Separate Hours

Twelve Separate Hours: A Case Study

Adrienne and Yuri Tipton, both psychotherapists with analytic training, had been married for twelve years when their relationship began to go sour. They are both psychotherapists, though of different theoretical persuasion — Adrienne a Laingian and Yuri an eclectic Freudian. In practice, the distinction was not as exceptional as it seemed in theory. According to the available evidence (eg. interviews with former and current patients), their therapeutic methods were virtually mirror images of one another. If their techniques were similar, they nevertheless had different, really opposing personal styles. Yuri’s performance with patients was nearer (this an aspect of trying to become what he is not) to Adrienne’s theories than to his own. He was, in fact, a more intuitive one to one therapist than Adrienne, who was herself so intuitive in her day to day life she felt the necessity of methodological constraints in her practice. Consequendy, her performance as therapist was considerably more conservative, more predetermined so to speak, than her idea of the therapist’s ideal role. Adrienne and Yuri had discussed their positions so often, each taking the most uncompromising stance for the sake of argument, that it had made possible unacknowledged accommodation to the other’s position.

Adrienne had believed for a long time, not a duration readily circumscribed, that Yuri was better at what they both did than she. She admired him, though kept from him the secret of her admiration. All marriages rely to a greater or lesser extent on the fantasy each partner has created of the other. In rare circumstances, die reality and the fantasy come together like shadows of one another. The lover never sees clearly; the light is always in his eyes. Adrienne envied Yuri’s apparent ease of performance, his persistent sense of sureness even in areas of marked ambiguity. So she appropriated him, took on his presumed qualities like a second skin. But die Yuri she appropriated was an imaginary figure, a fantasy figure wiser and more potent than the original. If Adrienne felt herself on safe ground by appropriating her fantasy of Yuri (she wanted only to be perfect), she also resented the obligation such mimicry implied. There was small satisfaction in being her husband’s lesser self, particularly when she sensed (their competitiveness was clearly a factor) that she was ready to out-distance him.

As her dissatisfaction grew, she became aware that she was connected to Yuri to an intolerable degree. It was as if she had no edges, no beginning or end. It was only natural diat she pull away, and so she gradually revised her fantasy of Yuri. In the new light she brought to bear, Yuri had more failings than she could, while honoring herself, readily tolerate. Disappointment was everywhere. The way to save herself was to fall in love elsewhere.

This is all surmise, a persuasive conjecture based on incomplete evidence.

As Adrienne moved away from him, Yuri felt compelled to move closer to keep things as they were. He pursued the ghost of Adrienne’s devotion. Such behavior engendered contempt. It became clear to Adrienne that she had subordinated herself to a man who was unworthy of her self-denial. As she saw it, Yuri had pretended to be something he was not, had offered himself to her as perfect. That made her angry. Such deception, which was how she experienced Yuri’s failure to live up to her idealized version of him, was unforgiveable.

For his part, Yuri suffered die abruptness of her disaffection, misunderstood its nature and sought vainly (I use the word in its double sense) to make amends. He looked for ways to please her, reinvented himself to satisfy what he imagined she wanted. Once the process of her disillusionment reached a certain momentum, however, there was no reversing it. His attempts at accommodation only fueled her disaffection. Every gesture he made, in the light of her angry disappointment, was interpreted against him.

What did Adrienne hope to gain from the course of this behavior? Nothing really. Everything. A more fully developed sense of self. There were no petty self-interested motives or none that she allowed to take hold of her consciousness. Her behavior was governed by compulsion and ambivalence. She wanted to get away from Yuri and she wanted to have him at hand. She wanted never to see him again and to know that she could count on him when she needed him. “What she really wanted was to live out her real destiny (as opposed to the false one as Yuri’s other self), the map of which was buried, she sensed, in embryonic form in her psyche.

So she made Yuri into a version of her first husband, Ralph. It was an exchange of one fantasy for another. Yuri was no longer an enhanced version of the father who left her, but had become instead a combination of her mother and stepfather — the uncaring parent. His imperfections magnified under her glance. Each time she thought herself free of Yuri, she would look at the suffering victim, which is how she experienced him, and feel a tug of affection. The man depended on her — how could she possibly leave him? The process fed on itself. Such feelings of bondage oppressed her, made her want to escape Yuri all the more. She couldn’t nurture indefinitely this man she no longer loved. She had a newly discovered separate life of her own that clearly had to have priority. She felt her situation was unique, though she knew a number of women, a few of whom had been patients, who had suddenly found themselves out of love with husbands they had once adored. She made common cause with them. Their examples gave her courage.

