Separate Hours

Eleven Behavioral Therapy

A

In an undated entry in his journal, Yuri reports an incident (a fight really) that is significandy different from my own sense of things.

We are sleepwalkers in separate dreams.

Y

I walked Barbara home in the rain after lunch. We held hands, walked the streets like teenagers pretending to be lovers.

“I need someone to hold hands with,” she said. “It’s what I miss most about my marriage.”

I had no recollection of Peter and Barbara ever holding hands. I said goodbye to her in the lobby of her apartment building.

She was suddenly coy, said there was something she wanted to tell me, but not now, another time. I pressed her to tell meher secret. “If I told you now,” she said, “you’d have no reason to ever see me again.”

Adrienne, I later learned, was having lunch with Peter while I was having lunch with Barbara.

A

(Peter, your best friend Peter, propositioned me today. It is said when the check arrives face down between us. “I have always wondered what it would be like to do the sack scene with you,” he says loud enough for people at the next table to hear. “What about your girl friend?” I ask him. “I don’t really know if she’s into threesomes,” he says. We laugh together as if it were the funniest thing.)

Y

We shared impressions that evening of our friends’ emotional states. We had begun to talk again in the old manner. What do I mean exactly by the old manner? We tended to discuss our friends’ behavior as if we were a medical team diagnosing some new and interesting pathology. It was a form of intimacy between us.

“Now that they’re apart,” she said, “they’ve taken on aspects of the other’s personality. Have you noticed that?”

I said I hadn’t, not in Barbara’s case at least, though I could believe it was true.

Adrienne said she worried about Barbara, that she thought it was going to be worse for her — much worse — before it got any better.

What are we talking about when we talk about Peter and Barbara?

R

This may have been in my sleep. I was going down to the basement to see my daddy in his office. I was afraid they had gone somewhere without telling me. On the steps, as I was going down, I saw this humungous bug. It wasn’t moving. I touched it with the toe of my shoe to prove it wasn’t dead. It made a sound like a cry and rolled boldly on to its back. It was more like a scraping sound. It scrambled back on to its front. The sound this time was like Darth Vader breathing. I ran up the stairs and closed the door behind me. I wanted to get far away from that bug and I didn’t want it to know where I was going.

A

Yuri mentions a psychoanalytic conference in Zurich he has been invited to attend. I have also been invited. I have also thought of going. In postponing a decision (how difficult such trips seemed), I had forgotten about the invitation.

“You went to the last conference,” I say. “Why don’t you stay home with Rebecca and I’ll go this time.”

His face darkens as if a small bulb under the skin has gone out. “We could both go,” he says. “Rebecca could stay with my mother.”

I tell him he can go alone if it is important to him and I will go the next time. Do I smile? I think in this instance I do. I am thinking, This is not the rejection you are going to make of it, Yuri. This is a gesture to show you that I am not the witch you make me out to be. He says he will think about it but I can see he has no intention of going by himself. The phone interrupts us.

Peter says, “You are setting yourself up to be rejected by Yuri.”

Y

Although we seem to be moving headlong in that direction, I don’t want to get caught up in an affair with Barbara. We did a lot of hand holding during our exchange of confidences. And we embraced for extended moments when we said goodbye. “I think of you as the first line of my support system,” Barbara said. It was the essence of what she said if not the exact words. We had the ambience of a love affair without actually making love.

I had lunch with Peter once a week and I felt, if not disloyal, somewhat compromised by my unacknowledged (unconsumated) intimacy with Barbara. At alternate times, Adrienne broke bread and exchanged confidences with Barbara or Peter, or with other mutual friends, who were separated or contemplating separation. If we had all compared notes, who knows what we might have learned. I saw little of Adrienne, tended to be downstairs when she was up, upstairs when she was down. When we talked it was to replay old conversations. I was going through the early stages of mourning. I was living with someone who, in the context of my emotional life, had recently died.

Peter took my reluctance to leave Adrienne as a personal affront. His overstated outrage had a calming effect on me, let me feel that my life was secretly better than anyone knew. For his own part, Peter professed to be overjoyed with unmarried life, though he didn’t want a divorce from Barbara so he wouldn’t be under pressure to marry Roberta, the twenty-nine year old pop singer he was currently dating. He was also suffering from high blood pressure and had occasional heart palpitations of non-somatic origin.

