Separate Hours

Ten Marital Therapy: Pro & Con

A

The phone is ringing. I am not in. (Adrienne is busy giving birth to herself.) I let the answering device represent me in my absence.

The call is from Carroway. It is the third this month. (I have an instinct for avoiding him.) I get up with excessive care and go to the bathroom for a valium. I feel invaded. I put the valium on my tongue. It slips out of my mouth before I can fill the cup with water.

A brief meeting with Carroway yesterday. He was seductive and childish. This man has nothing for me, I told myself. His presence is a kind of compelling absence. One needs to fill the space he has left vacated. That is his attraction. He is a living black hole. He is beautiful (like some poisonous flower) and he is not really there. Therefore he is dangerous. Such knowledge as I had was no real protection from him. I went with him on empty pretext (we had met for drinks at a noisy bar, could not hear ourselves talk) to his studio, which was four blocks away. I went to his studio to look at his latest painting. That was another pretext. He needed to have my critique. The painting required my acknowledgement to exist. In his space, he had me. He asked (as if he needed to ask), if I wanted to go to bed. I said absolutely not It was a straight-faced lie. We shook hands instead. It was not prelude to the main event. It was the event itself. I went home empty.

After the valium works its witchery, I do a drawing of a nude male figure (of no one real, though it bears some resemblance to Carroway) with a penis that looks like an antler. I rip out the page from my book and file it under A (for antler or aberration). Or ambivalence. Or Adrienne.

Is it the message of the drawing that penises are really weapons? Perhaps the disfigured penis points the other way. It demystifies the weapon.

(Why didn’t Thomas call back? Why isn’t this more than friend concerned about my reasons for calling off our date? Since we’ve become lovers, we seem to be running on different tracks.)

Alone in the house, listening to “The Marriage of Figaro” on QXR, I start to giggle to myself. The image of the penis- antler gets to me. I try to keep a serious face and keep breaking up. What a funny drawing that is! What a funny thing to do!

I make myself a cup of Camomille Tea and treat myself to a Cadbury bar I had been hiding in my purse. I had been saving it as a reward for the appropriate moment. This is my treat to myself. I take tiny bites. The chocolate nourishes me. It is like love. It is the very thing.

My mind does a walkabout (there’s something I’m supposed to remember) during my single morning session. I have a way of listening to things, hearing them with my feelings without focusing on words. My patient, Kermit Epstein, had been obsessing for months about his wife being a kind of vampire. I understood the feeling, had similar soundings myself in connection with Yuri. I understood the feeling, but not the real issue the feeling disguised. As Kermit is pursuing his obsession (and my mind is elsewhere), I am struck with an insight. Kermit is afraid of his wife (has invested his wife with frightening powers) because he is greatly dependent on her — more so than he knows and much more so than he is able to admit. The vampire business is a protective disguise. If she leaves him, he has the feeling that his life would leave with her. It would be like having his blood drained, or (the emotional equivalent) being denied suck — having the breast taken away. He is absolutely terrified, this grown man, of being weaned. No wonder he resents the woman and is unable to stand up to her. “Why don’t I leave her?” he asks himself in different words again and again. And I don’t have the answer (not the real answer) until I am removed from his monologue by distraction. “Because you’re afraid you’ll die without her.” The answer repeats itself. Echoes for me.

What I had forgotten is that today is the day I am supposed to go with Yuri to this family therapist to discuss (as if everything hadn’t already been laid bare) the disrepair of our marriage. I dread the prospect.

Y

I harbor the illusion that my life is in the process of radical change. The illusion is based on a few uncharacteristic gestures, only one of which comes to mind. I took off from the hospital yesterday morning, went to Barney’s and bought myself a pair of hundred and fifty dollar shoes marked down to a hundred and nine ninety five. I wore them away from the store, my feet embraced by their luxurious leather, until the right one began to pinch at the small toe. I took them off during lunch with Peter, lined them up under the table like an extra set of feet. I grieved at their betrayal, thought of returning them, though there was no time for that. There was barely time to hear the conclusion of Peter’s story, which concerned a new woman in his life.

There was a revised self in my mirror, an adventurous misery in the eyes. I no longer concerned myself with Adrienne’s moods, accepted the rift between us as an illness not susceptible to treatment. On the drive over to Peter and Barbara’s annual party, she rested her hand on my arm. “Let’s not stay late,” she said. “Okay?”

What did it mean, I thought, her saying she didn’t want to stay late? I found myself analyzing her remark — the more innocuous the more puzzling — as if it were one of the more significant riddles of the Sphinx.

The party was as it always was, some fifty people milling about in two large rooms, the buzz of conversation like some industrial noise. I returned Peter’s obligatory bear hug, pushed my way to the bar, had a Scotch and water, ordered a refill, and only then looked over the room. I saw Adrienne, smiling brilliantly, flitting among the crowd, a wilting butterfly. I knew about half the people there, all therapists of one denomination or another. I was too sober to face them without another drink.

Barbara came over, appeared from nowhere, and asked, with exaggerated concern, how I was getting along.

The question had no context for me. “Terrific,” I said.

“You look wasted, you know?” she said. “Peter and I are worried about you.”

