Separate Hours

Three The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Two summers ago on Martha’s Vineyard — we have a small summer house in Chilmark — Adrienne took up sketching, did a series of drawings of seagulls in flight. Almost every morning she would sit on a desk chair on the screened-in porch that overlooked the ocean and absorb herself in private vision. She sketched while I went through the motions of writing my book on counter-transference, a subject I had been pursuing for some time with a diminishing sense of obligation. Sandy, the teenaged girl we had brought with us from the city, would take Rebecca, who was eight that summer, for a walk on the beach while we worked. When concentration failed me as it did too often that summer, I would watch Adrienne from my window, her impassive face like a bird’s, sketching on an oversized pad I didn’t know she owned. I thought of it as a way of locking herself out of the world, a way of justifying through worked-up occasion her need to withdraw. The withdrawal, not the sketching, concerned me. I missed her. The Adrienne I knew, presumed to know, was missing.

I tried to involve myself in her activity, asked to look at her drawings, pointed out the ones I liked, but she knew that my interest was contrived. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “They’re nothing in particular.”

“Why do you do them if they’re nothing?” I asked.

“They make me happy,” she said. And another time: “Didn’t you know I always wanted to be an artist?”

I didn’t know, didn’t remember knowing. We had long since confided all our secrets, I thought, our secret selves. Was this a secret self she had withheld from me?

“Maybe I’ll do some sketching too,” I said one morning over breakfast, only partly joking.

“I don’t want you to,” she said with childlike petulance. “Why do you have to share everything I do? Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t realize they were your gulls,” I said. “I had hoped they were in the public domain.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” she said.

In the car, driving to a cocktail party in Edgartown, she reached for my hand. “I’m sorry to be so difficult,” she said. “I’m sorry too,” I said.

“Sorry that I’m so difficult?” She smiled secretively.

“Sorry that I intruded on your space, sweetheart.”

“You’re such a nice man,” she said.

And though we had apparently made up, a certain tension remained, kept us company like an intruder. We kept making up that summer, enforcing restoration where there had been no apparent breach.

What was going on? I might have asked myself, but the habits of evasion had long-standing claim on me. I got into writing my book, wrote up a case study as if it were a scene in a play, got into my book at the very point where I thought there was no book to write. And I began to play tennis, took a half hour lesson each day, fretted over the flaws in my backhand with a false and displaced seriousness. Adrienne sketched, turned inward. When I talked to her about my book she smiled approvingly, patted me on the head with her smile. She didn’t have time to listen to me — the gulls, or something I was unable to imagine, occupied her. It was as if she were pregnant with some new idea about herself, though I didn’t know that then.

“Is there something I’ve done? Are you angry at me?” I remember asking her.

“I haven’t thought about it one way or another,” she said, offering the same radiant private smile. “I haven’t been thinking about you, Yuri.”

It was said with a child’s directness, without the slightest indication of cruel intent.

“What have you been thinking about?” I asked. Banished from her thoughts, I was in exile from my own good will. I felt punished by her abrupt indifference. My attitude — I see this now — petitioned for forgiveness.”

“Whatever it is,” she said in the manner of someone with a guilty secret.

I didn’t laugh, though her remark struck me funny. “You’ve been strange this summer,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“You think I’m strange because I haven’t been thinking about you?” she said. “Come on, Yuri.”

I overreacted, left the house without explanation, took myself to the edge of the high dune that guarded our private beach. I don’t remember exactly how I descended that cliff of sand. There is no direct passage to the beach at that juncture. The next thing I knew I was standing at the water’s edge, no other human figure in sight, studying the ferocity of the waves, the ocean in turmoil from some impending storm. My feelings confronted me with the full burden of their outrage. The waves seemed possessed by furies. I walked in in my tennis shorts, gave myself to that presumed manifestation of my feelings, exhilarated by the sense of risk. The second of two extraordinary waves carried me under and held me prisoner until my lungs burned.

I apologized to Adrienne that night after Rebecca had gone to bed, my remarks brealcing the extended silence between us.