A

C’s absence feeds on me like a lingering disease. I don’t accept that he prefers Anna Marie. (Is prefer what it is?) I think of myself in the abstract: the nurturing woman who has been sent away.

Last week, after clinic, I went to die Moondance Diner for coffee. I sat at a table, which has an oblique view of C’s loft building. Two women emerged and about five minutes later C appeared, wearing hat and dark glasses. The women came out of die building at the same time (it could have been coincidence) and went off in opposite directions. One might have been widi C. My intuition was diat he had been with both. That seemed less awful somehow. I watched him walk to his car, completely absorbed in himself. He looked sad. Post-coital triste? I was sad for him. I felt no jealousy, felt released from jealousy.

Y

“Face it, Yuri,” Barbara said. “Adrienne is not going to go back to you.” We were in her apartment, drinking espresso as black as ashes.

“How do you know this?” I asked, the question violating die implicit rules of our foursome.

Her face was flushed and she was looking away. “When Peter first moved out,” she said, “what I missed most was die physical contact. I felt kind of unloveable. I was telling that to Adrienne, who was very supportive. She’s a good listener. She really is. Then she said radier casually, ‘Why don’t you have an affair with Yuri?’ I was shocked, you know, when she said it. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you and couldn’t.”

I had no reaction, shook my head, wanted not to believe her. She moved an infinitesimal distance away. “I felt a little guilty, Yuri, as if she had caught me doing something wrong. To be frank, after you kissed me that time at the party, I had thought of it too. I felt kind of angry about it the next day. I was kind of crazed about it really.”

I was thinking out loud, pursuing comprehension. “It’s possible she was trying to find out if there was something between us,” I said. “It may have been a way of keeping us from having an affair. Or maybe she felt she could trust me to you. According to Freud, every gesture has an almost infinite burden of meanings.”

“Is she really that subtle?” Barbara asked. Our thighs were touching, and I sensed that if we were to start an affair, if it were ever going to happen, this was its moment. I had to leave, had a patient to see.

We kissed at the door several times, Barbara keeping her hands behind her back. “I’ll have fantasies about you when you’re gone,” she said.

A

The first day I nursed coffee for over two hours. Today I had herb tea and a crumbly blueberry muffin. I was various in my behavior. A surprising person. My sketchbook was with me. I never saw C leave the building. I stayed too long, waiting for nothing. I just couldn’t pull myself away. (You didn’t ask where I was. I let you think what you wanted to think.)

I wrote another letter to C, the second since our break up (or is it break down?). Yuri would have said (had you known about the letters) that they were letters to myself given the displacement of a contrived occasion. I deny that of course. I was writing to a man who had loved me. If he is incapable of love (I believe and I don’t believe), it is a choice C lets himself make, a kind of cowardice.

By the time I got the letter down on paper, I knew it by heart. As soon as I folded the letter and put it in an envelope, I could barely remember a complete sentence. I wanted the letter as it was. I wanted the letter as it had been before it was a letter.

I had it photocopied (one for me and one for him) and I put the original in the addressed envelope. I carried it around in my purse for what must have been more than a week before thrusting it in the mailbox one windy Sunday morning. On two more occasions I went back to the diner. I felt at home there. The waitresses nodded to me when I came in. The one time I spotted C, he left the building in a hurry and hailed a cab. This was before I had mailed the letter. I felt lonely at being excluded from his plans.

R

There I was going down those same stairs and the same humungous bug was there waiting for me to come along. I was going to ask my mom a question when I nearly stomped on the ugly bug. I could hear my mom’s voice. She was either on the phone or with a patient. B was on a different step this time. My mom was saying, “Don’t expect too much from me.” I pushed B with my shoe, then ran up the stairs, and escaped to my room. I hated that bug. I said this to my daddy: “Daddy, we have to call the exterminator. This house is crawling with bugs.” “Is it?” he said.

Y

Melinda, who I hadn’t heard from in months, was waiting for me in the anteroom of the clinic. She followed me into my office without invitation.

“How have you been?” I asked. She looked worn.

“I don’t know if you want to see me,” she said shyly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.”

“I have a patient waiting,” I said. “Could I meet you somewhere after three o’clock?”