I had known Barbara for fifteen years and I had never before — perhaps once or twice in a small way — been excited by her presence. When she touched my hand, I felt the heat rush to my face. “You’re looking very fetching tonight,” I said. “Your hair is different.”

“I had a cut,” she said. “Peter thinks it’s too short. Do you like it?”

“I think it looks sexy,” I said. “You look a little like what’s her name, the actress who’s been rediscovered. Louise Brooks.”

Blushing, Barbara averted her face. “Yuri, that’s very nice,” she said, “even if I don’t know who Louise Brooks is…. I want to show you something. All right?”

I followed her, carrying my fourth or fifth Scotch, into the master bedroom — the bed piled halfway to the ceiling with coats. There was another person in the room, a man standing at the window smoking a cigarette.

“I fell in love with it at sight,” Barbara said, pointing out a painting on the wall, a somber turn-of-the-century landscape in shadings of dark brown and black. “Peter thinks it’s too dark. I want a second opinion from you.”

It was nearly impenetrable in the half light. “It’s like glimpsing the secret world through veils of mist,” I said.

“I like that,” she said. “Secret veils of mist. Yes.”

When the man with the cigarette wandered out, I put my arm around Barbara’s waist and kissed her. The gesture seemed to make itself, was without premeditation.

When we came apart Barbara turned toward the door to see if anyone had seen us. We moved against the wall alongside the door and kissed again, mouths open, bodies contending for the same space. It was like passion, had the form of. We separated when someone knocked at the closed door. A woman I didn’t know came into the room, nodded at me, made her way to the pile of coats. “I’m glad you liked the picture,” Barbara said.

It was like an enchantment. For twenty minutes I had been in love with Barbara. When I reentered the party it was over.

I caught a glimpse of Adrienne’s face in a moment of repose — the willed animation gone — and I could see how sad she was. It was sad to see her sad. It struck me that she knew I had kissed Barbara. I started over to comfort her — it wasn’t my job anymore — but I never got there. She was talking to Peter.

I have almost no memory of what came next, though I do remember an argument I got into with a foolish man who had written a fashionable book debunking Freud. When I finished with him — a crowd gathered around us — there was a smattering of applause. After that, I made the rounds, gave myself willingly to the game play of the party.

At about midnight, we collected our coats and said our goodbyes. “Don’t go,” Peter said. “There’s a story I want to tell you.”

“We have to go,” I said, mumbling something about getting the sitter home on time. Meanwhile, Adrienne, her coat over her shoulders like a cape, slipped into an intense conversation with the man who had written the nasty book on Freud.

Peter’s story went like this. A couple we both knew, both therapists, had gone on a late night talk show whose subject was how husbands and wives in the same field deal with the inevitable competitiveness. The couple, Henry and Illana Quixote, were so pleased with themselves, with the brilliance of their arrangement, they seemed to think it a social responsibility to present their marriage on television. They had never seen the show before, did not know that the show’s smarmy right wing host, Hilton Safflower, had made a jackal’s career out of making public fools of people wiser and more accomplished than himself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the celebrity-therapist write something on the inside cover of a match-book and hand it to Adrienne.

After introducing his guests — there were three couples on the show — Safflower interviewed the husbands and wives outside the others’ hearing. Though they are presented as serious inquiry, the questions are designed to provoke extreme responses. The wives’ remarks are passed on, out of context, to the husbands and the husbands’ responses, similarly distorted, back to the wives. Safflower is skillful at manipulation, evokes hostility as if it were music from an orchestra. Before the program is over, Henry and Illana have been provoked into belittling each other before a sizeable national audience. As a consequence of their performance on television, they have stopped talking, feel betrayed, have begun to talk to lawyers about division of property. That was Peter’s story. I took it as a parable of my own situation.

In the elevator on the way down, I fantasized asking Adrienne if the Freud-debunker had given her his phone number. I imagined her asking in return what Barbara and I were doing in the bedroom the half hour or so we had been missing from the party.

And then. The car was not where I remembered parking it, was not even on the same street. I was abashed. Adrienne gave an impatient turn of the head, muttered something I was meant to hear and not meant to understand. She of course had no idea where the car was, had not been paying attention. It was not her responsibility, she said. We got into a brief shouting match on the street. Adrienne walked off in a huff, hailed a cab that refused to stop, then returned on the run to ask me for money for transportation. I had no time for her. All my time was invested in trying to remember where I had left the car.

It was as if I had lost myself. I had a few inspired recollections, flashes of memory that came to nothing. The car was in none of the several places I remembered leaving it. It was only after I decided to walk home — we were no more than fifteen blocks away — that the car appeared, found me before I found it. “Here it is,” I said to Adrienne, but she was not next to me or behind me or anywhere to be seen. I spent the next several minutes driving up and down streets looking for Adrienne. Not finding her, I assumed she had gotten a taxi or taken a bus and I drove in slow-motion — the precaution of the semi-unconscious — home. Adrienne wasn’t back (I left the car double-parked in front of the house), which presented a logistics problem. I couldn’t drive the baby-sitter, Sandy, home without someone to stay with Rebecca while I was gone. Anyway, Sandy had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so I decided to wait for Adrienne’s imminent return.

