“I want to see you again,” I said.
She made a gesture with her hands that suggested pushing away. “I better go,”she said. “You have this real patient waiting.”
The waiting room was empty when I let Melinda out, Dulcie apparendy having lost heart. I tried to separate myself from what I imagined Dulcie’s feelings to be — confusion, humiliation, self-loathing — but there was no getting around that I had behaved unacceptably. I paced the small clinic room as if it were a jail cell. Then Dulcie appeared. She had been to the bathroom, she said. She had been knocking to tell me she was going to the bathroom so I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t see her when I opened the door.
A
After my last patient of the day, I lie down on Yuri’s side of the bed and imagine Carroway receiving my letter. I try to envision his reaction as he reads (I was thinking “eats”) my words. My feelings disguised as words.
As I imagine it, he refuses to open the envelope. Refuses to risk himself to the touch of my words. The prospect engenders anxiety. My words die unread.
I keep stealing looks at Yuri’s journal, a new obsession. From yesterday’s entry: “I can think of no greater relief than her absence from my life.” I have the feeling he means me to read it. (True?) The absoluteness of the sentence upsets me. (What is the nature of this absence?) I put the journal back in its drawer without reading further. Later, I consider going back and writing a comment in the margin.
Y
I had a dream in which Barbara was offering me a part in a play she was writing called “Fire Away or Sink”. My performance took place behind the curtain — in shadow — for one of those reaons that seem so compelling in dreams. I called her the next morning — dreams require an answer — from my office at the clinic. “I have the feeling we’ve been avoiding each other,” I said. “I don’t want that to be the case.”
“My life is a disaster, Yuri,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
So I rearranged some appointments at the clinic and went to Barbara’s apartment. We didn’t talk, as I assumed we would, about whether or not we would sleep together.
Barbara’s subject was this: she had had a sexual encounter with a much younger man she had met at the local D’Agostino’s. The man, a blue collar type, had been standing behind her in the checkout line, and they had struck up a conversation concerning a bizarre headline in “The National Enquirer.” A MARTIAN FATHERED MY CHILD/ 14 YEAR OLD VIRGIN REPORTS.
The man was not her type, not someone she would have been interested in had they met through conventional channels. That was its attraction, she said. She was doing something outside the normal pattern of her behavior. He helped her with her groceries; she invited him in; one thing led to another.
“You did nothing wrong,” I said, willing a distance I was unable to feel.
“You know what’s crazy, Yuri”—she took my hand — “I don’t even like him. Yet I’m furious, you know, that he hasn’t called back. That’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Well, you went to bed with him, Barbara, to make yourself feel loveable. By his not calling you, which you feel as a rejection, he’s making you unlovable. You have reason to be pissed at him.”
“This is very kind of you, Yuri.” She squeezed my hand. “You know what? I’m in a really strange mood.” She nodded to herself in corroboration and left the couch, disappearing into die kitchen. “Am I loveable? How about some coffee or a glass of wine?” She broke a glass, taking it down from the shelf, then cut her finger cleaning up. “I’m sorry,” she said. Covering her face with her hands, she began to sob.
Patients cry in my office all the time, but I’ve never been easy with it. I tended to take crying — women’s in particular — as an unanswerable demand. “It’s okay, Barbara,” I said.
The crying, which had almost stopped, exploded again into violent sobs. She slumped into the nearest chair. “No one…no one loves me,” she keened.
The passion of her grief frightened me. I forced myself to sit on the arm of her chair, to put my arm around her. “We all love you,” I said.
She pressed her face into my chest, curled herself into me. “No one,” she said fiercely. “Hold me. Okay? I’ll do the same for you. Mommy.”
I held her as tightly as I could, put both my arms around her, and still I felt I was failing her. “I’m here,” I said.
I made love to Barbara on the floor of the living room, on her green Chinese rug.
When she returned from die bathroom — her make-up erratically restored, her lipstick like a child’s drawing — she looked like a survivor of some disaster. “How can I ever look you in the face again?” she said. Her smile belied the question.
“You were fine,” I said. “You were very brave.”
She hugged me from behind. “You’re being gallant, right? Right?”
I kissed her goodbye on the cheek, said the man from the supermarket had been a fool not to call back.
I was mildly depressed when I returned to the clinic, felt inauthentic, fraudulent.
R
What do we know about the feelings of B? That’s what I was thinking right before I went to sleep. The bug said something to me in my dream. What are you trying to say, B? It was in a language I couldn’t understand. It was not what you would call a human language. I got out of bed in the dark and put a blanket over my shoulders. It dragged under my feet when I walked. I looked into my Mom and Dad’s bedroom. They slept with their backs to each other. Mom lifted her head and said, “Nothing in the world can make me.” I walked downstairs in the dark, shining a flashlight on my feet. The floor was cold.
Y
It was not the inevitable next step, merely an acknowledgment of reality. I went to see a divorce lawyer for advice, a man named Harry Elders, who had been recommended to me as forceful from one of my colleagues at the clinic.
Elders was a youngish man — that is, he looked like a boy who had reached forty without becoming an adult — with a brash energetic manner. He radiated over-compensation. On the barest acquaintance, he announced that he fully understood my situation, that he liked to represent clients with whom he had feelings of identification. He moved between large aggressive claims — ” The woman has no case — we’ll destroy her pretensions”—to advising that no one can tell in advance how divorce matters will be adjudicated. His best advice was to avail myself of a first strike capacity. I told him that I wasn’t ready to act, wanted merely to acquaint myself with my rights. “With due respect, doctor,” he said, “from what you told me, and I’ve seen a number of cases like yours, divorce is the medicine I’d prescribe. The marriage, believe me, is over. Make your move before she makes it for you.”
I said I would get back to him. We shook hands across his desk. His grip was forceful. He was showing me I might become more powerful by hiring him.
“You chose this man to give yourself an excuse not to act,” Peter said over drinks at a new Columbus bar called Manna from Heaven. He was going to Roberta’s place afterward for dinner and I felt — what? — a touch of envy. He seemed more than usually pleased with himself, dominated our conversation.
The streetlights had just come on, though it was not yet dark, and I was aware of being alone, of feeling an ache of loneliness. Although I knew the upper west side well, the streets remained anonymous. Wanting acknowledgment, I stared into strangers’ faces, daring them to look away.