Their voices trailed after me and I imagined I heard Adrienne say, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
When I came into the kitchen on my return, the buzz of conversation died abruptly. Adrienne said in a peremptory voice, showing off, “Be a dear and open a bottle of white wine, Yuri.”
I uncorked the bottle and poured three glasses of wine. “Anything else I can do to make myself of use?” I asked.
Barbara laughed, Adrienne studied the tile floor. “You’re a shit,” she whispered.
Later, when Barbara had gone home, I asked Adrienne what they had been talking about on my arrival. “Nothing that concerns you,” Adrienne said.
I let it go, couldn’t let it go. “You stopped talking as soon as you were aware of me,” I said.
She gave me an amused mocking look, a sassy child’s look. “What would you say to a patient if he said something like that to you?”
“As you well know,” I said, “not all suspicion is evidence of paranoia. I want to know what it is I’m not supposed to hear.”
“If you’re not supposed to hear it, you don’t get to hear it,” she said in her dreamy voice. She offered a mock-shudder, put her arm on my shoulder. “Oh Yuri, why would we be talking about you. We were being silly, baby.” She bumped me playfully with her hip. “Do you want to explore the problem?” she said in her therapist’s voice.
If her signals were mixed, I responded only to the positive ones. I took her to bed. We took each other to bed, I suppose. It surprised me how hungry I was for her, how much hunger had been stored up.
“That was nice,” she said afterward. She put her head on my chest, her hair which was in a loose bun tangled in my beard, and I fell asleep that way. Her head bruised my heart with its weight.
The next day when I went to the Konigs to retrieve my car, I got into an extended conversation with Peter who was having his own domestic difficulties. Barbara, in what Peter referred to as a palace revolution, was demanding a salary for typing up his case notes, something she used to do as a matter of course. Peter didn’t mind paying a salary, he said — her rates were quite reasonable — but objected to the implications of the demand. “I resent being made into a sexist villain,” he said. “My feminist patients have a very different view of me.”
I drove to the Shell Station in Menemsha where I dropped off the tire for repair, Peter coming along for the ride. “Barbara mentioned that you were having some problems at home,” he said at some point. “I’m sorry as hell, buddy.”
I offered no news, was irritated at the pleasure he seemed to take in his own solicitousness. So Adrienne had lied to me, had used Barbara and Peter to deliver a message she had been unwilling to give me directly. I muttered something about there being palace revolutions everywhere.
“This is post-civilization, buddy,” he said, an old line of his. “Divorce has become an obligation to the self. I feel for both of you. I want you to know that. I love you both.”
Such claims of affection demanded the response of gratitude, which I offered almost willingly.
I stayed for lunch at the Konigs, in no hurry to confront Adrienne about her lie. Barbara and Peter played out the contentions of their marriage over a cold linguini dish with pesto, olives and artichoke hearts. I was there to witness their performance, to validate its necessity, though I left before the final curtain.
I took Rebecca to the ocean beach in the afternoon and later to the tennis club for a lesson while Adrienne did whatever it was she did.
“Did you have a good day?” she asked at the close of an almost silent dinner.
“Okay,” I said. “Bad in the morning, good in the afternoon.”
“I had a wonderful day,” she said, “being completely alone.”
“Why not?” I said. Rebecca came over and sprawled on my lap.
“You really don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “You need to have people around you, Yuri, or you feel empty.”
“I don’t recall telling you that,” I said.
“Guys,” Rebecca said, “this is not an argument we’re having.”
“No argument,” said Adrienne. “I’m just making an observation about Yuri.”
“Let me understand this,” I said, tasting my bitterness as if it were food the system had refused to digest. “You observe the emptiness I feel inside when I’m alone. You must be endowed with x-ray vision.” A cheap remark, unworthy of us.
“I find this discussion extremely tiresome,” my disaffected wife said and got up from the table. “Please excuse me.”
The next day, or the next, Adrienne sought me out to apologize for what she described as her need to live within herself more. She could understand, she said, that it was causing me some unhappiness, though it was not her intention to hurt me. “I’ve been changing and I don’t think you’ve noticed — you can be so oblivious, Yuri — or maybe you haven’t been willing to accept the change in me.”
I refused the bait this time, struggled to appear reasonable. “If you want us to live differently. Adrienne, tell me what you have in mind.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not even sure that the way I want to live includes you.”
Even given the estrangement of recent weeks, the remark shocked me, provoked panic.
“I don’t know what to make of what you tell me,” I said, or imagined myself saying. I thought of asserting that I continued to love her as if the burden of her apparent rejection of me were a demand for reassurance. “Is there someone else?” I let myself ask.
“There’s only me,” she said with just enough hesitation to suggest the possibility of another answer.
I willed self-control at the price of denying the pain I felt. “You’re disappointed with your life, want something else, is that it?”
She gave me a sly grin, offered the room a sigh. “It’s not even that I’m discontent, as you put it, Yuri. In some ways, I’m more at peace with myself than I’ve ever been. Can you understand that? It’s just that I feel there’s something missing in my life. I feel that we haven’t risked enough.”
It was like a dream in which everyone around you is speaking an indecipherable foreign language. “What haven’t we risked?” I asked. “Are you talking about fucking other people?”
It looked for a moment as if she might give an answer, her eyes turned inward studying private scripture. “Interview is over,” she said briskly. “I’d like to read now if it’s all right with you.” She picked up a copy of “Psychology Today” and covered her face with it.
When I turned away, she said from behind her mask, “You have to learn to be less dependent on me.”
It was as if a switch had been pushed that summer and the process of our disaffection set irreversibly in motion. It was tacky stuff, unworthy, though deeply compelling. We did what we could, Adrienne and I, moved tacitly into what had the appearance of a formal agreement. Our marriage became its own shadow. We stayed away from one another in private, though we gave the impression in public some of the time at least of being the devoted couple outsiders imagined us to be. The last thing to come apart were appearances. I am getting ahead of myself.
Peter dropped over one afternoon when Adrienne and Rebecca were out picking strawberries or taking a swim to tell me that Ted and Diane Fieldstone had split up after thirteen years. The news offered no great surprise. The previous fall Diane had published a satiric novel about psychoanalysts in which a man like her husband had been portrayed as a tedious hypocrite. The book seemed a not easily forgivable betrayal, though Ted seemed to take the novel in stride, allowed himself to manifest pleasure in his wife’s success.