Separate Hours

Four The Search for Identity

I haven’t written in this journal for two weeks now. Reasons will make their appearance. It’s the abruptness of what happened that surprises me. And yet I see it in retrospect as something that was bound to happen. I see it as something I had denied myself for too long. The details move backwards like a film shown in reverse.

I have always had faith in the fortuitous. In some superstitious pocket, I believe that my life has already been played out. I come to it after the fact, collecting clues as I go.

The man happened to be coming down the street in my direction just as I finished my session at the hospital. A coincidence I immediately distrusted. I was outraged at his presumption. I demanded to know what he was doing on my street. He had a work space in the neighborhood, he said, he was an art student, smiling in a way that made me disbelieve him all the more. I told him that I thought he was lying. He challenged me to come with him and see his studio with my own eyes. So I went along with him to catch him in his lie. (I had nothing else in mind.) There were four flights of stairs (two double flights) to climb. First impressions: the studio he showed me (I still didn’t believe it was his) was like an elaborate stage set. It had a brass double bed on a platform set off by a winding staircase. There were three or four paintings on the wall which were dark and technically crude. Also unexpectedly delicate. The sensibility of the paintings was surprisingly delicate. (So I was taken by surprise. There was more to him than I had been willing to see.) One of the paintings, a portrait of two women (with the same face), seemed almost good. In his space, as he called it, he was gentlemanly, even deferential. We had vinegary white wine in matching coffee mugs. We exchanged commonplaces. Then I said (or someone impersonating me said), “Now that you’ve got me here, we might as well get on with it.” He professed to be shocked, an inspired touch. “I admire you too much, Adrienne,” he said. (He pronounced my name correctly.)

I laughed at him. I called him a reluctant seducer. I was absolutely sure of what I wanted. (I was not myself. I did not feel like myself.) “You told me you envied my husband,” I said. “Was that just a tease?”

He refused to take me at my word. The more shy he played, the more insistent I became. “You know how to seduce,” I said, “but you don’t know how to give in.”

“You’re giving me a headache,” he said. “What about your husband? What is he going to think about this?”

“I’m interested in a sexual encounter,” this person I was impersonating said. “I’m not interested in discussing my life with you. I have a good marriage. I love my husband.”

“I want you to be absolutely sure that this is what you want,” he said. (I nodded, whispered yes.) “Okay. It’s your funeral.” (Hearing himself, he laughed.) “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

As we climbed the winding stairs to his balcony (it was like an altar in the sky), I began to panic. (You’re being bad, I told myself. It’s about time, I answered. I repeated the phrase to myself in the middle of things. “It’s about time.”)

There are worse betrayals than sleeping with someone other than your husband. The worst betrayals are betrayals of self.

I have a patient whose husband has left her after a marriage of thirty-one years. Her courage shames me. She is terribly (painfully) lonely. Her children are all grown, have separate lives. It is an act of will for her to get through the day. The vestiges of a lifelong dependence continue to hobble her. A life without taking care of someone seems unimaginable. She tends to mother her lovers and frighten them away. She has been dependent on the dependence of her husband and children for so long. I tell her nothing that she doesn’t already know. (I help her to clarify.) I tell her what she knows and she has not be able to fully accept: that she has not loved her husband for the longest time. I feed off her anger as she feeds off my support. At times, I feel myself taking on her sadness. I am furious at her husband for leaving her (and me, I feel) for a woman twenty years younger. I want to shake the man. I want to tell him, “You are not worthy of this woman you left.” What we share is a father’s defection — hers died when she was twelve, mine moved out when I was eight. We both know that the men we love betray us eventually. That knowledge is engraved in us.

Yuri asks me (in bed of all places) if I’m still seeing Carroway.

“Not as a regular patient,” I say. Even in evasion, I feel it necessary to tell a version of the truth.

“Do you mind,” he asks, “if I see Mrs. Carroway as a patient?”

“Why should I mind?” I say.

“If you were still seeing Carroway, it might create complications.”

“I told you I wasn’t, didn’t I?” My voice is shrill. “What do you want from me, Yuri?” Panic gathers. My smile is like a mask.

“Have I missed something?” He does a double take, a routine that used to amuse me. “Are you pissed off at me because I was right about Carroway?”

“You’re so wrong, Yuri. You couldn’t be more wrong.”

“The man has a reputation as a seducer of shop girls,” he says. “He’s a classic sociopath.”

The phrase “seducer of shop girls” makes me giggle. “Oh Yuri,” I say and touch his arm. “You don’t have to put Carroway down. You’re not in competition with him.” I put my arms around him. Yuri. Yuri.

“I’d rather you didn’t take on Mrs. Carroway,” I say.

