She closes her eyes. “Uh huh,” she says to herself, acknowledging some private revelation. “Uh huh. Uh huh. My sister was in a marriage like yours for years and it drove her what I call bananas. She was always halfway bananas, but that’s my sister Hortense for you. No two situations are exactly the same. My sister Hortense is not the best example. She died of a kidney infection before she ever found the time to get divorced. I think the world would have come to a halt before Hortense ever got around to filing the necessary papers.” She opens her eyes and seems surprised to find us in the room with her. “You have a child, is that right? You have a child of twelve if I remember, which is a problematic age.”
“She’s ten actually,” I say, mumbling apologetically as if her failure to be twelve were my fault.
“Her name is Rebecca,” Yuri says, seems to say. (I don’t seem able to pick up what he says.)
“I didn’t hear that,” Dr. Wimpole says. “I have some hearing loss in my left ear. It’s something that happened when I was a girl. I was the most reckless and impetuous little girl. It surprises me I ever grew up.”
“Her name is Rebecca,” we both say, almost in one voice.
“How is this child, Rebecca, getting along?” Dr. Wimpole asks Yuri.
“She’sverylovely,” I say. “Is that something one shouldn’t say about one’s own child.” I listen to myself laugh.
“Children know so much of what’s going on even if you’re very careful in front of them,” Dr. Wimpolesays in her scatty way. “I could tell you some stories about my niece Bernadette, but I don’t think we have time for that today.”
“Rebecca has bad dreams,” Yuri says. “She has trouble sleeping through the night.”
“Yuri tends to exaggerate,” I say, shaking my head at him. “It’s happened at most three times in the past several months.”
“It’s more like three times a week,” Yuri says. “Adrienne doesn’t want to believe her behavior has any impact on her child’s life.”
“Come off it,” I say. “And how would you know how often Rebecca wakes up at night? You’re always asleep when she comes in our room. I’m the one who has to deal with it.”
“Last Wednesday,” Yuri says, “when Rebecca woke from a bad dream I stayed with her in her room until it was morning.”
“Big deal,” I say.
“You both want to get credit for what you’ve been doing,” Dr. Wimpole says. “You feel, both of you people, that you don’t get enough credit from the other. Yes?”
I am readily credulous. Even banalities tend to surprise me with their disguised old news. “Is that really true?” I ask Yuri, who has his hands clasped in his lap and is staring morosely at the ceiling.
Yuri takes refuge in looking the other way. He can’t admit he wants anything from me, which is sad. (Is it not?) I see him for the moment with absolute clarity. Dr. Wimpole is leaning forward, head tilted, listening with her good ear to the unspoken.
Y
Adrienne was looking into the office, was self-absorbed, when I came up behind her. When I touched her shoulder to let her know I was there she let out a gasp. “Where did you come from?” she cried. She had her hand on her heart as if reciting The Pledge of Allegiance. A vein stood out on her forehead. She squeezed by me in the doorway, some contact between us unavoidable. Her elbow thumped my chest. I had a hard-on, which grazed her hip. She had a faint, knowing smile on her face, a child’s leer.
I forced her against me for a second or so, then let her go. “I have a patient coming any minute,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. She moved up the stairs with a kind of insect intensity. I watched her go away. A moment later, she called to me from the top of the steps. “Yuri, if you want to phone Dr. Wimpole, it’s all right with me.
I was all over the place, walked back and forth, stared at myself in the full length office mirror. An imposter stared back at me. My clothes hung on me. My face looked raw-edged and incomplete as if it had been torn from its mold. Fucking Adrienne, I felt, was the only thing that could heal me.
When my patient arrived, I was all right, felt magically in control. He was boy of twelve named Alex, a wise child, who had come to me with irrational fears of abandonment. I had been seeing him now for four months and we had made some small progress. He had agreed to sleep over a friend’s house the past weekend and he was coming today to report to me about the experience.
It is dangerous for a therapist to be dependent for satisfaction on his patients’ breakthroughs.
Alex had cancelled the sleepover, was aggrieved with himself. We reviewed the events immediately preceding his change of heart. His mother had visited him in his room, had urged him to go to the party in a way that fueled his anxiety. They had a fight about something and she left his room, saying she was very unhappy with him. He lay in bed for a while, masturbating. When he heard her coming upstairs, he buried himself in his covers. She said he better get ready if he was going to the party and he shouted back that he wasn’t going. Until he announced he wasn’t going, he hadn’t actually decided. She asked him if he was afraid to go and he said yes and she sat down next to him like someone in a sickroom — Alex’s image — and hugged him.
I saw an insight flash across his face. When I asked him what it was, he shook his head in denial.
It was after the session was over, when he had already gotten up from his chair, that he said, “She was afraid of my leaving her.”
I nodded. We shook hands. I felt hopeful at that moment for both of us.
This was the next day. After clinic, I went for a drink with Peter, listened to his confession, shared complaints about our wives, went back with him to his apartment. He didn’t want to be alone with Barbara and I didn’t want to go home to Adrienne.
I sat between them on the sofa, drinking champagne, fussed over and admired. At some point, Barbara invited me to stay for dinner. I said — it was an automatic response — that I had to call home to see if Adrienne had anything special planned.
“Don’t call,” Peter said.
I dialed my number, got a busy signal, returned to my place between them on the couch.
“I take full responsibility for your not calling home,” Peter said. “Let her worry about you.”
“That’s stupid, Peter,” Barbara said. There was a knife edge of anger in her voice. “If Yuri feels he has to call, it’s not your business to object. He’s the kind of man who doesn’t want his family to worry about him.”
“That’s an ignorant remark,” Peter said. “The man has got to show his wife he’s unpredictable.”
I got Rebecca on the phone. We talked for a few minutes, made small talk as if I hadn’t seen her for weeks. “Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get to sleep,” she said.
“I know, honey,” I said. “I was there. What are you and Mom doing about dinner?”
Momentarily, Adrienne was at my ear. “Hi,” she said.
“Adrienne, I’m at Peter and Barbara’s,” I said
“Are you?” she said. “How nice.”
“They’ve asked me to stay for dinner,” I said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Why should I mind?” she said in her extraterrestrial voice. “Really. Why should you think I would mind?”
“Well, I just wanted to let you know where I am.”
“And you have,” she said. “We’ll see you later, I suppose.” She hung up.
“He was wrong, wasn’t he?” Barbara said when I returned to my place between them on the couch.