Separate Hours

One The Structure of Behaviour

As a psychoanalyst, I am a profound believer in middles, in the life itself. Beginnings and ends are the stuff of fantasy. I once imagined that if I ever wrote the story of my life I would begin by saying, “Call me Shrink,” a remark which offers the form of a joke without its substance and so disarms the reader by its foolishness. Someone so unguarded, someone toward whom you feel immediately superior, cannot be other than trustworthy. Watch out for me. I am full of tricks.

The aetiology of my condition was arrogance. I was, let me confess, overwhelmingly content with my life — with my career as analyst, with my brilliant and beautiful wife, with my precocious daughter, with my elegant West Side brown-stone. I floated in the ether of contentment. Routine sustained me. So manyhours a week of private practice, so many hours at the hospital, so many hours teaching a course at the university, so many hours with my family, so many hours writing my book. I was occupied from morning to night with matters of consequence. Let me say it now — it will come out soon enough — my wife Adrienne (my former wife Adrienne) is also a therapist. It gave us a common language, a common point of reference. I liked that, had come to it by premeditated choice. I had a companion with whom I could share the things that mattered, I thought, most to me. We had as good a marriage in our way, as intimate a friendship, as anyone we knew. We got along, didn’t we? We got along famously, performed our roles with impressive conviction. I remind myself that this is the account of a man who saw only what it suited him to see. We had the appearance, the illusion, of a happy marriage.

In taking you into my confidence, I am playing a kind of confidence game. I want you to perceive me as a trustworthy witness, someone who will tell the truth even to his own disadvantage. My sanity has been thrown into question by Adrienne’s opposing version of our shared reality. I leave it to you: which of us is unable to separate reality from wish. If one of us is telling the truth, the other, says reflex, is an extraordinarily persuasive lunatic. I begin with my first meeting with Adrienne.

I met Adrienne for the first time three different times.

one

I had a lunch date with a colleague and was picking him up at his office at the hospital. I was early, or he was late, and I camped out on a chair in his institutional waiting room. A tall elegant woman with large staring eyes came out of his office and gave me a corner-of-the-mouth smile. “I’ve kept the seat warm for you,” she said.

two

I was lecturing on Transference at NYU, filling in for a friend, and Adrienne was in the audience, made her presence known by arriving a moment or so after I had begun. I was aware of her as if she was the only woman in the room and performed for her, rose to flights of eloquence usually beyond my range. She looked somewhat different from the woman I saw coming out of Ted Fieldstone’s office — and I wasn’t sure that she was the same person. I didn’t get to talk to her after the lecture, though her aura lingered for me in the auditorium.

Three

The occasion eludes me. It was a cocktail party, some official function of the Clinical Psychology Program. I was looking out a window, had my back to the party when someone said. “Yuri, I’d like you to meet the most talented student in the program.” And there she was, the same striking woman, though sufficiently different to give me cause foe wonder. We had an intense conversation of a kind usually only available to those who are likely never to see each other again or to analysand and analyst. She told me about problems in her marriage, about her childhood, about her anti-social obsessions, her tendency to outrageous behavior. And what did I reveal about myself? That I knew how to listen, that I was sympathetic. “I’ll bet you’re a very good therapist,” she said. We were interrupted after about an hour by the presence of her husband, Ralph, who asked if she was ready to leave. Adrienne said no, to go without her if he was intent on going. Her tone was unequivocal yet gentle. Her answer angered him, though he pretended otherwise, remained willfully pleasant. How much longer would she be? he asked. She said in the same polite, slightly irritated voice that she had no idea, not to worry about her, she would manage to get home. As it turned out, the husband stayed on and they left together about midnight.

I’ve always thought it interesting how memories deform, how they’re altered by revisionist feelings, the heart’s betrayal of the past. I can witness the process in others, but I am unable to recognize it in myself — the desire to justify overwhelms the need to be true to oneself. I was connected to Adrienne from the start, was in love without naming it love. Adrienne seemed to me — do I actually remember thinking that? — the woman that I was destined to spend my life with. The fact that she was already married seemed only a minor obstacle to be pushed aside. I realize how unfeeling this sounds, and I suspect I exaggerate to make my point, but it is a fair representation of the state of mind of my younger self. All behavior has its consequences — I would pay for my brutality in the end. I did not concern myself with the husband, did not concern myself with Adrienne’s apparent lack of concern for him. If we were to be together, the husband had to be discarded. I accepted that necessity, taking no particular pleasure in the other man’s pain. Mine was an infatuation that nurtured an already blooming arrogance. This way: if this wholly desirable woman desired me, I must be the remarkable man I imagined myself to be.

