All of which made me more irritable, because I sensed that I was failing when all I'd ever done, my whole life, was try to succeed. My high standards intensified the pressure I felt personally, which meant that I wasn't home with our kids enough (three in five years, in keeping with our plan) or much of a partner for Trudy - who had suspended her law career to enable our childrearing - sexually or in any other way. I became, as they say, "irritable" - hard to work for and harder to live with. I saw this metabolic tinkering as nothing more than taking care of business, and the ease with which I chemically managed my deficits, coupled with a slight drug nausea I often felt, made me doubly impatient with everyone else. When the Adderall made me jangly, I'd calm down with Xanax or Percocet in the afternoon before knocking myself out with more sleeping pills at bedtime. I started taking sleeping pills at night and Adderall in the morning to get me going - and eventually throughout the day to keep me sharp. But Polly was colicky, and by then I was the youngest partner in my law firm's history, and the workload was crushing. I bridged the gaps with peanut butter, which I ate by the jar, and teenage energy. In high school, my insomnia had made it possible to excel academically while also playing three varsity sports, working for a tree pruning company, and pleasing a finicky girlfriend. But certain things, like sleep, resist rigid control. Every move I made was aimed at harrying myself toward greater excellence. If anything can be said in defense of the person I was in 2008, the year Sasha made amends and Polly was born - the year I turned thirty - it can be only that I was least forgiving of myself. When that very same pen showed up in my mailbox a couple of years later with a handwritten note that began, "Since my teenage years I have struggled with a compulsion to steal, which has been a source of great anguish to me, and of loss and frustration to many others," I called my dad. I'd phoned the restaurant, the taxi authority, the MTA I'd retraced my steps through Koreatown, bent at the waist to scrutinize gutters. I'd nearly had a brain hemorrhage when it vanished after a family dinner at a Korean restaurant while I was visiting New York. I, too, received a pen, but mine was a Montblanc worth several hundred dollars. My dad got a Bic pen, the kind they sold in bags of twenty at Staples. Everyone in the family received an item or two, sometimes of so little value that it was amazing Sasha remembered what belonged to whom.
How did I know?Because right before she married Drew, in 2008, she started returning things. Sasha had been a f-up all the way into her thirties: a kleptomaniac who'd managed to pilfer countless items from countless people over countless years. If anyone had required proof that life's outcomes are impossible to predict, this development would have supplied it.
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