Silent Partner

2

I slept poorly and woke with the sun on Friday. With no patients scheduled, I dived into busywork: messengering the video of Darren to Mal, finishing other reports, paying and mailing bills, feeding the koi and netting debris out of their pond, cleaning the house until it sparkled. That took until noon and left the rest of the day open for wallowing in misery.

I had no appetite, tried running, couldn’t get the tightness out of my chest and gave up after a mile. Back home, I gulped a beer so quickly it made my diaphragm ache, followed it with another and took the six-pack into the bedroom. I sat in my underwear and watched images float across the TV screen. Soap operas: perfect-looking people suffering. Game shows: real-looking people regressing.

My mind wandered. I stared at the phone, reached out for the receiver. Pulled back.

The shoemaker’s children…

At first I’d thought the problem had something to do with business- with forsaking the world of high tech for the hand-cramping, poorly compensated life of an artisan.

A Tokyo music conglomerate had approached Robin about adapting several of her guitars into prototypes for mass production. She was to draw up the specifications; an army of computerized robots would do the rest.

They flew her first-class to Tokyo, put her up in a suite at the Okura Hotel, sushied and sake’d her, sent her home laden with exquisite gifts, sheaves of contracts printed on rice paper, and promises of a lucrative consultantship.

All that hard sell notwithstanding, she turned them down, never explaining why, though I suspected it had something to do with her roots. She’d grown up the only child of a mercilessly perfectionistic cabinetmaker who worshipped handwork, and an ex-showgirl who grew bitter playing Betty Crocker and worshipped nothing. A daddy’s girl, she used her hands to make sense of the world. Endured college until her father died, then eulogized him by dropping out and handcrafting furniture. Finally she found her perfect pitch as a luthier, shaping, carving, and inlaying custom guitars and mandolins.

We were lovers for two years before she agreed to live with me. Even then she held on to her Venice studio. After returning from Japan, she began escaping there more and more. When I asked her about it she said she had to catch up.

I accepted it. We’d never spent that much time together. Two headstrong people, we’d fought hard for independence, moving in different worlds, merging occasionally- sometimes it seemed randomly- in passionate collision.

But the collisions grew less and less frequent. She started spending nights at the studio, claiming fatigue, turning down my offers to pick her up and drive her home. I was keeping busy enough to avoid thinking about it.

I’d retired from child psychology at the age of thirty-three after overdosing on human misery, had lived comfortably off investments made in Southern California real estate. Eventually I began to miss clinical work, but continued to resist the entanglement of long-term psychotherapy. I dealt with it by limiting myself to forensic consultations referred by lawyers and judges- custody evaluations, trauma cases involving children, one recent criminal case that had taught me something about the genesis of madness.

Short-term work, with little or no follow-up. The surgical side of psych. But enough to make me feel like a healer.

A post-Easter lull left me with time on my hands- time spent alone. I began to realize how far Robin and I had drifted from each other, wondered if I’d missed something. Hoping for spontaneous cure, I waited for her to come around. When she didn’t, I cornered her.

She shrugged off my concerns, suddenly remembered something she’d forgotten at the studio and was gone. After that, I saw her even less. Phone calls to Venice triggered her answering machine. Drop-ins were maddeningly unsatisfying: Usually she was surrounded by sadeyed musicians cradling mangled instruments and singing one form of blues or the other. When I caught her alone she used the roar of saws and lathes, the hiss of the spray gun, to blot out discourse.

I gritted my teeth, backed off, told myself to be patient. Adapted by creating a heavy workload of my own. All during the spring, I evaluated, wrote reports, and testified like a demon. Lunched with lawyers, got stuck in traffic jams. Made lots of money and had no one to spend it on.

As summer neared, Robin and I had become polite strangers. Something had to give. Early in May, it did.

A Sunday morning, rich with hope. She’d come home late Saturday afternoon to retrieve some old sketches, had ended up spending the night, making love to me with a workmanlike determination that scared me but was better than nothing.

When I woke, I reached across the bed to touch her, felt only percale. Sounds filtered from the living room. I jumped out of bed, found her dressed, handbag over one shoulder, heading for the door.

“Morning, babe.”

“Morning, Alex.”

“Leaving?”

She nodded.

“What’s the rush?”

“Lots of things to do.”

“On Sunday?”

“Sunday, Monday, it doesn’t matter.” She put her hand on the doorknob. “I made juice- there’s a pitcher in the fridge.”

I walked over to her, put my hand on her wrist.

“Stay just a little longer.”

She eased away. “I really have to go.”

“Come on, take a breather.”

“I don’t need a breather, Alex.”

“At least stay for a while and let’s talk.”

“About what?”

“Us.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Her apathy was forced, but it pushed my button anyway. Months of frustration were compressed into a few moments of blazing soliloquy:

She was selfish. Self-obsessed. How did she think it felt to live with a hermit? What had I done to deserve this kind of treatment?

Then a laundry list of my virtues, of every lofty service I’d performed for her since the day we’d met.

