Separate Hours

Eight Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Routine helped me deceive pain. I took on new patients, reentered therapy with my old therapist, read novels, did my drawings, took a painting class one night a week, did things with Rebecca. I seemed calm around the house. I don’t think anyone knew what was going on with me. Certainly not Yuri. His face tortured with grievance.

Sometimes I took his face as a reflection of my own condition. It was as if we were sharing the same sadness. (The same office and the same feeling of loss.) That couldn’t be true.

When Carroway and I broke up I felt (what?) nothing. I was broken up. I thought: it is all for the best. It is all for the worst. I felt hurt, but didn’t feel the pain. When I thought about it calmly, I believed he would come back to me. He loved me, didn’t he? He valued me. There was a lesson to Carroway’s betrayal. There’s always a lesson, isn’t there? Men are more emotionally frail than women. That’s the moral of all relationships between men and women. After all, we take our houses with us.

Thomas was someone to talk to. He knew Carroway (he had taught Carroway drawing at Pratt), he knew of our relationship. He was one of the very few people either of us had confided in. I don’t think anyone else knew at the time except Carroway’s wife. Anna Marie. But that was something else. God, yes.

Carroway loves only himself, Thomas said. He helped me to understand what I already knew but refused to believe. That it was Carroway’s pattern to evade intimacy. Thomas made himself available whenever I needed him. He never seemed to want anything for himself. (Eventually the bill will arrive, I thought.) How kind Thomas was. He was a good friend.

So I talked to Thomas about Carroway and later, when I felt I could trust him, about my drawings. This is what I realized. I realized that what I was getting from Thomas (we were not lovers then, that wasn’t it) had replaced my need for Carroway. Then I asked myself, Why isn’t there more between us? What does Thomas want from me? (I’m never really sure what people want from me.) The question I should have been asking myself is what do I want from Thomas. I tend to confuse what people want from me with what I want for myself.

I’m in session with a patient when Carroway calls out of the blue (he doesn’t say who he is) and asks if we can get together. I know the moment I hear his voice that I no longer care in the same way. “I can’t talk now,” I say. “Can you call back in twenty minutes please?” My voice, which echoes in my ear, is calm. I am the professional person I pretend to be. (The hand holding the phone begins to cramp.)

“It gives me chills to hear your voice again,” he says. “I love the sound of your voice.”

“I’m with someone,” I say. “Is there a number where I can reach you?”

“Look, I’ll call back later,” he says. “I don’t want to impose myself on you while you have other commitments.” He hangs up without the usual amenities.

I dismiss Sara Huddle a few minutes early. The woman has been locked for weeks in the same obsessional grievance. I am out of patience today, feel burdened by the tedium of her monologue. When she is gone, I try not to think about Carroway calling back. I have the sense that the entire psychoanalytic institute (Yuri among them) is observing my composure at this difficult time. I am a model of indifference. I take two Tylenol caplets for a headache that goes off and on like flashing neon lights. This is the drill: when he calls I will tell him that I don’t want anything more to do with him. If he can’t accept that, I would be willing to meet him very briefly in some public place to explain myself. Between patients, I rehearse my lines. I never get a chance to use them. Carroway doesn’t call back.

After my last session I call Thomas and tell him of Carroway’s disruptive call. Thomas is his concerned self. He says he will take off from work if I need to see him right away. I have an hour free at four Tomorrow, I tell him. He suggests that I come to his studio in Soho, but there really isn’t time for that. Finally, we agree to meet, though postpone the decision of where. I sense we are involved in a tug of war.

I am lying down (coming down with something) and no one comes upstairs to ask how I am. (Even Rebecca stays away.)

I hear Yuri poking about in the kitchen, the shock waves of his presence. I want to scream something at him, some skyrocketing obscenity. (It is the thing about oppressors that they never identify themselves as oppressors.)

I feel crazed.

(Let me confess something. I have always been secretly afraid of losing touch. My most primitive terror is of coming apart. Going mad. There is little or no clinical evidence to support these feelings.)

I fall asleep briefly and Rebecca wakes me. “Are you coming down for dinner, mommy?”

“Only if I don’t have to fix it,” I say.

“Daddy’s already made dinner.” She says it, my lovely child, like a reproof.

“How could he?” I say. “There’s nothing in the house.”

I put on make-up, change my clothes (just my blouse really) and come down. Yuri has made pasta and meat sauce, has burned the garlic. Father and daughter have started eating without me.

“What’s everyone been doing?” I say with worked-up cheer.

Yuri says something that makes no impression. Rebecca says, “Oh, Daddy!” with affectionate exasperation. I am thinking: How distant I feel from you, Yuri. It’s as if your presence were an illusion on a TV screen. A lifelike configuration made up of inscrutable dots.

Yuri is in a good mood for a change. He jokes with Rebecca. I offer him a smile. I am thinking: Who’s going to wash the pots and pans when dinner is over?

I have my sketchbook open in my lap. The drawing is already visualized, though the page remains blank. Yuri’s presence (he is sitting across from me) makes it impossible for me to start. I know that he won’t have the grace to leave (he knows I need to be alone) without my making a fuss.