Yuri was unwilling to believe that Adrienne had stopped loving him, perceived her changed behavior as a form of displacement, a passing phase. He hated her for betraying him, but he also wanted to forgive her. If she was appropriately regretful, he was willing to forgive everything. Which is also to say he could forgive nothing. His sole aim was some kind of restitution — the way it was, the way it had always been. What sustained him was the fantasy that he had behaved well in the face of arbitrary cruelty.

They went on this way for a year, Yuri struggling to regain his place, alternately wooing and accusing, Adrienne drawing away from him, reimagining herself as a woman who needed no one but herself. Yuri glimmered in the distance of her imagination like a spectral image. Only his faults had presence for her. He took space in her life and at the same time he was bodiless — virtually invisible to her. And she knew he wanted her back, wanted things as they were, though he took pains to deny it. His wanting her back sustained her in her rejection of him.

They lived together this way in poised disequilibrium, in astate of unarmed warfare, for more than ayear, for almost two years. Their professional lives went on as before. They continued to share the basement office of their westside brownstone for therapy sessions, though complained to friends — it was rare that they talked openly to each other — of the difficulties of such an arrangement. Occasionally, they made appointments to see patients at the same time, a way of unacknowledging the other. The more estranged they became, the harder it was to maintain the arrangement of separate hours.

The new fantasy of their marriage required a new set of gestures. Both were compelled to prove (against the evidence of their feelings) that they were not dependent on the other. Yuri went to London for ten days to a conference on the use of computer technology in psychotherapeutic treatment. He delivered a paper that was well received, had a brief affair with a woman who treated behavioral disorders with massive doses of vitamins, felt more positive about himself. Adrienne had been invited to the same conference but had declined the invitation, saying next time it was her turn. That remark might be seen as evidence that she harbored the illusion that they would go on this way forever.

When Yuri returned from London he sensed that Adrienne was pleased to see him and he made some advances toward her (he thought of it as opening new lines of communication) that got him nowhere. She suffered his absence, though took no pleasure in his return. Her perception (her fantasy) of the man who came back to her was different from her perception of the man she had missed. Things remained as they had been.

Adrienne avoided Yuri except at dinner, usually stayed upstairs when he was down or downstairs when he was up. It was a regimen of denial. Sometimes they met on the stairs to (and from) their office, surprised that the other was still around. In private, they mourned each other’s absence.

Their ten year old daughter Rebecca, an exceptionally bright and sensitive child, took on the role of parent in the face of her mother and father’s abdication of adult responsibility. “Why don’t you spend more time with daddy?” she’d say to Adrienne. “I don’t mind staying with Sandy (her baby sitter) if you guys want to go out together.”

She would say to her father, “The trouble with you, Daddy, is that you give up too easily. Mommy likes you a lot more than you think.”

Yuri and Adrienne heard what they wanted to hear, took justification where none was offered.

It was a problematic situation, the way they lived, particularly for Yuri who was perceived as the rejected one. Friends wondered how he could continue to live in the same house with someone who made him feel unwanted. Yuri took solace in knowing (or believing he knew) that matters at home were not as terrible as outsiders imagined them to be.

For a while, Rebecca had trouble getting to sleep at night, had unadmitted fears concerning abandonment.

Yuri began to see women outside his marriage, rarely staying longer than three months with tlie same one. The affairs had a certain pattern: intense beginnings, flights of passion, followed by disappointment and withdrawal. Nothing sustained itself, which troubled Yuri, his feelings rarely the same from day to day, love visiting briefly like mail sent to the wrong address. He perceived himself as still married to Adrienne, as permanendy married to her. A vulnerability he could not remember having known before kept him constant company.

His longest involvement during this period was with a former patient (a stand-in in his fantasy for the Adrienne of fifteen years back), an erotic commitment that held Yuri almost as intensely as his collapsing marriage. He had lost the Adrienne-who-was-no-longer-Adrienne and taken in her place the more-real-than-real-Adrienne.