“I just want to say that I’m all right,” she said. “I’m doing all right.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

She laughed. “Well, I was talking about you in therapy and I thought it would be nice to see you again. And there you are, looking as you always look.”

She was dressed all in black, tight black skirt, loose black sweater. She looked frail and sad. My attraction to her was beyond any knowledge I was prepared to share with myself. “You look very sexy,” I said.

She turned her back to me and removed her raincoat, which had been open, then she unhooked her skirt and let it drop to the floor. Then crossing her arms, she lifted her sweater over her head.

Her breasts were like half-moons when she turned to face me. I kissed her open-mouthed, her fishy tongue sliding down my throat.

“There isn’t time for this,” I said.

She gave me a skeptical look, began in mock slow motion to get back into her sweater.

Melinda lay down on the flower-patterned linoleum floor, raised her knees. I thought of locking the door, though didn’t, let the thought suffice. I was estimating how much extra time I might give my neglected patient, a timid Korean woman named Dulcie, who had been waiting for me in the other room.

“I’ve entered the Clinical Psychology Program at NYU,” she whispered in my ear.

It was my obsession to share her obsession. “That’s terrific,” I said.

The sex went on longer than I had anticipated, extended itself. I imagined, as I was making love to Melinda, passive Dulcie sticking her head in the door to ask if I was ready for her.

Was this the nature of middle-aged passion? As I fucked a former patient, I was distractedly concerned with the aetiology of the one waiting to see me.

Oh Dulcie, I don’t want your therapist to disillusion you, to make you doubt your own sense of appropriateness!

And then, as if conjured by my anxiety, there was a tap on the door just loud enough to assert its reality.

I didn’t stop what I was doing, but said, barely turning my head, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Dulcie.”

The tapping repeated itself, became more assertive. “This is like a dream I had,” Melinda said.

I shouted in outrage to whoever was there — I no longer believed it was Dulcie — ” I have a patient in here with me.”

The wrong remark was, as always, the truth undisguised. When we broke connection it was like waking from a week’s sleep.

“You never call me,” she said, aggrieved.

“You asked me not to call you,” I reminded her.

She was in a sulky mood as she put on her skirt, her head turned away. “You wouldn’t have called anyway.”

“I’ll call you and we’ll get together,” I said. I stroked her hair.

She turned apout in my direction, her eyes so unutterably sad they moved me to concern. “I don’t want to hear from you,” she said. “I thought I could handle it, but obviously I cant.

“I want to see you again,” I said.

She made a gesture with her hands that suggested pushing away. “I better go,”she said. “You have this real patient waiting.”

The waiting room was empty when I let Melinda out, Dulcie apparendy having lost heart. I tried to separate myself from what I imagined Dulcie’s feelings to be — confusion, humiliation, self-loathing — but there was no getting around that I had behaved unacceptably. I paced the small clinic room as if it were a jail cell. Then Dulcie appeared. She had been to the bathroom, she said. She had been knocking to tell me she was going to the bathroom so I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t see her when I opened the door.

A

After my last patient of the day, I lie down on Yuri’s side of the bed and imagine Carroway receiving my letter. I try to envision his reaction as he reads (I was thinking “eats”) my words. My feelings disguised as words.

As I imagine it, he refuses to open the envelope. Refuses to risk himself to the touch of my words. The prospect engenders anxiety. My words die unread.

I keep stealing looks at Yuri’s journal, a new obsession. From yesterday’s entry: “I can think of no greater relief than her absence from my life.” I have the feeling he means me to read it. (True?) The absoluteness of the sentence upsets me. (What is the nature of this absence?) I put the journal back in its drawer without reading further. Later, I consider going back and writing a comment in the margin.

Y

I had a dream in which Barbara was offering me a part in a play she was writing called “Fire Away or Sink”. My performance took place behind the curtain — in shadow — for one of those reaons that seem so compelling in dreams. I called her the next morning — dreams require an answer — from my office at the clinic. “I have the feeling we’ve been avoiding each other,” I said. “I don’t want that to be the case.”

“My life is a disaster, Yuri,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

So I rearranged some appointments at the clinic and went to Barbara’s apartment. We didn’t talk, as I assumed we would, about whether or not we would sleep together.