I didn’t let things go by in those days. “What’s the story with your marriage?” I asked from time to time. Her answer was usually evasive, a joke or a forlorn shrug. At the time I also had a wife, though we had not been living together for several months. I will come to that later, the implications of my first marriage. I have a weakness for digression — in some sense digression is everything — that I’ll try to resist.

If this were a psychoanalytic paper, I might call it, “Marriage in an Age of Post-Civilization: Positives and Negatives.” It took our subjects almost two years to get together after the couple’s promising beginning. During this period of mock courtship, or more accurately mock marriage, A and Y’s relationship fell into apparently irreparable disrepair any number of times. We’re not talking about minor fights here, but actual break-ups, each avowing never to see the other again. Do damaged feelings ever really heal?

How many times did I swear to myself that I was through with her, that the woman was impossible? She was tense and high strung, vulnerable to changes of weather, her sense of well-being as fragile as spun glass. Let me cite examples. (I am a collector of evidence, an accountant of grievances.) At times we would contend over the meaning of an article in a magazine as if our existences were at stake. Neither of us could stand to be opposed by the other and yet it seemed as if we were always placing ourselves on opposite sides of an issue. When we held the same opinion, which was more often than either of us liked to admit, we tended to argue as to who held the opinion first. Am I making it sound worse than it was? Consider that I am remembering the past from the vantage of disenchantment.

I was crazy about her at her worst, particularly at her worst. I was enchanted with her.

Sometimes when we went to the movies we would get into a dispute about where to sit and end up sitting apart. More often than not I would make the necessary compromise and join her in the space she had chosen for us. I didn’t recognize then that significant patterns in our relationship were defined in these seemingly trivial struggles. She was more absolute than I was, more vulnerable perhaps, so to keep the peace I tended to be the one to accommodate. I suspect I couldn’t stand to have her favorable opinion — her respect, her affection, her love — withdrawn from me. I was addicted to her admiration, felt justified and rewarded by it, felt undeserving and in need, felt nurtured by it, felt anger at being in thrall to her. How many times did I give up on her in exasperation?

And then there was the matter of Adrienne’s husband, Ralph, a lingering presence in our lives, the shadow behind our door. “Poor Ralph,” as he was known in our private — our cruel — mythology. He had made a career out of having been a failed though promising student in an impressive variety of disciplines. He was the prodigal son as husband. There was nothing he couldn’t do, said the myth, and nothing he ever completed. Adrienne supported him financially and emotionally, was reluctant to discard “poor Ralph” until he achieved self-sufficiency. This is the voice of self-interest and I apologize for its harshness. In truth, in unadmitted grievance, I was jealous of Ralph. Adrienne took a long time to leave him — for good, as we say — and I held Ralph responsible, an obvious displacement, for Adrienne’s guilty procrastination. And maybe the ties between Adrienne and “poor Ralph” were more profound than I was willing to acknowledge. The son of a bitch had his ways. At some point, he became as much my problem as Adrienne’s. We had extended conversations in bed, often immediately after love making, about what to do about Ralph. And what were we talking about, what was the real subject, when we talked about Ralph? Leave him, I wanted to say, though I generally took a less directive stance.

If only Ralph would throw me out, Adrienne would say in one vocabulary or another, if only he would stop loving me. I resisted asking why the decision rested with Ralph, assuming that we both knew, assuming mistakenly an understanding existed between us that transcended ordinary discourse. The assumption that we both traded on — I begrudgingly, Adrienne with apparent resignation — was that Ralph, an injured party, must be given the space to make his own decision. He really wants to be rid of me, Adrienne would say in her deep sexy voice, he just isn’t ready to act on it yet.

While we waited for Ralph to achieve readiness, our intimacy deepened. We fought constantly. It was as if the integrity of our souls were at issue. I never fought with anyone as intensely as I fought with Adrienne during that period before our marriage that lasted actually three years but seemed to extend itself forever.