We talk for a few minutes about the difficulty Rebecca is having with a math teacher. When our banalities exhaust themselves, I attend the blank page in my book. “Yuri, don’t you have anything to do?” I ask in a kind voice. “You know I like to have time to myself after dinner.”

He lets out one of his ponderous sighs. “I can’t live like this, Adrienne,” he says.

I find myself laughing crazily. “What do you think you want Lm me?” I ask. I hear Rebecca stir in her bed and I put my finger over my lips to caution him.

He raises his voice nevertheless. “You’re not here,” he shouts. “It’s lonely living with an invisible woman.”

“I don’t want Rebecca to be brought into this,” I say softly.

He jumps to his feet with a clamor, bumping the marble coffee table with his knee. An eruption is imminent. “I’m sorry about your knee,” I whisper. “Think about it. There’s really nothing I can do for you.”

“What does your shrink think is going on?”

“I don’t talk to Henry about you,” I say. “As you’re always telling me, you’re not my problem.”

“Your marriage of twelve years is going to hell,” he says, his voice rising with each succeeding word, “and you don’t talk to Henry about it. It’s beyond belief. What the fuck do you talk to him about?”

I feel under siege. “I’m not prepared to discuss that with you,” I say. “Okay?…Please don’t wake Rebecca. She doesn’t need to hear you run amok.”

“You’re maddening, you know? You drive me mad.”

“So you like to tell me,” I say, keeping my voice low. “You make yourself unhappy, Yuri, because you refuse to accept things as they are.”

He points his finger at me as though it were a loaded gun. “What exactly do I refuse to accept?” The question reverberates through the house. His self-control is as fragile as egg shell. I imagine Rebecca sitting up in bed, listening in a terrified state.

“I don’t want to have this conversation,” I tell him. “I have a right not to have it if I don’t want it.”

I run upstairs to see if Rebecca is all right. She is sleeping restively, has kicked off one of her blankets.

(I am my own person, damn him.) I cover her, kiss her flushed cheek. “Love you, sweetie,” I whisper.

I lie in bed for a while with the covers over my face, listening to the rasp of my breath. I have my hands (who can tell where hands will wander?) between my legs. I have trouble getting into it. The house is suddenly so quiet I can hear Rebecca’s wheezy breathing from across the hall. And the sound of a television, the insinuating music of a suspense movie, from the house next door. I am wrapped up in depression like a mummy swathed in strips of sheet.

I reach my sister Grace on the phone and talk for almost an hour. (Yuri says two hours — I plan to check it when the bill comes in.) I end up telling her more of what’s going on than I intend. It takes awhile to unravel my story. And Grace has a story of her own.

Our mother has been calling her to complain about Spencer. Something is wrong with him and he absolutely refuses to see a doctor. She wants Grace to talk to him, which Grace thinks is funny. “I’d rather chew nails than ask anything of Spencer,” she says. I laugh. Then Grace laughs. “I wasn’t aware of being funny,” she says, which makes us both laugh again. (I wonder why mother chose to call Grace and not me. I used to be the one she’d come to for advice.)

I tell her about Carroway’s call at the office.

“You haven’t tried to see him?” she asks. “That’s not like you.”

“I feel as if I can’t bear not to see him,” I say, “and other times it’s as if it never really happened. (When I talk to Grace it’s like talking to another version of myself.) Can you understand that? I worry about losing my own experience.”

“I think I knowwhereyou’re coming from,” says Grace. “How’s Yuri handling it?”

“He has very little reality for me these days.”

“To tell you the truth,” she says, “I’ve always had some problems with Yuri. Do you know what I mean? I think he comes on to me.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I say.

“I can’t really explain,” says Grace. “I feel like, you know, he can’t tell the difference between us.”

Yuri is occupied watching a movie on television when I come back downstairs. I say “Hi” and he smiles in delayed reaction.

The movie is a Hitchcock film called “Marnie,” which I had seen pieces of on television before. (Whenever I watch, Marnie seems to be on horseback, the horse out of control.)

During a commercial he asks who I had been talking to for almost two hours. I see no reason not to tell him. “It was Grace,” I say. “My mother is worried about my step-father’s health.” Yuri mumbles something. I feel calmer, sit down on the couch and do a drawing, a self-portrait with half the face blurred out. We have returned to our routine of silence. After his movie is over, Yuri says goodnight, looks over at me, expecting something (what, Yuri?) and goes upstairs. “Sleep well,” I say to him. I feel tender toward him in his impending absence.

When you no longer love someone it is hard to remember how it was when you did.

In the office we share I come upon a notebook of Yuri’s which contains journal entries of the past year. I open the book on a sudden urge, intrigued with what’s going on with him. I stop to read certain passages in which my name appears or the names of other women are mentioned. He has not been so innocent. A line strikes me. “I am in mourning for an object which is itself in mourning.” I repeat the sentence to myself.

