When Deena showed him the full year of his email he was more shocked by its density than by the warmth of his confidences — though he was taken aback by glimpses of what he’d written. Writing was a way of forgetting, yet now it was all returned to him and he was reminded of everything he’d said. He did not know that a phone, even a high-tech computer-like device like that, could access so many messages, ones that he’d sent and received, twelve months of them, including ones that he’d deleted (which was most of them), that he’d believed, having dragged them to the trash-basket icon, were gone forever.
But they reappeared, arriving in a long unsorted list, a chronicle of his unerasable past, much of which he’d forgotten. And so the interrogation began, Deena saying, “I want to know everything”—another movie line? She held his entire memory in her hand, his secret history of the past year, and so, “Who is Rosie?” and “Tell me about Vickie.”
He was mute with embarrassment and anger. Ashamed, appalled, he could not account for the number of messages or explain his tone of flirtatious encouragement, his intimacies to strangers, all the irrelevant detail. He talked to them about his day, about their travel, about books, about his childhood; and they did the same, relating their own stories.
“What is your problem, Ellis!”
He didn’t know. He bowed his head, more to protect himself from her hitting him than in atonement. From the moment he got home from work, for a month or more, he and Deena argued. Her last words to him in bed at night were hisses of recrimination. And when he woke, yawning, slipping from a precarious farcical dream, but before he could recall the email crisis, she began again, clanging at him, her tongue like the clapper of a bell, her finger in his face, shrieking that she’d been betrayed. Some mornings, after a night of furious arguing, the back-and-forth of pleading and abuse, he woke half demented, his head hurting as though with an acute alcoholic hangover, and couldn’t work.
Deena demanded detail, but the few scraps he offered only angered her more; and she was unforgiving, so what was the point? It all seemed useless, a howl of pain. She was a yelling policeman who’d caught him red-handed in a crime, not yelling for the truth — she knew it all — but because she was in the right, wishing only to hurt and humiliate him, to see him squirm, to make him suffer.
He did suffer, and he saw that she was suffering too, in greater pain than he was, because she was the injured party. But he knew what was at the end of it. It really was like theater; she needed to inhabit every aspect of her role, to weary herself and him with the sorting of this trash heap of teasing confidences, and when he was sufficiently punished, the ending was inevitable.
They began sessions with a marriage counselor, who called himself Doctor Bob, a pleasant middle-aged man with a psychology degree, a professorial manner, and conventional college clothes — tweed jacket, button-down shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, probably bought at one of the mall outlets, Ellis thought. What bothered Ellis and Deena as much as the actual sessions were the chance encounters with one or another of Doctor Bob’s clients, someone troubled — drugs? alcohol? — leaving the office as they arrived, or someone similarly anguished, head bowed, on the couch in the waiting room as they left.
Doctor Bob listened carefully in the first session and said that such a discovery of compromising emails was not unusual. “I’m seeing three other couples in your position. In each case, the man is the collector.” He didn’t assign blame, he was sympathetic to both Ellis and Deena, and at one point near the end of the first hour, as Deena sat tearful with her hands on her lap and Ellis wondered why he had sent so many emails, Doctor Bob could be heard puzzling, saying softly, “How does it go? That old song, ‘strumming my pain with his fingers’—something about being flushed with fever, something-something by the crowd,” then raising his voice, but still in a confiding, lounge-singer croon, “‘I felt he found my letters, and read each one out loud…’”
“Please,” Deena said, “this isn’t funny.”
“I’m trying to put your situation into context,” Doctor Bob said. “There are other precedents. After his wife poked into his private letters, Tolstoy ran away from home. And died in a railway station. He was eighty-two.”
In the next session Doctor Bob asked blunt questions and acted, it seemed to Ellis, like a referee. He did not sing again. They returned for more sessions.
But instead of repairing the marriage or calming Deena, the counseling made matters worse by offering an occasion to air old grievances, conflicts that, before starting the sessions, Ellis had decided to live with. But why not mention them, the disappointments, the lapses, the rough patches that had remained unresolved? Long-buried resentments were disinterred and argued over. With a referee, a witness, they could be blunt.
Doctor Bob nodded and smiled gently, like the friendly old-fashioned priest at Saint Ray’s, Father Furty — reformed drinker, always sympathetic. He let Deena talk, then Ellis, both of them pleading with him to see their point of view, the validity of their claim, as though deciding “whose ball?” in a significant fumble.
He said, “What I’m hearing is…”
Letdowns they’d never mentioned were now mentioned, and the sessions became acrimonious: Deena’s friends, her absences; Ellis’s coldness, his absences.
“You’ve been leading separate lives…”
Ellis thought, Yes, maybe that’s why my life has been bearable. It was not a pleasure but a relief to go to work in the morning. Monotony was a harmless friend. He dreaded Sundays at home; most of all he hated vacations. Ellis had never met anyone who hated vacations, so he kept this feeling to himself.
Though Deena had that one issue on her mind — the business about the numerous and overfond emails — this dispute stirred Ellis into defending himself with memories of other disputes.
“I want to know why you were emailing those women,” Deena said.
Doctor Bob smiled at Ellis, who said, “I’d like to know that myself.”
“My name is nowhere in those emails. You never mention you’re married. I don’t exist. Why?”
Ellis said in a wondering tone that he didn’t know.
Pleading with Doctor Bob, Deena said, “He tells them what he’s reading! He tells them what he has for lunch!”
By then, about a month into counseling (and the store suffered by his absences), all contact with the women in the emails had been broken off. Deena still had possession of the phone, monitoring it every day. She clutched it in disgust, as though it was Ellis himself she was holding, her hatred apparent; and Ellis hated the sight of the thing too.
Ellis, at Deena’s insistence, got a new email address, and used it only for business. Without his contact with those women, he was numb, mute, friendless, but still could not explain the emails he’d sent, his befriending the many women, the strange amorous inquiring tone. To one he had said, “You are the sort of woman I’d take into the African bush,” and squirmed at the memory.
“I guess I was interested in their lives,” he said. “I was curious. There was a story line to the way they lived, an unfolding narrative. I’ve always liked hearing people’s stories.”
With a pocket-stuffing gesture, Doctor Bob asked, “But were you keeping them in your back pocket for later, something to act on?”
Ellis said no, but he was not sure. The solitude of the store, the uncertainty of the business, had set him dreaming. He did not know how to say that to his wife — no longer grief-stricken but enraged — and the nodding counselor. Doctor Bob would have said, “Dreaming of what?” And Ellis had no answer.
“Is there something you want to tell your wife?” Doctor Bob said.