I think of what I’ve done as characteristic yet unlike me. It happened that once and I am clear that it will not happen again. If Carroway makes any attempt to renew contact, I will tell him (I talk to myself the words) that I have no interest in seeing him again. I am even thinking of not going to the hospital on Thursday (I can call in sick) to avoid a confrontation. It has always been hard for me to refuse a direct request. The “good girl” wants to say yes to whatever is asked. She needs to please. Yuri has been particularly sweet these last few days. He senses my pulling away. (It’s as if he knows but doesn’t know he knows.)

My father, when he was young (my father was always young), was a charming and charismatic man. He was the most charming man. It was not his fault (nor mine) that my mother didn’t want a husband. When she married Spencer, she got a man who would never trouble her. My father’s dead now. My stepfather has never been fully alive.

I delayed leaving the hospital. I got drawn into a conversation with my supervisor (a jealous, mean-spirited lady), from which it was difficult to break free. It was a relief not to find Carroway waiting for me on the steps. The man is sensitive to my feelings, I let myself think. He is aware that I don’t want our thing (our thing that is really no-thing) to continue. It strikes me as I record my feelings that I am not telling myself everything I know. I feel grateful to Carroway for his tact and walking to the subway, I consider stopping by his loft to thank him. I feel no danger in making this unannounced visit. I am completely and perfectly calm. A black teenager makes an obscene remark as our paths cross. This ruffles me only a little. I let myself take it as appreciation. I feel radiant. I feel absolutely elegant. It is a blissful day to walk and I decide to go to the subway by way of Carroway’s loft, a slightly longer route. I will acknowledge the gracefulness of his behavior. I will thank him and leave.

I go through several changes of mood going up the four flights of stairs. I consider retracing my steps as I approach the door. I must take responsibility, I tell myself. I have made a decision, I have come this far. There is nothing to do but knock at the door and complete my errand. I am a great distance from my feelings. I am in a state of weatherless calm.

There is no answer to my knock. I listen (suspiciously) for sounds of movement inside. Thursday is his afternoon at his space, he told me. I tend to believe what I’m told. I knock again. If intent were enough, I would knock down the door. I’ve been a presumptuous lady. Yes? (I can feel myself unravelling.) My seducer of shop girls has made a point of avoiding his shopworn therapist. (How else explain his absence?) I would sit down on the steps but they are filthy and there is nothing to put under my skirt. I give myself fifteen minutes, then a five minute extension on the fifteen. Then (I have waited so long already) another five minutes. (I am not, am I, this fallen woman, waiting to see her seducer?) I return down the stairs. I am feeling fragile, slightly damaged. On the second landing, I hear someone coming. “I’m glad I didn’t miss you,” he says, taking my hand. “I had an appointment with my lawyer. You know how it is.” There is no occasion to thank him for his tact. I forget why I’m there.

“I really have to get home,” I say, going back up the stairs with him.

I have come this far. And he is so overjoyed, so persuasively overjoyed, to have me here. “I know I don’t want to go on with this,” I say, though I follow him up the devious steps to his balcony. It no longer seems like an altar to me. More like a stage this time. A place for performance. He congratulates me when it is over. “You were sensational,” he says. I feel myself blushing. I am pleased and touched. (I am the secretive girl my stepfather disapproved of.) I am on a high. (I feel I can do anything I want.) It is a scary scary feeling.

When I come in, Yuri looks at me as if he knows everything. His eyes are narrowed. (I know that look.) “What happened?” he asks.

“What do you mean what happened?” So much for belligerence. Then I make my excuse. “The train broke down,” I say. “We didn’t move for almost an hour.”

“I know how awful that can be,” he says. “I always panic in trains when they don’t move. Why don’t I fix you agin and tonic.”

His solicitude offends me. “What I really need is a hot shower, Yuri. And would it be so terrible if I had some private time after doing clinic?”

“The way you put it,” he says, “implies that I’m the one who’s keeping you from doing what you want. Is that realistic?” “Don’t fight,” Rebecca says. “We’ll agree that it’s not realistic.” How blind he is, I think. “Can we talk about it after I take my shower?” I say. It is not a question, though I wait for his reply, frozen in place.

Rebecca embraces me from behind, startles me. “What are you doing?” I scream at her. I feel that everyone has turned against me. Why won’t you let me be loveable to you? (Don’t love me so much.)

If I don’t pull myself away, I will stay at the bottom of

these stairs forever. I go up. I lock myself in the bathroom. I undress for the second time.

I think of myself as a bad person who has been wronged by being thought of as a bad person.

I do (did) what I have to do. I discover who I am by doing what is necessary to be myself.

In the shower, I feel charged with energy. And I think: what is it? What is it that I am feeling? I can barely breathe I am so terribly alive. (What is really going on?) I am a child in the shower. I sing. I abandon myself. (I feel myself abandoned.) And Yuri lets me go on with it. Yuri doesn’t care. Yuri no longer cares for me.