I dozed off in the overstuffed art deco arm chair. When I opened my eyes — only a split second seemed to have passed — Sandy was sitting up on the couch staring at me. “I didn’t want to wake you,” I said. “I wasn’t really sleeping,” she assured me. I glanced at my watch, which has no numbers, and I wasn’t sure whether almost one or almost two hours had stolen away since we left the party. Sandy said with her usual combination of timidity and complaint that she really ought to get home.

I had no idea where Adrienne might be, called the Konigs and got Barbara on the phone. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Somehow I expected you to call,” she said in a hushed voice.

Sandy stood behind me with her coat on, waiting with a show of restrained impatience. “Did Adrienne come back to your place after we left?” I asked.

“Adrienne?” Barbara said, as if she were trying to place the name. “Did you have a fight?”

“Well,” I said. I was embarrassed in front of Sandy, who was seventeen years old and tended to romanticize us, to explain the occasion of Adrienne’s absence.

“I’m a little confused,” Barbara said. “I thought you were calling about something else.”

“I have to take the sitter home,” I said. “If she shows up there, have her call me, will you? I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

I checked Rebecca’s room — she was there, she was in her bed — covered her and drove Sandy home. I was panicked, drove as quickly as I could within reason, went through what seemed like an endless red light, Sandy babbling about something Rebecca had done, something mildly (unintelligibly) unacceptable.

I found a parking space two blocks from the house, locked the keys in the car in my haste, and hurried back.

I imagined Rebecca waking to find no one home, becoming hysterical, Adrienne returning — the two of them in the living room awaiting me with outrage as I came through the door.

The house was as I had left it, silent and seemingly empty, Rebecca still asleep, Adrienne still unaccounted for. I obsessed about possibilities — mugging, rape, murder, assignation with a lover — then I had a glass of port (does it matter what I drink, is it part of the story?), and went up to bed.

I had a shock when I came into the dark bedroom, a nasty scare. Someone was lying curled up on my side of the bed. I thought — this was the way my thinking went — Sandy had had a boyfriend over and they had made out and he had fallen asleep in my bed. I was about to wake him when I realized it was not a man but a woman, that it was Adrienne and that she had been upstairs all the time. The feelings of relief exhausted me. I took off my shoes, lay down on her side of the bed, and went to sleep.

A

Yuri and I pick Rebecca up from school together and take her, my sweet baby, to Yuri’s mother’s apartment. (For some reason, Sandy, Rebecca’s usual sitter was not available, though I don’t remember why.) I see this visit as another example of not being able to say no to Yuri.

“Is this something you feel we have to do?” I ask him in the taxi on the way over.

“Come on. Adrienne. You suggested the idea.”

“Really, why should I suggest such a thing. Does this seem to you something I would want to do?”

“This is crazy, Adrienne.”

(That you want me to think myself crazy is something unforgivable.)

The therapist, Helena Wimpole, a scatty woman of about sixty- five with short limp white hair that seems conspicuously uncombed (her statement about herself), meets us in the cluttered living room of her East Side apartment. She has a reputation, according to Yuri’s analyst, of being particularly deft with couples. I find her, I must confess, unsympathetic on sight.

I sit down on the blue and orange flower print sofa and Yuri occupies a forties pale green empire chair on the other side of the room.

“I’ve never met with married therapists before,” she says. “I must say I’m a little nervous.”

We both smile on cue, trying to outdo one another at being the good child. I feel a wave of hysteria, then it passes, and I think: I have nothing to to worry about from this woman.

She explains procedure, which she calls “ground rules.” Every other sentence moves into digression. Each of us (apparently) is to spell out her (or his) sense of what’s gone wrong with our marriage. After that (I’m not sure of the sequence, have difficulty listening to her), we will have opportunity to respond to what’s been said.

“Who wants to be first, folks?” she asks, looking at Yuri.

“Adrienne can start,” he says.

“I think I’d prefer to go second,” I say, conscious of looking Mrs. Wimpole directly in the eye. “It was Yuri’s idea to have this joint session. I was the more reluctant one.”

“Yes?” Dr. Wimpole asks as if my remark had surprised her. “When I was younger, I always hated to be the one to speak first. Now the more opportunity I have to talk, the better I like it.”

I glance over at Yuri to see if he finds this woman as absurd as I do. He refuses to meet my glance. This is a competition for him.

“It’s all right,” he says. “I’ll start. (Is it his anxiety or mine that I feel? I avert my eyes.) “About nine months ago, I became aware that Adrienne was turning away from me.”

“It was longer ago than that,” I say.

“You’ll have your turn,” Dr. Wimpole says in a mildly reproachful voice. “Please don’t interrupt your husband.”

Yuri offers Dr. Wimpole his most loveable smile. She seems to melt in its glow. I sense an alliance forming between diem. Is Yuri the brilliant and loving son she never had and has fantasized for herself? (Is that it, Yuri?)

I can’t listen to him. It is painful to me to listen. He is so full (fool) of words. “We had been especially close,” I hear him saying, “and I found her repeated rejections painful and incomprehensible. When I confronted her about it, she said she was going through something and needed more time to herself. I could understand that. I backed off, I gave her the space she asked, but it only seemed to embitter her more. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But she made it increasingly clear that she didn’t want blah blah with me, neither blah, nor blah, nor even — I say this with difficulty — blah.”

