For his part, Yuri suffered die abruptness of her disaffection, misunderstood its nature and sought vainly (I use the word in its double sense) to make amends. He looked for ways to please her, reinvented himself to satisfy what he imagined she wanted. Once the process of her disillusionment reached a certain momentum, however, there was no reversing it. His attempts at accommodation only fueled her disaffection. Every gesture he made, in the light of her angry disappointment, was interpreted against him.
What did Adrienne hope to gain from the course of this behavior? Nothing really. Everything. A more fully developed sense of self. There were no petty self-interested motives or none that she allowed to take hold of her consciousness. Her behavior was governed by compulsion and ambivalence. She wanted to get away from Yuri and she wanted to have him at hand. She wanted never to see him again and to know that she could count on him when she needed him. “What she really wanted was to live out her real destiny (as opposed to the false one as Yuri’s other self), the map of which was buried, she sensed, in embryonic form in her psyche.
So she made Yuri into a version of her first husband, Ralph. It was an exchange of one fantasy for another. Yuri was no longer an enhanced version of the father who left her, but had become instead a combination of her mother and stepfather — the uncaring parent. His imperfections magnified under her glance. Each time she thought herself free of Yuri, she would look at the suffering victim, which is how she experienced him, and feel a tug of affection. The man depended on her — how could she possibly leave him? The process fed on itself. Such feelings of bondage oppressed her, made her want to escape Yuri all the more. She couldn’t nurture indefinitely this man she no longer loved. She had a newly discovered separate life of her own that clearly had to have priority. She felt her situation was unique, though she knew a number of women, a few of whom had been patients, who had suddenly found themselves out of love with husbands they had once adored. She made common cause with them. Their examples gave her courage.
Yuri was unwilling to believe that Adrienne had stopped loving him, perceived her changed behavior as a form of displacement, a passing phase. He hated her for betraying him, but he also wanted to forgive her. If she was appropriately regretful, he was willing to forgive everything. Which is also to say he could forgive nothing. His sole aim was some kind of restitution — the way it was, the way it had always been. What sustained him was the fantasy that he had behaved well in the face of arbitrary cruelty.
They went on this way for a year, Yuri struggling to regain his place, alternately wooing and accusing, Adrienne drawing away from him, reimagining herself as a woman who needed no one but herself. Yuri glimmered in the distance of her imagination like a spectral image. Only his faults had presence for her. He took space in her life and at the same time he was bodiless — virtually invisible to her. And she knew he wanted her back, wanted things as they were, though he took pains to deny it. His wanting her back sustained her in her rejection of him.
They lived together this way in poised disequilibrium, in astate of unarmed warfare, for more than ayear, for almost two years. Their professional lives went on as before. They continued to share the basement office of their westside brownstone for therapy sessions, though complained to friends — it was rare that they talked openly to each other — of the difficulties of such an arrangement. Occasionally, they made appointments to see patients at the same time, a way of unacknowledging the other. The more estranged they became, the harder it was to maintain the arrangement of separate hours.
The new fantasy of their marriage required a new set of gestures. Both were compelled to prove (against the evidence of their feelings) that they were not dependent on the other. Yuri went to London for ten days to a conference on the use of computer technology in psychotherapeutic treatment. He delivered a paper that was well received, had a brief affair with a woman who treated behavioral disorders with massive doses of vitamins, felt more positive about himself. Adrienne had been invited to the same conference but had declined the invitation, saying next time it was her turn. That remark might be seen as evidence that she harbored the illusion that they would go on this way forever.
When Yuri returned from London he sensed that Adrienne was pleased to see him and he made some advances toward her (he thought of it as opening new lines of communication) that got him nowhere. She suffered his absence, though took no pleasure in his return. Her perception (her fantasy) of the man who came back to her was different from her perception of the man she had missed. Things remained as they had been.
Adrienne avoided Yuri except at dinner, usually stayed upstairs when he was down or downstairs when he was up. It was a regimen of denial. Sometimes they met on the stairs to (and from) their office, surprised that the other was still around. In private, they mourned each other’s absence.
Their ten year old daughter Rebecca, an exceptionally bright and sensitive child, took on the role of parent in the face of her mother and father’s abdication of adult responsibility. “Why don’t you spend more time with daddy?” she’d say to Adrienne. “I don’t mind staying with Sandy (her baby sitter) if you guys want to go out together.”
She would say to her father, “The trouble with you, Daddy, is that you give up too easily. Mommy likes you a lot more than you think.”
Yuri and Adrienne heard what they wanted to hear, took justification where none was offered.
It was a problematic situation, the way they lived, particularly for Yuri who was perceived as the rejected one. Friends wondered how he could continue to live in the same house with someone who made him feel unwanted. Yuri took solace in knowing (or believing he knew) that matters at home were not as terrible as outsiders imagined them to be.
For a while, Rebecca had trouble getting to sleep at night, had unadmitted fears concerning abandonment.
Yuri began to see women outside his marriage, rarely staying longer than three months with tlie same one. The affairs had a certain pattern: intense beginnings, flights of passion, followed by disappointment and withdrawal. Nothing sustained itself, which troubled Yuri, his feelings rarely the same from day to day, love visiting briefly like mail sent to the wrong address. He perceived himself as still married to Adrienne, as permanendy married to her. A vulnerability he could not remember having known before kept him constant company.
His longest involvement during this period was with a former patient (a stand-in in his fantasy for the Adrienne of fifteen years back), an erotic commitment that held Yuri almost as intensely as his collapsing marriage. He had lost the Adrienne-who-was-no-longer-Adrienne and taken in her place the more-real-than-real-Adrienne.
Adrienne wanted no one for a while, wanted only her own company after her love affair with a former patient ended. She could not forgive Yuri for letting her treat him as badly as she had. She could not go back to what had been. That much was relatively clear. That more had come to her meant that more was still to come. She expected her lover to return to her, not literally perhaps (she had mosdy given up that false hope), but what she had with him (the fantasy of), the flowering of some deeper, more creative self she expected would return. While she waited for the new life that awaited her, she tested her attractiveness in a few relationships with other men, men who were safe, who didn’t matter, passionless dances. It was a period of restoration for her.