“Who was the friend you were having your drink with?” I ask.
“It’s nothing,” she says as if it were one word. “It’s not important.” She puts her coat on the back of a chair. It slides off on to the rug.
“If it wasn’t important, why did you go? And why isn’t Rebecca here?”
“Sandy wasn’t available,” she says. “I couldn’t very well leave her here by herself, now could I? It isn’t anything to concern yourself about, Yuri.” She goes upstairs, hurries up the steps, to the bathroom.
For what happens next, there is only my own self-doubting recollection.
I am in the hallway when Adrienne comes out of the bathroom wearing a loosely tied silk kimono, her breasts exposed. She is carrying a diaphragm in her right hand, balancing it on her palm.
Astonished, in a kind of shock, I lean against the wall to keep from falling.
She is under the covers reading a book on esthetics when I come in, my body like a furnace. “I want you to sleep downstairs,” I say in a mad calm voice.
“I have no problem with that,” she says, closing her book, sliding out of bed, getting into her kimono.
I sit on the bed with my back to her, more rage in my heart than I can bear to know.
“You have no idea what I want,” she says as if it were the harshest thing she might tell me. She takes her undisclosed passion downstairs. The unimaginable follows. I feel punished by her absence.
After pulling off my shoes — I don’t bother to untie them — I lie down fully clothed on top of the comforter. In an instant, I capitulate to exhaustion.
I wake during the night, notice the empty space in the bed next to me, go downstairs, find Adrienne curled awkwardly on the living room couch covered by one of my overcoats. “You can return,” I whisper to her. She doesn’t answer. I carry her up the stairs — she is astonishingly light — and put her to bed like a child.
Eleven
Behavioral Therapy
A
In an undated entry in his journal, Yuri reports an incident (a fight really) that is significandy different from my own sense of things.
We are sleepwalkers in separate dreams.
Y
I walked Barbara home in the rain after lunch. We held hands, walked the streets like teenagers pretending to be lovers.
“I need someone to hold hands with,” she said. “It’s what I miss most about my marriage.”
I had no recollection of Peter and Barbara ever holding hands. I said goodbye to her in the lobby of her apartment building.
She was suddenly coy, said there was something she wanted to tell me, but not now, another time. I pressed her to tell meher secret. “If I told you now,” she said, “you’d have no reason to ever see me again.”
Adrienne, I later learned, was having lunch with Peter while I was having lunch with Barbara.
A
(Peter, your best friend Peter, propositioned me today. It is said when the check arrives face down between us. “I have always wondered what it would be like to do the sack scene with you,” he says loud enough for people at the next table to hear. “What about your girl friend?” I ask him. “I don’t really know if she’s into threesomes,” he says. We laugh together as if it were the funniest thing.)
Y
We shared impressions that evening of our friends’ emotional states. We had begun to talk again in the old manner. What do I mean exactly by the old manner? We tended to discuss our friends’ behavior as if we were a medical team diagnosing some new and interesting pathology. It was a form of intimacy between us.
“Now that they’re apart,” she said, “they’ve taken on aspects of the other’s personality. Have you noticed that?”
I said I hadn’t, not in Barbara’s case at least, though I could believe it was true.
Adrienne said she worried about Barbara, that she thought it was going to be worse for her — much worse — before it got any better.
What are we talking about when we talk about Peter and Barbara?
R
This may have been in my sleep. I was going down to the basement to see my daddy in his office. I was afraid they had gone somewhere without telling me. On the steps, as I was going down, I saw this humungous bug. It wasn’t moving. I touched it with the toe of my shoe to prove it wasn’t dead. It made a sound like a cry and rolled boldly on to its back. It was more like a scraping sound. It scrambled back on to its front. The sound this time was like Darth Vader breathing. I ran up the stairs and closed the door behind me. I wanted to get far away from that bug and I didn’t want it to know where I was going.
A
Yuri mentions a psychoanalytic conference in Zurich he has been invited to attend. I have also been invited. I have also thought of going. In postponing a decision (how difficult such trips seemed), I had forgotten about the invitation.
“You went to the last conference,” I say. “Why don’t you stay home with Rebecca and I’ll go this time.”
His face darkens as if a small bulb under the skin has gone out. “We could both go,” he says. “Rebecca could stay with my mother.”
I tell him he can go alone if it is important to him and I will go the next time. Do I smile? I think in this instance I do. I am thinking, This is not the rejection you are going to make of it, Yuri. This is a gesture to show you that I am not the witch you make me out to be. He says he will think about it but I can see he has no intention of going by himself. The phone interrupts us.
Peter says, “You are setting yourself up to be rejected by Yuri.”
Y
Although we seem to be moving headlong in that direction, I don’t want to get caught up in an affair with Barbara. We did a lot of hand holding during our exchange of confidences. And we embraced for extended moments when we said goodbye. “I think of you as the first line of my support system,” Barbara said. It was the essence of what she said if not the exact words. We had the ambience of a love affair without actually making love.
I had lunch with Peter once a week and I felt, if not disloyal, somewhat compromised by my unacknowledged (unconsumated) intimacy with Barbara. At alternate times, Adrienne broke bread and exchanged confidences with Barbara or Peter, or with other mutual friends, who were separated or contemplating separation. If we had all compared notes, who knows what we might have learned. I saw little of Adrienne, tended to be downstairs when she was up, upstairs when she was down. When we talked it was to replay old conversations. I was going through the early stages of mourning. I was living with someone who, in the context of my emotional life, had recently died.
Peter took my reluctance to leave Adrienne as a personal affront. His overstated outrage had a calming effect on me, let me feel that my life was secretly better than anyone knew. For his own part, Peter professed to be overjoyed with unmarried life, though he didn’t want a divorce from Barbara so he wouldn’t be under pressure to marry Roberta, the twenty-nine year old pop singer he was currently dating. He was also suffering from high blood pressure and had occasional heart palpitations of non-somatic origin.
A
C’s absence feeds on me like a lingering disease. I don’t accept that he prefers Anna Marie. (Is prefer what it is?) I think of myself in the abstract: the nurturing woman who has been sent away.