“Did she give any reason for it?” Dr. Wimpole asks, a cunning look on her face. “If something like that were happening to me, I would ask for reasons.”

This is what I am thinking. (These two are in this together. They are both, Yuri and Wimpole, versions of my mother.) What must Helena think of me? What a bad wife, this Adrienne is! She does not treat this man, her husband, with the proper respect.

I half-expect that she will send me to my room after Yuri finishes his story.

Yuri is having his turn. I try to listen. “One time,” he is saying, “she thought we had been too dependent on one another and that blah blah blah blah. Another time she said she was no longer yatatta yattata yattata.” He looks toward me and I wink at him. “Yeah,” he says, “also that she had sole responsibility for taking care of the house and for the bringing up of Rebecca, neither of which has truth. I’m here because I want to work things out.”

I clap politely at his conclusion. Good show, Yuri!

“And what do you want?” Dr. Wimpole asks me. What do I want? “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t really want to be here.” My voice is unhesitating, calm. (This is a sincere person, the observer will think.) “I don’t know what Yuri’s talking about. It’s been a long time since we’ve been close. I would say more like two years than nine months. I think it’s significant that he didn’t notice that I wasn’t responding to him in the same way.”

“What makes you so sure I didn’t notice?” he says, interrupting me.

“You’ve had your say,” I say, looking pointedly at Dr. Wimpole. “It’s my turn now. Do you want to hear what I have to say, or do you want to speak both parts?”

She shakes her finger at Yuri, a flirtatious reproach. “You have my word that Yuri won’t interrupt again,” she says.

“It’s interesting that you felt the need to speak for him,” I say. I laugh good-naturedly.

“I was speaking for myself,” says this paragon. “Please go on, Arianne.”

“It’s interesting,” I continue, “because women tend to be protective of him. Women fall over themselves to take care of the poor man. That’s his appeal; that’s the appeal he makes to….”

This time Dr. Wimpole interrupts. “Are you saying, Arianne, that you believe your husband is having something with another woman?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I say. “What I’m saying is (for a moment my mind is blank), that Yuri has a way of getting his way without you knowing that it’s happening. That’s one of my reasons, but I don’t do things for reasons. I really thought we had this good marriage. I thought, you know, that Yuri was this perfect man. Yuri is wonderful and I am this crazy dissatisfied bitch. I have this wonderful husband.

I have this satisfying career. Why aren’t I overwhelmingly happy? I must be this terrible person. Then I got involved with this man and I saw, you know, there were things about myself, needs really, I had never given attention to. I kept asking myself, Why are you doing this, Adrienne? I slowly began to realize that there was something wrong with my marriage to Yuri. I was changing and Yuri was not. I came to see that Yuri was incapable of change.” (Wimpole looks taken aback, rushes her hand through her hair.) “I’m afraid I’m not articulate,” I add.

Yuri is saying something. “Why didn’t you come to me and tell me you were unhappy?” he says in a booming voice.

“Well, why didn’t you notice I was unhappy,” I say. “Why did it never cross your mind? You know why — it’s because you don’t see things.”

“I didn’t know our marriage was supposed to be a test,” he shouts at me. “I failed your test, Adrienne, because you wanted me to fail.”

“I knew that was coming,” I say, my voice rising. “Speaking of self-fulfilling behavior. Look, I don’t need you to analyze me. You think you’re the only one who knows anything. You don’t know anything I don’t know.”

He turns to Dr. Wimpole as if to say, Look what I have to put up with. See how unreasonable this woman is.

“I think we’ve reached a counter-productive point, people,” Dr. Wimpole says. “Back up for a moment if you will. I’d like to give you my observations regarding what I’ve heard so far. All right? Do you people think you can listen to what I say without interrupting or shouting at each other?”

“That’s why we’re here,” I say.

Yuri looks unhappy, says nothing.

With a kind of ritual fussiness, as if her hands had not told the rest of her what they were doing, Dr. Wimpole locates a pair of glasses on an end table and puts them on, raising them to her forehead after a single glance at each of us. “First ofall,” shesays, Tmnotatallsurewhyyou’rehere. I’m speaking of the woman primarily, but I’m not excluding the man. Let’s put that on the table, people. This man says he wants his wife, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him and he’s angry as blazes at her for pushing him away. This woman is also angry. She says she thought she was happy married to this man, but it wasn’t true and so she has gone elsewhere to find Mr. Happiness. Has it been established whether happiness was found elsewhere?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I say. “Yes, she did. But it’s not working out.”

“As I’ve said, I’m not in the least bit sure why you’ve come to see me,” she says, giving me what I take to be a censorious glance. Let me establish that fact before moving on to the next fact. I like to move slowly. Would you believe it, people? As I get older, I feel no urgency to move on to die next place. Well, here you are. I don’t know what to say to you people. You’re both too old for me to take over my knee and spank.”

She closes her eyes. “Uh huh,” she says to herself, acknowledging some private revelation. “Uh huh. Uh huh. My sister was in a marriage like yours for years and it drove her what I call bananas. She was always halfway bananas, but that’s my sister Hortense for you. No two situations are exactly the same. My sister Hortense is not the best example. She died of a kidney infection before she ever found the time to get divorced. I think the world would have come to a halt before Hortense ever got around to filing the necessary papers.” She opens her eyes and seems surprised to find us in the room with her. “You have a child, is that right? You have a child of twelve if I remember, which is a problematic age.”

