Separate Hours
by
Jonathan Baumbach
For A. G.
It is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary, baffled space of pain — what should these people have done? What, in the name of God, should they have done?
There is a deception in amorous time (this deception is called: the love story).
One
The Structure of Behaviour
As a psychoanalyst, I am a profound believer in middles, in the life itself. Beginnings and ends are the stuff of fantasy. I once imagined that if I ever wrote the story of my life I would begin by saying, “Call me Shrink,” a remark which offers the form of a joke without its substance and so disarms the reader by its foolishness. Someone so unguarded, someone toward whom you feel immediately superior, cannot be other than trustworthy. Watch out for me. I am full of tricks.
The aetiology of my condition was arrogance. I was, let me confess, overwhelmingly content with my life — with my career as analyst, with my brilliant and beautiful wife, with my precocious daughter, with my elegant West Side brown-stone. I floated in the ether of contentment. Routine sustained me. So manyhours a week of private practice, so many hours at the hospital, so many hours teaching a course at the university, so many hours with my family, so many hours writing my book. I was occupied from morning to night with matters of consequence. Let me say it now — it will come out soon enough — my wife Adrienne (my former wife Adrienne) is also a therapist. It gave us a common language, a common point of reference. I liked that, had come to it by premeditated choice. I had a companion with whom I could share the things that mattered, I thought, most to me. We had as good a marriage in our way, as intimate a friendship, as anyone we knew. We got along, didn’t we? We got along famously, performed our roles with impressive conviction. I remind myself that this is the account of a man who saw only what it suited him to see. We had the appearance, the illusion, of a happy marriage.
In taking you into my confidence, I am playing a kind of confidence game. I want you to perceive me as a trustworthy witness, someone who will tell the truth even to his own disadvantage. My sanity has been thrown into question by Adrienne’s opposing version of our shared reality. I leave it to you: which of us is unable to separate reality from wish. If one of us is telling the truth, the other, says reflex, is an extraordinarily persuasive lunatic. I begin with my first meeting with Adrienne.
I met Adrienne for the first time three different times.
one
I had a lunch date with a colleague and was picking him up at his office at the hospital. I was early, or he was late, and I camped out on a chair in his institutional waiting room. A tall elegant woman with large staring eyes came out of his office and gave me a corner-of-the-mouth smile. “I’ve kept the seat warm for you,” she said.
two
I was lecturing on Transference at NYU, filling in for a friend, and Adrienne was in the audience, made her presence known by arriving a moment or so after I had begun. I was aware of her as if she was the only woman in the room and performed for her, rose to flights of eloquence usually beyond my range. She looked somewhat different from the woman I saw coming out of Ted Fieldstone’s office — and I wasn’t sure that she was the same person. I didn’t get to talk to her after the lecture, though her aura lingered for me in the auditorium.
Three
The occasion eludes me. It was a cocktail party, some official function of the Clinical Psychology Program. I was looking out a window, had my back to the party when someone said. “Yuri, I’d like you to meet the most talented student in the program.” And there she was, the same striking woman, though sufficiently different to give me cause foe wonder. We had an intense conversation of a kind usually only available to those who are likely never to see each other again or to analysand and analyst. She told me about problems in her marriage, about her childhood, about her anti-social obsessions, her tendency to outrageous behavior. And what did I reveal about myself? That I knew how to listen, that I was sympathetic. “I’ll bet you’re a very good therapist,” she said. We were interrupted after about an hour by the presence of her husband, Ralph, who asked if she was ready to leave. Adrienne said no, to go without her if he was intent on going. Her tone was unequivocal yet gentle. Her answer angered him, though he pretended otherwise, remained willfully pleasant. How much longer would she be? he asked. She said in the same polite, slightly irritated voice that she had no idea, not to worry about her, she would manage to get home. As it turned out, the husband stayed on and they left together about midnight.
I’ve always thought it interesting how memories deform, how they’re altered by revisionist feelings, the heart’s betrayal of the past. I can witness the process in others, but I am unable to recognize it in myself — the desire to justify overwhelms the need to be true to oneself. I was connected to Adrienne from the start, was in love without naming it love. Adrienne seemed to me — do I actually remember thinking that? — the woman that I was destined to spend my life with. The fact that she was already married seemed only a minor obstacle to be pushed aside. I realize how unfeeling this sounds, and I suspect I exaggerate to make my point, but it is a fair representation of the state of mind of my younger self. All behavior has its consequences — I would pay for my brutality in the end. I did not concern myself with the husband, did not concern myself with Adrienne’s apparent lack of concern for him. If we were to be together, the husband had to be discarded. I accepted that necessity, taking no particular pleasure in the other man’s pain. Mine was an infatuation that nurtured an already blooming arrogance. This way: if this wholly desirable woman desired me, I must be the remarkable man I imagined myself to be.
I didn’t let things go by in those days. “What’s the story with your marriage?” I asked from time to time. Her answer was usually evasive, a joke or a forlorn shrug. At the time I also had a wife, though we had not been living together for several months. I will come to that later, the implications of my first marriage. I have a weakness for digression — in some sense digression is everything — that I’ll try to resist.
If this were a psychoanalytic paper, I might call it, “Marriage in an Age of Post-Civilization: Positives and Negatives.” It took our subjects almost two years to get together after the couple’s promising beginning. During this period of mock courtship, or more accurately mock marriage, A and Y’s relationship fell into apparently irreparable disrepair any number of times. We’re not talking about minor fights here, but actual break-ups, each avowing never to see the other again. Do damaged feelings ever really heal?
How many times did I swear to myself that I was through with her, that the woman was impossible? She was tense and high strung, vulnerable to changes of weather, her sense of well-being as fragile as spun glass. Let me cite examples. (I am a collector of evidence, an accountant of grievances.) At times we would contend over the meaning of an article in a magazine as if our existences were at stake. Neither of us could stand to be opposed by the other and yet it seemed as if we were always placing ourselves on opposite sides of an issue. When we held the same opinion, which was more often than either of us liked to admit, we tended to argue as to who held the opinion first. Am I making it sound worse than it was? Consider that I am remembering the past from the vantage of disenchantment.