“Look at the man’s face, Babs,” Peter said. “That face has just made contact with a closed door.”
The meal, which featured a roast of some sort, made almost no impression. I ate little, tasted nothing. Peter and Barbara were a model of decorum, a seminar in domestic diplomacy. I was aware of having had too much to drink and not enough to eat. Although barely able to stand up, I announced that it was time for me to go.
Barbara said, “You can stay the night, Yuri. We can find some place to put you.”
“He’s not going to stay,” Peter said. “Don’t waste your breath on him, Babs. The man has got to get home to his family.”
“I appreciate this, my friends,” I said. I was standing at the door with my coat on. I kissed Barbara, hugged Peter. I feel very close to you both.”
Peter and Barbara embraced me from opposite sides, held me between them.
“You mean a lot to us,” Peter said.
“We love you,” said Barbara, hugging me.
The room behind them, the extended hallway, seemed filtered through yellow smoke.
“I am very moved,” I said or thought of saying.
“We want you to know,” Peter said, “that if you need a place to stay, there’s always a bed for you in our house.”
Barbara kissed me on the side of the mouth, said, “If I weren’t married to Peter, you would be the man I would want to be with.”
Tears came to my eyes. “Thank you, friends,” I said. “I love you both.”
Peter leaves with me, Barbara stands in the doorway waving.
Peter and I walk several blocks in various directions, looking for my car. It is the second time in two weeks, both during visits to the Konigs, that it has disappeared.
The house is mostly dark when I let myself in. I am elated at having found my car, at having found a parking place for it, at having arrived home safely, feel oddly — tremulously — triumphant. Rebecca loves me. I look into Rebecca’s room, discover her bed has not been slept in. I look into my own bedroom, find neither wife nor daughter. The emptiness of the house confuses me.
Eventually I discover that Adrienne has left me a note wedged into the kitchen phone like a flower.
Yuri —
I’m having a drink with a friend. Rebecca is sleeping at Olivia’s house. Don’t wait up for me.
I flop down on the couch, turn on the television with the remote, watch sports and weather — I suffer Rebecca’s absence, the empty house — the weather map dissolving into an old movie. I doze, wake, fight off sleep. I see snatches of a black and white movie, a detective story with the ambience of a bad dream. A man is pushed out of a skyscraper window, screams as he falls, his mouth agape like a wound. The detective is questioning a woman — she puts her arms around his neck. I think to warn him that she can’t be trusted. He kisses her. The door behind him opens. Adrienne, looking like she has fallen from a window, comes into the room.
She calls my name, moves to the television to turn it off.
Half-asleep, I rise from the sofa like an apparition. What do you think you’re doing?” I say. “The murder is still unsolved.”
She gasps, says, “God, you scared me half to death.”
A
Dr. Wimpole is wearing her mischievous look. “Have I said something I wasn’t supposed to say,” she says. ‘Tell you the truth, people, I’m not in the least bit sorry.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I look at Yuri, who seems equally befuddled. “I don’t think parenting is an issue where Adrienne and I are at odds,” he says.
“I think Yuri’s been mosdy a good father,” I say.
“I didn’t know you thought I did anything well,” Yuri says.
That’s a sad thing for him to say. “You’re not such a bad father,” I say to him.
“Thank you,” he says with what I take to be irony.
Wimpole has a secret smile on her face. “What do you think of Adrienne as a mother?” she asks Yuri.
He doesn’t answer right away, which is a message in itself. “I never said Adrienne wasn’t a good mother,” he says in a dead voice.
“Why don’t you tell that to her?” Wimpole says.
I want to cry when she says that. I have this image of myself as a child standing in front of a class, getting ready to recite some lesson I failed to prepare. Getting it wrong was unthinkable. It was my role to be perfect.
This scatty woman we have turned ourselves over to asks me what my reaction is to what Yuri has said.
“What did Yuri say? I’m sorry. I didn’t realize he said anything.”
“It may be the case, let me put it to you, that you preferred not to hear him,” Wimpole says. “Could that be possible, Arianne?”
“I think that’s probably true,” I say.
“I said I felt you were a good mother,” he says. He refuses to look at me.
“Did you?” I look over at Wimpole. I assume the issue is concluded. “We don’t always see eye to eye on what’s best for Rebecca,” I hear myself say.
“How did you feel, Arianne, when Yuri said you were a good mother?” Wimpole asks me. “Were you in touch with your feelings?”
I resist her manipulation. “Of course I like to be praised,” I say. “Who doesn’t like to be praised? I would have liked it better if it were less grudging. I felt he was saying it mostly for your benefit.”
“Why for my benefit, of all things?” she says.
“He wants you to like him,” I say. “He wants you to see him as the good person in this marriage.”
Her feathery white hair floats about in all directions when she nods. “Oh I don’t matter,” she says. “Yuri knows that.” She gives a girlish shrug. “If Yuri’s the good person, Arianne, does that make you the bad person? The secretly no-one-knows- how-good-I-am bad person.”
“That’s a bit easy, isn’t it?” I say.
“I have no illusions,” Wimpole says. “There’s nothing under the sun that I can tell you that you don’t already know in spades. Arianne, how would you have responded if you felt your husband’s compliment were genuine?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I say. “By the way, my name is pronounced Adrienne. I don’t anticipate my feelings, Dr. Wimpole. I can only know what they are when I experience them.”
“Arianne, in my opinion as observer,” Wimpole says, “Yuri was being sincere.”
I look over at Yuri who has his usual severe countenance. “Did you mean it?” I ask him.
“I meant it,” he says. He adds my name to the sentence as an afterthought.
I turn away, turn my face away. I feel ashamed. “I don’t know that I really believe him,” I say. “I don’t know that. And even if he meant it, I don’t see that it changes anything.”
Yuri rests his head on his hand.
“It sounds to me as if Arianne…Adrienne is rejecting you,” Wimpole says to him. “How does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know,” he says from behind his hand. “I have trouble believing she means it.”
My voice is like ice against glass. “Yuri tends to ignore what he doesn’t want to hear,” I hear myself saying. “He has a talent for obliviousness.”
“Fuck off,” he says.
“He also tends to be insulting,” I say.
“What I hear,” Wimpole says, “is that you don’t want to give this man anything. And this man may want everything, but he doesn’t know how to ask. Is that accurate? Is that an observation to be put on the table, people?” Her glasses slide down her forehead and she removes them in annoyance.
“She wants to kill me,” Yuri says, “and she wants me to look after her after I’m dead.”