She had been sitting in bed reading a book called “Birds of New England” when I approached her, and she looked up at me with a benign incongruous smile. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” she said.

“Just so. I regret storming out of the house the way I did,” I said.

“Why was that?” The question asked with wide-eyed sincerity, which I misread as irony.” I wasn’t sure why you had left, though I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with me.

I was trying to read her, trying to understand what she was saying or not saying. “You didn’t think I was angry at you?

A flicker of impatience was the only flaw in her maddening calm. She shrugged, went back to her text. I stared at her until she raised her eyes. “I had no idea what was upsetting you, Yuri,” she said, “and frankly it didn’t interest me.

“It didn’t interest you?”

“It was not exactly at the center of my consciousness,” she said, seemingly amused at the turn of our conversation. “I’d like to go back to my book if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t know who the fuck I’m talking to,” I said. “I think you’re a strange visitor from another planet.”

She giggled, kept her eyes on the page.

I went away and came back, unable to let go, pulled by the string of her indifference. “Adrienne, I want to know what’s going on with you,” I said.

She seemed surprised to discover that I still existed, that I was still in the same room. “Yuri, I’m not angry at you,” she said with an assurance that was hard to discredit. “I’m just more into myself these days. Don’t feel rejected, honey.” She smiled like Mother Theresa among the lepers.

“I think you’re wrong about what’s going on,” I said in a conciliatory tone, and took her hand.

She acknowledged my hand only to remove it, to hold me at arm’s length. “Do something by yourself,” she said. “Okay? I really want to read. Okay?”

I left her to herself, watched the middle innings of a Red Sox game on television, then went out for a walk in the moonless night. The darkness seemed an appropriate text.

As Adrienne locked hands with herself, I spent more and more time with Rebecca. Or with acquaintances on the island, most of whom were shrinks of one denomination or another. I looked forward to the obligatory cocktail parties, accepted whatever human contact was available, avoided being alone.

Our friends, Peter and Barbara Konig, had a house five miles up island, an inappropriately grandiose A-frame that seemed designed more for pagan worship than as a summer residence. We generally shared dinners with them two or three times a week in the most casual way, never arranging anything more than an hour in advance. Peter was one of my oldest friends and I didn’t trouble to distinguish what was habit between us and what was affection. I loved Peter and Barbara, yet I could be exasperated with them, with Peter mostly, but that’s another story, only some of which is relevant here.

Peter is a psychoanalyst with a reputation for encouraging the “inner voice” of his therapeutic patients. He tends to encourage the most outrageous acting out and I suspect — this is not an opinion I’ve kept from him — that he lives off it vicariously. Barbara, who comes from money, who has an income in her own right, is the author of two whimsical children’s books, one recently published to respectable reviews. Before she became a writer, she was Peter’s secretary, a significant detail in their relationship. We had both been closer to Peter until this summer when Adrienne “discovered” Barbara. “She’s more intelligent and articulate,” Adrienne reported, “when Peter’s not around to intimidate her.”

That had not been my experience of Barbara, not at that time.

With the Konigs, Adrienne came out of herself, was notably charming and talkative, a different person from the serene mute that shared my bed and table.

“You’ve really blossomed this summer,” Peter told Adrienne. “I’ve never seen you look so sensational.”

“I don’t believe a word of it, Peter,” Adrienne said, though I could tell his remark had spoken to her innermost voice. She knew herself to have risen — ascended, I might even say — to a higher stage of development.

And alas I was also charmed by Adrienne’s performance around the Konigs, was as much attracted to her that summer as in the passionate early years of our relationship.

The more she withdrew from me, the more, God help me, I felt drawn to her.

When we came home from an evening at the Konigs where she dominated conversation, and laughed giddily at almost anything said, the social butterfly would hide behind the first book or magazine to come to hand. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I might ask, my attempts at conversation becoming increasingly tentative.

“Umm,” she might answer.

“You did or you didn’t?”

“I told you,” she would say. “Why do you keep asking?”

“I want to find out if there’s someone else in the room.”

It was the same conversation again and again with only cosmetic variation.