“She’s ten actually,” I say, mumbling apologetically as if her failure to be twelve were my fault.

“Her name is Rebecca,” Yuri says, seems to say. (I don’t seem able to pick up what he says.)

“I didn’t hear that,” Dr. Wimpole says. “I have some hearing loss in my left ear. It’s something that happened when I was a girl. I was the most reckless and impetuous little girl. It surprises me I ever grew up.”

“Her name is Rebecca,” we both say, almost in one voice.

“How is this child, Rebecca, getting along?” Dr. Wimpole asks Yuri.

“She’sverylovely,” I say. “Is that something one shouldn’t say about one’s own child.” I listen to myself laugh.

“Children know so much of what’s going on even if you’re very careful in front of them,” Dr. Wimpolesays in her scatty way. “I could tell you some stories about my niece Bernadette, but I don’t think we have time for that today.”

“Rebecca has bad dreams,” Yuri says. “She has trouble sleeping through the night.”

“Yuri tends to exaggerate,” I say, shaking my head at him. “It’s happened at most three times in the past several months.”

“It’s more like three times a week,” Yuri says. “Adrienne doesn’t want to believe her behavior has any impact on her child’s life.”

“Come off it,” I say. “And how would you know how often Rebecca wakes up at night? You’re always asleep when she comes in our room. I’m the one who has to deal with it.”

“Last Wednesday,” Yuri says, “when Rebecca woke from a bad dream I stayed with her in her room until it was morning.”

“Big deal,” I say.

“You both want to get credit for what you’ve been doing,” Dr. Wimpole says. “You feel, both of you people, that you don’t get enough credit from the other. Yes?”

I am readily credulous. Even banalities tend to surprise me with their disguised old news. “Is that really true?” I ask Yuri, who has his hands clasped in his lap and is staring morosely at the ceiling.

Yuri takes refuge in looking the other way. He can’t admit he wants anything from me, which is sad. (Is it not?) I see him for the moment with absolute clarity. Dr. Wimpole is leaning forward, head tilted, listening with her good ear to the unspoken.

Y

Adrienne was looking into the office, was self-absorbed, when I came up behind her. When I touched her shoulder to let her know I was there she let out a gasp. “Where did you come from?” she cried. She had her hand on her heart as if reciting The Pledge of Allegiance. A vein stood out on her forehead. She squeezed by me in the doorway, some contact between us unavoidable. Her elbow thumped my chest. I had a hard-on, which grazed her hip. She had a faint, knowing smile on her face, a child’s leer.

I forced her against me for a second or so, then let her go. “I have a patient coming any minute,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. She moved up the stairs with a kind of insect intensity. I watched her go away. A moment later, she called to me from the top of the steps. “Yuri, if you want to phone Dr. Wimpole, it’s all right with me.

I was all over the place, walked back and forth, stared at myself in the full length office mirror. An imposter stared back at me. My clothes hung on me. My face looked raw-edged and incomplete as if it had been torn from its mold. Fucking Adrienne, I felt, was the only thing that could heal me.

When my patient arrived, I was all right, felt magically in control. He was boy of twelve named Alex, a wise child, who had come to me with irrational fears of abandonment. I had been seeing him now for four months and we had made some small progress. He had agreed to sleep over a friend’s house the past weekend and he was coming today to report to me about the experience.

It is dangerous for a therapist to be dependent for satisfaction on his patients’ breakthroughs.

Alex had cancelled the sleepover, was aggrieved with himself. We reviewed the events immediately preceding his change of heart. His mother had visited him in his room, had urged him to go to the party in a way that fueled his anxiety. They had a fight about something and she left his room, saying she was very unhappy with him. He lay in bed for a while, masturbating. When he heard her coming upstairs, he buried himself in his covers. She said he better get ready if he was going to the party and he shouted back that he wasn’t going. Until he announced he wasn’t going, he hadn’t actually decided. She asked him if he was afraid to go and he said yes and she sat down next to him like someone in a sickroom — Alex’s image — and hugged him.

I saw an insight flash across his face. When I asked him what it was, he shook his head in denial.

It was after the session was over, when he had already gotten up from his chair, that he said, “She was afraid of my leaving her.”

I nodded. We shook hands. I felt hopeful at that moment for both of us.

This was the next day. After clinic, I went for a drink with Peter, listened to his confession, shared complaints about our wives, went back with him to his apartment. He didn’t want to be alone with Barbara and I didn’t want to go home to Adrienne.

I sat between them on the sofa, drinking champagne, fussed over and admired. At some point, Barbara invited me to stay for dinner. I said — it was an automatic response — that I had to call home to see if Adrienne had anything special planned.

“Don’t call,” Peter said.

I dialed my number, got a busy signal, returned to my place between them on the couch.

“I take full responsibility for your not calling home,” Peter said. “Let her worry about you.”

“That’s stupid, Peter,” Barbara said. There was a knife edge of anger in her voice. “If Yuri feels he has to call, it’s not your business to object. He’s the kind of man who doesn’t want his family to worry about him.”

“That’s an ignorant remark,” Peter said. “The man has got to show his wife he’s unpredictable.”

