SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1998

The House impeached the President yesterday. I listened on the radio while I primed boards, and the whole thing sounded like a family fighting in the next apartment: you can't make out the words, only that it's gone too far and nobody is going to apologize.

My own news is smaller. Arturo has a friend who runs the adult-ed program at an art school in Manhattan, and she needs somebody to teach a night painting class starting in February. Two nights a week, fourteen weeks. Arturo gave her my name before asking me, which is how Arturo does things. She called Thursday. I said yes before I could think about it.

Then I thought about it. Me. In front of twelve strangers, twice a week, being steady. Explaining color to people as if I still believed in it.

Then I thought: the money is real, and I've painted about forty apartments on the Upper West Side and never once been asked what I think about anything. So. We'll see if they want me after the interview in January.

Christmas is at Ben and Laurel's again, their first one married. Laurel has already called twice to ask if I can eat ham, "with the medicine." I love her for asking. Yes. I can eat ham.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1998

John Glenn went back up last week at seventy-seven. I'm forty-nine and I can't get off the ground.

Let me be honest, since that's the deal here. I have painted about thirty small pictures this year. They are competent. The drawing is sound, the color is sensible, the edges are where edges go. They would look very nice over a sofa in a hotel in Hartford. Arturo looks at them and says "Good," the way you say it to a man who has just parallel parked.

And against the long wall there are fourteen canvases from 1997 that I don't turn around anymore, because when I do, they look back.

So yes: I think about stopping the lithium. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I think about it the way you think about calling an old girlfriend. You know how it ends. You do the arithmetic anyway.

I told Dr. L. on Tuesday. He didn't argue. He took off his glasses and asked, "Were those paintings worth the sixteen days?" And I sat there, and I didn't have an answer, and he let me not have one for a long time. Then he put his glasses back on and wrote me a refill.

I'm still taking it. I want that on the record, for anybody who writes to me asking what I'd do. I don't know what I'd do. I know what I'm doing.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1998

I haven't written since the wedding. Summer happened. I painted three apartments, one of them twice because the client changed her mind from Linen White to Navajo White, which are the same color and different religions.

This week McGwire hit his sixty-second and the Starr Report went up on the Internet for anybody to read, so everybody's private business was public this week, and mine's public on purpose. Somehow that makes me feel better. At least I chose.

Ben and Laurel came back from their honeymoon in Maine brown and happy and brought me a lobster buoy, which is hanging in the studio where it makes no sense at all. I love it.

Level check Tuesday: 0.7. Thyroid fine. Tremor the same. Mood: flat, but a flat with furniture in it.

SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1998
The wedding

My son got married yesterday, at a catering hall in Laurel's hometown in New Jersey, under a trellis of white roses that I kept wanting to paint in with a little Naples yellow.

The toast. I'd been dreading it for a month because of the hands. You can't hold a champagne glass steady and talk at the same time with a lithium tremor; the glass rings against nothing. So I set the glass down on the table, put both hands in my pockets like a man at a bus stop, and read the whole thing off an index card propped against the centerpiece. I wrote it in block capitals, like my father's signs. I said Ben was the best thing I ever made, and that I made a lot of things, and most of them are leaning against a wall. People laughed. Ben didn't. He came over after and held on to me for a long time.

Then Lenore.

She came with Howard, who is an orthodontist and a good man, which is the worst thing I can say about him. She wore dark green. Late in the evening the bandleader said Sinatra had passed last month and played "The Way You Look Tonight," and Howard, bless him, went to get a coffee at exactly the right moment, and I asked her to dance.

We danced like two people who used to know how. She said, "You look well." I said, "I look medicated." She said, "It suits you," and then, into my shoulder, "He brought you to the hospital. Did you know he called me first, from the pay phone?" I didn't know. I didn't know that.

I felt it. I want to write that down. For a year I've felt things through a storm window, and on that dance floor the window was open for about three minutes. Then the song ended and Howard came back with two coffees, one of them for me, decaf, because Lenore had told him.

SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1998

Rented a tuxedo. The man measured my arms and said, "You have painter's shoulders." I said, "How can you tell?" He said, "There's cadmium red in your ear."

Thirteen days. I'm practicing the toast in front of the long wall, to the backs of fourteen paintings. They're a tough room.

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1998

Sinatra died last night, the same night as the Seinfeld finale, so this morning the whole city is wearing a black armband over a crooner and a sitcom, in no particular order.

Here's what I want to say about the flatness, because I've been circling it for months. I used to cry at the long-distance commercials. The one with the soldier calling his mother, I'd have to leave the room. Last night I put on "In the Wee Small Hours," which is the saddest record ever pressed in this country, and I sat in the dark and listened to the whole thing, and I felt like a man reading a weather report for a city he's never visited. Low of forty. Chance of rain. Interesting.

That's the price. Nobody tells you the price is paid in small bills, every day.

Dr. L. says it can soften with time, and that some of what I call flat is just what calm feels like to a man who's never had any. Maybe. He's been right about most things. I told him I'd rather be sad than nothing. He wrote that down, which is the first time I've seen him write something down that I said.

SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 1998

For the people who've written asking what lithium is actually like, day to day, here is the unglamorous part.

You get your blood drawn. A lot, at first, and now every few months. It has to be done about twelve hours after your last dose, so on lab days I take my night capsules, skip the morning ones, and walk down to the lab on Manhattan Avenue at eight in the morning to sit with the pregnant women and the old men with clipboards. The technician has a Mets logo tattooed on her wrist and finds my vein on the first try every time. I've started bringing her rugelach.

The number comes back in a day or two. There's a range they want you in. Too low and it doesn't hold you. Too high and you get sick, shaky and stupid and worse, which is why you drink water all day and don't go crazy with salt one way or the other and don't take the ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet without asking. They check your thyroid and your kidneys too, once in a while, because lithium can lean on them.

And you're thirsty. Always. I carry a gallon jug of water around the studio like a bricklayer. The logical consequence of the gallon jug I'll leave to your imagination.

Last week's level: 0.8. Dr. L. says, "Right where we want you." I told him it's right where he wants me.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1998

Ben and Laurel took me to see the Titanic movie. Three hours and change. Everybody in the theater was sniffling by the end, and I sat there and admired the lighting. Laurel held my arm on the way out, the way you'd hold the arm of an old man on ice, and asked if I was all right. I was. That's the trouble. I was all right.

Storm window. That's the best I can do. I can see everything, the color and the weather and the people I love, clear as day. I just can't feel the wind.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 1998
New paint job

A year of this page, almost. Six months of lithium, a little more. So I've repainted, as you see. The yellow is gone from the front. I've left the 1997 page just the way it was, because that's the truth of it.

All week the TV has shown the ice storm up in Quebec and New England. Whole forests cased in glass. Power lines bowed down to the snow. Birches bent into perfect arches, like somebody drew them with a compass. Last year I'd have been on a bus up there with a sketchbook and no gloves. This year I watched it and said, out loud, to nobody, "That's pretty," and turned it off and went to bed at ten.

I slept until seven. I'm told this is progress.

— T.