Adrienne wanted no one for a while, wanted only her own company after her love affair with a former patient ended. She could not forgive Yuri for letting her treat him as badly as she had. She could not go back to what had been. That much was relatively clear. That more had come to her meant that more was still to come. She expected her lover to return to her, not literally perhaps (she had mosdy given up that false hope), but what she had with him (the fantasy of), the flowering of some deeper, more creative self she expected would return. While she waited for the new life that awaited her, she tested her attractiveness in a few relationships with other men, men who were safe, who didn’t matter, passionless dances. It was a period of restoration for her.

They went on like this for longer than anyone who knew them imagined possible. Observers tended to think that it was Yuri’s tenacity that kept them together, his refusal to let go. He had decided apparently to refuse defeat, to outwait Adrienne’s disaffection. Tenacity had gotten him everything he wanted so far and his faith in his own persuasive powers was outsized. Perhaps he loved Adrienne so much he was willing to put up with anything to keep her. Perhaps it was a mix of dependence and love, a confusion of the two. Adrienne appeared to assume, had said as much in confidence to several friends that Yuri couldn’t manage without her. Such statements are readily decoded. The person who thinks himself (herself) the object of dependency tends also to be dependent.

When Yuri was much younger — it was just after he had completed medical school and gone into the service — he fell in love with a southern woman, someone he met in Charlottesville when on leave from the Air Force. The woman, a former child actress, swore that she would wait for him, though she ultimately married someone else. When he was released from the Air Force, Yuri rented a house across the bay from where the woman, no longer performing, lived with her husband and child. He fantasized that once she saw him again she would remember that she had loved him. A year after this period of vigil, Yuri went into analysis and decided to become an analyst himself.

They were in a deadlock, Yuri waiting for Adrienne to return to him, Adrienne acting as if he weren’t there, for two years, almost three.

Just when their estranged life together seemed to have achieved a certain stability, Yuri told Adrienne that he wanted a divorce. The news, it appears (which is not surprising), surprised her. For the first time in years, she was not in control of the situation. She may even have suffered feelings of rejection, her prerogatives denied her. Still, a divorce was what she imagined herself wanting, what she had been moving (in place) toward, and she agreed in principle with his decision.

So Yuri left Adrienne, sublet the apartment of a friend, also a therapist, which was initially a relief to both of them. They talked on the phone almost every day, exchanged anecdotes (reconstituted former intimacy), made arrangements for passing Rebecca between them.

Now that we’re separated, Adrienne said, I feel close to you again. I feel that we can be real friends. She told Yuri about a man she had been seeing, described some of the problems of the relationship.

I really don’t want to talk to you, Yuri said. I don’t want you to call me any more.

Adrienne felt justified at having broken with him (Yuri was graceless and unreliable), t Jiough she also suffered feelings of deprivation. It was as if something that was rightfully hers was being denied her. The next time she called it was concerning the roof of the house that needed, according to the roofer she had consulted, extensive repair. Was the roofer trustworthy? Yuri asked. Adrienne took offense at the question, said she was every bit as competent in dealing with such matters as he was. Yuri didn’t argue the issue — his principal concern was to get off the phone — said to go ahead and have the job done if it needs to be done.

Don’t you think I should get a few other estimates? asked Adrienne. It’s really a lot of money.

Then get some other estimates, said Yuri.

I really don’t think we’re going to find anyone cheaper than Mr. Pustulli, said Adrienne.

Then use Pustulli, said Yuri. I don’t have any problem with that.

I just want to make sure it’s all right with you, she said, before I go ahead with it. What have you been doing?

Yuri said he couldn’t talk, was on his way out.

She too was busy, she said. She had a new patient coming in a few minutes.

Adrienne was disappointed that they couldn’t be friends, had difficulty sympathizing with Yuri’s apparent bitterness. It had been her fantasy that they would be better friends than ever once they were separated. As she saw it, Yuri’s need to avoid her was his problem, something he would eventually work through. For her part, she continued to think a friendship between them was not impossible.

Their lives went on much as before except that they no longer shared the same house or, after Yuri found another space, the same therapy office in the same house. Giving up the shared therapy space was a significant step in their coming apart. Yuri, as mentioned, went through a period of intense sexual activity, wanting both contact and distance, an intimacy that made no demands. He tended to be dour during this period, to seem to be in mourning, to lose weight. He looked as if sleep had become as much a stranger as Adrienne. He wanted, he told his therapist, to fuck himself into unconsciousness.