It is five minutes past midnight when I phone Carroway from the office. He answers in a harsh voice on the second ring. “I’m sorry if I woke you,” I say in a whisper. “Who the fuck is this?” he says, shouts. (As if I were malting an obscene phone call.) I hang up, then moments later call again. I am in a state, my heart flapping wildly, though also in control. This time he answers on the first ring, says in a muffled voice, “What do you want?” “So you knew it was me,” I say. “I don’t expect to be treated this way from a….” The sentence doesn’t end.

“Why don’t I call you back first thing in the morning,” he says.

“I want to talk now.”

“I think it would be better if I got back to you in the morning,” he says. “Good night, sir.”

“Anna Marie is in the room, I suppose.”

“That’s an intelligent assumption. Good night.”

“Do you ever think of me?” I ask.

“I’m going to have to hang up now,” he says. “Okay?”

I say nothing, wait for the axe.

“Get some sleep,” he says and is gone.

I feel nothing. I am afraid to open myself to whatever I am really feeling. When I turn around there’s Yuri, in the dark blue silk bathrobe I had once given him for his birthday, watching me from the doorway. “Do you want something?” I ask him. There is a rash on his forehead that extends almost to the bridge of his nose.

I want to know who you were talking to on the phone,” he says in a voice full of childish belligerence.

“It doesn’t concern you,” I say cooly.

“If I’m concerned, it concerns me,” he says. He has his hands on his hips and sways slightly as he talks.

He is angry enough to smash me, I sense, though I feel no danger. He’ll be sorry if he lays a hand on me. That’s what I’m thinking. “Come off it, Yuri,” I say to him.

He repeats his demand, takes a step in my direction.

“It will only hurt you to know,” I say. “Do you think I want to hurt you? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“And Nixon is not a crook,” he says. “I think you get off on hurting me.” His face looks as if the skin had been scraped with sandpaper.

“I have my own problems,” I say. “I’m not going to be sucked into yours.” I walk past him in the narrow space to show him I am not afraid of him. He brushes me with his shoulder.

He waits until I am past him, until I begin to climb the steps, before shouting my name. “Have the decency not to throw your shit in my face,” he says.

“You think I’m indecent, Yuri?” I ask the question without turning around. My legs ache. I am aware suddenly of being exquisitely tired. “Is that what you think of me, Yuri?”

He follows me up the basement stairs into the living room before answering. “That’s the kindest way it might be put,” he says.

“Say what you mean, you mother fucker.” I keep my voice down, focus my anger.

“I didn’t get that,” he says.

“I’ll tell you something, Yuri,” I say. “If you sawa movie about our lives,” I say, “you’d find me the more sympathetic character. You know that’s true.”

He shakes his head in denial, looks lost. “Anything is possible,” he says, “in a medium that means to deceive. As a matter of fact, Adrienne, you’re full of shit.”

I have the sense of being an observer of some obscene public event. I am watching an ugly domestic squabble in the movies in which someone like myself is a major participant, a crazy fight to the death has just begun, a fight that will get uglier and uglier until it breaks off into something else, some vulgar and painful resolution, and I watch myself think, No, I don’t want this, and I hold up my hand like a traffic cop. I witness myself holding up my hand. “I don’t want to talk now, Yuri. Okay?” I disengage.

He follows me up to the bedroom, stares his anger at me for a long time without saying a word. It doesn’t frighten me. There isn’t anything he can do to frighten me.

“Yuri, if you have something to say, say it. What do you want?”

He turns around, returns downstairs.

It is a relief to be free of him. I make a bet with myself that he will return (I know him too well) in five maybe ten minutes for a final flail. There will be an unfelt apology or a last angry word. I put off going to sleep.

I am wrong as it turns out, but not very far wrong. (I know Yuri. I can set my watch on his heart beat.) At breakfast the next morning, he leans over to me and says he is sorry about last night. Rebecca is at the table so I merely nod in acknowledgement

Later, as he is leaving the house, I say, “You don’t need to apologize to me for anything, Yuri.”

He nods, offers me the trace of a smile. “I think I apologize to you because I want you to apologize to me,” he says.

“I think I know that about you,” I say.

Yuri goes out, closes the door behind him. Before I can sit down to my second cup of coffee, he is back.

His hair is in disarray even though he has been outdoors less than a minute. “I feel patronized by you,” he says. “That’s all I want to say.”

“Let’s not have another fight,” I say. “Okay?”

“What else is there?” he says. “It’s the only contact left us.

“Please don’t shout,” I whisper. “At least close the door, honey. You know how I feel about public scenes.”

“Whenever I say something you don’t want to hear, you accuse me of shouting,” he shouts. “The neighbors are in the audience watching the movie of your life. Show them how sympathetic you are.”

“I’m not angry at you now,” I say. I squeeze his hand. “I was thinking last night that you’re not so bad.” I can feel my face flush.

He puts his arm around my waist, pulls me to him.

“You’ll be late, honey,” I say. I have to push him gently toward the door to get him out.

When he is gone I feel safe again. There is more air to breathe. I think of clearing up the kitchen (Yuri has left his coffee cup in the sink), go upstairs to take a shower instead. (I don’t think of Carroway’s call.) While I wash my hair, I imagine myself watching the movie of our life. It is not our real story. And there are distractions. I hear Yuri’s key rattling in the lock. He is always there, waiting to get in.