“It didn’t interest you?”
“It was not exactly at the center of my consciousness,” she said, seemingly amused at the turn of our conversation. “I’d like to go back to my book if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t know who the fuck I’m talking to,” I said. “I think you’re a strange visitor from another planet.”
She giggled, kept her eyes on the page.
I went away and came back, unable to let go, pulled by the string of her indifference. “Adrienne, I want to know what’s going on with you,” I said.
She seemed surprised to discover that I still existed, that I was still in the same room. “Yuri, I’m not angry at you,” she said with an assurance that was hard to discredit. “I’m just more into myself these days. Don’t feel rejected, honey.” She smiled like Mother Theresa among the lepers.
“I think you’re wrong about what’s going on,” I said in a conciliatory tone, and took her hand.
She acknowledged my hand only to remove it, to hold me at arm’s length. “Do something by yourself,” she said. “Okay? I really want to read. Okay?”
I left her to herself, watched the middle innings of a Red Sox game on television, then went out for a walk in the moonless night. The darkness seemed an appropriate text.
As Adrienne locked hands with herself, I spent more and more time with Rebecca. Or with acquaintances on the island, most of whom were shrinks of one denomination or another. I looked forward to the obligatory cocktail parties, accepted whatever human contact was available, avoided being alone.
Our friends, Peter and Barbara Konig, had a house five miles up island, an inappropriately grandiose A-frame that seemed designed more for pagan worship than as a summer residence. We generally shared dinners with them two or three times a week in the most casual way, never arranging anything more than an hour in advance. Peter was one of my oldest friends and I didn’t trouble to distinguish what was habit between us and what was affection. I loved Peter and Barbara, yet I could be exasperated with them, with Peter mostly, but that’s another story, only some of which is relevant here.
Peter is a psychoanalyst with a reputation for encouraging the “inner voice” of his therapeutic patients. He tends to encourage the most outrageous acting out and I suspect — this is not an opinion I’ve kept from him — that he lives off it vicariously. Barbara, who comes from money, who has an income in her own right, is the author of two whimsical children’s books, one recently published to respectable reviews. Before she became a writer, she was Peter’s secretary, a significant detail in their relationship. We had both been closer to Peter until this summer when Adrienne “discovered” Barbara. “She’s more intelligent and articulate,” Adrienne reported, “when Peter’s not around to intimidate her.”
That had not been my experience of Barbara, not at that time.
With the Konigs, Adrienne came out of herself, was notably charming and talkative, a different person from the serene mute that shared my bed and table.
“You’ve really blossomed this summer,” Peter told Adrienne. “I’ve never seen you look so sensational.”
“I don’t believe a word of it, Peter,” Adrienne said, though I could tell his remark had spoken to her innermost voice. She knew herself to have risen — ascended, I might even say — to a higher stage of development.
And alas I was also charmed by Adrienne’s performance around the Konigs, was as much attracted to her that summer as in the passionate early years of our relationship.
The more she withdrew from me, the more, God help me, I felt drawn to her.
When we came home from an evening at the Konigs where she dominated conversation, and laughed giddily at almost anything said, the social butterfly would hide behind the first book or magazine to come to hand. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I might ask, my attempts at conversation becoming increasingly tentative.
“Umm,” she might answer.
“You did or you didn’t?”
“I told you,” she would say. “Why do you keep asking?”
“I want to find out if there’s someone else in the room.”
It was the same conversation again and again with only cosmetic variation.
“What do you want from me, Yuri?” she would complain. “Why does my separateness bother you?”
“What do I want from you? I want you to treat me as if I don’t exist.”
Her irritation would flower into a sigh. “That has to be your problem,” she would say. “I’m not responsible for you, Yuri. I’m not your mother, baby.”
“I get it,” I said. “What you’re doing is defining by negative example what it is not to be my mother.”
“Just fuck off,” she said, her voice rising.
When I sat down next to her, she got up from the couch as if I had tilted her from her seat.
She hates me, I said to myself. The news, which seemed all but impossible to believe, left me in a state of panic. Hated by her, I found my own company intolerable.
I had turned forty a month before we left for the Vineyard.
That night, when I finally came to bed, she pretended to be asleep, lying all the way over on her side, facing away, then she came over and put her head on my chest. I kept my arms at my sides.
“What’s the matter, honey?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said in a choked voice.
“Are you crying?”
I didn’t answer, fought to gain control of myself, said no.
“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” she said and returned to her side of the bed, her treatment concluded. “Goodnight.”
I lay on my back, staring into the dark, in touch with feelings of rage that were inseparable from grief.
The next few days Adrienne was more like her old self, was kinder and more accessible, though a reserve, a certain wariness, had developed between us. We said good morning at breakfast like acquaintances at a hotel. At lunch, we talked about going to a movie in Vineyard Haven, argued about what to see. Adrienne couldn’t malce up her mind whether she wanted to go or not, suggested that we ask the Konigs to join us.
I have a clearer recollection of what I wanted to say then what I actually said. What I wanted and didn’t want — ambivalence is always a factor — was to go alone with Adrienne, though I ended up calling Peter and Barbara, who were, as always, happy to join us. There was no necking this time in the back seat of the car. It was our car we took and I was the driver.
We went to the Konigs’ place after the movie — I think it was “Tootsie” we saw that night — had ice cream and espresso with them and returned home. Except that we didn’t return home. The back right tire of our aging Volvo — the tire farthest from the driver — was completely flat, a fact discovered after driving for a while on a dirt road that seemed to have turned to sand. Adrienne wasn’t amused. “You’re the one responsible for the car,” she said.
It was too dark to change the tire so we left the car at the side of the road and walked back in silence to the Konigs’ A-frame, interrupted a shouting match that stopped, it seemed, in midsentence at our unanticipated appearance. Adrienne called the sitter to explain our delay while I had a glass of brandy. When she got off the phone she said, “I forgive you for the tire.”
Barbara drove us home, insisted on the prerogative. The two women sat in front, buzzing like flies. Adrienne was giggling at something I hadn’t heard. “What’s funny?” I asked. “It really can’t be explained,” Barbara said.
I took the sitter home in the Konigs’ silver Mercedes — our live-in girl away that week — while Adrienne and Barbara continued their private talk in our driveway.