“You tell me.”
He closes his eyes. “Okay. I’m unsatisfied because my wife is driving me crazy.”
“Yes?”
“Anna Marie loathes and despises me,” he says. “I have stood in the way of her growth and development as a person.”
“She has told you this in so many words?” (My question seems to puzzle him.)
He shakes his head. “She said to me last night that the reason for her freezing me out is to keep herself from going crazy. I like don’t see it frankly. I never asked from her anything I wasn’t willing to give myself.”
“That doesn’t mean it was what she wanted,” I hear myself say. “Does it?”
He turns his attention on me. He gives me the full light of his interest and regard. “That’s right on the money,” he says. “So when I say to her I don’t see what her problem is, she says, ‘I suppose you expect me to do what your waitress does or that little woman in the bookshop or that nude model or the wife of that assemblyman.’ I told her I didn’t want her to do anything she didn’t want to do. ‘Fine,’ she says, and she disappears into the bathroom. She returns in this abbreviated red lace nightgown. ‘I want to be eaten,’ she says to me, ‘like a banquet.’“
(I sense that he is reading my face. What is he looking for?)
“You don’t want to hear this, right?” he says, offering me his sad (his post-coital) smile. “If you want me to stop, just say the word.”
“Well,” I say, laughing nervously. “What you’re talking about now seems relevant to your problem. There’s a difference, isn’t there? Look, I’m not a prude.”
“I don’t want to offend you, Dr. Tipton,” he says, using the name as if it were a private joke between us. “But like it or not, my life is my life. Do I continue?” (I nod reluctantly.) “So I say to Anna Marie, ‘I’m not interested, baby. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do either.’ A little later, I do exactly what she asked, but I go down on her not because she demanded it — do you see what I’m saying? — but for myself. In the middle of things, so to speak, the bitch starts screaming at me.”
The man is describing oral sex with his wife and my mind begins to wander. (Why don’t I ever get what I want? I think. Don’t I deserve as much as Anna Marie?)
“She is like screaming her head off, ‘You’re not doing it right, Carroway. You don’t love me.’ ‘That’s a fucking lie,’ I say. ‘You lie so much you wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you.’ ‘I’m sorry, babe,’ she says. ‘Finish me.’ After she comes she says, ‘I hate you, Carroway. I really hate you.’ Does that make any sense?”
“Did you ask her what was going on with her?” I ask.
“You kidding me?” he says. “Anna Marie has a fifteen word vocabulary.”
“Did you even try to discuss it with her?”
He lifts his head as if pulling it away from the flower of his wife’s sex. “As a rule,” he says, “I don’t make gestures that are not fully acceptable.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Look, I know you’re super smart,” he says. “What I’m saying, let me put this as well as I can, what I’m saying is that I make it a point of honor never to go any place I’m not desired. Do you get what I mean? It’s not important.”
“What I hear you saying, Carroway, is that you anticipate what the other person wants. You do what you know will ingratiate you. That’s manipulative. It’s also very passive.”
He stifles a yawn. “Nowyou’re losing me, Dr. Tipton,” he says. “I have a question for you. Would you carry a message for me to the other Dr. Tipton? Would you tell him that Carroway envies him his wife?”
(Basking in his narcissistic light as if he were carrying me into that private mirror in which he lives.) “Do you flatter everyone you want something from?” I ask him. “Is that the way you get what you want from the world?”
“I always speak from the heart,” he says. “Sometimes I lie a little. You’ve seen right through me from the start. You know that.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “What have I seen?”
“My flaws of character,” he says, leaning forward as if he means to offer them to me. “I want to say that you’re very good at what you do.”
“And you’re incorrigible,” I say. (Does he know the affect he has on me? He is more complicated than he lets on.) “I still don’t know what you need me for.” (The remark is infelicitous.) “Carroway, your marital difficulties may be an outgrowth of the pressure you put on your marriage. I’m talking about your sexual arrangements. Infidelity, even by agreement, can erode the conditions that keep people together. The two of you have been playing with erotic fire and now you’ve gotten burned. It’s….”
He interrupts. “I want to continue seeing you,” he says, more like a lover than a patient. “Don’t cut me off.”
“I’m not sure I’m the right therapist for you,” I say. “You know all too well how to get around women.”
“I don’t seem to be getting around you,” he says. “So, where do we go from here, Adrienne? You want to see me again or what?”
“I have to think about it,” I say. “We could have another exploratory session, Carroway, and end it there. Or I could give you the names of some other therapists who I think you would get on with.”
He reads me under that piercing light of his. “Why do you think you’re not the person for me?” he asks. (Of all things: he is watching his performance through my eyes.)
“I don’t even know that I have any hours open for you next week,” I say, not sure what I want. “Why don’t you call me tomorrow at five and I’ll let you know.” (I can barely catch my breath.)
“I can survive without you,” he says.
“I may have a cancellation. Call me tomorrow between four and five, why don’t you?” My manner is as businesslike as panic allows.
He gets up from his chair as though it were giving birth to him. “Thank you for your trouble, Dr. Tipton,” he says, holding out his hand.
“We’ll talk,” I say, avoiding his hand, his touch, his face. Endangered by something unseen.
“I don’t know if I’ll call,” he says.
(He is rejecting me. How wonderful!) “Then I’ll expect your call or I won’t,” I say.
His exit is managed without the calculated poise of his entrance. It is a relief, I tell myself, to have him out of my hair. (Which hair? Witch hair.)
We meet halfway on the basement stairs, Yuri coming down as I ascend. I throw him a kiss, which he takes as his due. He points his index finger at me. Bang bang.
I feel emptied out. I take two Tylenol caplets and lie down. I put my hand on my heart. (It may not even be where I think it is.) I listen to myself breathe.
I wake to a kiss between the eyes. Yuri says, leaning over me, “What are we going to do about dinner?”
I wake in an erotic phase. Why do n’t you just eat me like a banquet, I think of saying. This familiar man, sitting half-turned away on the bed, is talking of taking Chinese food in for dinner, has General Tso’s chicken on his mind. I touch his arm. I rub it as if it were a magic lamp. Otherness is an unbridgeable distance. (When we met he told me he was five ten; I said I was five seven and a half. One day last month, I realized we were really the same height.)
“Do we have a date for tonight?” he asks.
“Why don’t you make the decision about dinner?” I say. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Two things upset me today. Two trifles. A letter from an insurance company addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Tipton. Yuri showing me a rather charming love note from one of his clinical psych students.