This isn't a story. It's a confession.
When you marry someone with bipolar disorder, some might say you're committing yourself to two people, the high, manic person and the low, depressed person. Actually, it's three people. This is because for a few months, sometimes weeks, sometimes just days, you are with the person that's neither low nor high. Some might call this the "real" person.
We call them Beatrice, Moana and Sgt Sparkles.
I can't remember which woman I fell in love with. Twenty years ago, I wasn't too tuned into the differences between Beatrice's personas. I like to think all three caught my eye and my heart. Beatrice and I worked together, and I remember first noticing her when a birthday cake was brought to her desk, and everybody sang happy birthday. She didn't shrink or cover her face when this happened. She danced to the ridiculous tune with a kind of hip-swinging, bright-eyed, slow-motion boogie. It was the silliest, cutest thing I'd ever seen.
Beatrice has an impossibly generous demeanour. One of life's listeners. She's petite and curvaceously slim with big, bright eyes, enormous lips and a small but leonine nose. The other blokes in the office called her--to her face--" Le French Sex Kitten" and would do dumb, "ironic" wolf whistles at her. This was London in the nineties; we all thought we were post-sexism. For her part, Beatrice would refer to herself as Cat Girl or, sometimes, Mad Cat Lady.
The second time I noticed her was when she got some photos back from the chemists (!) She showed them to her sister, who cried and wrapped her arms around her. When I asked if everything was OK, her sister showed me the photos. They were different angles on a jar with what looked like a piece of Meccano and some bolts inside. They laughed at my confused face. The sister told me they were the pins just removed from Beatrice's ankle, which she'd smashed jumping from a third-floor window a couple years before. That night I dreamt of holding Beatrice tight. In the morning, I masturbated thinking about her.
The third time I paid attention to her, it was because I couldn't not. I'd just finished with my long-term girlfriend (it seemed wrong to be in bed with one person masturbating about another) and was dragged out by a colleague to a work drink. I had to pay attention to Beatrice because there was an invisible but very taut rubber band between us. We kept bumping into each other, and she would flush when we spoke, and we stumbled over our words and made dumb comments that created awkward silences, but we still stayed close. She was beside me, talking to her office friends while I talked to mine. I can't even remember exactly who I was talking to that evening. Still, I can remember every detail of Beatrice just from the corner of my eye: her tied-up hair and her long neck and the arch of her back and her figure-hugging pencil skirt and how she held her pint in two hands. She complained about some builders on her cycle route who shouted, "Lucky saddle" at her. She moaned about her non-committal boyfriend, who she'd overheard gloating to his friend: "I'm only in it for the sublime blowjobs."
This was such an unlikely thing for her to say--she's pretty reserved-- that I wondered if she'd said it for my benefit, like a kind of sideways flirt. When I bumped into her at the bar a bit later, I asked her if she'd like to go somewhere quieter.
She fiddled with her purse and bit back a grin. "Yes," she said.
A year later, we were married.
So which of those was the "real" Beatrice? The "normal" one? I can't tell, even with the benefit of hindsight. I like to tell myself I fell for all three.
