But also of course it was a test, her asking me not to go, the kind of test I could only hope to fail. If I didn’t accede to her wishes, it proved that I didn’t love her. If I did give in, I proved myself easily controlled and so unworthy of her respect.
I arrived at the lounge of the Royalton Hotel, ten minutes late for our appointment, changed my scat three times waiting for Patricia to make her belated appearance. When I saw her come in the door wearing a white blouse and light blue skirt, I remembered having loved her. The feeling was unexpected, almost shocking, given my indifference toward her for the longest time. There was something bridelike in her appearance. She blushed when she sat down across from me in the booth, a compelling illusion. I felt a kind of longing and it struck me that Adrienne had an intuition about what would happen, that she knew me in a way I didn’t know myself. Still, I pursued my errand in a businesslike way, said it made little sense after all this time not to get a divorce. I anticipated resistance and got none. Patricia said — it was as if I had dreamed her remarks — that she saw no point in being tied to a man who was no longer her husband. We were for the first time in years in agreement. She had the signed papers with her and took them out of her purse. I felt relief and a sense of loss, thought how pleased and surprised Adrienne would be. Appreciative of Patricia’s grace, I ordered champagne to celebrate the waning moments of our marriage. We toasted each other’s future, then sat with nothing to say to each other, our business concluded. I was feeling a little sad, holding on to the moment of our last goodbye, when Patricia mentioned that she had taken a room in the hotel that seemed a pity not to use.
I didn’t get home until late. Adrienne, who was in bed reading as it turned out, contrived to ignore my entrance. I sensed that I was in for trouble.
We were living in four small rooms at this point — a floor through in a brownstone — the kitchen as narrow as a finger. I was making myself a drink in the narrow kitchen when Adrienne came up behind me. I wasn’t aware of her until she spoke. “How did it go?” she asked.
I took the signed agreement from the breast pocket of my jacket and passed it to her without turning around.
“That’s unexpected,” she said, then put her arms around me from behind. I tensed self-protectively, ducked my head. She laughed. “You act like a man with a bad conscience.”
I admitted to nothing, took my drink into another room — perhaps left the kitchen without it. Adrienne followed. I yawned, said I thought I’d go to bed, steeled myself against an accusation she refrained from making.
We stayed up the remainder of the night talking about other things, case studies, the marriages of friends, regression, transference, fears of dying. The apparent subject, we were trained to know, was almost never the real subject.
Was it a mistake not to acknowledge that I had slept with Patricia that evening, not in exchange for a divorce, nothing as crude as that, but to pursue the illusion of connection one last time? Adrienne knew of course and I knew she knew. There was that between us.
There are a few more incidents to be covered — fragments of evidence — before I get to the present.
This comes back to me: I was at the airport with Adrienne’s sister Grace, who had come to New York for our wedding and was now returning to her guru in Denver. Her flight was delayed for an hour and we went to the cocktail lounge for a drink. Grace had difficulty deciding what to order and I was struck by that, the similarity between sisters, the use of tentativeness as a form of control.
“I am really glad that you and Adrienne got together,” I remember her saying. She ordered a Bloody Mary, then changed her mind and switched to grapefruit juice. It was something she had said before, the comment about our getting together, something she seemed pleased to repeat.
“We’re unexpectedly alike, Adrienne and I,” I said. “Superficially different yet unexpectedly alike.”
“That’s like the opposite of what I was going to say,” Grace said. “I was thinking really how totally different the two of you are. Adrienne likes things just so. Nothing has ever been good enough for her. Know what I mean?”
I said yes, then no not exactly, wanting to hear how it seemed to Grace.
“I think Adrienne idealizes you,” she said. “Do you mind if I have another juice?”
I ordered a drink for me and a juice for Grace. “Adrienne sees into my every fault,” I said.
Grace shook her head in her solemn way. “That’s not the way she talks about you to me.”
“What does she say about me?”
Grace rebuked my curiosity with a shocked stare. She whispered her answer or rather mouthed the words so I wasn’t sure what I heard. “She thinks you’re wonderful,” she might have said. I had the impression Grace was blushing. It was the only time I’d seen her show embarrassment.
“I didn’t get that,” I said.
Grace seemed amused at my request to repeat her confidence, said she thought I had heard her perfectly well.
“You have a way of confiding and withholding at the same time,” I said. “One has to lean forward to hear you, has to read your lips.”
“But not my heart,” she whispered, offering her words and taking them back. “Look, Yuri, whatever you do, try not to disillusion her. Okay?”
“It’s unavoidable,” I said. I noted that it was time for her to go to the boarding gate.
“That makes me very sad,” she purred as we left the bar, the reference already elusive. “It really does. There must be something you can do to avoid it.”
What I could do, what I did in fact, was to pretend not to understand her.
What is missing from my account is the texture of our life together, the dailiness, the habits of routine, the major and minor pleasures. I think of this memoir as a rational inquiry into the mysterious.
When the passion became domesticated, when it no longer seemed a matter of life and death to make love, we were easier with each other for awhile, more protective and affectionate. I don’t know if that’s true. What is true? The urgency went away but not far, came back like a recurring dream, was always there.
The following fragments are from a journal I’ve kept on and off over the years. It’s in my handwriting so that I know that it’s mine but I don’t remember having written it.
When Rebecca feeds at Adrienne’s breast alongside me in bed, I am jealous of them both. They exclude me and it is painful to be left out…. Adrienne lets me taste her milk. She cups my head from behind as I drink. The birth of the child has made her motherly to almost everyone. Do her patients notice the difference? In the office we share I can smell the aura of her milk…. We argue over who will take Rebecca to her first day of school. No serious argument. We take her together, one on each side, our hands connecting us. At school, Adrienne can’t bear to separate, has to steal herself to leave. I am there to tear her loose. Rebecca herself is more matter of fact, lets her parents carry the brunt of her anxiety at separation…. I never thought I would say this to myself — much of my childhood spent resisting the urge to cry — I am a happy man, a happy happy man.
Every day, excluding Sunday, for much of every day, I talked to people who were in some kind of pain, their lives deformed, their senses of self incompletely or negligibly defined. Professionalism aside, I would have had to be absolutely heartless not to carry some of it away, I imagine it was the same for Adrienne, though it was a subject — one of many — we tended to avoid. I was made continually aware of how fragile human transactions are, how dangerous intimacy can be, how one never fully escapes the configurative relationships of childhood. Self-destructive patterns asserted themselves after years of apparent remission. Long term relationships went abruptly bad at some predictable point as if fulfilling an inexorable destiny. Sex staled. Affection dissipated. Couples turned one another through a kind of compulsive alchemy into false unloving parents.