“I’m not angry at you now,” I say. I squeeze his hand. “I was thinking last night that you’re not so bad.” I can feel my face flush.
He puts his arm around my waist, pulls me to him.
“You’ll be late, honey,” I say. I have to push him gently toward the door to get him out.
When he is gone I feel safe again. There is more air to breathe. I think of clearing up the kitchen (Yuri has left his coffee cup in the sink), go upstairs to take a shower instead. (I don’t think of Carroway’s call.) While I wash my hair, I imagine myself watching the movie of our life. It is not our real story. And there are distractions. I hear Yuri’s key rattling in the lock. He is always there, waiting to get in.
Nine
The Movie of Their Lives
An overhead shot of Brooklyn Heights at dusk. We see the Brooklyn Bridge, the setting sun glancing off it like veils of light. The camera moves through the various rooms of an elegantly furnished Brooklyn Heights brownstone, stopping to rest in an upstairs bedroom, where we catch a man and woman (in their early forties) in the act of making love, the door slightly ajar, a child’s eye at the open slit. The eye recedes as we approach it, disappears altogether. You never say anything, the woman whispers. How do I know what you feel?
An immaculately dressed, dour man, wearing turned down hat and dark glasses, studies the two brass plaques on a front wall of the same brownstone. The camera moves in by degrees on the signs: Yuri A. Tipton, Psychotherapist, and under the first, Adrienne French-Tipton, Psychotherapist. The man looks behind him before entering the building, wary of being observed.
A phone is ringing inside the house. Adrienne and Yuri answer virtually at the same time on different extensions. The call is from the assistant producer of a midnight television talk show, inviting them to appear on a program dealing with the issue of highly successful husbands and wives in the same profession. Adrienne says maybe, she needs to think it over. A decision is deferred. Yuri is adamant, says he is opposed to cheapening their professional lives by making them the occasion of situation comedy. They get into a heated argument disguised as civilized discussion. The debate ends without resolution, with Adrienne going downstairs to see a patient. The camera watches her descent as if it were a trip into a nether world.
The patient is the man we saw outside the building, a Long Island real estate developer named Brian Carroway. Carroway, as he calls himself, has come through the referral of a colleague, and although Adrienne’s time is already oversubscribed, she has agreed to this preliminary interview out of professional courtesy. Carroway has a disarmingly open manner. His style is to insinuate intimacy, to presume on an implicit understanding between himself and his listener. He and his wife, he tells Adrienne, have an open marriage in which each is free to explore the sensual life so long as the integrity of their marriage is not otherwise violated. His most recent affair has been with a eighteen year old McCrory’s sales girl, who chews gum during the sexual act, which Carroway says has been a near-religious experience for him.
His problem is that his wife, Anna Marie, has stopped confiding her experiences to him. As a consequence, he has become jealous and has begun to spy on his wife. He suspects, he says, that Anna Marie actually prefers one of her lovers to him, though he is yet to discover which one. While he makes his confession, almost as a form of punctuation, Carroway flirts with Adrienne.
We see at the same time (on split screen) Adrienne talking to Carroway and Adrienne talking to Yuri about her session with Carroway. Composing herself, Adrienne says to Carroway that maybe he ought to explore the need to share the details of various loveless sexual encounters.
Yuri advises Adrienne not to take on Carroway as a patient. Before Carroway leaves, he praises Adrienne for her perceptiveness, claiming that he feels, on the basis of this first session, already greatly improved. He’s asexual exhibitionist, says Yuri, which is why he wants a woman therapist. Adrienne says the problem has a certain case study quality that interests her, and that she intends to have another exploratory session with Carroway.
Yuri tell Adrienne that he has been having problems with a young woman who, in a transference reaction, has confided that she is in love with him. Is she a temptation? Adrienne asks, half jokingly. To which Yuri says in a deadpan, It’s all I can do to resist her.
We cut to Yuri sitting opposite his doting patient, Margo Goldhart, in the same office in which we had seen Adrienne and Carroway. Margo says it is difficult for her to say but the fact is she is disappointed with her therapist, glancing at Yuri slyly to see what impact her remark has made. “When Yuri doesn’t respond, she escalates the terms of her attack. Let me say, Yuri says, that I don’t think either of us believes I’m the real cause of your anger. How awful you must think I am? she whispers. Their session has the quality of a lovers’ quarrel.
The scene dissolves into one in which Adrienne and Carroway are facing each other in the same office. Carroway tells Adrienne that he has put together a dossier of his wife’s deceptions, neglecting his business and his health in the process. He has learned, he says, that Anna Marie is having a serious affair with either a politician or a psychologist. Carroway picks up his reflection in an ornamental mirror on the wall. He watches himself cry. I hate my life, he says. It’s a strain to keep up pretenses. You know what I’m saying?
Adrienne nods. If the way you live gives you pain, Carroway, it might make sense to try something else, she says. No?
It’s important for me to hear that, Carroway says. You’re good for me, Dr. Tipton.
“When he leaves, Adrienne remains in her seat, staring at the vacated chair.
We notice Carroway hanging around the Tiptons’ brownstone after his session is over. Yuri passes him; the men take each other’s measure.
The camera picks up Adrienne and Yuri having dinner together in their formal dining room. Yuri is saying if Adrienne wants to do it, he’ll do the television show with her. Adrienne says she still hasn’t made up her mind on the issue. Their 11 year old daughter, Rebecca, comes in, wanting to know if her parents have any objection to her smoking grass, just a little to see what it’s like, with her best friend Dora. Absolutely no, honey, Adrienne says. Yuri says he thinks it would be a good idea if Rebecca waited until she was a little older. How much older? Rebecca asks. Thirty years older, says Yuri. After Rebecca has gone, Yuri says maybe they ought to take her out of the progressive private school she’s in and put her in a more traditional place where they don’t start smoking marijuana until they’re twelve. Adrienne says she trusts Rebecca to make the wise choice. I think she’s wonderful too, Yuri says.
When Yuri asks if Carroway has gotten easier to deal with, we cut to Anna Marie and Carroway at a more elaborate table in another dining room, sniffing cocaine. Carroway kisses the palm of his wife’s hand as she studiously inhales, Anna Marie looking off with sultry indifference into the distance. What’s going on? he asks. When she doesn’t answer, he bends back one of her fingers. Don’t, she says.
We cut back to Yuri and Adrienne, their images superimposed over Carroway and Anna Marie. Carroway is one of the most open people I’ve ever met, Adrienne is saying. It’s a deceptive mode, Yuri says. The man’s manipulative.
Through the use of montage, we see Yuri meet with a succession of patients, repeating himself, striking similar attitudes again and again. At some point there is a changing of the guard, Adrienne descending the steps to the office as Yuri goes upstairs to the apartment. He stops to give her a hug. What’s this? she says.