Blue Lake, whose color white people were not supposed to see; a fake map written on a crumpled piece of paper; the forest and the aspen trees that connected their roots underground and changed their color simultaneously.
But most of all it was the elks’ apparition in the moonlight that stayed with me. In the following years I always connected that flash of wildness to Teo, like a reminder that those parallel lives of secret and mostly invisible creatures living in northern forests or the dense African bush had always been around us, closer than we imagined, and always would be. The thought reassured me, as if the glimpse I had caught of them had been a message from him to me and me only.
THERE MIGHT BE BLOOD
Diana told her friends she was going to take some time off from her marriage, making it sound like a whimsical plan. She called it “an adventure of self-discovery,” smirking in a self-deprecating way to show it was meant ironically. The plan included a novel—the novel she claimed she had always meant to write—in case anybody wondered what she was going to do for two months in Rome by herself. Friends encouraged her—how could they not?—but most of them figured there must be serious trouble between her and Mark. Nobody knew exactly what—they had always been very private, careful to project the image of a solid couple. To her friends Diana didn’t seem the type of woman who suddenly needed her independence so badly as to leave her husband in New York and move to a city where she didn’t know anybody and didn’t speak the language. The idea that she was going to write a novel also sounded ludicrous, even pitiable.
Mark seemed indifferent to Diana’s preparations for her journey. Throughout their relationship, even before their marriage, he had always been the one calling the shots, and now, for the first time, he found himself waiting for her next move. At first he thought her idea to live in Rome for two months was just a tactic to punish him and didn’t believe she would go through with it. Only when she announced she had canceled, until her return, all the classes at Diana’s Kitchenworks—the successful cooking school she had opened a few years earlier—did he realize she was actually leaving him, although temporarily. He didn’t ask questions but he sulked, in the passive-aggressive way that lately had become a familiar trait of his.
Diana had found a sublet on a website called Rome for Nomads, a fitting name for those who despised the idea of being just a tourist. The site listed “a trove of secret information for the experienced traveler” and, in addition to authentic restaurants and great shopping tips, it advertised charming places to stay and feel at home “and live the way Romans do.” The apartment she picked was near Piazza Navona, right in the heart of the city. A top floor with a terrace in a palazzo built in the seventeenth century that bore the name of the ancient family—princes, it appeared—whose descendants still occupied one entire floor. It was expensive, but she had done some clever haggling with the owner, and because it was going to be a long-term sublet, she managed to get a considerable discount.