Eight months after the book’s publication, Ted had left Diane, had flown off the Vineyard to spend a few days with friends in Boston.
“I told Ted on the phone,” Peter reported, “that he had put all our marriages in jeopardy by running off.”
“Peter, if inconsistency were a virtue,” I said, “you’d be a candidate for sainthood. Had Barbara written a book like Diane’s, you would have walked out on her before the jacket cover had been designed.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I might have kicked the shit out of Barbara if she attacked me in print, but I would never have broken up our marriage over it.”
“You see wife beating, then, as the more moral of the two alternatives?”
“That’s middle-class bullshit, buddy, and you know it. A man throws a punch at his wife is making a statement about his feelings for her. Barbara knows that.”
We got into one of our theoretical arguments, though it was more heated, more acrimonious than usual. “You’re a fraud,” I shouted at him. “You only believe the things you say the moment you hear yourself say them.”
“You’re a bigger fraud, buddy,” he shouted back. “I’ll tell you what I can’t believe, what I can’t believe is that you’ve never taken a poke at the provocative lady you share your bed with.”
I said something about his living vicariously through other people’s aggressions, then seeing the look on his face — Peter is more vulnerable than he lets on — I realized that I had gone too far. I made a joke about our long standing competitiveness.
He passed me to retrieve his beer and we inadvertently bumped shoulders. “You were in the way,” he said.
“I wasn’t moving,” I said.
“It so happens I had right of way,” he said. “The rule is, offensive player has right of way on the defensive man’s court.”
“I think it’s called hospitality,” I said. I held out my hand and Peter took it, embracing me with his other arm.
“Yuri, last Christmas, Barbara bought me a pair of boxing gloves. I’m embarrassed to tell you this, though why should I be. Sometimes we spar before going to bed. It converts hostility into sexual energy. I’m thinking of doing a paper on it.”
“In my house we tend to spar with words,” I said.
“That’s a mistake,” he said. “Words hurt feelings. Words create real wounds.”
Adrienne and Rebecca came in. Rebecca embraced me and Adrienne gave Peter an enthusiastic kiss. “The ocean is wonderful today,” she said. “It’s as gentle and sweet-natured as a lover.”
“That sounds like an attractive recommendation,” Peter said. Adrienne giggled as if Peter’s remark contained more wit than I had noticed.
Peter’s departure was occasion for Adricnne’s withdrawal. She took her sketchpad out on the deck, asked in passing if I would entertain Rebecca while she worked.
I followed my disaffected wife on to the deck and stood over her until she acknowledged my presence. I was in a fever, a blind stupefied rage. Rebecca stood behind me, tugging on my shirt. It was fortunate for that. Our child saved us, gave us a temporary reprieve. I know I would have regretted what I was about to do, though it seemed at the moment the only appropriate response. There is worse to come.
Four
The Search for Identity
I haven’t written in this journal for two weeks now. Reasons will make their appearance. It’s the abruptness of what happened that surprises me. And yet I see it in retrospect as something that was bound to happen. I see it as something I had denied myself for too long. The details move backwards like a film shown in reverse.
I have always had faith in the fortuitous. In some superstitious pocket, I believe that my life has already been played out. I come to it after the fact, collecting clues as I go.
The man happened to be coming down the street in my direction just as I finished my session at the hospital. A coincidence I immediately distrusted. I was outraged at his presumption. I demanded to know what he was doing on my street. He had a work space in the neighborhood, he said, he was an art student, smiling in a way that made me disbelieve him all the more. I told him that I thought he was lying. He challenged me to come with him and see his studio with my own eyes. So I went along with him to catch him in his lie. (I had nothing else in mind.) There were four flights of stairs (two double flights) to climb. First impressions: the studio he showed me (I still didn’t believe it was his) was like an elaborate stage set. It had a brass double bed on a platform set off by a winding staircase. There were three or four paintings on the wall which were dark and technically crude. Also unexpectedly delicate. The sensibility of the paintings was surprisingly delicate. (So I was taken by surprise. There was more to him than I had been willing to see.) One of the paintings, a portrait of two women (with the same face), seemed almost good. In his space, as he called it, he was gentlemanly, even deferential. We had vinegary white wine in matching coffee mugs. We exchanged commonplaces. Then I said (or someone impersonating me said), “Now that you’ve got me here, we might as well get on with it.” He professed to be shocked, an inspired touch. “I admire you too much, Adrienne,” he said. (He pronounced my name correctly.)
I laughed at him. I called him a reluctant seducer. I was absolutely sure of what I wanted. (I was not myself. I did not feel like myself.) “You told me you envied my husband,” I said. “Was that just a tease?”
He refused to take me at my word. The more shy he played, the more insistent I became. “You know how to seduce,” I said, “but you don’t know how to give in.”
“You’re giving me a headache,” he said. “What about your husband? What is he going to think about this?”
“I’m interested in a sexual encounter,” this person I was impersonating said. “I’m not interested in discussing my life with you. I have a good marriage. I love my husband.”
“I want you to be absolutely sure that this is what you want,” he said. (I nodded, whispered yes.) “Okay. It’s your funeral.” (Hearing himself, he laughed.) “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
As we climbed the winding stairs to his balcony (it was like an altar in the sky), I began to panic. (You’re being bad, I told myself. It’s about time, I answered. I repeated the phrase to myself in the middle of things. “It’s about time.”)
There are worse betrayals than sleeping with someone other than your husband. The worst betrayals are betrayals of self.
I have a patient whose husband has left her after a marriage of thirty-one years. Her courage shames me. She is terribly (painfully) lonely. Her children are all grown, have separate lives. It is an act of will for her to get through the day. The vestiges of a lifelong dependence continue to hobble her. A life without taking care of someone seems unimaginable. She tends to mother her lovers and frighten them away. She has been dependent on the dependence of her husband and children for so long. I tell her nothing that she doesn’t already know. (I help her to clarify.) I tell her what she knows and she has not be able to fully accept: that she has not loved her husband for the longest time. I feed off her anger as she feeds off my support. At times, I feel myself taking on her sadness. I am furious at her husband for leaving her (and me, I feel) for a woman twenty years younger. I want to shake the man. I want to tell him, “You are not worthy of this woman you left.” What we share is a father’s defection — hers died when she was twelve, mine moved out when I was eight. We both know that the men we love betray us eventually. That knowledge is engraved in us.