We were going off to a psychoanalytic conference in Boston together and had taken adjoining rooms in the same hotel. It was an opportunity, a rare one at that point, to spend an entire night together. I was to deliver a paper on transference, a work whose small clevernesses I imagined to be the flashes of light given off by genius. If I am being hard on my younger self, it is because he led me astray, set me up for a fall I was not prepared to take. I still recall the charge of Adrienne’s affection on the ride over, her sitting squeezed against me in our rented Dodge as though we were teenagers.

We sat in that rented Dodge Polaris, Adrienne’s arm draped around my shoulders as if we were wearing each other like pieces of clothing. I had a hard-on for almost the entire trip from her proximity, from anticipation of our night together in the same bed. The exhilaration I felt scared me. I joked somewhat nervously as we rode like Siamese twins in that rented Dodge, made light of the conference, talked with false modesty about the implicit brilliance of my paper. I felt love for the woman next to me, felt the echoing intensity of her love for me, though I was afraid to break the spell by acknowledging the wonder of the moment with something as pedestrian as words. I assumed that my feelings — how powerful and articulate they seemed — spoke for themselves.

The weather changed radically as we neared Boston, an unseasonal blizzard resulting in an accident on the Mass. Pike, three cars and an enormous truck conspiring, which kept things at a standstill for over an hour. The snow piled up like a dunce cap on our hood. After the delay, there was barely time to check into our hotel rooms before the conference convened. The highway accident had made us both tense, reminding us how vulnerable we are to arbitrary circumstances. Adrienne seemed to blame me for the delay, for the hectic rush to the hotel along icy streets in poor visibility. I could see she was becoming irritated at my concern with being late. Yet she made no audible complaint. She wanted, as I did, our weekend together — all, everything — to be perfect.

After I gave the paper, after we had dinner with some other participants, after we had returned to my hotel room, we had a terrible fight. We were both on edge, Adrienne more intensely so. At some inevitable point, the ghost of Ralph appeared to fret us with its saintly claims. I said I thought we had agreed that Ralph was off-limits for the weekend. Then Adrienne announced that she wanted me to know — it had been eating at her holding back the news — that she thought my paper was essentially “a tedious rehash of commonplaces.” She had been terribly disappointed, having wanted so much to like what I had written. “To be frank,” she said as if her previous unpleasantness had been a form of reticence, “to be frank, Yuri, I was really embarrassed when you read your paper, embarrassed as much for you as for myself. Why didn’t you show it to me first? I would have told you to put it away.”

I grumbled darkly, snarled, “I don’t need you to tell me if what I do professionally is acceptable or not.”

“Well, maybe you do,” she said. “At least somebody should have had the grace to tell you not to give that paper.”

I had my back to her, felt aggrieved though also defensive. “The conference committee was pleased with it,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly have been as bad as you say.”

“It was both banal and dull,” she said. “What worse!”

I did what I had to do, lifted her from the bed and carried her into the hall. She offered only token resistance.

“I don’t ever want to see you again,” she hissed through the closed door. “I mean it this time.” I didn’t doubt her.

Perhaps I had Scotch sent to my room or went down to the bar for a drink — it’s as if this interval were vanished time — or went out into the snow for an aimless walk. Perhaps I tried to imagine my life — the next day, the day after — without this relentlessly painful relationship.

It was always when I had given up on her, when I hoped never to see her again, that she would return without apology and make amends.

There was a timid knock on the door at about two in the morning. It was as if I climbed out of my body — I was dozing, lying across the bed in my clothes — to arrive at the door. I considered not answering, I considered that the knock — really a tap — might have been a figment of a dream, though I answered the door before it repeated itself. She was standing there, huddled, childlike, smiling slyly, glancing away before I could catch her eye. “Are you still angry at me?” she asked in avoice barely meant to be heard. I made agesture that suggested a variety of possibilities. Her smile apologized for itself. “Should I go away?” she asked.

“Yes, go away,” I said. I put my arm around her waist and locked her against me.

She reminded me that the door to the hallway was open behind us, that someone, some secret agent of the respectable, might catch us in our illicit embrace. We were both at the moment fully clothed. I let go of her to close the door, still unreconciled. When I turned around she was lying on the bed in provocative pose. “Do you want to fuck, doctor?” she whispered in mock-German accent, an imitation of one of my imitations.

“You think you’re irresistible, don’t you,” I said, angry at myself for being so readily charmed.

I remember the fierceness of our lovemaking if not the specifics. I remember the desire and terror, the exchange of orgasms like the taking of vows. We had sex several times during that long night as if fucking or sucking was the appropriate language of forgiveness, the only undeniable proof.

