“Does it tempt you?” I ask. He insists not. But he says, only partly joking, “She’s a major temptation. If I were a free man, I don’t know what I’d do.”
We joke about it back it forth, which brings on a kind of panic. (Am I jealous? If so, of which one?) I can’t leave well enough alone. “Have you thought of not discouraging her?” I feel compelled to ask. “Don’t you think that possibility should also be explored?”
The desirable psychologist grins foolishly. “She has this slutty quality which I find very appealing,” he says. “She’s looks a bit like the actress — I can’t remember her name — in “Last Tango in Paris.”
“Yuri, why don’t you take her up on her offer if she’s so appealing?” I hear myself say. “What’s stopping you?”
“You know what stops me,” he says. His face shows that I have wounded him.
“You don’t like to take risks, do you?” I say. “You don’t go after what you want and then you act as if it’s my fault.”
“There are things I value that I don’t want to lose,” he says.
The moment his assertion moves me, I feel myself distrust it. “That’s your excuse, honey,” I say. “You can’t have something unless you’re also willing not to have it.”
We have a fight that never quite takes place. Yuri wears his misunderstood look like a prize through dinner. I recall in the evening that Carroway hasn’t phoned for an appointment. My take is, that his defection (rejection?) may be the source of my irritation with Yuri. I apologize for my bitchiness. (It’s hard for me to say I’m sorry and mean it. It always feels like an obligation.)
When I come to bed, Yuri reaches for me. It is a gesture that evades the anger he must be feeling. I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I want you to eat me like a banquet.”
“My pleasure,” he says and he slides his head under the covers into the regions of the night.
Three
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Two summers ago on Martha’s Vineyard — we have a small summer house in Chilmark — Adrienne took up sketching, did a series of drawings of seagulls in flight. Almost every morning she would sit on a desk chair on the screened-in porch that overlooked the ocean and absorb herself in private vision. She sketched while I went through the motions of writing my book on counter-transference, a subject I had been pursuing for some time with a diminishing sense of obligation. Sandy, the teenaged girl we had brought with us from the city, would take Rebecca, who was eight that summer, for a walk on the beach while we worked. When concentration failed me as it did too often that summer, I would watch Adrienne from my window, her impassive face like a bird’s, sketching on an oversized pad I didn’t know she owned. I thought of it as a way of locking herself out of the world, a way of justifying through worked-up occasion her need to withdraw. The withdrawal, not the sketching, concerned me. I missed her. The Adrienne I knew, presumed to know, was missing.
I tried to involve myself in her activity, asked to look at her drawings, pointed out the ones I liked, but she knew that my interest was contrived. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “They’re nothing in particular.”
“Why do you do them if they’re nothing?” I asked.
“They make me happy,” she said. And another time: “Didn’t you know I always wanted to be an artist?”
I didn’t know, didn’t remember knowing. We had long since confided all our secrets, I thought, our secret selves. Was this a secret self she had withheld from me?
“Maybe I’ll do some sketching too,” I said one morning over breakfast, only partly joking.
“I don’t want you to,” she said with childlike petulance. “Why do you have to share everything I do? Absolutely not.”
“I didn’t realize they were your gulls,” I said. “I had hoped they were in the public domain.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said.
In the car, driving to a cocktail party in Edgartown, she reached for my hand. “I’m sorry to be so difficult,” she said. “I’m sorry too,” I said.
“Sorry that I’m so difficult?” She smiled secretively.
“Sorry that I intruded on your space, sweetheart.”
“You’re such a nice man,” she said.
And though we had apparently made up, a certain tension remained, kept us company like an intruder. We kept making up that summer, enforcing restoration where there had been no apparent breach.
What was going on? I might have asked myself, but the habits of evasion had long-standing claim on me. I got into writing my book, wrote up a case study as if it were a scene in a play, got into my book at the very point where I thought there was no book to write. And I began to play tennis, took a half hour lesson each day, fretted over the flaws in my backhand with a false and displaced seriousness. Adrienne sketched, turned inward. When I talked to her about my book she smiled approvingly, patted me on the head with her smile. She didn’t have time to listen to me — the gulls, or something I was unable to imagine, occupied her. It was as if she were pregnant with some new idea about herself, though I didn’t know that then.
“Is there something I’ve done? Are you angry at me?” I remember asking her.
“I haven’t thought about it one way or another,” she said, offering the same radiant private smile. “I haven’t been thinking about you, Yuri.”
It was said with a child’s directness, without the slightest indication of cruel intent.
“What have you been thinking about?” I asked. Banished from her thoughts, I was in exile from my own good will. I felt punished by her abrupt indifference. My attitude — I see this now — petitioned for forgiveness.”
“Whatever it is,” she said in the manner of someone with a guilty secret.
I didn’t laugh, though her remark struck me funny. “You’ve been strange this summer,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“You think I’m strange because I haven’t been thinking about you?” she said. “Come on, Yuri.”
I overreacted, left the house without explanation, took myself to the edge of the high dune that guarded our private beach. I don’t remember exactly how I descended that cliff of sand. There is no direct passage to the beach at that juncture. The next thing I knew I was standing at the water’s edge, no other human figure in sight, studying the ferocity of the waves, the ocean in turmoil from some impending storm. My feelings confronted me with the full burden of their outrage. The waves seemed possessed by furies. I walked in in my tennis shorts, gave myself to that presumed manifestation of my feelings, exhilarated by the sense of risk. The second of two extraordinary waves carried me under and held me prisoner until my lungs burned.
I apologized to Adrienne that night after Rebecca had gone to bed, my remarks brealcing the extended silence between us.
She had been sitting in bed reading a book called “Birds of New England” when I approached her, and she looked up at me with a benign incongruous smile. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” she said.
“Just so. I regret storming out of the house the way I did,” I said.
“Why was that?” The question asked with wide-eyed sincerity, which I misread as irony.” I wasn’t sure why you had left, though I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with me.
I was trying to read her, trying to understand what she was saying or not saying. “You didn’t think I was angry at you?
A flicker of impatience was the only flaw in her maddening calm. She shrugged, went back to her text. I stared at her until she raised her eyes. “I had no idea what was upsetting you, Yuri,” she said, “and frankly it didn’t interest me.