Separate Hours

Five Transference

Let me set the scene. I am packing the car in a desultory way when Peter and Barbara drive up to say goodbye. We are leaving the Vineyard three days early because the weather — it is our mutually agreed on excuse — has failed us. We have been shrouded in mist, our view of the ocean denied us for almost a week. Barbara scurries in the house to see Adrienne after giving me the kind of kiss mourners exchange at funerals. My memory to this point is absolute.

Peter sidles up as is his style, his posture itself an unacceptable insinuation. “Depression is not the way to nirvana, buddy,” he says. He puts his arm on my shoulder and I shrug it off. “I’m feeling for you, you asshole,” he says.

There’s more of the same — Peter’s infuriating condescension, my benumbed packing of the car — before all hell breaks loose, but I want to cut away to something that happened the morning of the day before. The scene moves indoors.

“You and mommy are very weird with each other this summer,” Rebecca was saying. We were sitting on a rug in front of the fireplace playing Monopoly while Adrienne, at the other end of the long room, sketched imaginary birds. I thought for a while — she seemed to be studying us — that we were her subject.

I made some lame remark about people who are together a lot of the time needing periods of separateness.

“Is that anything like a divorce?” said my precocious daughter. She knew about divorces from the broken homes of several of her classmates at Brearley.

I defended the status quo. “Your mother and I have no plans to get a divorce,” I said.

“Is that a promise, daddy — you’ll never get divorced?”

“No one can say for certain what’s going to happen in the future,” I said.

“That’s what you always say,” said my world-weary opponent.

“You’re confusing me with your other parents,” I said.

Adrienne laughed. Rebecca reminded me that I had landed on Chance and was required to pick a card. The arrival of one of Rebecca’s friends interrupted the game. The card I picked was “Get Out of Jail Free.”

“You handled that well,” Adrienne said to me later when Rebecca was outside playing with her friend Tanya.

“What would you have said?” I asked her, but she was already out of the room, had moved on to the porch. I repeated my question and when she ignored it a second time, I came up from behind and put my arms around her. She put her hands over mine. We stood there like that for something like fifteen seconds, then she said, “Yuri, you always make gestures that are willed rather than felt. You know that’s true, baby.” She removed my arms like untying a package.

Her assertion provoked denial. And yet she was right, right enough to make me question my motives. Consciousness, I wanted to say, did not preclude feeling, but she knew all that. Our way of seeing things was so much the same, our insights so interconnected, that our conversation remained implicit, required no voice. Our roles had been defined by unspoken agreement. I was the prisoner of consciousness, she was the sprite of feeling, a medium for unexamined and uncontrolled urges.

I am aware that the scene I am describing has not been brought to conclusion, remains on the page, as it does in my feelings, permanently incomplete. We seemed to play the same inconclusive scene again and again that summer (that fall, that winter) in intricate variation.

The next thing I remember — clearly some steps have been repressed — Peter and I were rolling around on the damp grass, punching one another.

Barbara was screaming something at us that sounded like “don’t you dare” and sometimes my name and sometimes his. I broke his nose while he was on the ground, broke it with my elbow or with my forearm, heard the crack or felt it when I hammered the side of his head with my arm. Barbara was pulling my hair and I remember getting up and holding out my hand to Peter. “I’m sorry, buddy,” I think I said. Barbara helped Peter into the car — he was bent over, his eyes tearing, nose out of joint — and they drove away. Adrienne and Rebecca shunned me when I came in, were in Rebecca’s room with the door closed.

I floated through the silent house like an unwelcomed hero, high on acting out, resenting the betrayal of those closest. Peter, who was an advocate of hands-on expression of feelings, had been treated with his own medicine. My knuckles ached with pleasure. It was instinctive what I had done, uncharacteristic and unexpected, therefore valuable. I was riding the displacement express, exhilaration receding as reality gradually returned. I finished packing the car in virtual slow motion. “Why did you do such a thing,” Rebecca asked me when I saw her again.

“He did something I didn’t like,” I said.

“You don’t like me to fight when someone does something I don’t like,” she said.

“Sometimes,” I said, “we do things we don’t approve of for our children.”

“It’s not Peter you were angry at,” Adrienne said. And then a moment later when Rebecca was out of the room. “I hope you know that was a cowardly thing to do.”

I took her reprimand to heart, which is to say I drove back to the city under a cloud of depression and self-loathing.

Rebecca forgave me the disappointment my behavior had caused her as soon as we reached home. “You must have had good reasons, daddy,” she said, hugging me an extra long time when I put her to bed. “Please don’t let it happen again.” She laughed at herself, at her parody of me.

“I’ll try to do better,” I promised.

“I’m glad it was his nose and not yours,” she said.

The first time that Peter and I ran into each other at clinic, he put his arm on my shoulder. “I missed you, buddy,” he said. Though pleased to be forgiven, I found myself, unaccountably, unforgiving.

“When I called,” I said, “Barbara said you weren’t talking to me.” His nose was still swollen.

“That’s Barbara’s thing,” he said. “For my part, Yuri, I wish you only well. I hope things are going better for you on the home court. So?”

“Things are better at home,” I said, full of sufferer’s pride. “It’s good we’re still friends,” I mumbled, moving on.

The next time our paths crossed at the hospital, we avoided looking at each other.

Adrienne called Barbara at some point in the hopes of repairing that half of the friendship.

I found her in the bedroom when I came home from clinic, lying in fetal position with a pillow covering her face. “Is that you, Yuri?” she asked from thousands of miles away. “I’m feeling bombed out, honey. Would you look after dinner?” I sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hand. Her eyes were puffed and red. “What happened?”