When I was through she put down her bag and took a seat on the couch. “You’re right. We do need to talk.”

She stared out the window.

I said, “I’m listening.”

“I’m trying to collect my thoughts. Words are your business, Alex. I can’t compete with you on that level.”

“No one needs to compete with anyone. Just talk to me. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know how to put this without being hurtful.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just let it out.”

“Whatever you say, doctor.” Then: “Sorry, this is just very hard.”

I waited.

She clenched her hands, unflexed them and spread them out. “Look around this room- the furniture, the artwork- everything exactly the way it was the first time I saw it. Picture-perfect-your perfect taste. For five years, I’ve been a boarder.”

“How can you say that? This is your home.”

She started to reply, shook her head and turned away.

I stepped into her line of vision, pointed to the ash-burl trestle table in the dining room. “The only furniture that means anything to me is that. Because you built it.”

Silence.

“Say the word and I’ll chop everything to matchsticks, Robin. We’ll start from scratch. Together.”

She put her face in her hands, sat that way for a while, and finally looked up, wet-eyed. “This isn’t about interior decorating, Alex.”

“What is it about?”

“You. The kind of person you are. Overwhelming. Over-powering. It’s about the fact that you’ve never thought to ask if I wanted anything different- if I had ideas of my own.”

“I never thought that kind of thing mattered to you.”

“I never hinted that it did- it’s me, too, Alex. Accepting, going along, fitting into your preconceived notions. Meanwhile, I’ve been living a lie- viewing myself as strong, self-sufficient.”

“You are strong.”

She laughed without joy. “That was Daddy’s line: You are strong girl, beautiful strong girl. He used to get mad at me when my confidence lagged, yelled at me and told me over and over that I was different from the other girls. Stronger than them. To him, strong meant using your hands, creating. When the other girls were playing with Barbies, I was learning how to load a band saw. Sanding my knuckles to the bone. Constructing a perfect miter joint. Being strong. For years I bought into it. Now here I am, finally taking a good look in the mirror, and all I see is another weak woman living off a man.”

“Did the Tokyo deal have anything to do with this?”

“The Tokyo deal made me stop and think about what I wanted out of life, made me realize how far I was from it- how beholden I’ve always been to someone.”

“Babe, I never meant to hem you in-”

“That’s the problem! I’m a babe- a damn baby! Helpless and ready to be fixed by Doctor Alex!”

“I don’t view you as a patient,” I said, “I love you, for God’s sake.”

“Love,” she said. “Whatever the hell that means.”

“I know what it means to me.”

“Then you’re just a better person than I am, okay? Which is the crux of the problem, isn’t it! Doctor Perfect. Ph.D. problem-solver. Looks, brains, charm, money, all those patients who think you’re God.”

She got up, walked the floor. “Dammit, Alex, when I first met you, you had problems- the burnout, all those self-doubts. You were a mortal and I could care for you. I helped you through that, Alex. I was one of the main reasons you pulled out of it, I know I was.”

“You were, and I still need you.”

She smiled. “No. Now you’re fixed, my darling. Perfectly tuned. And there’s nothing left for me to do.”

“That’s crazy. I’ve been miserable not seeing you.”

“Temporary reaction,” she said. “You’ll cope.”

“You must think I’m pretty shallow.”

She walked some more, shook her head. “God, I’m listening to myself and realizing it all comes down to jealousy, doesn’t it? Stupid, childish jealousy. The same way I used to feel about the popular girls. But I can’t help it- you’ve got it all together. Everything organized into a neat little routine: run your three miles, take a shower, work a little, cash your checks, play your guitar, read your journals. Fuck me until we both come, then fall asleep, grinning. You buy tickets to Hawaii, we take a vacation. Show up with a picnic basket, we take lunch. It’s an assembly line, Alex, with you pushing the buttons, and one thing Tokyo taught me was that I don’t want an assembly line. The crazy thing is, it’s a great life. If I let you, you’d take care of me forever, make my life one perfect, sugar-coated dream. I know lots of women would kill for something like that, but it’s not what I need.”

Our eyes met. I felt stung, turned away.

“Oh, God,” she said, “I’m hurting you. I just hate this.”

“I’m fine. Just go on.”

“That’s all of it, Alex. You’re a wonderful man, but living with you has started to scare me. I’m in danger of disappearing. You’ve been hinting about marriage. If we married, I’d lose even more of my self. Our children would come to see me as someone dull and unstimulating and bitter. Meanwhile, Daddy would be out in the wide world performing heroics. I need time, Alex- breathing space. To sort things out.”

She moved toward the door. “I have to go now. Please.”

“Take all the time you need,” I said. “All the space. Just don’t cut me off.”

She stood trembling in the doorway. Ran to me, kissed my forehead, and was gone.

Two days later I came home and found a note on the ash-burl table:

Dear Alex,

Gone up to San Luis. Cousin Terry had a baby. Going to help her, be back in about a week.

Don’t hate me.

Love,

R