Adrienne moved in the other direction, became increasingly private, rarely went out in the evenings, worked on her drawings, devoted herself to her daughter. Her health seemed fragile — symptoms of illness plagued her — though nothing specific was determined. She went into the hospital for three days to take a battery of tests. Apart from occasional depression and her anxieties about illness, she felt an ease to her post-married life she couldn’t remember having known before. She asked Yuri to drive her to the hospital and, though he grumbled about it, acted as if he were put upon, he did. He also took her back when the tests were completed, insisted on the prerogative, and Adrienne was touched by what she took to be his concern. They held on by reestablishing in their post-marriage some of the ambience of their pre-marriage.

Once she separated from Yuri, Adrienne’s obsession with the lover who had rejected her disappeared. For a long time she had ached to see him, had felt his loss like an unhealed wound from childhood. One morning, exactly a week after Yuri’s departure, it was gone and she was free of that particular ache, that particular knowledge of loss forever.

Yuri’s anger with Adrienne persisted. Whenever he thought of her he dredged up some horror scene from the last years of their marriage. This was a period in which he fell in and out of love almost as often as the weather changed. He thought he wanted to live with a woman again, perhaps with Helena Paar, whom he had just discovered, but he was wary of rushing into anything long term, distrusted his feelings which showed themselves to be untrustworthy. His life was frantic, he seemed to believe, overburdened with commitments. There was little ease, not enough love. He wanted some kind of sexual contact with every attractive woman who crossed his path and risked, on more than one occasion, making a fool of himself. And sometimes all he wanted to do was suck breasts or cunts or be sucked on himself. He couldn’t get enough and yet when he had it, had had it, was having it, he longed to escape the demands of pleasure. The life he envisioned for himself was one where commitment to work took priority over everything else. He wanted, while behaving as a child, to think of himself as a serious man.

One day, his friend Barbara, whom he visited Tuesday nights, told Yuri that her husband had asked if he could come back. Her husband Peter had talked about their having another child, something he had adamantly opposed for years. She wanted Yuri’s advise, she said, was in need of some wisdom.

You’ve already decided to take him back, Yuri said, playing the part she had assigned him.

Barbara denied it with some vehemence, though she acknowledged later in the discussion that it was the best offer she had had, meaning apparendy diat she had none from Yuri. They put their arms around each other then selfconsciously drew back. It embarrassed Yuri that he had once slept with his friend Peters estranged wife. Such behavior was at odds with the idea he had of himself as a moral man. Barbara asked if he would remain her friend and, without irony or without the appearance of irony, Yuri asserted that he couldn’t imagine it otherwise.

When Yuri moved in widi Helena — a woman Adrienne didn’t know, had never met — Adrienne was secredy furious with him. She told everyone how pleased she was for Yuri, though at least on one occasion when she had been drinking rather heavily she made mildly disparaging remarks about Helena’s intelligence. At other times, she spoke generously about them both. If her behavior during this period resembled jealousy, it was probably also a relief to her that Yuri was no longer her responsibility. It was a time of unburdening for her, a freeing herself from what she thought of as false obligations. She cut down on her practice, showed her drawings (she had done no new ones in a year) to an art dealer she had dated on two or three occasions, talked of having an exhibition. The tests she took could find nothing wrong, but she suffered, she believed, from some inexorable malady.

One day when Yuri came to the house to return Rebecca — the child lived alternate weeks with each parent — Adrienne, who usually kept out of sight, appeared at the door. She was extremely charming, almost desperately so. Yuri was reminded of their early days together when he was married to Patricia and she to Ralph. Adrienne suggested that they go out for a drink some evening. There was something important she wanted to discuss with him. She spoke the word “important” as if it were in italics. Yuri hesitated — it was his recent role to hesitate whenever she asked something of him — before saying he didn’t see why not. (The specific language is important to understanding what he meant.) His answer confused her, she said. Was he willing to have a drink with her or not?

Yuri picked her up at the house one night the next week after Rebecca was asleep. They didn’t want to go to a local bar — no one was supposed to know about the casual drink they were having together — so they drove out of the city to an inn they had been to before they were married, a place called the Libertyville Canal House. Nothing was said on the drive out about the occasion for this meeting. They talked about the profession they shared in common in a way that was reminiscent of old times together, argued about methods and diagnoses, talked about books read.