Barbara’s subject was this: she had had a sexual encounter with a much younger man she had met at the local D’Agostino’s. The man, a blue collar type, had been standing behind her in the checkout line, and they had struck up a conversation concerning a bizarre headline in “The National Enquirer.” A MARTIAN FATHERED MY CHILD/ 14 YEAR OLD VIRGIN REPORTS.

The man was not her type, not someone she would have been interested in had they met through conventional channels. That was its attraction, she said. She was doing something outside the normal pattern of her behavior. He helped her with her groceries; she invited him in; one thing led to another.

“You did nothing wrong,” I said, willing a distance I was unable to feel.

“You know what’s crazy, Yuri”—she took my hand — “I don’t even like him. Yet I’m furious, you know, that he hasn’t called back. That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Well, you went to bed with him, Barbara, to make yourself feel loveable. By his not calling you, which you feel as a rejection, he’s making you unlovable. You have reason to be pissed at him.”

“This is very kind of you, Yuri.” She squeezed my hand. “You know what? I’m in a really strange mood.” She nodded to herself in corroboration and left the couch, disappearing into die kitchen. “Am I loveable? How about some coffee or a glass of wine?” She broke a glass, taking it down from the shelf, then cut her finger cleaning up. “I’m sorry,” she said. Covering her face with her hands, she began to sob.

Patients cry in my office all the time, but I’ve never been easy with it. I tended to take crying — women’s in particular — as an unanswerable demand. “It’s okay, Barbara,” I said.

The crying, which had almost stopped, exploded again into violent sobs. She slumped into the nearest chair. “No one…no one loves me,” she keened.

The passion of her grief frightened me. I forced myself to sit on the arm of her chair, to put my arm around her. “We all love you,” I said.

She pressed her face into my chest, curled herself into me. “No one,” she said fiercely. “Hold me. Okay? I’ll do the same for you. Mommy.”

I held her as tightly as I could, put both my arms around her, and still I felt I was failing her. “I’m here,” I said.

I made love to Barbara on the floor of the living room, on her green Chinese rug.

When she returned from die bathroom — her make-up erratically restored, her lipstick like a child’s drawing — she looked like a survivor of some disaster. “How can I ever look you in the face again?” she said. Her smile belied the question.

“You were fine,” I said. “You were very brave.”

She hugged me from behind. “You’re being gallant, right? Right?”

I kissed her goodbye on the cheek, said the man from the supermarket had been a fool not to call back.

I was mildly depressed when I returned to the clinic, felt inauthentic, fraudulent.

R

What do we know about the feelings of B? That’s what I was thinking right before I went to sleep. The bug said something to me in my dream. What are you trying to say, B? It was in a language I couldn’t understand. It was not what you would call a human language. I got out of bed in the dark and put a blanket over my shoulders. It dragged under my feet when I walked. I looked into my Mom and Dad’s bedroom. They slept with their backs to each other. Mom lifted her head and said, “Nothing in the world can make me.” I walked downstairs in the dark, shining a flashlight on my feet. The floor was cold.

Y

It was not the inevitable next step, merely an acknowledgment of reality. I went to see a divorce lawyer for advice, a man named Harry Elders, who had been recommended to me as forceful from one of my colleagues at the clinic.

Elders was a youngish man — that is, he looked like a boy who had reached forty without becoming an adult — with a brash energetic manner. He radiated over-compensation. On the barest acquaintance, he announced that he fully understood my situation, that he liked to represent clients with whom he had feelings of identification. He moved between large aggressive claims — ” The woman has no case — we’ll destroy her pretensions”—to advising that no one can tell in advance how divorce matters will be adjudicated. His best advice was to avail myself of a first strike capacity. I told him that I wasn’t ready to act, wanted merely to acquaint myself with my rights. “With due respect, doctor,” he said, “from what you told me, and I’ve seen a number of cases like yours, divorce is the medicine I’d prescribe. The marriage, believe me, is over. Make your move before she makes it for you.”

I said I would get back to him. We shook hands across his desk. His grip was forceful. He was showing me I might become more powerful by hiring him.

“You chose this man to give yourself an excuse not to act,” Peter said over drinks at a new Columbus bar called Manna from Heaven. He was going to Roberta’s place afterward for dinner and I felt — what? — a touch of envy. He seemed more than usually pleased with himself, dominated our conversation.

