Separate Hours

Thirteen Last Words

Yuri

Adrienne

I have no more to say about my marriage to Adrienne. Peter says, Peter who lives in a state of perpetual undeclared war with Barbara, that divorce is an indicator of success in post-civilized America. He says it self-mock-ingly because he himself has been close to divorce and has put his marriage back together again as if it were a broken table. It is his theory that people in our milieu break faith with their marriages in pursuit of self-improvement. I don’t feel successful in having divorced Adrienne. On the contrary, I see it as a compromise with the demands of romantic ambition. It is easier to live with Helena. We don’t take our emotional pulses every hour; we are not unhappy if we’re not happy. We respect each other’s otherness. That’s a kind of sanity. Adrienne and I, for all our time in therapy, for all our time as therapists confused the boundaries between us. Adrienne was everything to me: lover, wife, daughter, mother, father, closest friend, rival, other self. Our marriage had to be perfect or it was nothing. What I wonder at is not that we came apart but that we survived together as long as we had. Helena and I talk openly with each other, make a point of being honest, but there are certain things I am unable to share with her. Can I tell her that I dream about Adrienne, that I continue to hold conversations with her in my imagination, that when I wake from dreams in the dead hours of the night, I think of Adrienne as my wife? How can I let Helena know that without making her feel betrayed?

There are times (yes, this is true) that I feel totally at peace as if body and soul had achieved some effortless union. Rebecca and tend to be easier with each other in Yuri’s absence. I am more my own person, more and more my own person. (And yet some things remain the same. I try to please, I am always trying to please.) When I lie in bed in the early morning awaiting the call of the next day, I focus on who I am. Who am I? I am Adrienne French. It is discouraging sometimes to be no one other than oneself. But who else is there? I am all I have. My secret self has become my public persona.

Yuri and I played house for a while with what appeared to be success. Yes. We were stuck and something had to be done, and I was the one who did it. I confess I did it. I acted (or aaed out if you insist) for the both of us. I’ve always lived on the knife edge of my feelings. I was the first one to do what the other children were afraid to do. I went (I always did) where it was forbidden to go. The bad child is the brave child.

Love is its own betrayal. My late step-father’s favorite expression, which Grace and I often mocked (we were such bad girls) is: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. My question is: Did I break more eggs than needed to be broken? My answer: The more eggs you break the more substantial the omelet.

I hope that I am not giving the wrong impression, that language has not again taken me beyond where I mean to go. I love Helena, and I believe she loves me without having to make more of me than I am. I have not said anything about sex. We Freudians tend to overstate its importance, to see it as the central mystery, the anima of all other pleasures and pains. A delicacy of feeling restrains me here. I find myself hesitant in saying that sex with Helena is one of the major pleasures of this middle aged therapist. It is said. I move on.

Now I come to another admission that for different reasons I have been reluctant to make. Though my life is good, I am not gready happy, not happy enough of the time. This awareness taunts me. It is as though just behind me, just out of view, something is missing that completes the puzzle. It is a sadness that occupies me even in moments of intense joy.

I am a more successful therapist for what I’ve gone through. I’ve had successes recently with patients who had been judged untreatable by certain esteemed analysts. I have a gift. I am gifted at therapy. It has taken me a long time to be able to say this.

No tragedy, my life. No one has died of grief or heartbreak. No one has killed herself. (I’ve had this feeling all my life that I am doomed. That I will die young. Yes, but I am no longer young.)

It is sad to me that Yuri doesn’t want to be my friend. (We had been friends in our way for such a long time.) If only for Rebecca’s sake such reconciliation makes sense. Maybe Yuri hasn’t allowed himself to forgive me. (In time.) Our exchanges are mostly abrupt and businesslike. In my dreams, he is like some relentless figure of vengeance pursuing me. He will never forgive me, never let me go.

Yuri knows what’s between us (let him deny it), and what he has with Helena, whatever he thinks it is, is not the same. I have lovers too. (I protest too much. It doesn’t matter.)

I am not so blindly romantic as to believe my former wife the cause of this unresolved free floating grief. I am a rational man who likes to be clear about what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. It is my life’s work after all to make clarity out of confusion. That’s the side of me that others value most. The other side is fathomless and dangerous. The other pursues only the elusive and so courts disappointment.

For all that I understand, I understand nothing that matters. I admit that without embarrassment. I go through life blindfolded in an endless tunnel of my own imaginative creation and what I want — that insatiable ache — what I reach out for in the mysterious dark, touches me briefly then slips away into the ether. I have had for the briefest time whatever it is I have lost, and I have somehow let it escape my grasp. It is no wonder that some kind of irremediable illness looms behind me when I turn my head.

My art is the most fulfilling thing I have. Sometimes it seems the only thing. My vision. Each time I believe I am through drawing birds, the same elegant erotic studies, I rediscover my subject. Some day I will give up doing therapy, and concentrate (full time) on my art.

Whatever the rumors (such talk echoes), I am not unhappy, I am not depressed or anxious much of the time. I feel I have to announce that to myself and to those who want to pity me. (Pity is just malice in black silk.) This woman, Adrienne is not unhappy with her life. She knows that there is nothing to regret. She knows that love is only one of a number of illusions that dies and never comes back to life. Love died with Yuri; love left us for good. It doesn’t matter. (Forgive me, Yuri.) There is no recovery from this illness.