I got Rebecca on the phone. We talked for a few minutes, made small talk as if I hadn’t seen her for weeks. “Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get to sleep,” she said.

“I know, honey,” I said. “I was there. What are you and Mom doing about dinner?”

Momentarily, Adrienne was at my ear. “Hi,” she said.

“Adrienne, I’m at Peter and Barbara’s,” I said

“Are you?” she said. “How nice.”

“They’ve asked me to stay for dinner,” I said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?” she said in her extraterrestrial voice. “Really. Why should you think I would mind?”

“Well, I just wanted to let you know where I am.”

“And you have,” she said. “We’ll see you later, I suppose.” She hung up.

“He was wrong, wasn’t he?” Barbara said when I returned to my place between them on the couch.

“Look at the man’s face, Babs,” Peter said. “That face has just made contact with a closed door.”

The meal, which featured a roast of some sort, made almost no impression. I ate little, tasted nothing. Peter and Barbara were a model of decorum, a seminar in domestic diplomacy. I was aware of having had too much to drink and not enough to eat. Although barely able to stand up, I announced that it was time for me to go.

Barbara said, “You can stay the night, Yuri. We can find some place to put you.”

“He’s not going to stay,” Peter said. “Don’t waste your breath on him, Babs. The man has got to get home to his family.”

“I appreciate this, my friends,” I said. I was standing at the door with my coat on. I kissed Barbara, hugged Peter. I feel very close to you both.”

Peter and Barbara embraced me from opposite sides, held me between them.

“You mean a lot to us,” Peter said.

“We love you,” said Barbara, hugging me.

The room behind them, the extended hallway, seemed filtered through yellow smoke.

“I am very moved,” I said or thought of saying.

“We want you to know,” Peter said, “that if you need a place to stay, there’s always a bed for you in our house.”

Barbara kissed me on the side of the mouth, said, “If I weren’t married to Peter, you would be the man I would want to be with.”

Tears came to my eyes. “Thank you, friends,” I said. “I love you both.”

Peter leaves with me, Barbara stands in the doorway waving.

Peter and I walk several blocks in various directions, looking for my car. It is the second time in two weeks, both during visits to the Konigs, that it has disappeared.

The house is mostly dark when I let myself in. I am elated at having found my car, at having found a parking place for it, at having arrived home safely, feel oddly — tremulously — triumphant. Rebecca loves me. I look into Rebecca’s room, discover her bed has not been slept in. I look into my own bedroom, find neither wife nor daughter. The emptiness of the house confuses me.

Eventually I discover that Adrienne has left me a note wedged into the kitchen phone like a flower.

Yuri —

I’m having a drink with a friend. Rebecca is sleeping at Olivia’s house. Don’t wait up for me.

I flop down on the couch, turn on the television with the remote, watch sports and weather — I suffer Rebecca’s absence, the empty house — the weather map dissolving into an old movie. I doze, wake, fight off sleep. I see snatches of a black and white movie, a detective story with the ambience of a bad dream. A man is pushed out of a skyscraper window, screams as he falls, his mouth agape like a wound. The detective is questioning a woman — she puts her arms around his neck. I think to warn him that she can’t be trusted. He kisses her. The door behind him opens. Adrienne, looking like she has fallen from a window, comes into the room.

She calls my name, moves to the television to turn it off.

Half-asleep, I rise from the sofa like an apparition. What do you think you’re doing?” I say. “The murder is still unsolved.”

She gasps, says, “God, you scared me half to death.”

A

Dr. Wimpole is wearing her mischievous look. “Have I said something I wasn’t supposed to say,” she says. ‘Tell you the truth, people, I’m not in the least bit sorry.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about. I look at Yuri, who seems equally befuddled. “I don’t think parenting is an issue where Adrienne and I are at odds,” he says.

“I think Yuri’s been mosdy a good father,” I say.

“I didn’t know you thought I did anything well,” Yuri says.

That’s a sad thing for him to say. “You’re not such a bad father,” I say to him.

“Thank you,” he says with what I take to be irony.

Wimpole has a secret smile on her face. “What do you think of Adrienne as a mother?” she asks Yuri.

He doesn’t answer right away, which is a message in itself. “I never said Adrienne wasn’t a good mother,” he says in a dead voice.

“Why don’t you tell that to her?” Wimpole says.

I want to cry when she says that. I have this image of myself as a child standing in front of a class, getting ready to recite some lesson I failed to prepare. Getting it wrong was unthinkable. It was my role to be perfect.

This scatty woman we have turned ourselves over to asks me what my reaction is to what Yuri has said.

“What did Yuri say? I’m sorry. I didn’t realize he said anything.”

“It may be the case, let me put it to you, that you preferred not to hear him,” Wimpole says. “Could that be possible, Arianne?”

“I think that’s probably true,” I say.

“I said I felt you were a good mother,” he says. He refuses to look at me.

“Did you?” I look over at Wimpole. I assume the issue is concluded. “We don’t always see eye to eye on what’s best for Rebecca,” I hear myself say.

“How did you feel, Arianne, when Yuri said you were a good mother?” Wimpole asks me. “Were you in touch with your feelings?”

I resist her manipulation. “Of course I like to be praised,” I say. “Who doesn’t like to be praised? I would have liked it better if it were less grudging. I felt he was saying it mostly for your benefit.”

