I was twelve or thirteen and my step-father had gotten furious at me for being “sassy” to him. (He meant “sexy,” though he didn’t know that was what he meant.) “You’re not too old, young lady, to take over my knee,” he said. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door, or thought I had it locked, recalled my fingers turning the latch. For whatever reason, the door didn’t lock (you would say, Yuri, that I had meant it not to), though I didn’t realize that until later when Spencer forced his way in.
I stood in the bathtub, the shower curtain wrapped around me like a second skin. “Open the door, you,” he said. My hands were sweating and I blotted them against my breasts. I had the illusion that I was bleeding, that my period had started (I had only recendy turned that corner) before it was due. “Go away,” I whispered into the curtain. Though I assumed the door was locked, I felt vulnerable to him.
He kept knocking and knocking (beating on the door with his fist) and then as if he had worn it out, the door came open. I knew I was in for it then. He didn’t come in right away, which heightened the terror I was feeling. (Where was my mother when this was happening, why was she letting it happen?)
“When you hide in the bathroom, darlin,” he said with a harsh laugh, “you’ll have to remember to lock the old door.”
“Go to hell,” I muttered. (It might have been something worse.)
“What did you say?” he asked in a bullying voice. “What was that, darlin?”
I repeated it for him, mumbled the offensive words, wrapped in my plastic sheath, the bleeding (I felt) a disfiguring punishment for my badness. “Fuck off, you bastard.” I don’t really know what I said or what he imagined he heard. Whatever, it provoked him to enter. Gave him the excuse he was looking for all along.
He did this strange thing next: he latched the door behind him. He stood there silently (I imagined him a step away from the tub), his disfigured silhouette looming over me. His breathing was like the sound of a furnace just turning on. It came in rushes. I shut my eyes. He stayed there without doing anything for what seemed like a long time.
I anticipated that at any moment he would rip the shower curtain from me. And do what? He would do something so awful (I couldn’t imagine what it would be) that I would never be able to forgive him.
And yet I was fully clothed. I was wearing a yellow sundress, which I thought of as babyish for my age. I was reluctant to cry out. I was talking to myself under my breath, “I promise I’ll be good if you go away,” but not saying it so he could hear it, not willing to give him die least satisfaction. I didn’t know about ambivalence then. I was conscious of wishing him away. Some part of me must have believed that I deserved whatever punishment Spencer was there to give out. I was a sassy girl, after all. I had sexual feelings. I had a reputation for being wild. His breathing seemed like a kind of communication. Why couldn’t he catch his breath, what was he asking of me in this wordless voice? I knew even then, though it was not conscious knowledge, that the breathing was a kind of love message. Spencer never expressed feelings directly, not feelings of affection or tenderness. The words he might have spoken had fragmented into broken sounds, the machinery of wheeze and death and hate (and love too, I believe) and a passion for connection he surely didn’t want to face.
My eyes opened. They had been closed for what seemed like an hour, delusory protection against being discovered. That he hadn’t moved for a long time, that he seemed to be affixed to whatever spot he had taken as his own, was no assurance that he wouldn’t come at me when he was good and ready. I never stopped hoping that he would leave, that he would decide I had been punished enough. I dug my nails into my arm. My breathing seemed to increase in volume (we made a kind of music together) while I wanted nothing more than to disappear into mute repentance.
He came at me, attacked me. He tore the curtain away, tore at it with both hands, the plastic tearing, curtain rings clattering into the tub. I felt it was me and not the curtain that was being torn and dismantled. It was a surprise to discover afterward that I was essentially unharmed. A purple bruise on my arm was all I took away from his assault. I do remember him slapping me across the face, though that may have been another time. And then he exposed himself (I’ve not mentioned this to you) and sidled out. When it was over, when he left me, I promised myself that I would never forgive him. (You are saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s too late for that.) I can forgive him now.
Twelve
Separate Hours: A Case Study
Adrienne and Yuri Tipton, both psychotherapists with analytic training, had been married for twelve years when their relationship began to go sour. They are both psychotherapists, though of different theoretical persuasion — Adrienne a Laingian and Yuri an eclectic Freudian. In practice, the distinction was not as exceptional as it seemed in theory. According to the available evidence (eg. interviews with former and current patients), their therapeutic methods were virtually mirror images of one another. If their techniques were similar, they nevertheless had different, really opposing personal styles. Yuri’s performance with patients was nearer (this an aspect of trying to become what he is not) to Adrienne’s theories than to his own. He was, in fact, a more intuitive one to one therapist than Adrienne, who was herself so intuitive in her day to day life she felt the necessity of methodological constraints in her practice. Consequendy, her performance as therapist was considerably more conservative, more predetermined so to speak, than her idea of the therapist’s ideal role. Adrienne and Yuri had discussed their positions so often, each taking the most uncompromising stance for the sake of argument, that it had made possible unacknowledged accommodation to the other’s position.
Adrienne had believed for a long time, not a duration readily circumscribed, that Yuri was better at what they both did than she. She admired him, though kept from him the secret of her admiration. All marriages rely to a greater or lesser extent on the fantasy each partner has created of the other. In rare circumstances, die reality and the fantasy come together like shadows of one another. The lover never sees clearly; the light is always in his eyes. Adrienne envied Yuri’s apparent ease of performance, his persistent sense of sureness even in areas of marked ambiguity. So she appropriated him, took on his presumed qualities like a second skin. But die Yuri she appropriated was an imaginary figure, a fantasy figure wiser and more potent than the original. If Adrienne felt herself on safe ground by appropriating her fantasy of Yuri (she wanted only to be perfect), she also resented the obligation such mimicry implied. There was small satisfaction in being her husband’s lesser self, particularly when she sensed (their competitiveness was clearly a factor) that she was ready to out-distance him.
As her dissatisfaction grew, she became aware that she was connected to Yuri to an intolerable degree. It was as if she had no edges, no beginning or end. It was only natural diat she pull away, and so she gradually revised her fantasy of Yuri. In the new light she brought to bear, Yuri had more failings than she could, while honoring herself, readily tolerate. Disappointment was everywhere. The way to save herself was to fall in love elsewhere.
This is all surmise, a persuasive conjecture based on incomplete evidence.
As Adrienne moved away from him, Yuri felt compelled to move closer to keep things as they were. He pursued the ghost of Adrienne’s devotion. Such behavior engendered contempt. It became clear to Adrienne that she had subordinated herself to a man who was unworthy of her self-denial. As she saw it, Yuri had pretended to be something he was not, had offered himself to her as perfect. That made her angry. Such deception, which was how she experienced Yuri’s failure to live up to her idealized version of him, was unforgiveable.