Our separation has improved you, Adrienne says in response to one of Yuri’s remarks.

In what way? Yuri wants to know.

Just that, Adrienne says. You haven’t noticed that I’m wearing the scarf you gave me on our tenth anniversary.

Yuri tells her of an article he has been writing about children of divorced parents.

After dinner at the inn — they have mussels and roast duck and black forest cake for dessert — they decide it is too late to drive back and they take a room for the night. The availability of a room at the Canal House, which is usually booked a month in advance, seems an inescapable omen. Adrienne calls the sitter and makes arrangements with her to stay overnight with Rebecca. Yuri calls Helena to say he will not be back until the next morning. She doesn’t ask why and he doesn’t volunteer a reason, having none to give, no acceptable excuse. He doesn’t want to lie. He has reached a point in his life where he avoids lying whenever possible.

The phone call to Helena depresses Yuri. On his guard, as if some moral arbiter were watching him from above, he imagines he will refuse Adrienne when the time comes. In his fantasy he has already told her it’s not going to happen, but when they climb into bed rejecting her is not his first priority.

In bed, after love, he says in a brusque voice, surprised at the tenderness he feels, Is this the important thing you wanted to talk about?

She gives him back his feigned indifference. You’re not as funny as you used to be, she says. I woke up the other morning and I remembered how funny you were when we first met. I remembered liking you and I wanted to see if it was real or some nostalgic illusion.

It’s all illusion, Yuri says, and its all real.

How smart you are, she says, only partially mocking him. She sits propped up on the narrow bed — it is no more than three- quarter’s size — with an arm around his shoulders. — Why did you go along with me? You knew what was going to happen.

I didn’t know, he says. I knew and I didn’t know. Is that an evasion? It’s possible that I was testing my feelings.

You still don’t say what you feel, she says.

You throw me over, he says, and now you want me to tell you that I never stopped being in love with you. You’re as presumptuous as ever.

I haven’t heard anyone say “throw me over” since I was a teenager, Yuri. (She presses her face to his.) I was hoping, I know this sounds silly after all this, that we could still be friends. I’ve always been fond of you. That’s true. There’s something about you that makes no sense to me that I like to have around.

It is two in the morning and Yuri, apparently disturbed at the turn of the conversation, suggests they go to sleep.

I don’t feel at all sleepy, she says. How can you think of going to sleep? I told you what I was feeling. You have to say something. It’s called conversation.

Or transactional therapy, he says. I’m feeling good at this moment, but I know I’m going to hate myself for having done this. After all the shit I’ve taken from you, you think I’ll come running whenever you call.

Do I think that? Adrienne says. I don’t know that that’s what I think. And what about all the shit I’ve taken from you?…Do you love Helena?

The question takes him by surprise. He turns away from her, delays his answer, says Yes.

She turns away from him onto her side, punishes him with distance.

He puts his hand on her back between her shoulder blades, falls asleep touching the hollow of her back. He imagines himself saying, You too, though the words are never spoken. He wakes to find her hugging him.

She whispers, Yuri, if I let myself feel anything for you, I would have never been able to “throw you over”. I had to get free. I was suffocating.

But what about me? he says. Are you the only one who has feelings?

Honey, I couldn’t tell you then, she says. Try to look at it from my viewpoint. Okay?

I’ve done too much of that, he says.

Have you? Have you? she says. She is playful, climbs on top of him and pins his arms to his sides. He lies passively for a minute or so, wearing her like a blanket, then he lifts his arms. They wresde, Adrienne intent on getting her way, intent on holding him down. It is a serious struggle in the guise of play.

It is cold in the room. Adrienne’s breath steams. You’ve had your way long enough, he says, rolling her over abruptly, pinning her down with his weight.

Adrienne absorbs his pressure as if it were her will to have him there. It is her victory, she tells herself.

I shower when I get out of bed, dress myself in yesterday’s clothes. A kind of inertia has settled over me, which I make an effort to resist. I ask Adrienne when she has to be back and she doesn’t answer, has slipped back into sleep. I think of waking her, but decide against it — she is like a child when she sleeps — and I go out for a walk to pass the time. It is a luxury to walk in the country on a cool June morning. I walk for about twenty minutes until I arrive at a cluster of shops that calls itself a town. There is nothing I want — even so I have brought no money — and I turn back, impatient with the slowness of the day.