“What do you want from me, Yuri?” she would complain. “Why does my separateness bother you?”

“What do I want from you? I want you to treat me as if I don’t exist.”

Her irritation would flower into a sigh. “That has to be your problem,” she would say. “I’m not responsible for you, Yuri. I’m not your mother, baby.”

“I get it,” I said. “What you’re doing is defining by negative example what it is not to be my mother.”

“Just fuck off,” she said, her voice rising.

When I sat down next to her, she got up from the couch as if I had tilted her from her seat.

She hates me, I said to myself. The news, which seemed all but impossible to believe, left me in a state of panic. Hated by her, I found my own company intolerable.

I had turned forty a month before we left for the Vineyard.

That night, when I finally came to bed, she pretended to be asleep, lying all the way over on her side, facing away, then she came over and put her head on my chest. I kept my arms at my sides.

“What’s the matter, honey?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said in a choked voice.

“Are you crying?”

I didn’t answer, fought to gain control of myself, said no.

“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” she said and returned to her side of the bed, her treatment concluded. “Goodnight.”

I lay on my back, staring into the dark, in touch with feelings of rage that were inseparable from grief.

The next few days Adrienne was more like her old self, was kinder and more accessible, though a reserve, a certain wariness, had developed between us. We said good morning at breakfast like acquaintances at a hotel. At lunch, we talked about going to a movie in Vineyard Haven, argued about what to see. Adrienne couldn’t malce up her mind whether she wanted to go or not, suggested that we ask the Konigs to join us.

I have a clearer recollection of what I wanted to say then what I actually said. What I wanted and didn’t want — ambivalence is always a factor — was to go alone with Adrienne, though I ended up calling Peter and Barbara, who were, as always, happy to join us. There was no necking this time in the back seat of the car. It was our car we took and I was the driver.

We went to the Konigs’ place after the movie — I think it was “Tootsie” we saw that night — had ice cream and espresso with them and returned home. Except that we didn’t return home. The back right tire of our aging Volvo — the tire farthest from the driver — was completely flat, a fact discovered after driving for a while on a dirt road that seemed to have turned to sand. Adrienne wasn’t amused. “You’re the one responsible for the car,” she said.

It was too dark to change the tire so we left the car at the side of the road and walked back in silence to the Konigs’ A-frame, interrupted a shouting match that stopped, it seemed, in midsentence at our unanticipated appearance. Adrienne called the sitter to explain our delay while I had a glass of brandy. When she got off the phone she said, “I forgive you for the tire.”

Barbara drove us home, insisted on the prerogative. The two women sat in front, buzzing like flies. Adrienne was giggling at something I hadn’t heard. “What’s funny?” I asked. “It really can’t be explained,” Barbara said.

I took the sitter home in the Konigs’ silver Mercedes — our live-in girl away that week — while Adrienne and Barbara continued their private talk in our driveway.

Their voices trailed after me and I imagined I heard Adrienne say, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

When I came into the kitchen on my return, the buzz of conversation died abruptly. Adrienne said in a peremptory voice, showing off, “Be a dear and open a bottle of white wine, Yuri.”

I uncorked the bottle and poured three glasses of wine. “Anything else I can do to make myself of use?” I asked.

Barbara laughed, Adrienne studied the tile floor. “You’re a shit,” she whispered.

Later, when Barbara had gone home, I asked Adrienne what they had been talking about on my arrival. “Nothing that concerns you,” Adrienne said.

I let it go, couldn’t let it go. “You stopped talking as soon as you were aware of me,” I said.

She gave me an amused mocking look, a sassy child’s look. “What would you say to a patient if he said something like that to you?”

“As you well know,” I said, “not all suspicion is evidence of paranoia. I want to know what it is I’m not supposed to hear.”

“If you’re not supposed to hear it, you don’t get to hear it,” she said in her dreamy voice. She offered a mock-shudder, put her arm on my shoulder. “Oh Yuri, why would we be talking about you. We were being silly, baby.” She bumped me playfully with her hip. “Do you want to explore the problem?” she said in her therapist’s voice.

