“Shhhh,” Wimpole says. She puts her finger across her lips and holds it there.
I close my eyes, try to listen to my feelings, but hear only static. “I feel that I don’t want to give myself to Yuri ever again,” I hear myself saying. “I’m willing to fix his meals, but I don’t want to give anything of myself to him. I don’t want to be touched by him ever again.” It is as if there is a loudspeaker right behind my head that reproduces these words. Yuri lets out a groan from his side of the room and I don’t dare to look at him. I feel in my jacket pocket for a kleenex and find some ancient wadded piece which I use to blot my eyes. “I feel I’m terrible,” I say.
Wimpole gives me this motherly smile. “That’s clear,” she says in her no nonsense manner. “You don’t want to have any intimacy with this man.”
I nod, though I sense she is representing me in some willfully dense way. (Is she making fun of me? Mocking me?) I am aware of how I look to the others, how ugly, eyes red, eyeliner running. Yuri hands me a box of kleenex and I blow my nose. I hold the box on my lap like a child. “He really has no idea of who I am,” I say. “He thinks of me as some virgin…version of himself.”
“That’s bullshit,” he shouts, which makes me laugh through my tears. “I know you as well as I know myself.”
“I’m never going back to you,” I shout at him.
His face cracks down the middle. “I can survive without you,” he mutters.
“Wait just a minute here,” Wimpole says. “Yuri, do you or do you not want this woman back. I thought that was a fact we had on the table.”
He sighs, this Yuri. “I don’t want her this way,” he says. “This isn’t the woman I want.”
“This is the way I am,” I throw back at him. “If you can’t accept that, I don’t want you around.”
“What I see,” Wimpole says, “is a very angry woman. What is it, Arianne? What has this man done to make you so angry?”
“Adrienne’s this angry lady,” I say. “It’s Adrienne, okay? not Arianne. I’m angry at Yuri because he doesn’t really care what I do. I feel I’ve been deceived by him.”
“You feel Yuri deceives you,” she says, looking about for a figurative table to place this “fact” on. “Let me get this straight. Yuri deceives you by pretending to care for you when, in fact, he really doesn’t.”
“I don’t think I made myself clear,” I say.
“You’re clear, Adrienne,” she says. “You’re a well spoken person, which is something I admire. If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to make a statement of intent. The reason I spend my afternoons doing this, working with people like you people, is that marriage is too important, in my opinion, to leave, when in crisis, solely to the principals involved. When you marry someone, you are electing to spend the rest of your life with that person. That can be difficult. When things go haywire, you just want to run away from it as fast and as far as you can go.” She seems to have lost her train of thought, makes a gesture to no point. “I’m here, people, to help you find your way back to where you were in the happy times.”
I notice from the digital clock on the bookcase behind Yuri’s head that there are four minutes left to our session. (What a disaster it’s been.) Wimpole is asking me something. I force myself to pay attention.
“Arianne, let’s forget about this man, Yuri,” she is saying. “Let’s put old Yuri in the closet.” She mimes locking someone in the closet, which makes me smile. “Now Arianne…Adrienne, if you were getting together with another man, what would you want from this relationship?”
There is just a minute left to our fifty minute session, I note with some relief. “I really haven’t given it a lot of thought,” I say. “All I feel clear about is what I don’t want. I don’t want what I’ve had. Yuri refuses to accept that as a fact that’s on the table.”
“Yuri’s in the closet,” Wimpole says. “Adrienne, what do you want from this new man?”
I want to tell her that our time, which she may not have noticed, has run out. I envision another distraught couple in the waiting room, waiting to put their marriage on Wimpole’s imaginary table. “What do I want?” I ask rhetorically, conscious of stalling. “First of all, I want to be treated as an equal.” I indicate with a shrug that that is all I can think of under the pressure of the moment. “Yes, and I want to be treated with appropriate respect.”
“I see, yes,” Wimpole says, retrieving her glasses from the table, holding them in front of her eyes. She studies my face. “Is that what you want most from a man, Adrienne, respect?”
“I want him to be generous with money.” I laugh. (It is meant as a joke.) “I want someone who’s kind. Kindness is a high priority.” Wimpole nods. “I want to be loved of course. I think that goes, doesn’t it, without….” My voice breaks. Tears leak from my eyes. I am trembling. I have the sense I am so awful that no one could possibly love me. No one at all. These feelings anger me.
“Are you aware, Adrienne, that Yuri said something to you?” she asks me.
(What?) If I had strength in my legs, I would get up from the couch and leave the room. “I want kindness,” I hear myself say. (I have no idea what’s going on.) Yuri says something, which makes no sense. “Are you taking back what you just said?” Wimpole asks him. “That was a minute ago,” he says. “My feelings have changed. If she wanted to hear what I said, she would have heard it.” “What don’t I want to hear,” I say. I am still sobbing. “You’re a narcissist, Adrienne,” he says. “Your emotional age is sixteen years old going on nine. You’ve treated me in the last year like some derelict relative who’s overstayed his welcome. You’re a pain in the ass.” “Why do you stay with me?” I say under my breath. “If I’m so terrible, why don’t you just leave.” He turns his face away. “I said I loved you,” he says as though he were reading someone else’s line. He won’t look at me. Not enough, I tell myself. He is unable to say it with real feeling. I get up from the couch (though don’t remember getting up), go over to where he sits with his eyes averted. I squeeze his hand. He looks startled. “I love you too,” I hear myself say, meaning it and not meaning it. He pulls me roughly on to his lap and strokes my hair. My name is whispered to me. I rub my wet face against his. When I stop crying, I return to my place on the couch. I am out of focus. “This is probably as good a place to stop as any,” Wimpole says in her bemused way. I go into the bathroom to wash my face. I go to the bathroom to get away from the others and study my face in the mirror. Yuri and Wimpole are buzzing about something outside my closed door. There is laughter. Who is laughing? (Are you amusing her, Yuri?) As I return to the living room, I witness Yuri passing a check to her. She takes it with embarrassed cknowledgement as though it were a bribe. Yuri holds my coat for me. When we step out into the hall and close the door (it is a relief that Wimpole does not come home with us), he puts his arm around my waist. He pulls me to him. I feel affection for this man, though I don’t know why. I let him kiss me. “I don’t know what happened in there,” I say. “Don’t make too much of it. All right?” He walks off ahead of me without a word and presses the elevator button. As we get out of the elevator, he says, “I won’t make anything of it.” What a funny old lady! I want to say to him. Nothing that happened in that room can be taken seriously. Can it? I want to ask him. As if he has the answer. Therapy, it strikes me, is full of charged moments of deception.
Y
I ask Adrienne what time it is.
“Around twelve thirty,” she says. The wall clock in the kitchen shows twenty minutes after one. Adrienne takes off her coat, seems not to know what to do with it.