You could have let me know, I say.
Oh Yuri! You knew I was awake.
I’m not going to deal with that, I say. The last thing I want is to have a fight with you now.
The last thing I want, sweetheart, is to have a fight with you, Yuri says.
Oh, Yuri, I say, putting my arms around him, kicking him playfully, you never want to fight.
On the trip back, I tell Yuri a story that I think will amuse him. I have a new patient, a woman about my own age, who is fixed on me in this strange way. Last week when she missed a period, the woman accused me of being responsible for her pregnancy. — Do you think it’s some kind of transference? I ask him. In no other way does this woman seem psychotic.
She sees your authority as masculine, Yuri says. Are you sure you’re not the father?
If you think I’m making this up, I say, you’re wrong.
The car is making an odd banging noise and I ask Yuri to stop and see what’s wrong.
We go on another ten minutes like this, the noise growing more and more ominous. He will get off at the next exit, Yuri says. We don’t get to the next exit. A tire blows (I don’t know that at the time) and we go out of control, skid crazily on to the dirt collar. It all happens so quickly there is no time to know how terrified I am. We come to a stop inches from a low metal fence guarding an embankment.
Damn it, Yuri yells. Those are his words of comfort to his passenger. We both get out of the car. Do you have a good spare? I ask him.
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t open the trunk to look, says something about needing to catch his breath.
If you give me the key to the trunk, I’ll change the tire myself, I say.
He walks away from me, stares into the distance. I pick up a stone and throw it at him. His back is to me when I throw this harmless small stone, but he turns in midflight and it catches him in the face just under the right eye. I let out a cry of warning when I see what’s going to happen. Then all of a sudden he’s tearing after me and I’m running for my life. Bitch, I hear him yell. The entire highway hears him.
At wit’s end, I turn and face him (there is no place to go) and we exchange a few punches and kicks and roll around in the dirt. I am afraid he will hurt me and I cry out when a punch to the head produces not stars so much as flashes of lightning. And then he stops. I feel grateful to have survived.
After the fight is over, he opens the trunk of the car. He changes the tire (the spare is minimally usable) while I sit on a rock looking in another direction. Imagining how we must appear to the people in the cars streaming by, I start to laugh.
We have little to say to each other the rest of the trip. I am no longer angry at him, but it is not something I can say. When we stop in front of the house, I am aware of how shy I feel with him. I lean toward him and barely touch his cheek with my lips. It is what I mean. It is all I mean. I don’t like to give the wrong impression. Yuri touches my shoulder, says, See you.
See you, I say and hurry out of the car.
I watch Adrienne unlock the door of the house and go inside — ”our” house, I am thinking, though of course it is no longer mine — consider saying hello to Rebecca, though drive off. It would only confuse her to know I was with her mother. Anyway, I’ll be taking her to my place the day after tomorrow. The radio is on — I don’t remember pressing the button — and I listen to David Bowie singing “Absolute Beginners.” I have to be at clinic in an hour and I consider stopping off at home to change my clothes. I look at myself in the rearview mirror — my face smeared with dirt, a mean cut below my right eye — and I see there is no way to explain away what happened. I decide to go on and call Helena from my office at the hospital.
They didn’t go off again together.
Two years after she split up with Yuri, Adrienne’s stepfather died and she took his death harder than anyone anticipated. Yuri’s loss no longer seemed to matter. In her revisionist fantasy, her marriage had eroded of its own accord. They could no longer live together (their marriage had become impossible), though when asked why, she was vague about the details. She tended to remember that they were good together at their best, and she blamed Yuri just a little for being impatient with her during a period of emotional crisis in her life.
For Yuri, the night with Adrienne at the inn in upstate New York was a conclusion to the relationship. As an apparent consequence, he felt free of Adrienne and was able to commit himself more fully to Helena, who was in certain unapparent ways like Adrienne (this was Yuri’s perception alone), though she was not a therapist but a designer of women’s clothes. He no longer hated Adrienne, and he was able to talk to her on the phone, and sometimes in person, without anger or sadness. Eventually he married Helena and they had a child together, a son.
Adrienne did not remarry.
Thirteen
Last Words
Yuri
Adrienne
I have no more to say about my marriage to Adrienne. Peter says, Peter who lives in a state of perpetual undeclared war with Barbara, that divorce is an indicator of success in post-civilized America. He says it self-mock-ingly because he himself has been close to divorce and has put his marriage back together again as if it were a broken table. It is his theory that people in our milieu break faith with their marriages in pursuit of self-improvement. I don’t feel successful in having divorced Adrienne. On the contrary, I see it as a compromise with the demands of romantic ambition. It is easier to live with Helena. We don’t take our emotional pulses every hour; we are not unhappy if we’re not happy. We respect each other’s otherness. That’s a kind of sanity. Adrienne and I, for all our time in therapy, for all our time as therapists confused the boundaries between us. Adrienne was everything to me: lover, wife, daughter, mother, father, closest friend, rival, other self. Our marriage had to be perfect or it was nothing. What I wonder at is not that we came apart but that we survived together as long as we had. Helena and I talk openly with each other, make a point of being honest, but there are certain things I am unable to share with her. Can I tell her that I dream about Adrienne, that I continue to hold conversations with her in my imagination, that when I wake from dreams in the dead hours of the night, I think of Adrienne as my wife? How can I let Helena know that without making her feel betrayed?
There are times (yes, this is true) that I feel totally at peace as if body and soul had achieved some effortless union. Rebecca and tend to be easier with each other in Yuri’s absence. I am more my own person, more and more my own person. (And yet some things remain the same. I try to please, I am always trying to please.) When I lie in bed in the early morning awaiting the call of the next day, I focus on who I am. Who am I? I am Adrienne French. It is discouraging sometimes to be no one other than oneself. But who else is there? I am all I have. My secret self has become my public persona.
Yuri and I played house for a while with what appeared to be success. Yes. We were stuck and something had to be done, and I was the one who did it. I confess I did it. I acted (or aaed out if you insist) for the both of us. I’ve always lived on the knife edge of my feelings. I was the first one to do what the other children were afraid to do. I went (I always did) where it was forbidden to go. The bad child is the brave child.
Love is its own betrayal. My late step-father’s favorite expression, which Grace and I often mocked (we were such bad girls) is: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. My question is: Did I break more eggs than needed to be broken? My answer: The more eggs you break the more substantial the omelet.