We had proven to each other that we could survive the unforgivable.

On the drive back — much of this account is of comings and goings — I said lightly, lightly treading air, “I’m sorry you hated my paper, sweetheart.”

She looked at me — I watched her from the corner of my eye as I drove — with unaffected surprise. “You don’t really believe that, do you? I can’t imagine that you really believe that, Yuri. You know better, don’t you? I say a lot of things I don’t mean. You know I respect you a lot.”

I only knew it when she told me it was so. It’s possible that I misread her all along, had been willing to believe whatever flattered me and deny the implications of the rest.

I am skipping ahead, pursuing some private chronology of Significant Events. I was at a Psychology Department party, an end of term spiked-punch affair. The chairman, who was no friend of mind, got me into a corner to discuss ostensibly — I have some theories about his motives but will not pursue them here — marginal Ph.D candidates. Adrienne’s name came up. I don’t know that he knew we were living together, but he had to know there was some tie between us. Still, he proceeded to talk about her with unconcealed dislike. “The woman is a snakepit,” he said. “She should never have been allowed to remain in the program.”

I made an awkward attempt to defend her, presuming she needed no defense, mentioned how perceptive she was, how finely tuned, how smart. It was not a conversation I needed, though a difficult one to escape. I was a part-time faculty, dependent on the chairman’s good graces for my employment.

“Entre nous, this lady’s trouble,” he said. “I happen to know there’s serious disturbance there.”

There was more. Was I betraying her by continuing to listen to him? He was talking about Adrienne using her seductiveness in her dealings with men when I found some excuse to leave the party.

At first I wasn’t going to mention this conversation to Adrienne, but then I decided — I worried the issue until it clarified — that silence was a form of betrayal, a way of feeling superior. Still, I muted Norman’s malice in reporting his remarks. Even in the diluted form I gave them, they precipitated a fight. The bearer of bad news never gets off easily.

“Norman is a malicious fool,” I repeated over and again. “No one takes Norman seriously.”

“What you refuse to see,” she said in the voice of superior wisdom, “is that what went on between you and Norman has more to do with you than with me.”

I could read her mood well enough to see what was coming and took her hand, which she let me hold only long enough to feel its loss when it was gone. My objective was to forestall the inevitable.

“I’m very upset,” she reminded me.

“I understand that,” I said. “It’s upsetting to find out someone is whispering malice about you.”

She stared at me with undisguised dislike. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“Doing what, sweetheart?” I strove to be reasonable.

“If you don’t know,” she said as if she were offering privileged information to someone without the appropriate clearance, “you’re much more limited than I thought. I really don’t see how you can be a therapist and be so blind to your own motives.”

“You’re the only one that matters to me in this,” I said, distrusting the assertion as I made it, raising my voice.

“I hate it when you scream at me,” she said. “It makes me hate you.”

“I’m not your enemy,” I said in the voice of an already engaged combatant. “If I withheld Norman’s viciousness to protect your feelings, that would be patronizing. Norman is an asshole. I suspect that he was attracted to you and felt put down at not getting what he wanted.”

“I slept with Norman,” she said, turning her face away.

The news had too much impact to allow it to register.

“Why are you saying that?” I think I said.

She took my hand, was unusually solemn. “I’m not making it up, Yuri.”

“When was this?”

“It was before I knew you,” she said. “I was in training analysis with him.” She squeezed my hand as an offer of reassurance. “I didn’t stay with him for long.”

“Whose idea was it?” I asked.

She averted her face, said nothing I could hear.

I fantasized exposing Norman’s treachery, though realized there was nothing I could do. “I’d like to break him in half,” I said.

I don’t remember where we were — what room, which place — when this confrontation took place. Adrienne was sitting next to me, impacted, suffering, her hand on my hand. I was torn between revulsion and tenderness, left her for another room, then found my way back, impelled to heal the rift between us.

I omit the silences in this account.

“Norman doesn’t matter to you,” Adrienne said. “You really want to kill me.” She had her head turned away when she made this pronouncement so I had no way of reading her face.

I muttered something about the abuse of authority, though I recognized that Adrienne was right or mostly right or partly right. I asked her why it had happened.

“No reason,” she said. “Self-loathing maybe.”

“You’re too good for that,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s the voice of love speaking,” she said.