The streetlights had just come on, though it was not yet dark, and I was aware of being alone, of feeling an ache of loneliness. Although I knew the upper west side well, the streets remained anonymous. Wanting acknowledgment, I stared into strangers’ faces, daring them to look away.

I went from flashes of exhilaration to feelings of extreme vulnerability. If someone, some former patient, with an imagined grievance, wanted to assault me, there was no one to come to my aid on these streets. I felt some urgency about getting home. My anxiety focused on Rebecca and Adrienne. I needed them to need me to protect them from some kind of danger.

A woman, someone coming up from behind, called what sounded like “Yuri,” not a name readily confused with something else. I stopped reluctantly.

A

In the dream, he was dancing in the street with a waitress from the diner, a blowsy gum-chewing, red-headed woman. In real life (there is that too), I am walking down the street toward the diner when I see him. He has his bow-like back curved toward me. There is a woman, who might have been the sister of the red-headed woman in the dream, holding on to his arm. They go into the building, C leading the way like a tour guide. It is so much like the dream I will myself to wake. I find myself in a phone booth and dial his number incorrectly. One digit isn’t right, is blocked out. (Does it mean I don’t want to make connection?) I get a busy signal and dial again. This time I know I have the right number. I anticipate his voice. My heart is buzzing. The dream, I think (the trauma), must play itself out. The phone rings twenty-one times. Someone picks up the phone and hangs it up without a word. At least he’s not in bed with her, I tell myself.

Y

The apartment was in advanced disarray as if nothing had been picked up in the five days or so since I had seen her last. “Don’t look,” she said. I stood with my back to the room while Barbara made a few minor alterations. “Do you know what I’ve been doing?” she said. “I’m writing an adult novel about modern marriage.”

She took a folded up sheet of paper from her purse and read out loud the most recent version, she said, of the opening sentence. “When Hilda Karpatsky discovered one morning that she was in love with her husband’s best friend, she felt herself standing on a narrow precipice on which a move in any direction was to risk disaster.”

I hadn’t sat down, had accepted a glass of white wine, was moving about the living room looking for an uncluttered place to sit when the phone rang.

Barbara gave me a complicit look, let the ringing play itself out. The phone persisted beyond Barbara’s will to ignore it. “It might be important,” she said. She took the call in the bedroom. “I was in the shower,” I heard her say, then she lowered her voice.

When she returned ten minutes later to the living room, she had a pained smile on her face, the ironic look of someone who feels wrongfully punished. “Guess who?” she said.

I shook my head, could imagine. “Peter.”

“That was Adrienne,” she said. “She wanted to know if you were here.”

I could feel my face burning.

“I don’t know how I get into these situations,” Barbara said. “Adrienne’s my friend too.”

“Did you say I was here?”

“Yuri, the question really took me by surprise. I didn’t tell her, but I hesitated before I answered. She had to know I was lying.”

“I didn’t know I was going to be here,” I said. “How could Adrienne know?”

“She must have a detective following you. That’s all I need now is to get named correspondent in a divorce suit.”

“There’s no detective,” I insisted, though I wondered.

I imagined someone, some callow detective’s assistant with a scruffy beard, shadowing me. Had he followed me to the lawyer’s office?

Hysteria is seductive. I remember holding her tightly by the shoulders to calm her. When I let go (after how long? We were both possessed.) she punched me in the chest, in the heart it seemed. I couldn’t catch my breath and it panicked me. She threw her arms around me, said she was sorry, really sorry. I felt suffocated and pushed her away to free myself. She bumped into something — the arm of a chair — and disabled her back. “Please leave,” she said, bent over like an old woman. “You don’t live here.”

I saw my inflamed face in the mirror as I stepped into the hall. It was the madman in the mirror who shadowed me as I walked quickly home to Adrienne and Rebecca though the half-lit, night world streets.

R

When I closed my eyes, I could see the bugs marching up the stairs. They were the color, these bugs, of dark stairs. It was the way they got at you without being seen.

The bed was feeling buggy near my right foot. I stayed very very still. I was thinking, Turn on the light, Rebecca. I was thinking, Here goes. I’m turning on the light. I’ll get out of bed and turn on the light.

