They went on like this for longer than anyone who knew them imagined possible. Observers tended to think that it was Yuri’s tenacity that kept them together, his refusal to let go. He had decided apparently to refuse defeat, to outwait Adrienne’s disaffection. Tenacity had gotten him everything he wanted so far and his faith in his own persuasive powers was outsized. Perhaps he loved Adrienne so much he was willing to put up with anything to keep her. Perhaps it was a mix of dependence and love, a confusion of the two. Adrienne appeared to assume, had said as much in confidence to several friends that Yuri couldn’t manage without her. Such statements are readily decoded. The person who thinks himself (herself) the object of dependency tends also to be dependent.
When Yuri was much younger — it was just after he had completed medical school and gone into the service — he fell in love with a southern woman, someone he met in Charlottesville when on leave from the Air Force. The woman, a former child actress, swore that she would wait for him, though she ultimately married someone else. When he was released from the Air Force, Yuri rented a house across the bay from where the woman, no longer performing, lived with her husband and child. He fantasized that once she saw him again she would remember that she had loved him. A year after this period of vigil, Yuri went into analysis and decided to become an analyst himself.
They were in a deadlock, Yuri waiting for Adrienne to return to him, Adrienne acting as if he weren’t there, for two years, almost three.
Just when their estranged life together seemed to have achieved a certain stability, Yuri told Adrienne that he wanted a divorce. The news, it appears (which is not surprising), surprised her. For the first time in years, she was not in control of the situation. She may even have suffered feelings of rejection, her prerogatives denied her. Still, a divorce was what she imagined herself wanting, what she had been moving (in place) toward, and she agreed in principle with his decision.
So Yuri left Adrienne, sublet the apartment of a friend, also a therapist, which was initially a relief to both of them. They talked on the phone almost every day, exchanged anecdotes (reconstituted former intimacy), made arrangements for passing Rebecca between them.
Now that we’re separated, Adrienne said, I feel close to you again. I feel that we can be real friends. She told Yuri about a man she had been seeing, described some of the problems of the relationship.
I really don’t want to talk to you, Yuri said. I don’t want you to call me any more.
Adrienne felt justified at having broken with him (Yuri was graceless and unreliable), t Jiough she also suffered feelings of deprivation. It was as if something that was rightfully hers was being denied her. The next time she called it was concerning the roof of the house that needed, according to the roofer she had consulted, extensive repair. Was the roofer trustworthy? Yuri asked. Adrienne took offense at the question, said she was every bit as competent in dealing with such matters as he was. Yuri didn’t argue the issue — his principal concern was to get off the phone — said to go ahead and have the job done if it needs to be done.
Don’t you think I should get a few other estimates? asked Adrienne. It’s really a lot of money.
Then get some other estimates, said Yuri.
I really don’t think we’re going to find anyone cheaper than Mr. Pustulli, said Adrienne.
Then use Pustulli, said Yuri. I don’t have any problem with that.
I just want to make sure it’s all right with you, she said, before I go ahead with it. What have you been doing?
Yuri said he couldn’t talk, was on his way out.
She too was busy, she said. She had a new patient coming in a few minutes.
Adrienne was disappointed that they couldn’t be friends, had difficulty sympathizing with Yuri’s apparent bitterness. It had been her fantasy that they would be better friends than ever once they were separated. As she saw it, Yuri’s need to avoid her was his problem, something he would eventually work through. For her part, she continued to think a friendship between them was not impossible.
Their lives went on much as before except that they no longer shared the same house or, after Yuri found another space, the same therapy office in the same house. Giving up the shared therapy space was a significant step in their coming apart. Yuri, as mentioned, went through a period of intense sexual activity, wanting both contact and distance, an intimacy that made no demands. He tended to be dour during this period, to seem to be in mourning, to lose weight. He looked as if sleep had become as much a stranger as Adrienne. He wanted, he told his therapist, to fuck himself into unconsciousness.
Adrienne moved in the other direction, became increasingly private, rarely went out in the evenings, worked on her drawings, devoted herself to her daughter. Her health seemed fragile — symptoms of illness plagued her — though nothing specific was determined. She went into the hospital for three days to take a battery of tests. Apart from occasional depression and her anxieties about illness, she felt an ease to her post-married life she couldn’t remember having known before. She asked Yuri to drive her to the hospital and, though he grumbled about it, acted as if he were put upon, he did. He also took her back when the tests were completed, insisted on the prerogative, and Adrienne was touched by what she took to be his concern. They held on by reestablishing in their post-marriage some of the ambience of their pre-marriage.
Once she separated from Yuri, Adrienne’s obsession with the lover who had rejected her disappeared. For a long time she had ached to see him, had felt his loss like an unhealed wound from childhood. One morning, exactly a week after Yuri’s departure, it was gone and she was free of that particular ache, that particular knowledge of loss forever.
Yuri’s anger with Adrienne persisted. Whenever he thought of her he dredged up some horror scene from the last years of their marriage. This was a period in which he fell in and out of love almost as often as the weather changed. He thought he wanted to live with a woman again, perhaps with Helena Paar, whom he had just discovered, but he was wary of rushing into anything long term, distrusted his feelings which showed themselves to be untrustworthy. His life was frantic, he seemed to believe, overburdened with commitments. There was little ease, not enough love. He wanted some kind of sexual contact with every attractive woman who crossed his path and risked, on more than one occasion, making a fool of himself. And sometimes all he wanted to do was suck breasts or cunts or be sucked on himself. He couldn’t get enough and yet when he had it, had had it, was having it, he longed to escape the demands of pleasure. The life he envisioned for himself was one where commitment to work took priority over everything else. He wanted, while behaving as a child, to think of himself as a serious man.
One day, his friend Barbara, whom he visited Tuesday nights, told Yuri that her husband had asked if he could come back. Her husband Peter had talked about their having another child, something he had adamantly opposed for years. She wanted Yuri’s advise, she said, was in need of some wisdom.
You’ve already decided to take him back, Yuri said, playing the part she had assigned him.
Barbara denied it with some vehemence, though she acknowledged later in the discussion that it was the best offer she had had, meaning apparendy diat she had none from Yuri. They put their arms around each other then selfconsciously drew back. It embarrassed Yuri that he had once slept with his friend Peters estranged wife. Such behavior was at odds with the idea he had of himself as a moral man. Barbara asked if he would remain her friend and, without irony or without the appearance of irony, Yuri asserted that he couldn’t imagine it otherwise.