I realize how selective this document is, how much of consequence it leaves out. The claims of feeling, in their moment, seem to drive out all else. One tends to fall in love with those to whom the psychological prophesies of childhood lead. We were fighting to free ourselves from an inescapable emotional destiny. If our love couldn’t survive disappointment and betrayal and violent battles of will, what was the point, whispered mock-logic, in continuing together?

I’ve mentioned Adrienne’s problems in freeing herself from Ralph’s dependency, though I have mentioned nothing of the difficulty in dissolving my marriage to Patricia. Aggrieved by my defection, Patricia had refused to give me a divorce. Gradually her position had moderated and we had been negotiating through lawyers — and occasionally by phone directly — a closure to our marriage. So when she suggested that we meet and talk in person about a settlement I consented despite Adrienne’s objection to my going. Adrienne’s resistance to the meeting became more impassioned as the time for the appointment neared.

The meeting with Patricia is not in itself the issue here, is of less concern than Adrienne’s opposition to my having a drink in public with a woman I had been estranged from for over two years. At the time I thought the issue was jealousy, which I found both flattering and upsetting. It was more likely that Adrienne didn’t want our situation to change, needed the frisson of ghostly shadows sharing our bed. The powerful factor of the illicit.

But also of course it was a test, her asking me not to go, the kind of test I could only hope to fail. If I didn’t accede to her wishes, it proved that I didn’t love her. If I did give in, I proved myself easily controlled and so unworthy of her respect.

I arrived at the lounge of the Royalton Hotel, ten minutes late for our appointment, changed my scat three times waiting for Patricia to make her belated appearance. When I saw her come in the door wearing a white blouse and light blue skirt, I remembered having loved her. The feeling was unexpected, almost shocking, given my indifference toward her for the longest time. There was something bridelike in her appearance. She blushed when she sat down across from me in the booth, a compelling illusion. I felt a kind of longing and it struck me that Adrienne had an intuition about what would happen, that she knew me in a way I didn’t know myself. Still, I pursued my errand in a businesslike way, said it made little sense after all this time not to get a divorce. I anticipated resistance and got none. Patricia said — it was as if I had dreamed her remarks — that she saw no point in being tied to a man who was no longer her husband. We were for the first time in years in agreement. She had the signed papers with her and took them out of her purse. I felt relief and a sense of loss, thought how pleased and surprised Adrienne would be. Appreciative of Patricia’s grace, I ordered champagne to celebrate the waning moments of our marriage. We toasted each other’s future, then sat with nothing to say to each other, our business concluded. I was feeling a little sad, holding on to the moment of our last goodbye, when Patricia mentioned that she had taken a room in the hotel that seemed a pity not to use.

I didn’t get home until late. Adrienne, who was in bed reading as it turned out, contrived to ignore my entrance. I sensed that I was in for trouble.

We were living in four small rooms at this point — a floor through in a brownstone — the kitchen as narrow as a finger. I was making myself a drink in the narrow kitchen when Adrienne came up behind me. I wasn’t aware of her until she spoke. “How did it go?” she asked.

I took the signed agreement from the breast pocket of my jacket and passed it to her without turning around.

“That’s unexpected,” she said, then put her arms around me from behind. I tensed self-protectively, ducked my head. She laughed. “You act like a man with a bad conscience.”

I admitted to nothing, took my drink into another room — perhaps left the kitchen without it. Adrienne followed. I yawned, said I thought I’d go to bed, steeled myself against an accusation she refrained from making.

We stayed up the remainder of the night talking about other things, case studies, the marriages of friends, regression, transference, fears of dying. The apparent subject, we were trained to know, was almost never the real subject.

Was it a mistake not to acknowledge that I had slept with Patricia that evening, not in exchange for a divorce, nothing as crude as that, but to pursue the illusion of connection one last time? Adrienne knew of course and I knew she knew. There was that between us.

There are a few more incidents to be covered — fragments of evidence — before I get to the present.

This comes back to me: I was at the airport with Adrienne’s sister Grace, who had come to New York for our wedding and was now returning to her guru in Denver. Her flight was delayed for an hour and we went to the cocktail lounge for a drink. Grace had difficulty deciding what to order and I was struck by that, the similarity between sisters, the use of tentativeness as a form of control.

“I am really glad that you and Adrienne got together,” I remember her saying. She ordered a Bloody Mary, then changed her mind and switched to grapefruit juice. It was something she had said before, the comment about our getting together, something she seemed pleased to repeat.