A

I’ve felt nothing toward Yuri for the longest time — neither love nor hate (each had its season). Then I wake during the night and I watch Yuri sleeping on his side facing away from me and I feel this surge of affection for him. (It is the day after I saw C in the street with the red-headed waitress.) I put my hand out and touch his arm as if I were a blind person reading braille. I stroke his arm with the tips of my fingers. He mumbles something that might be a name. (Who are you dreaming of, Yuri?)

He has his back to me and I lay against him front to back, my arms like a sash around his waist. (I am bewitched.) Now he stirs. He takes a long time to wake, his body flaming with sleep. We fit together like two replicas of the same model.

I am kissing his ear. Pressing my mouth against his ear. Sucking his ear. He moans, then reaches behind him to touch my leg. “What is this?” he asks in ironic complaint.

I move my hand along his arms, caress his arms. He doesn’t move. The touching, the repeated touching, excites me. “What do you want, baby,” I say. “Do you want to make love?”

“Okay,” he says, his voice thick. He turns around in a kind of retarded motion (it is the slowest I have ever seen you move) to look at me. It is as though it is not real to him.

“We don’t have to,” I say.

He moves himself on top of me and kisses me without tenderness or affection. “I don’t know if I want you,” he says.

“I think you do,” I say. “I think you love me.” (I don’t know why I said that.) “Well, should I put my diaphragm in?

I take his silence for assent, but when he moves off me, I can’t get up. I feel weak and lazy. I feel a kind of sensuous paralysis. “Do you want to get it for me?” I ask him.

“I want not Jiing from you,” he says in a hoarse voice. (The lie detector between your legs refutes your denial.)

“I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want,” I say. I remove my hand. I move all the way over to my side of the bed.

It is interesting what one thinks when one is prepared to think of nothing. I am free associating. I remember sitting next to Yuri in the movies (it was before everything) and wanting to be touched by him. I tried to will him to make the first move. I concentrated on making it happen. His arm brushed mine on the armrest we shared. The movie (it comes back to me) was an Italian film of “The Stranger.” I ran my finger along the back of his hand, then withdrew my hand. He reached over and took it back (he took my hand) and kissed the palm.

“If you want to make love, I’m still in the mood,” I say.

“I don’t want to make love to you,” he says. “It’s only my prick that’s interested.”

“Then why don’t you fuck me?”

“What I’d like to do is go down on you,” he says.

I resist offering an interpretation. (I do not say your intent is hostile.) I have been tormented my whole life by double consciousness. I watch myself feeling shy and somewhat (this surprises me) threatened by him, not answering because I want him to know what I am feeling without being told. I want him to be in touch with me.

He will later claim that I was testing him, but what do I need to prove after all these years together that I don’t already know?

Y

Adrienne was at the dinner table, lingering over coffee when I came in. Rebecca was somewhere else.

“We waited for you as long as we could,” Adrienne said as if the opening line of a memorized speech.

I went upstairs to visit Rebecca, wondered why she hadn’t come down to greet me when she heard me come in. Her door was closed and I knocked. “It’s daddy,” I said.

“Mommy said you weren’t coming home till late,” she said. She was lying on her bed fully dressed, facing the wall.

I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Did you have a bad day, sweetheart?”

“I had agood day,” she said. “It’s you who had a bad day. If you’re getting a divorce, I don’t want to talk to you again.”

I was caught between wanting to apologize for letting things come apart and wanting to insist on my innocence and good faith against charges I hadn’t heard. “What did mommy say to you?” I asked.

“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” she said, then she turned around to look at me. “She said that you both loved me, but that you were not happy with each other.”

She let me hug her for a minute or two, then pulled away. “I’m still angry with you,” she said.

“Becca, I want you to know,” I said, “that I’m doing everything I can to save this marriage. I promise you that.” “Daddy, I don’t know how to break this to you,” she said. “I want to be by myself. Okay?”

“You’re beginning to sound like your mother,” I said.

“Well, she’s her mother’s daughter,” Adrienne said. She was standing in the doorway of Rebecca’s room.

“I thought this was a private conversation,” I said. Rebecca groaned. “Daddy!” she said.

Adrienne, I noticed, was wearing an inappropriately beatific smile. “The two of you looked so sweet together, I couldn’t resist coming over,” she said.

