“We have to go,” I said, mumbling something about getting the sitter home on time. Meanwhile, Adrienne, her coat over her shoulders like a cape, slipped into an intense conversation with the man who had written the nasty book on Freud.
Peter’s story went like this. A couple we both knew, both therapists, had gone on a late night talk show whose subject was how husbands and wives in the same field deal with the inevitable competitiveness. The couple, Henry and Illana Quixote, were so pleased with themselves, with the brilliance of their arrangement, they seemed to think it a social responsibility to present their marriage on television. They had never seen the show before, did not know that the show’s smarmy right wing host, Hilton Safflower, had made a jackal’s career out of making public fools of people wiser and more accomplished than himself.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the celebrity-therapist write something on the inside cover of a match-book and hand it to Adrienne.
After introducing his guests — there were three couples on the show — Safflower interviewed the husbands and wives outside the others’ hearing. Though they are presented as serious inquiry, the questions are designed to provoke extreme responses. The wives’ remarks are passed on, out of context, to the husbands and the husbands’ responses, similarly distorted, back to the wives. Safflower is skillful at manipulation, evokes hostility as if it were music from an orchestra. Before the program is over, Henry and Illana have been provoked into belittling each other before a sizeable national audience. As a consequence of their performance on television, they have stopped talking, feel betrayed, have begun to talk to lawyers about division of property. That was Peter’s story. I took it as a parable of my own situation.
In the elevator on the way down, I fantasized asking Adrienne if the Freud-debunker had given her his phone number. I imagined her asking in return what Barbara and I were doing in the bedroom the half hour or so we had been missing from the party.
And then. The car was not where I remembered parking it, was not even on the same street. I was abashed. Adrienne gave an impatient turn of the head, muttered something I was meant to hear and not meant to understand. She of course had no idea where the car was, had not been paying attention. It was not her responsibility, she said. We got into a brief shouting match on the street. Adrienne walked off in a huff, hailed a cab that refused to stop, then returned on the run to ask me for money for transportation. I had no time for her. All my time was invested in trying to remember where I had left the car.
It was as if I had lost myself. I had a few inspired recollections, flashes of memory that came to nothing. The car was in none of the several places I remembered leaving it. It was only after I decided to walk home — we were no more than fifteen blocks away — that the car appeared, found me before I found it. “Here it is,” I said to Adrienne, but she was not next to me or behind me or anywhere to be seen. I spent the next several minutes driving up and down streets looking for Adrienne. Not finding her, I assumed she had gotten a taxi or taken a bus and I drove in slow-motion — the precaution of the semi-unconscious — home. Adrienne wasn’t back (I left the car double-parked in front of the house), which presented a logistics problem. I couldn’t drive the baby-sitter, Sandy, home without someone to stay with Rebecca while I was gone. Anyway, Sandy had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so I decided to wait for Adrienne’s imminent return.
I dozed off in the overstuffed art deco arm chair. When I opened my eyes — only a split second seemed to have passed — Sandy was sitting up on the couch staring at me. “I didn’t want to wake you,” I said. “I wasn’t really sleeping,” she assured me. I glanced at my watch, which has no numbers, and I wasn’t sure whether almost one or almost two hours had stolen away since we left the party. Sandy said with her usual combination of timidity and complaint that she really ought to get home.
I had no idea where Adrienne might be, called the Konigs and got Barbara on the phone. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.
“Somehow I expected you to call,” she said in a hushed voice.
Sandy stood behind me with her coat on, waiting with a show of restrained impatience. “Did Adrienne come back to your place after we left?” I asked.
“Adrienne?” Barbara said, as if she were trying to place the name. “Did you have a fight?”
“Well,” I said. I was embarrassed in front of Sandy, who was seventeen years old and tended to romanticize us, to explain the occasion of Adrienne’s absence.
“I’m a little confused,” Barbara said. “I thought you were calling about something else.”
“I have to take the sitter home,” I said. “If she shows up there, have her call me, will you? I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
I checked Rebecca’s room — she was there, she was in her bed — covered her and drove Sandy home. I was panicked, drove as quickly as I could within reason, went through what seemed like an endless red light, Sandy babbling about something Rebecca had done, something mildly (unintelligibly) unacceptable.
I found a parking space two blocks from the house, locked the keys in the car in my haste, and hurried back.
I imagined Rebecca waking to find no one home, becoming hysterical, Adrienne returning — the two of them in the living room awaiting me with outrage as I came through the door.
The house was as I had left it, silent and seemingly empty, Rebecca still asleep, Adrienne still unaccounted for. I obsessed about possibilities — mugging, rape, murder, assignation with a lover — then I had a glass of port (does it matter what I drink, is it part of the story?), and went up to bed.
I had a shock when I came into the dark bedroom, a nasty scare. Someone was lying curled up on my side of the bed. I thought — this was the way my thinking went — Sandy had had a boyfriend over and they had made out and he had fallen asleep in my bed. I was about to wake him when I realized it was not a man but a woman, that it was Adrienne and that she had been upstairs all the time. The feelings of relief exhausted me. I took off my shoes, lay down on her side of the bed, and went to sleep.
A
Yuri and I pick Rebecca up from school together and take her, my sweet baby, to Yuri’s mother’s apartment. (For some reason, Sandy, Rebecca’s usual sitter was not available, though I don’t remember why.) I see this visit as another example of not being able to say no to Yuri.
“Is this something you feel we have to do?” I ask him in the taxi on the way over.
“Come on. Adrienne. You suggested the idea.”
“Really, why should I suggest such a thing. Does this seem to you something I would want to do?”
“This is crazy, Adrienne.”
(That you want me to think myself crazy is something unforgivable.)
The therapist, Helena Wimpole, a scatty woman of about sixty- five with short limp white hair that seems conspicuously uncombed (her statement about herself), meets us in the cluttered living room of her East Side apartment. She has a reputation, according to Yuri’s analyst, of being particularly deft with couples. I find her, I must confess, unsympathetic on sight.
I sit down on the blue and orange flower print sofa and Yuri occupies a forties pale green empire chair on the other side of the room.
“I’ve never met with married therapists before,” she says. “I must say I’m a little nervous.”
We both smile on cue, trying to outdo one another at being the good child. I feel a wave of hysteria, then it passes, and I think: I have nothing to to worry about from this woman.