I was crazy about her at her worst, particularly at her worst. I was enchanted with her.
Sometimes when we went to the movies we would get into a dispute about where to sit and end up sitting apart. More often than not I would make the necessary compromise and join her in the space she had chosen for us. I didn’t recognize then that significant patterns in our relationship were defined in these seemingly trivial struggles. She was more absolute than I was, more vulnerable perhaps, so to keep the peace I tended to be the one to accommodate. I suspect I couldn’t stand to have her favorable opinion — her respect, her affection, her love — withdrawn from me. I was addicted to her admiration, felt justified and rewarded by it, felt undeserving and in need, felt nurtured by it, felt anger at being in thrall to her. How many times did I give up on her in exasperation?
And then there was the matter of Adrienne’s husband, Ralph, a lingering presence in our lives, the shadow behind our door. “Poor Ralph,” as he was known in our private — our cruel — mythology. He had made a career out of having been a failed though promising student in an impressive variety of disciplines. He was the prodigal son as husband. There was nothing he couldn’t do, said the myth, and nothing he ever completed. Adrienne supported him financially and emotionally, was reluctant to discard “poor Ralph” until he achieved self-sufficiency. This is the voice of self-interest and I apologize for its harshness. In truth, in unadmitted grievance, I was jealous of Ralph. Adrienne took a long time to leave him — for good, as we say — and I held Ralph responsible, an obvious displacement, for Adrienne’s guilty procrastination. And maybe the ties between Adrienne and “poor Ralph” were more profound than I was willing to acknowledge. The son of a bitch had his ways. At some point, he became as much my problem as Adrienne’s. We had extended conversations in bed, often immediately after love making, about what to do about Ralph. And what were we talking about, what was the real subject, when we talked about Ralph? Leave him, I wanted to say, though I generally took a less directive stance.
If only Ralph would throw me out, Adrienne would say in one vocabulary or another, if only he would stop loving me. I resisted asking why the decision rested with Ralph, assuming that we both knew, assuming mistakenly an understanding existed between us that transcended ordinary discourse. The assumption that we both traded on — I begrudgingly, Adrienne with apparent resignation — was that Ralph, an injured party, must be given the space to make his own decision. He really wants to be rid of me, Adrienne would say in her deep sexy voice, he just isn’t ready to act on it yet.
While we waited for Ralph to achieve readiness, our intimacy deepened. We fought constantly. It was as if the integrity of our souls were at issue. I never fought with anyone as intensely as I fought with Adrienne during that period before our marriage that lasted actually three years but seemed to extend itself forever.
We were going off to a psychoanalytic conference in Boston together and had taken adjoining rooms in the same hotel. It was an opportunity, a rare one at that point, to spend an entire night together. I was to deliver a paper on transference, a work whose small clevernesses I imagined to be the flashes of light given off by genius. If I am being hard on my younger self, it is because he led me astray, set me up for a fall I was not prepared to take. I still recall the charge of Adrienne’s affection on the ride over, her sitting squeezed against me in our rented Dodge as though we were teenagers.
We sat in that rented Dodge Polaris, Adrienne’s arm draped around my shoulders as if we were wearing each other like pieces of clothing. I had a hard-on for almost the entire trip from her proximity, from anticipation of our night together in the same bed. The exhilaration I felt scared me. I joked somewhat nervously as we rode like Siamese twins in that rented Dodge, made light of the conference, talked with false modesty about the implicit brilliance of my paper. I felt love for the woman next to me, felt the echoing intensity of her love for me, though I was afraid to break the spell by acknowledging the wonder of the moment with something as pedestrian as words. I assumed that my feelings — how powerful and articulate they seemed — spoke for themselves.
The weather changed radically as we neared Boston, an unseasonal blizzard resulting in an accident on the Mass. Pike, three cars and an enormous truck conspiring, which kept things at a standstill for over an hour. The snow piled up like a dunce cap on our hood. After the delay, there was barely time to check into our hotel rooms before the conference convened. The highway accident had made us both tense, reminding us how vulnerable we are to arbitrary circumstances. Adrienne seemed to blame me for the delay, for the hectic rush to the hotel along icy streets in poor visibility. I could see she was becoming irritated at my concern with being late. Yet she made no audible complaint. She wanted, as I did, our weekend together — all, everything — to be perfect.
After I gave the paper, after we had dinner with some other participants, after we had returned to my hotel room, we had a terrible fight. We were both on edge, Adrienne more intensely so. At some inevitable point, the ghost of Ralph appeared to fret us with its saintly claims. I said I thought we had agreed that Ralph was off-limits for the weekend. Then Adrienne announced that she wanted me to know — it had been eating at her holding back the news — that she thought my paper was essentially “a tedious rehash of commonplaces.” She had been terribly disappointed, having wanted so much to like what I had written. “To be frank,” she said as if her previous unpleasantness had been a form of reticence, “to be frank, Yuri, I was really embarrassed when you read your paper, embarrassed as much for you as for myself. Why didn’t you show it to me first? I would have told you to put it away.”
I grumbled darkly, snarled, “I don’t need you to tell me if what I do professionally is acceptable or not.”
“Well, maybe you do,” she said. “At least somebody should have had the grace to tell you not to give that paper.”
I had my back to her, felt aggrieved though also defensive. “The conference committee was pleased with it,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly have been as bad as you say.”
“It was both banal and dull,” she said. “What worse!”
I did what I had to do, lifted her from the bed and carried her into the hall. She offered only token resistance.
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” she hissed through the closed door. “I mean it this time.” I didn’t doubt her.
Perhaps I had Scotch sent to my room or went down to the bar for a drink — it’s as if this interval were vanished time — or went out into the snow for an aimless walk. Perhaps I tried to imagine my life — the next day, the day after — without this relentlessly painful relationship.
It was always when I had given up on her, when I hoped never to see her again, that she would return without apology and make amends.
There was a timid knock on the door at about two in the morning. It was as if I climbed out of my body — I was dozing, lying across the bed in my clothes — to arrive at the door. I considered not answering, I considered that the knock — really a tap — might have been a figment of a dream, though I answered the door before it repeated itself. She was standing there, huddled, childlike, smiling slyly, glancing away before I could catch her eye. “Are you still angry at me?” she asked in avoice barely meant to be heard. I made agesture that suggested a variety of possibilities. Her smile apologized for itself. “Should I go away?” she asked.