Free Manic by Terri Cheney Page B

week.
    Perhaps I was being too cautious. My firm, after all, was one of the most liberal in Beverly Hills, famous for espousing humanitarian causes, for championing the rights of the poor and the weak. But weakness in a client is one thing; weakness in a lawyer is something else altogether. In my second year, all the junior associates were given hand-tooled leather copies of The Art of War for Hanukkah, because that was how we saw ourselves, as modern-day warriors, and warriors are never allowed to be weak.
    So I slunk in and out of my therapist’s office. I knew that I needed to be there, but I didn’t quite know why. I had no official diagnosis. All I knew was that something was wrong, terribly wrong, and had been for almost a year. My body wouldn’t move. Every gesture felt leaden and labored. Even breathing required an effort of will. Worst of all, I couldn’t answer the phone. The message slips kept piling up and up until stacks of little white papers littered my desk. And yet, I somehow managed to keep my job. Unhappiness in a lawyer seemed to be the norm, nothing worth getting upset about.
    My therapist acknowledged the demands of my practice, but that was only a part of it, he said. There was more to my misery than met the eye. Just what, he didn’t know or tell me. But every Monday and Thursday, he would sit in his big brown swivel-back chair and nod as I cried my way through half a box of tissues. After a while I almost forgot he was there. I left reality behind in the waiting room and began to speak my fantasies out loud: how I wished everyone in my law firm would die and leave me, at last, alone, or how I wished I could fall asleep one night and never wake up.
    Finally, he spoke. “Personally, I hate ultimatums. But professionally, I feel I have no choice but to tell you that unless you agree to be hospitalized, I will be forced to commit you myself.”
    “You—you’re kidding, right?”
    He shook his head. “I couldn’t be more serious. For three months now, I’ve listened to you talk about death as if it was some kind of romantic adventure. That’s simply not normal cognition.”
    “But it’s not supposed to be normal,” I said. “I was just fantasizing—no, free-associating would be a better term. That’s what you’re supposed to do in a therapist’s office, right? Free-associate?”
    He leaned back in his chair. “Your fantasies are the key to your subconscious,” he said. “And your subconscious obviously wants to die.”
    “But I can’t go to the hospital,” I said with frustration. “I’ve got an appellate brief due at the end of the month, and three motions in limine next week.”
    To my surprise, he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you promise to check yourself in voluntarily, you can leave whenever you like.”
    “What kind of hospital are we talking about?”
    “There’s a very nice place not far from here. Exclusive, quiet, beautiful grounds.”
    “And what would I be expected to do if I went there?”
    “Whatever you like. Read, rest, putter around in the garden. We’ve come a long way since The Snake Pit, you know.”
    “But it’s still a mental hospital—won’t there be a lot of lunatics there?”
    He smiled. “Come on, you ought to know better than that. Rich people are never crazy, they’re colorful. And it ought to be a healthy change for you, after being surrounded by lawyers all day. Maybe it would help if you thought of it this way. Your brain is like a Ferrari—it’s a world-class instrument when it’s running right. But it’s highly temperamental, and sometimes it needs a good tune-up. You wouldn’t take a Ferrari in to a Jiffy Lube to get serviced, would you? No, you’d take it in to the Ferrari shop, and let the experts tinker away. Let’s let the experts take a look at you.”
    How well he knew me. It was not for nothing that of all the towns in all the world, I had settled in Beverly Hills. Nor was it any great surprise that I had