If her signals were mixed, I responded only to the positive ones. I took her to bed. We took each other to bed, I suppose. It surprised me how hungry I was for her, how much hunger had been stored up.

“That was nice,” she said afterward. She put her head on my chest, her hair which was in a loose bun tangled in my beard, and I fell asleep that way. Her head bruised my heart with its weight.

The next day when I went to the Konigs to retrieve my car, I got into an extended conversation with Peter who was having his own domestic difficulties. Barbara, in what Peter referred to as a palace revolution, was demanding a salary for typing up his case notes, something she used to do as a matter of course. Peter didn’t mind paying a salary, he said — her rates were quite reasonable — but objected to the implications of the demand. “I resent being made into a sexist villain,” he said. “My feminist patients have a very different view of me.”

I drove to the Shell Station in Menemsha where I dropped off the tire for repair, Peter coming along for the ride. “Barbara mentioned that you were having some problems at home,” he said at some point. “I’m sorry as hell, buddy.”

I offered no news, was irritated at the pleasure he seemed to take in his own solicitousness. So Adrienne had lied to me, had used Barbara and Peter to deliver a message she had been unwilling to give me directly. I muttered something about there being palace revolutions everywhere.

“This is post-civilization, buddy,” he said, an old line of his. “Divorce has become an obligation to the self. I feel for both of you. I want you to know that. I love you both.”

Such claims of affection demanded the response of gratitude, which I offered almost willingly.

I stayed for lunch at the Konigs, in no hurry to confront Adrienne about her lie. Barbara and Peter played out the contentions of their marriage over a cold linguini dish with pesto, olives and artichoke hearts. I was there to witness their performance, to validate its necessity, though I left before the final curtain.

I took Rebecca to the ocean beach in the afternoon and later to the tennis club for a lesson while Adrienne did whatever it was she did.

“Did you have a good day?” she asked at the close of an almost silent dinner.

“Okay,” I said. “Bad in the morning, good in the afternoon.”

“I had a wonderful day,” she said, “being completely alone.”

“Why not?” I said. Rebecca came over and sprawled on my lap.

“You really don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “You need to have people around you, Yuri, or you feel empty.”

“I don’t recall telling you that,” I said.

“Guys,” Rebecca said, “this is not an argument we’re having.”

“No argument,” said Adrienne. “I’m just making an observation about Yuri.”

“Let me understand this,” I said, tasting my bitterness as if it were food the system had refused to digest. “You observe the emptiness I feel inside when I’m alone. You must be endowed with x-ray vision.” A cheap remark, unworthy of us.

“I find this discussion extremely tiresome,” my disaffected wife said and got up from the table. “Please excuse me.”

The next day, or the next, Adrienne sought me out to apologize for what she described as her need to live within herself more. She could understand, she said, that it was causing me some unhappiness, though it was not her intention to hurt me. “I’ve been changing and I don’t think you’ve noticed — you can be so oblivious, Yuri — or maybe you haven’t been willing to accept the change in me.”

I refused the bait this time, struggled to appear reasonable. “If you want us to live differently. Adrienne, tell me what you have in mind.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not even sure that the way I want to live includes you.”

Even given the estrangement of recent weeks, the remark shocked me, provoked panic.

“I don’t know what to make of what you tell me,” I said, or imagined myself saying. I thought of asserting that I continued to love her as if the burden of her apparent rejection of me were a demand for reassurance. “Is there someone else?” I let myself ask.

“There’s only me,” she said with just enough hesitation to suggest the possibility of another answer.

I willed self-control at the price of denying the pain I felt. “You’re disappointed with your life, want something else, is that it?”

She gave me a sly grin, offered the room a sigh. “It’s not even that I’m discontent, as you put it, Yuri. In some ways, I’m more at peace with myself than I’ve ever been. Can you understand that? It’s just that I feel there’s something missing in my life. I feel that we haven’t risked enough.”

It was like a dream in which everyone around you is speaking an indecipherable foreign language. “What haven’t we risked?” I asked. “Are you talking about fucking other people?”