Adrienne is dressed and ready to leave when I get back to the room. Where were you? she says in an aggrieved voice. I have to get back for Rebecca. You know that.

I remind her that she had been the one who had fallen asleep. She insists that she was awake, that she heard me open and close the door.

You could have let me know, I say.

Oh Yuri! You knew I was awake.

I’m not going to deal with that, I say. The last thing I want is to have a fight with you now.

The last thing I want, sweetheart, is to have a fight with you, Yuri says.

Oh, Yuri, I say, putting my arms around him, kicking him playfully, you never want to fight.

On the trip back, I tell Yuri a story that I think will amuse him. I have a new patient, a woman about my own age, who is fixed on me in this strange way. Last week when she missed a period, the woman accused me of being responsible for her pregnancy. — Do you think it’s some kind of transference? I ask him. In no other way does this woman seem psychotic.

She sees your authority as masculine, Yuri says. Are you sure you’re not the father?

If you think I’m making this up, I say, you’re wrong.

The car is making an odd banging noise and I ask Yuri to stop and see what’s wrong.

We go on another ten minutes like this, the noise growing more and more ominous. He will get off at the next exit, Yuri says. We don’t get to the next exit. A tire blows (I don’t know that at the time) and we go out of control, skid crazily on to the dirt collar. It all happens so quickly there is no time to know how terrified I am. We come to a stop inches from a low metal fence guarding an embankment.

Damn it, Yuri yells. Those are his words of comfort to his passenger. We both get out of the car. Do you have a good spare? I ask him.

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t open the trunk to look, says something about needing to catch his breath.

If you give me the key to the trunk, I’ll change the tire myself, I say.

He walks away from me, stares into the distance. I pick up a stone and throw it at him. His back is to me when I throw this harmless small stone, but he turns in midflight and it catches him in the face just under the right eye. I let out a cry of warning when I see what’s going to happen. Then all of a sudden he’s tearing after me and I’m running for my life. Bitch, I hear him yell. The entire highway hears him.

At wit’s end, I turn and face him (there is no place to go) and we exchange a few punches and kicks and roll around in the dirt. I am afraid he will hurt me and I cry out when a punch to the head produces not stars so much as flashes of lightning. And then he stops. I feel grateful to have survived.

After the fight is over, he opens the trunk of the car. He changes the tire (the spare is minimally usable) while I sit on a rock looking in another direction. Imagining how we must appear to the people in the cars streaming by, I start to laugh.

We have little to say to each other the rest of the trip. I am no longer angry at him, but it is not something I can say. When we stop in front of the house, I am aware of how shy I feel with him. I lean toward him and barely touch his cheek with my lips. It is what I mean. It is all I mean. I don’t like to give the wrong impression. Yuri touches my shoulder, says, See you.

See you, I say and hurry out of the car.

I watch Adrienne unlock the door of the house and go inside — ”our” house, I am thinking, though of course it is no longer mine — consider saying hello to Rebecca, though drive off. It would only confuse her to know I was with her mother. Anyway, I’ll be taking her to my place the day after tomorrow. The radio is on — I don’t remember pressing the button — and I listen to David Bowie singing “Absolute Beginners.” I have to be at clinic in an hour and I consider stopping off at home to change my clothes. I look at myself in the rearview mirror — my face smeared with dirt, a mean cut below my right eye — and I see there is no way to explain away what happened. I decide to go on and call Helena from my office at the hospital.

They didn’t go off again together.

Two years after she split up with Yuri, Adrienne’s stepfather died and she took his death harder than anyone anticipated. Yuri’s loss no longer seemed to matter. In her revisionist fantasy, her marriage had eroded of its own accord. They could no longer live together (their marriage had become impossible), though when asked why, she was vague about the details. She tended to remember that they were good together at their best, and she blamed Yuri just a little for being impatient with her during a period of emotional crisis in her life.

For Yuri, the night with Adrienne at the inn in upstate New York was a conclusion to the relationship. As an apparent consequence, he felt free of Adrienne and was able to commit himself more fully to Helena, who was in certain unapparent ways like Adrienne (this was Yuri’s perception alone), though she was not a therapist but a designer of women’s clothes. He no longer hated Adrienne, and he was able to talk to her on the phone, and sometimes in person, without anger or sadness. Eventually he married Helena and they had a child together, a son.

Adrienne did not remarry.