“I understand,” I said. “I just want to know who you were talking to on the phone.”
“My life is my own,” she said, “and if you can’t get used to that, maybe you ought to take off. I don’t need you here.”
“You go too far,” I said. We stood glaring at each other, maybe a foot apart, neither willing to yield ground.
Our separate rages played off one another like images in a mirror.
“Your problem, Yuri, is that you don’t go far enough,” she said as if she were disappointed to discover this failing in me. Needing to prove her wrong, I walked out of the house without explanation, banged the door melodramatically behind me.
Does it matter what happened? Or that nothing happened. I spent the next couple of hours talking distractedly to a woman in a bar, small, dark, of no particular age. She seemed amused, even turned on, by my distraction. We talked about talking and listening, as a matter of fact. I confided that I liked to talk so much that listening to others required enormous constraint for me. It was a truth about myself I had not recognized before.
I walked her home a little after midnight and we kissed at the door of her place. Then we went inside together. She said if we went to bed, she would want me to stay the night. Those were her terms. I said I couldn’t manage that. We pressed against each other, she brushed her hand through my hair. I took her number and left.
When I came home, Adrienne was upstairs — most of the house lights out — and I watched the last third of a movie on TV before going up to bed. In the movie a man has left his wife for a younger woman and at the end he is left in turn by the woman for a younger man.
I slipped under the covers — Adrienne was sleeping in the center of the bed — conscious of heaviness, feeling swollen and out of shape, conscious of not wanting Adrienne to wake. I was imagining how my time with the woman in the bar would have seemed in a movie. Would the man have seemed more sympathetic to an audience if he stayed with the woman or if he left? A moment or so after I closed my eyes, Adrienne whispered something that sounded like, “Are you crying, Yuri?”
I said nothing, reached for her, put my hand on her shoulder. She put her hand over mine, then removed it as if her fingers had been burned. “Why won’t you let me sleep?” she said. “Go fuck yourself,” I said in a hoarse voice.
“If you don’t let me sleep,” she said after a moment, hesitantly, “I’ll sleep somewhere else. Is that what you want?”
I turned on my side away from her, laughed at something, felt crazed.
She rested her hand on my back. “Do you want me to leave, Yuri?”
“I don’t care,” I lied.
She huddled on her side. “I’m going to sleep,” she announced as if there were more than one other person listening to her.
Why am I reporting this mundane conversation? Because, I answer myself, meanings reside in mundane details. I am trying to understand what was going on between us — the dynamic of our deteriorating relationship — so I return again and again to the same or similar scenes, looking for clues.
I return to this sleepless night, which goes on and on, a waking dream of hell. I doze and come alive, sleep for minutes at a time, turn from back to side like a metronome. Adrienne sleeps or seems to sleep.
I get up, go downstairs, have a brandy, come back to bed.
“Make up your mind,” Adrienne says as if she had been rehearsing the remark to herself for hours.
“What about?” I ask after a prolonged silence. “What are you talking about?”
She matches my silence and takes it a beat further. “Whether you want to sleep in this bed or walk around,” she says.
“I wouldn’t mind getting it on,” I whisper.
She laughs, which is unexpected, bumps my leg with hers. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I roll over on top of her and she reluctantly (perhaps not), puts her arms around me. I put my mouth on her breast, the cotton of her nightgown between us. Her breathing quickens.
At some point, we both seem to turn to stone as if bewitched.
We stay this way for prolonged minutes, an embrace of statues, frozen in time. In my memory of it, we never come apart.
I was aware in that embrace, memory reports, of hating her, which was a new feeling for me or new in its intensity. I had no tenderness for her, or too much to acknowledge. Anger was the only thing in me that wanted to make love. My feelings horrified me and I rolled off her corpse, moved in defeat to my side of the bed. Sleep, which had rejected me, took me in hand.
“Are you all right, honey?” Adrienne asked from across the void.
I didn’t say anything because I was asleep, or moving into sleep, her question too far away to acknowledge. Of course, I’m all right, I imagined myself saying, heard myself say in the privacy of dream. Why wouldn’t I be all right? Her answer to my silence echoed, revised itself over and over and never was right, never gave satisfaction.
I had a succession of nightmares that night. Sleep’s hands were rough.
Six
The Language of the Self
I am this bad person, I have always been made to believe. It is my stepfather’s idea of me. It is Yuri’s idea. I am my mother’s bad self. (I’ve been a prisoner of other people’s definitions.) It is not even my reflection in the mirror, but Yuri’s version (I was going to write virgin) of me. The bad Adrienne. For more than twelve years, I’ve been living as Yuri’s shadow. That’s not quite right either. I tend not to be inarticulate so much as bereft of language. Unparented by language. Language’s orphan. As I was my mother’s idea of a daughter (though she never approved, never really loved me for it), I became Yuri’s idea of a wife. I was not Yuri’s shadow, but his female image of himself in fantasy’s mirror. I was the not-Yuri part of Yuri. I existed for him as if he had imagined me in a novel or a movie: the smart, sexy, happy wife who was (in his image) also a shrink. Except I wasn’t always deliriously happy with the arrangement. I knew of course that it was my failure, this deficiency, that I was still the same bad girl my father fled (and my step-father beat), and who wouldn’t (couldn’t) please my saintly mother and that there was some hidden, nasty part of me (I was always a secret terrorist in my heart) that couldn’t leave well enough alone.
There were rewards. There are rewards for being good. If I took care of Yuri, if I took care to hide my bad self, he would have to love me. I was ready to do almost anything (wash windows, take out the garbage, anything) to be loved. At the same time, the bad child (my hidden self) knew it was a lie. Who could love me? I was an article of use. I was other people’s fantasy of wife, daughter, mother, lover, window washer, therapist, whatever. And I wasn’t in this alone. Yuri has to bear some of the blame. (One morning love, wearing only a scarf, walked out the door never to return.) Yuri didn’t notice what was happening. If he loved me enough, he would never have allowed things to go so far. I suspect he was collecting grievances. (We all do some of that, don’t we?) I couldn’t like that about him.
These are my reasons. I thought — How could I continue to see Carroway if I loved Yuri? I thought — If I was really happy with Yuri, I wouldn’t have needed Carroway. And so on. Because I found myself in love with someone not my husband (I was no longer the good person who was Yuri’s wife), I stopped loving Yuri. It had to happen. We had been like two organisms breathing out of the same lung. The air began to get too thin. I had to tear myself free in order to breathe.