It looked for a moment as if she might give an answer, her eyes turned inward studying private scripture. “Interview is over,” she said briskly. “I’d like to read now if it’s all right with you.” She picked up a copy of “Psychology Today” and covered her face with it.

When I turned away, she said from behind her mask, “You have to learn to be less dependent on me.”

It was as if a switch had been pushed that summer and the process of our disaffection set irreversibly in motion. It was tacky stuff, unworthy, though deeply compelling. We did what we could, Adrienne and I, moved tacitly into what had the appearance of a formal agreement. Our marriage became its own shadow. We stayed away from one another in private, though we gave the impression in public some of the time at least of being the devoted couple outsiders imagined us to be. The last thing to come apart were appearances. I am getting ahead of myself.

Peter dropped over one afternoon when Adrienne and Rebecca were out picking strawberries or taking a swim to tell me that Ted and Diane Fieldstone had split up after thirteen years. The news offered no great surprise. The previous fall Diane had published a satiric novel about psychoanalysts in which a man like her husband had been portrayed as a tedious hypocrite. The book seemed a not easily forgivable betrayal, though Ted seemed to take the novel in stride, allowed himself to manifest pleasure in his wife’s success.

Eight months after the book’s publication, Ted had left Diane, had flown off the Vineyard to spend a few days with friends in Boston.

“I told Ted on the phone,” Peter reported, “that he had put all our marriages in jeopardy by running off.”

“Peter, if inconsistency were a virtue,” I said, “you’d be a candidate for sainthood. Had Barbara written a book like Diane’s, you would have walked out on her before the jacket cover had been designed.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I might have kicked the shit out of Barbara if she attacked me in print, but I would never have broken up our marriage over it.”

“You see wife beating, then, as the more moral of the two alternatives?”

“That’s middle-class bullshit, buddy, and you know it. A man throws a punch at his wife is making a statement about his feelings for her. Barbara knows that.”

We got into one of our theoretical arguments, though it was more heated, more acrimonious than usual. “You’re a fraud,” I shouted at him. “You only believe the things you say the moment you hear yourself say them.”

“You’re a bigger fraud, buddy,” he shouted back. “I’ll tell you what I can’t believe, what I can’t believe is that you’ve never taken a poke at the provocative lady you share your bed with.”

I said something about his living vicariously through other people’s aggressions, then seeing the look on his face — Peter is more vulnerable than he lets on — I realized that I had gone too far. I made a joke about our long standing competitiveness.

He passed me to retrieve his beer and we inadvertently bumped shoulders. “You were in the way,” he said.

“I wasn’t moving,” I said.

“It so happens I had right of way,” he said. “The rule is, offensive player has right of way on the defensive man’s court.”

“I think it’s called hospitality,” I said. I held out my hand and Peter took it, embracing me with his other arm.

“Yuri, last Christmas, Barbara bought me a pair of boxing gloves. I’m embarrassed to tell you this, though why should I be. Sometimes we spar before going to bed. It converts hostility into sexual energy. I’m thinking of doing a paper on it.”

“In my house we tend to spar with words,” I said.

“That’s a mistake,” he said. “Words hurt feelings. Words create real wounds.”

Adrienne and Rebecca came in. Rebecca embraced me and Adrienne gave Peter an enthusiastic kiss. “The ocean is wonderful today,” she said. “It’s as gentle and sweet-natured as a lover.”

“That sounds like an attractive recommendation,” Peter said. Adrienne giggled as if Peter’s remark contained more wit than I had noticed.

Peter’s departure was occasion for Adricnne’s withdrawal. She took her sketchpad out on the deck, asked in passing if I would entertain Rebecca while she worked.

I followed my disaffected wife on to the deck and stood over her until she acknowledged my presence. I was in a fever, a blind stupefied rage. Rebecca stood behind me, tugging on my shirt. It was fortunate for that. Our child saved us, gave us a temporary reprieve. I know I would have regretted what I was about to do, though it seemed at the moment the only appropriate response. There is worse to come.