“Why for my benefit, of all things?” she says.

“He wants you to like him,” I say. “He wants you to see him as the good person in this marriage.”

Her feathery white hair floats about in all directions when she nods. “Oh I don’t matter,” she says. “Yuri knows that.” She gives a girlish shrug. “If Yuri’s the good person, Arianne, does that make you the bad person? The secretly no-one-knows- how-good-I-am bad person.”

“That’s a bit easy, isn’t it?” I say.

“I have no illusions,” Wimpole says. “There’s nothing under the sun that I can tell you that you don’t already know in spades. Arianne, how would you have responded if you felt your husband’s compliment were genuine?”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I say. “By the way, my name is pronounced Adrienne. I don’t anticipate my feelings, Dr. Wimpole. I can only know what they are when I experience them.”

“Arianne, in my opinion as observer,” Wimpole says, “Yuri was being sincere.”

I look over at Yuri who has his usual severe countenance. “Did you mean it?” I ask him.

“I meant it,” he says. He adds my name to the sentence as an afterthought.

I turn away, turn my face away. I feel ashamed. “I don’t know that I really believe him,” I say. “I don’t know that. And even if he meant it, I don’t see that it changes anything.”

Yuri rests his head on his hand.

“It sounds to me as if Arianne…Adrienne is rejecting you,” Wimpole says to him. “How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he says from behind his hand. “I have trouble believing she means it.”

My voice is like ice against glass. “Yuri tends to ignore what he doesn’t want to hear,” I hear myself saying. “He has a talent for obliviousness.”

“Fuck off,” he says.

“He also tends to be insulting,” I say.

“What I hear,” Wimpole says, “is that you don’t want to give this man anything. And this man may want everything, but he doesn’t know how to ask. Is that accurate? Is that an observation to be put on the table, people?” Her glasses slide down her forehead and she removes them in annoyance.

“She wants to kill me,” Yuri says, “and she wants me to look after her after I’m dead.”

“Shhhh,” Wimpole says. She puts her finger across her lips and holds it there.

I close my eyes, try to listen to my feelings, but hear only static. “I feel that I don’t want to give myself to Yuri ever again,” I hear myself saying. “I’m willing to fix his meals, but I don’t want to give anything of myself to him. I don’t want to be touched by him ever again.” It is as if there is a loudspeaker right behind my head that reproduces these words. Yuri lets out a groan from his side of the room and I don’t dare to look at him. I feel in my jacket pocket for a kleenex and find some ancient wadded piece which I use to blot my eyes. “I feel I’m terrible,” I say.

Wimpole gives me this motherly smile. “That’s clear,” she says in her no nonsense manner. “You don’t want to have any intimacy with this man.”

I nod, though I sense she is representing me in some willfully dense way. (Is she making fun of me? Mocking me?) I am aware of how I look to the others, how ugly, eyes red, eyeliner running. Yuri hands me a box of kleenex and I blow my nose. I hold the box on my lap like a child. “He really has no idea of who I am,” I say. “He thinks of me as some virgin…version of himself.”

“That’s bullshit,” he shouts, which makes me laugh through my tears. “I know you as well as I know myself.”

“I’m never going back to you,” I shout at him.

His face cracks down the middle. “I can survive without you,” he mutters.

“Wait just a minute here,” Wimpole says. “Yuri, do you or do you not want this woman back. I thought that was a fact we had on the table.”

He sighs, this Yuri. “I don’t want her this way,” he says. “This isn’t the woman I want.”

“This is the way I am,” I throw back at him. “If you can’t accept that, I don’t want you around.”

“What I see,” Wimpole says, “is a very angry woman. What is it, Arianne? What has this man done to make you so angry?”

“Adrienne’s this angry lady,” I say. “It’s Adrienne, okay? not Arianne. I’m angry at Yuri because he doesn’t really care what I do. I feel I’ve been deceived by him.”

“You feel Yuri deceives you,” she says, looking about for a figurative table to place this “fact” on. “Let me get this straight. Yuri deceives you by pretending to care for you when, in fact, he really doesn’t.”

“I don’t think I made myself clear,” I say.

“You’re clear, Adrienne,” she says. “You’re a well spoken person, which is something I admire. If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to make a statement of intent. The reason I spend my afternoons doing this, working with people like you people, is that marriage is too important, in my opinion, to leave, when in crisis, solely to the principals involved. When you marry someone, you are electing to spend the rest of your life with that person. That can be difficult. When things go haywire, you just want to run away from it as fast and as far as you can go.” She seems to have lost her train of thought, makes a gesture to no point. “I’m here, people, to help you find your way back to where you were in the happy times.”

I notice from the digital clock on the bookcase behind Yuri’s head that there are four minutes left to our session. (What a disaster it’s been.) Wimpole is asking me something. I force myself to pay attention.

“Arianne, let’s forget about this man, Yuri,” she is saying. “Let’s put old Yuri in the closet.” She mimes locking someone in the closet, which makes me smile. “Now Arianne…Adrienne, if you were getting together with another man, what would you want from this relationship?”