“Go away, Yuri. Please. I mean it.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“If you don’t go away, I’ll scream,” she said in a whisper. She looked like a child.

“I don’t mind if you scream,” I said.

She mouthed a scream, a mock scream, a real scream mocked. “I promise I’ll tell you later, Yuri,” she said. “Okay? I need to be alone at this time, baby. I really do. Barbara gave me a horrendous time.”

I reproduce this conversation — half real, half imagined — because I knew, as I walked away, that I was once more failing her test.

That wasn’t all. The next day, coming upstairs from the office, I overheard Adrienne talking on the phone, heard her saying that she didn’t know she could ever forgive Barbara. When I came into the bedroom she made a show of lowering her voice. When I looked at her she waved me away and though I couldn’t understand why she needed to exclude me — at first I waved back, mocking her gesture — I returned downstairs, accepted my dismissal.

As soon as I was out of the room her voice rose again so that it seemed that she meant me to hear her side of the conversation, that she was using the call as a form of communication between us. “Look Barbara, I said,” I heard her say, “Yuri and I are not the same person. I’m not responsible for his bad behavior.”

When she got off the phone, I asked her who she was talking to. “That’s my business,” she said. “Why do you involve yourself in my business?”

“We happen to be married,” I said.

“I want you to respect my privacy,” she said in the voice of empty threat. “I don’t want to be questioned about what I do or who I talk to. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said. “I just want to know who you were talking to on the phone.”

“My life is my own,” she said, “and if you can’t get used to that, maybe you ought to take off. I don’t need you here.”

“You go too far,” I said. We stood glaring at each other, maybe a foot apart, neither willing to yield ground.

Our separate rages played off one another like images in a mirror.

“Your problem, Yuri, is that you don’t go far enough,” she said as if she were disappointed to discover this failing in me. Needing to prove her wrong, I walked out of the house without explanation, banged the door melodramatically behind me.

Does it matter what happened? Or that nothing happened. I spent the next couple of hours talking distractedly to a woman in a bar, small, dark, of no particular age. She seemed amused, even turned on, by my distraction. We talked about talking and listening, as a matter of fact. I confided that I liked to talk so much that listening to others required enormous constraint for me. It was a truth about myself I had not recognized before.

I walked her home a little after midnight and we kissed at the door of her place. Then we went inside together. She said if we went to bed, she would want me to stay the night. Those were her terms. I said I couldn’t manage that. We pressed against each other, she brushed her hand through my hair. I took her number and left.

When I came home, Adrienne was upstairs — most of the house lights out — and I watched the last third of a movie on TV before going up to bed. In the movie a man has left his wife for a younger woman and at the end he is left in turn by the woman for a younger man.

I slipped under the covers — Adrienne was sleeping in the center of the bed — conscious of heaviness, feeling swollen and out of shape, conscious of not wanting Adrienne to wake. I was imagining how my time with the woman in the bar would have seemed in a movie. Would the man have seemed more sympathetic to an audience if he stayed with the woman or if he left? A moment or so after I closed my eyes, Adrienne whispered something that sounded like, “Are you crying, Yuri?”

I said nothing, reached for her, put my hand on her shoulder. She put her hand over mine, then removed it as if her fingers had been burned. “Why won’t you let me sleep?” she said. “Go fuck yourself,” I said in a hoarse voice.

“If you don’t let me sleep,” she said after a moment, hesitantly, “I’ll sleep somewhere else. Is that what you want?”

I turned on my side away from her, laughed at something, felt crazed.

She rested her hand on my back. “Do you want me to leave, Yuri?”

“I don’t care,” I lied.

She huddled on her side. “I’m going to sleep,” she announced as if there were more than one other person listening to her.

Why am I reporting this mundane conversation? Because, I answer myself, meanings reside in mundane details. I am trying to understand what was going on between us — the dynamic of our deteriorating relationship — so I return again and again to the same or similar scenes, looking for clues.

I return to this sleepless night, which goes on and on, a waking dream of hell. I doze and come alive, sleep for minutes at a time, turn from back to side like a metronome. Adrienne sleeps or seems to sleep.

I get up, go downstairs, have a brandy, come back to bed.

“Make up your mind,” Adrienne says as if she had been rehearsing the remark to herself for hours.

“What about?” I ask after a prolonged silence. “What are you talking about?”

She matches my silence and takes it a beat further. “Whether you want to sleep in this bed or walk around,” she says.

“I wouldn’t mind getting it on,” I whisper.

She laughs, which is unexpected, bumps my leg with hers. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I roll over on top of her and she reluctantly (perhaps not), puts her arms around me. I put my mouth on her breast, the cotton of her nightgown between us. Her breathing quickens.

At some point, we both seem to turn to stone as if bewitched.

We stay this way for prolonged minutes, an embrace of statues, frozen in time. In my memory of it, we never come apart.

I was aware in that embrace, memory reports, of hating her, which was a new feeling for me or new in its intensity. I had no tenderness for her, or too much to acknowledge. Anger was the only thing in me that wanted to make love. My feelings horrified me and I rolled off her corpse, moved in defeat to my side of the bed. Sleep, which had rejected me, took me in hand.

“Are you all right, honey?” Adrienne asked from across the void.

I didn’t say anything because I was asleep, or moving into sleep, her question too far away to acknowledge. Of course, I’m all right, I imagined myself saying, heard myself say in the privacy of dream. Why wouldn’t I be all right? Her answer to my silence echoed, revised itself over and over and never was right, never gave satisfaction.

I had a succession of nightmares that night. Sleep’s hands were rough.