“We were talking about divorce,” I said.

R

It’s morning and I am in bed. My father is shaving away in the bathroom. The motor of his electric razor is like a speeding heartbeat.

My mother says at breakfast she is afraid of roaches not for themselves but for the disease they spread. What disease is that? my father says.

I ask my father if he saw anything on the basement steps. He says, That’s a funny question, Becca. Was there something I was supposed to see.

I don’t say what. I am a mysterious person.

B follows me to school. Does she know who I am? What have I done that’s so bad she has to follow me?

I have an earache at school and ask the teacher if I can go home. They call my mother from the assistant principal’s office but no one answers the phone. I hold my head in my hands.

Later Ms. Dickstein, the assistant principal, reaches my mother and I go home. Where were you? I say to her. I shout at her. I am so mad. Where were you?

A

(I’ve never completely understood how feelings turn themselves around without warning.) His head perches over me, hesitates (he is waiting for permission), then drops into my unmade lap. I may or may not have gripped him by the short hairs at the back of the neck. I’ve been told by Yuri (it’s not something I mean to dispute here) that I suffer from selective amnesia. (Even when I lie it is my way of telling the truth,)

This is what I remember. My hand is at die back of his head. I remember feeling the thickness of his knotted hair. I remember feeling that what I want doesn’t matter (my feelings don’t matter) to Yuri.

There is no premeditation to what I do. I am open to whatever comes next. (He doesn’t know his place, I say to myself.) I am thinking just that as I pull his head away. (I felt assaulted. I didn’t want to be in your debt.) “That’s not what I want,” I say.

“You hurt me,” he says. A giggle escapes from me. (I feel myself trembling.) He is furious.

I cover my face with my arms. “Don’t you dare,” I say. I close my eyes and wait.

Y

“I think it’s nice that you can have talks with your father,” said my saintly wife. “When I was your age, Bee, I couldn’t talk to your father…I mean my stepfather. Spencer.” The voice unutterably sweet, distant, hidden.

Rebecca took my hand and I sensed — it was too dark in tiie room to know for sure — that she was also holding her motjier’s hand. She was connecting us. I felt the connection with such intensity it frightened me.

When I left Rebecca’s room — Adrienne stayed on with her, I had things to do, felt compelled to move on — I experienced a sense of relief. There was more going on in that room than I could stand for long.

Who was I to be so unforgiving? I thought.

Later that night, I sought Adrienne out in die bedroom, where she sat propped up on pillows with her open sketchbook like a napkin in her lap. “You were very sweet tonight,” I said.

An awkward silence followed. Adrienne seemed about to say something, though withheld whatever it was. A vague smile flickered across her face. “What?” I said.

“I felt better about you tonight,” she whispered. “I looked at you with Rebecca and I thought, Well I like him really. I do like you, Yuri.…Some times.” She laughed to conciliate the “sometimes”.

“If you like me, why do we live like this?” I asked.

She laughed giddily. “I don’t know,” she said.

I imagined moving into the bed with her, sliding under the covers, tracing the inside of her thigh with my tongue.

“I like you best at a distance,” she said as if she had read my thoughts. “When you’re next to me, I want to get away.”

“Take off,” I said under my breath. “I don’t want you.”

She turned her head away. “That’s your problem,” she said.

“Look at me, for God’s sake.” I turned her head to face me, held her face. “I’m Yuri,” I said. “I’m the man you chose to marry. I’m the man you love.”

“I see you, Yuri,” she said in a singsong voice. Then she closed her eyes. “I don’t have to see you if I don’t want to.”

“I don’t think you know who I am,” I said. “I’m not the father who deserted you. I’m not the stepfather who patted your teenaged ass.”

She giggled. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Is this your idea of shock therapy? You really think I’m crazy, don’t you?” She opened her eyes.

“Who am I, Adrienne?” I brought my face closer, posed for the picture she might take of me. I waited with a sense of expectation for her verdict. “I want an answer,” I said. “I’m not going to answer you,” she said.

When I woke in the early morning, Adrienne was pressed against me from behind, her arms around me. She was so close she seemed to have moved under my skin.

