Last week, after clinic, I went to die Moondance Diner for coffee. I sat at a table, which has an oblique view of C’s loft building. Two women emerged and about five minutes later C appeared, wearing hat and dark glasses. The women came out of die building at the same time (it could have been coincidence) and went off in opposite directions. One might have been widi C. My intuition was diat he had been with both. That seemed less awful somehow. I watched him walk to his car, completely absorbed in himself. He looked sad. Post-coital triste? I was sad for him. I felt no jealousy, felt released from jealousy.
Y
“Face it, Yuri,” Barbara said. “Adrienne is not going to go back to you.” We were in her apartment, drinking espresso as black as ashes.
“How do you know this?” I asked, the question violating die implicit rules of our foursome.
Her face was flushed and she was looking away. “When Peter first moved out,” she said, “what I missed most was die physical contact. I felt kind of unloveable. I was telling that to Adrienne, who was very supportive. She’s a good listener. She really is. Then she said radier casually, ‘Why don’t you have an affair with Yuri?’ I was shocked, you know, when she said it. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you and couldn’t.”
I had no reaction, shook my head, wanted not to believe her. She moved an infinitesimal distance away. “I felt a little guilty, Yuri, as if she had caught me doing something wrong. To be frank, after you kissed me that time at the party, I had thought of it too. I felt kind of angry about it the next day. I was kind of crazed about it really.”
I was thinking out loud, pursuing comprehension. “It’s possible she was trying to find out if there was something between us,” I said. “It may have been a way of keeping us from having an affair. Or maybe she felt she could trust me to you. According to Freud, every gesture has an almost infinite burden of meanings.”
“Is she really that subtle?” Barbara asked. Our thighs were touching, and I sensed that if we were to start an affair, if it were ever going to happen, this was its moment. I had to leave, had a patient to see.
We kissed at the door several times, Barbara keeping her hands behind her back. “I’ll have fantasies about you when you’re gone,” she said.
A
The first day I nursed coffee for over two hours. Today I had herb tea and a crumbly blueberry muffin. I was various in my behavior. A surprising person. My sketchbook was with me. I never saw C leave the building. I stayed too long, waiting for nothing. I just couldn’t pull myself away. (You didn’t ask where I was. I let you think what you wanted to think.)
I wrote another letter to C, the second since our break up (or is it break down?). Yuri would have said (had you known about the letters) that they were letters to myself given the displacement of a contrived occasion. I deny that of course. I was writing to a man who had loved me. If he is incapable of love (I believe and I don’t believe), it is a choice C lets himself make, a kind of cowardice.
By the time I got the letter down on paper, I knew it by heart. As soon as I folded the letter and put it in an envelope, I could barely remember a complete sentence. I wanted the letter as it was. I wanted the letter as it had been before it was a letter.
I had it photocopied (one for me and one for him) and I put the original in the addressed envelope. I carried it around in my purse for what must have been more than a week before thrusting it in the mailbox one windy Sunday morning. On two more occasions I went back to the diner. I felt at home there. The waitresses nodded to me when I came in. The one time I spotted C, he left the building in a hurry and hailed a cab. This was before I had mailed the letter. I felt lonely at being excluded from his plans.
R
There I was going down those same stairs and the same humungous bug was there waiting for me to come along. I was going to ask my mom a question when I nearly stomped on the ugly bug. I could hear my mom’s voice. She was either on the phone or with a patient. B was on a different step this time. My mom was saying, “Don’t expect too much from me.” I pushed B with my shoe, then ran up the stairs, and escaped to my room. I hated that bug. I said this to my daddy: “Daddy, we have to call the exterminator. This house is crawling with bugs.” “Is it?” he said.
Y
Melinda, who I hadn’t heard from in months, was waiting for me in the anteroom of the clinic. She followed me into my office without invitation.
“How have you been?” I asked. She looked worn.
“I don’t know if you want to see me,” she said shyly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.”
“I have a patient waiting,” I said. “Could I meet you somewhere after three o’clock?”
“I just want to say that I’m all right,” she said. “I’m doing all right.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
She laughed. “Well, I was talking about you in therapy and I thought it would be nice to see you again. And there you are, looking as you always look.”
She was dressed all in black, tight black skirt, loose black sweater. She looked frail and sad. My attraction to her was beyond any knowledge I was prepared to share with myself. “You look very sexy,” I said.
She turned her back to me and removed her raincoat, which had been open, then she unhooked her skirt and let it drop to the floor. Then crossing her arms, she lifted her sweater over her head.
Her breasts were like half-moons when she turned to face me. I kissed her open-mouthed, her fishy tongue sliding down my throat.
“There isn’t time for this,” I said.
She gave me a skeptical look, began in mock slow motion to get back into her sweater.
Melinda lay down on the flower-patterned linoleum floor, raised her knees. I thought of locking the door, though didn’t, let the thought suffice. I was estimating how much extra time I might give my neglected patient, a timid Korean woman named Dulcie, who had been waiting for me in the other room.
“I’ve entered the Clinical Psychology Program at NYU,” she whispered in my ear.
It was my obsession to share her obsession. “That’s terrific,” I said.
The sex went on longer than I had anticipated, extended itself. I imagined, as I was making love to Melinda, passive Dulcie sticking her head in the door to ask if I was ready for her.
Was this the nature of middle-aged passion? As I fucked a former patient, I was distractedly concerned with the aetiology of the one waiting to see me.
Oh Dulcie, I don’t want your therapist to disillusion you, to make you doubt your own sense of appropriateness!
And then, as if conjured by my anxiety, there was a tap on the door just loud enough to assert its reality.
I didn’t stop what I was doing, but said, barely turning my head, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Dulcie.”
The tapping repeated itself, became more assertive. “This is like a dream I had,” Melinda said.
I shouted in outrage to whoever was there — I no longer believed it was Dulcie — ” I have a patient in here with me.”
The wrong remark was, as always, the truth undisguised. When we broke connection it was like waking from a week’s sleep.
“You never call me,” she said, aggrieved.
“You asked me not to call you,” I reminded her.
She was in a sulky mood as she put on her skirt, her head turned away. “You wouldn’t have called anyway.”
“I’ll call you and we’ll get together,” I said. I stroked her hair.
She turned apout in my direction, her eyes so unutterably sad they moved me to concern. “I don’t want to hear from you,” she said. “I thought I could handle it, but obviously I cant.