Sooner or later, said the evidence of my patients’ lives, relationships were bound to fail. It was a constant warning to me not to let things slide in my own marriage. I came to believe that marriages like individual lives had to be continually reinvented, that they survived the loss of romance only as a matter of will. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t will that survival came apart, sought love elsewhere, came to hate one another. We were the exceptions. We tended the fire. Whenever I reflected on it, I thought how enduring our marriage was, how intimate, how full of affection and respect. The worst had come and gone before we even started out.
Therapists are not necessarily less susceptible to delusion than people in other professions.
Sometimes in watching the slow-motion replay of a disastrous moment in a baseball game, I feel myself willing the event altered in its recurrence. It is a magical, contrary to fact hope, a commitment to unreality, an unwillingness to accept loss and, ultimately, death. It is the same for me in telling this story.
Two
The Divided Self
Bear with me. Words tend to hide in my throat. Sometimes I am at a loss for words.
We are having dinner. We are almost finished with dinner. Rebecca, who is eight (ate), asks if she can be excused. Yuri looks at her plate with his accountant’s eye. “You haven’t eaten very much, honey,” he says.
“Oh let her go,” I say. “She’s eaten as much as she wants.”
Yuri scowls. “Bee,” he says, “one more piece of meat and you’re a free woman.” Rebecca, wanting to please, stuffs down two pieces for her daddy. When she gets up, I hold out my arms to her. She gives me a hug (and Yuri a kiss) and goes her way.
“I didn’t mean to undermine you,” I say. “I just wanted to talk to you about something not for Rebecca’s ears.”
He gives a sigh of exasperation. “If you had made the decision first, I would have gone along with it.”
“I know you would,” I say. I come over and put my arms around him. “Do you want to hear about this wild man Peter sent to me as a referral?”
“What wild man? You’re not talking about Brian Carroway by any chance?”
“How do you know about him?”
“I was the one who sent him to Peter. I diagnosed him over the phone as a borderline sociopath.”
“That’s sort of glib, isn’t it? What does that mean, borderline sociopath? If someone else used the term, you’d find it offensive. How can you diagnose someone over the phone?”
“Come off it, Adrienne,” he says, smiling as if it were a game we were playing. “So what do you want to tell me about Brian Carroway? You’re having some problem with him or you wouldn’t have brought him up.”
I tell him what I can, what I think he wants to hear. I tell him about Carroway’s assaultive manner, about his graphic sexual confessions, about his coming on to me, but not that he has an astonishing face. I make him sound (it is the way words play tricks on meaning) worse than I think he is.
“It sounds to me as if he’s using the therapeutic situation as an occasion for exhibiting himself,” Yuri says in his measured way. “If he makes you uncomfortable, I’d say drop him. Not everyone can be helped. Why make life more difficult than it has to be?”
I am tempted to argue, though I resist that particular temptation. I am tempted to say that maybe I can do something for him where you and Peter can’t. “I’ll have to sleep on it,” I say. “I can’t come to decisions as quickly as you can.
He puts his arm around me (we are sitting on the brown velvet loveseat with the tear in the back) and he says, “I only told you what you wanted to hear, A. I could tell from the way you told the story what your decision had been.”
Sometimes I like that. That he has to prove to me how smart he is. “I like that you watch over me,” I say.
My first take when he strutted into my office that November afternoon was that this man was arrogant and narcissistic, possibly dangerous. (What I meant by dangerous I didn’t know at the time.) His manner was terribly solemn. I was aware in the most intense way of the nervousness he made small effort to repress. The astonishing beauty of his face repelled me. I felt assaulted by the aggressive insistence of his presence.
He was unexpectedly shy. Spoke haltingly at first. Carroway (as he called himself) was thirty-six, a real estate broker, former newspaperman, former free-lance publicist. He had a wife named Anna Marie, who was a dancer. No children. His wife, he said, had been in the chorus line of two failed Broadway musicals. When I asked which ones, he said he couldn’t remember the names. (He didn’t inspire trust.)
The preliminaries out of the way, we sat facing each other, chair to chair, and I asked as I do, “How have you been?”
He shrugged. “I have to get this off my chest,” he said. “You’re not what I pictured. You’re super-attractive for someone in your line of work.”
My heart fluttered. “That’s uncalled for, Carroway,” I said. “I wasn’t just saying that as a come on,” he said. “You really have amazing eyes.”
I gave him my severest look. (I hated his crudeness.) “You don’t have to seduce me to enlist my sympathy,” I said.
He hung his head in parody of a scolded child. “No one wants to hear the truth,” he said under his breath. “If I offended you, doctor, I assure you it wasn’t my intention.”
“I understood from Dr. Konig that you were having marital problems,” I said. “I think we ought to talk about why you’re here.”
His manner remained languid, though his attention was unwavering. He had the quality (studied, I suspected) of making you feel that you were the only person in the world that interested him. “I’m not so to speak my own problem,” he said. “I am and I’m not, if you know what I mean. I believe if you hear me out, you’ll see that my situation doesn’t fit into any preconception.”
“No one’s does,” I said. “I make no preconceptions.”
“I like that you say that,” he said. “Anna Marie and I have what I believe is called an open marriage. Okay? It’s not for everyone, but it’s worked for us. We take our fun, so to speak, where we find it.” He winked at me.
I began to dislike him more and more. “I’ve had other patients with open marriages,” I said. (Is that true? I wondered.)
“Have you?” He gave me an unhappy smile. “Marriage, Dr. Tipton, is just a convenience in my opinion, a useful arrangement. Why should we cut ourselves off from other pleasurable relationships merely because we have a wife or a husband. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“You don’t have to sell me on your life style,” I said. “I’m capable of appreciating its value to you without finding it desirable for myself.”
He established eye contact. “Maybe you’re missing something,” he said.
“You’re behavior is inappropriate,” I said. “Maybe that’s your problem, Carroway.”
He held up both hands in a mock-gesture of surrender. “Okay.” He took a deep breath, smiled his insinuating smile. “I have this thing going with a waitress at the Holiday Inn in Port Washington. We get it together twice a week either in my car or hers. Okay? When in my car I sit behind the wheel and she bellies down on the passenger seat and she — I hope this doesn’t embarrass you — she like takes my prick in her mouth. In her car, we reverse the procedure. She gets behind the wheel and I stick my head under her apron — I really get off on the apron — and I like make a meal of her. That’s the drill. My car or yours?”