A

I feel the blow (my eyes are closed), though he swears he hasn’t touched me. He bashes the pillow with his fist so close to my head that I feel the blow’s menace. My head is spinning. (Did you only mean to frighten me, Yuri? That’s violence too.) I know I’ve been hurt.

I knew I had been hurt. I was in shock. My body was shaking — the fear like sexual feelings. No one has ever treated me this way, I said to myself in outrage. No one. At the same time, it was all terribly familiar. (Yuri is, is not, apologizing.) This is what I remembered. I turned away to let the memory play itself out.

I was twelve or thirteen and my step-father had gotten furious at me for being “sassy” to him. (He meant “sexy,” though he didn’t know that was what he meant.) “You’re not too old, young lady, to take over my knee,” he said. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door, or thought I had it locked, recalled my fingers turning the latch. For whatever reason, the door didn’t lock (you would say, Yuri, that I had meant it not to), though I didn’t realize that until later when Spencer forced his way in.

I stood in the bathtub, the shower curtain wrapped around me like a second skin. “Open the door, you,” he said. My hands were sweating and I blotted them against my breasts. I had the illusion that I was bleeding, that my period had started (I had only recendy turned that corner) before it was due. “Go away,” I whispered into the curtain. Though I assumed the door was locked, I felt vulnerable to him.

He kept knocking and knocking (beating on the door with his fist) and then as if he had worn it out, the door came open. I knew I was in for it then. He didn’t come in right away, which heightened the terror I was feeling. (Where was my mother when this was happening, why was she letting it happen?)

“When you hide in the bathroom, darlin,” he said with a harsh laugh, “you’ll have to remember to lock the old door.”

“Go to hell,” I muttered. (It might have been something worse.)

“What did you say?” he asked in a bullying voice. “What was that, darlin?”

I repeated it for him, mumbled the offensive words, wrapped in my plastic sheath, the bleeding (I felt) a disfiguring punishment for my badness. “Fuck off, you bastard.” I don’t really know what I said or what he imagined he heard. Whatever, it provoked him to enter. Gave him the excuse he was looking for all along.

He did this strange thing next: he latched the door behind him. He stood there silently (I imagined him a step away from the tub), his disfigured silhouette looming over me. His breathing was like the sound of a furnace just turning on. It came in rushes. I shut my eyes. He stayed there without doing anything for what seemed like a long time.

I anticipated that at any moment he would rip the shower curtain from me. And do what? He would do something so awful (I couldn’t imagine what it would be) that I would never be able to forgive him.

And yet I was fully clothed. I was wearing a yellow sundress, which I thought of as babyish for my age. I was reluctant to cry out. I was talking to myself under my breath, “I promise I’ll be good if you go away,” but not saying it so he could hear it, not willing to give him die least satisfaction. I didn’t know about ambivalence then. I was conscious of wishing him away. Some part of me must have believed that I deserved whatever punishment Spencer was there to give out. I was a sassy girl, after all. I had sexual feelings. I had a reputation for being wild. His breathing seemed like a kind of communication. Why couldn’t he catch his breath, what was he asking of me in this wordless voice? I knew even then, though it was not conscious knowledge, that the breathing was a kind of love message. Spencer never expressed feelings directly, not feelings of affection or tenderness. The words he might have spoken had fragmented into broken sounds, the machinery of wheeze and death and hate (and love too, I believe) and a passion for connection he surely didn’t want to face.

My eyes opened. They had been closed for what seemed like an hour, delusory protection against being discovered. That he hadn’t moved for a long time, that he seemed to be affixed to whatever spot he had taken as his own, was no assurance that he wouldn’t come at me when he was good and ready. I never stopped hoping that he would leave, that he would decide I had been punished enough. I dug my nails into my arm. My breathing seemed to increase in volume (we made a kind of music together) while I wanted nothing more than to disappear into mute repentance.

He came at me, attacked me. He tore the curtain away, tore at it with both hands, the plastic tearing, curtain rings clattering into the tub. I felt it was me and not the curtain that was being torn and dismantled. It was a surprise to discover afterward that I was essentially unharmed. A purple bruise on my arm was all I took away from his assault. I do remember him slapping me across the face, though that may have been another time. And then he exposed himself (I’ve not mentioned this to you) and sidled out. When it was over, when he left me, I promised myself that I would never forgive him. (You are saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s too late for that.) I can forgive him now.