“We’re unexpectedly alike, Adrienne and I,” I said. “Superficially different yet unexpectedly alike.”

“That’s like the opposite of what I was going to say,” Grace said. “I was thinking really how totally different the two of you are. Adrienne likes things just so. Nothing has ever been good enough for her. Know what I mean?”

I said yes, then no not exactly, wanting to hear how it seemed to Grace.

“I think Adrienne idealizes you,” she said. “Do you mind if I have another juice?”

I ordered a drink for me and a juice for Grace. “Adrienne sees into my every fault,” I said.

Grace shook her head in her solemn way. “That’s not the way she talks about you to me.”

“What does she say about me?”

Grace rebuked my curiosity with a shocked stare. She whispered her answer or rather mouthed the words so I wasn’t sure what I heard. “She thinks you’re wonderful,” she might have said. I had the impression Grace was blushing. It was the only time I’d seen her show embarrassment.

“I didn’t get that,” I said.

Grace seemed amused at my request to repeat her confidence, said she thought I had heard her perfectly well.

“You have a way of confiding and withholding at the same time,” I said. “One has to lean forward to hear you, has to read your lips.”

“But not my heart,” she whispered, offering her words and taking them back. “Look, Yuri, whatever you do, try not to disillusion her. Okay?”

“It’s unavoidable,” I said. I noted that it was time for her to go to the boarding gate.

“That makes me very sad,” she purred as we left the bar, the reference already elusive. “It really does. There must be something you can do to avoid it.”

What I could do, what I did in fact, was to pretend not to understand her.

What is missing from my account is the texture of our life together, the dailiness, the habits of routine, the major and minor pleasures. I think of this memoir as a rational inquiry into the mysterious.

When the passion became domesticated, when it no longer seemed a matter of life and death to make love, we were easier with each other for awhile, more protective and affectionate. I don’t know if that’s true. What is true? The urgency went away but not far, came back like a recurring dream, was always there.

The following fragments are from a journal I’ve kept on and off over the years. It’s in my handwriting so that I know that it’s mine but I don’t remember having written it.

When Rebecca feeds at Adrienne’s breast alongside me in bed, I am jealous of them both. They exclude me and it is painful to be left out…. Adrienne lets me taste her milk. She cups my head from behind as I drink. The birth of the child has made her motherly to almost everyone. Do her patients notice the difference? In the office we share I can smell the aura of her milk…. We argue over who will take Rebecca to her first day of school. No serious argument. We take her together, one on each side, our hands connecting us. At school, Adrienne can’t bear to separate, has to steal herself to leave. I am there to tear her loose. Rebecca herself is more matter of fact, lets her parents carry the brunt of her anxiety at separation…. I never thought I would say this to myself — much of my childhood spent resisting the urge to cry — I am a happy man, a happy happy man.

Every day, excluding Sunday, for much of every day, I talked to people who were in some kind of pain, their lives deformed, their senses of self incompletely or negligibly defined. Professionalism aside, I would have had to be absolutely heartless not to carry some of it away, I imagine it was the same for Adrienne, though it was a subject — one of many — we tended to avoid. I was made continually aware of how fragile human transactions are, how dangerous intimacy can be, how one never fully escapes the configurative relationships of childhood. Self-destructive patterns asserted themselves after years of apparent remission. Long term relationships went abruptly bad at some predictable point as if fulfilling an inexorable destiny. Sex staled. Affection dissipated. Couples turned one another through a kind of compulsive alchemy into false unloving parents.

Sooner or later, said the evidence of my patients’ lives, relationships were bound to fail. It was a constant warning to me not to let things slide in my own marriage. I came to believe that marriages like individual lives had to be continually reinvented, that they survived the loss of romance only as a matter of will. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t will that survival came apart, sought love elsewhere, came to hate one another. We were the exceptions. We tended the fire. Whenever I reflected on it, I thought how enduring our marriage was, how intimate, how full of affection and respect. The worst had come and gone before we even started out.

Therapists are not necessarily less susceptible to delusion than people in other professions.

Sometimes in watching the slow-motion replay of a disastrous moment in a baseball game, I feel myself willing the event altered in its recurrence. It is a magical, contrary to fact hope, a commitment to unreality, an unwillingness to accept loss and, ultimately, death. It is the same for me in telling this story.