There is just a minute left to our fifty minute session, I note with some relief. “I really haven’t given it a lot of thought,” I say. “All I feel clear about is what I don’t want. I don’t want what I’ve had. Yuri refuses to accept that as a fact that’s on the table.”

“Yuri’s in the closet,” Wimpole says. “Adrienne, what do you want from this new man?”

I want to tell her that our time, which she may not have noticed, has run out. I envision another distraught couple in the waiting room, waiting to put their marriage on Wimpole’s imaginary table. “What do I want?” I ask rhetorically, conscious of stalling. “First of all, I want to be treated as an equal.” I indicate with a shrug that that is all I can think of under the pressure of the moment. “Yes, and I want to be treated with appropriate respect.”

“I see, yes,” Wimpole says, retrieving her glasses from the table, holding them in front of her eyes. She studies my face. “Is that what you want most from a man, Adrienne, respect?”

“I want him to be generous with money.” I laugh. (It is meant as a joke.) “I want someone who’s kind. Kindness is a high priority.” Wimpole nods. “I want to be loved of course. I think that goes, doesn’t it, without….” My voice breaks. Tears leak from my eyes. I am trembling. I have the sense I am so awful that no one could possibly love me. No one at all. These feelings anger me.

“Are you aware, Adrienne, that Yuri said something to you?” she asks me.

(What?) If I had strength in my legs, I would get up from the couch and leave the room. “I want kindness,” I hear myself say. (I have no idea what’s going on.) Yuri says something, which makes no sense. “Are you taking back what you just said?” Wimpole asks him. “That was a minute ago,” he says. “My feelings have changed. If she wanted to hear what I said, she would have heard it.” “What don’t I want to hear,” I say. I am still sobbing. “You’re a narcissist, Adrienne,” he says. “Your emotional age is sixteen years old going on nine. You’ve treated me in the last year like some derelict relative who’s overstayed his welcome. You’re a pain in the ass.” “Why do you stay with me?” I say under my breath. “If I’m so terrible, why don’t you just leave.” He turns his face away. “I said I loved you,” he says as though he were reading someone else’s line. He won’t look at me. Not enough, I tell myself. He is unable to say it with real feeling. I get up from the couch (though don’t remember getting up), go over to where he sits with his eyes averted. I squeeze his hand. He looks startled. “I love you too,” I hear myself say, meaning it and not meaning it. He pulls me roughly on to his lap and strokes my hair. My name is whispered to me. I rub my wet face against his. When I stop crying, I return to my place on the couch. I am out of focus. “This is probably as good a place to stop as any,” Wimpole says in her bemused way. I go into the bathroom to wash my face. I go to the bathroom to get away from the others and study my face in the mirror. Yuri and Wimpole are buzzing about something outside my closed door. There is laughter. Who is laughing? (Are you amusing her, Yuri?) As I return to the living room, I witness Yuri passing a check to her. She takes it with embarrassed cknowledgement as though it were a bribe. Yuri holds my coat for me. When we step out into the hall and close the door (it is a relief that Wimpole does not come home with us), he puts his arm around my waist. He pulls me to him. I feel affection for this man, though I don’t know why. I let him kiss me. “I don’t know what happened in there,” I say. “Don’t make too much of it. All right?” He walks off ahead of me without a word and presses the elevator button. As we get out of the elevator, he says, “I won’t make anything of it.” What a funny old lady! I want to say to him. Nothing that happened in that room can be taken seriously. Can it? I want to ask him. As if he has the answer. Therapy, it strikes me, is full of charged moments of deception.

Y

I ask Adrienne what time it is.

“Around twelve thirty,” she says. The wall clock in the kitchen shows twenty minutes after one. Adrienne takes off her coat, seems not to know what to do with it.

“Who was the friend you were having your drink with?” I ask.

“It’s nothing,” she says as if it were one word. “It’s not important.” She puts her coat on the back of a chair. It slides off on to the rug.

“If it wasn’t important, why did you go? And why isn’t Rebecca here?”

“Sandy wasn’t available,” she says. “I couldn’t very well leave her here by herself, now could I? It isn’t anything to concern yourself about, Yuri.” She goes upstairs, hurries up the steps, to the bathroom.

For what happens next, there is only my own self-doubting recollection.

I am in the hallway when Adrienne comes out of the bathroom wearing a loosely tied silk kimono, her breasts exposed. She is carrying a diaphragm in her right hand, balancing it on her palm.

Astonished, in a kind of shock, I lean against the wall to keep from falling.

She is under the covers reading a book on esthetics when I come in, my body like a furnace. “I want you to sleep downstairs,” I say in a mad calm voice.

“I have no problem with that,” she says, closing her book, sliding out of bed, getting into her kimono.

I sit on the bed with my back to her, more rage in my heart than I can bear to know.

“You have no idea what I want,” she says as if it were the harshest thing she might tell me. She takes her undisclosed passion downstairs. The unimaginable follows. I feel punished by her absence.

After pulling off my shoes — I don’t bother to untie them — I lie down fully clothed on top of the comforter. In an instant, I capitulate to exhaustion.

I wake during the night, notice the empty space in the bed next to me, go downstairs, find Adrienne curled awkwardly on the living room couch covered by one of my overcoats. “You can return,” I whisper to her. She doesn’t answer. I carry her up the stairs — she is astonishingly light — and put her to bed like a child.