I'm Glad About You

by Theresa Rebeck

  “For all the dresses. They have to make them, because he was like, he didn’t like anything that they shopped, so they’re building all these dresses for me and he’s more or less hyperobsessed and you know. He wants to see fabric swatches.”

  “The head of the studio. Is looking at fabric swatches. For your costumes.”

  “Stupid, right? Plus he can’t make up his mind, so they have to build like two or three versions of every dress. It costs a lot of money, everybody’s all worried about the budget but he keeps going, ‘That dress sucks,’ and he keeps reshooting things.”

  “He’s ordering a lot of reshoots? For what?”

  “No one knows. Or at least they’re not telling me. No, wait, the one we were supposed to do today? They reshot it three times, and now it turns out he wants me to be putting lipstick on. While I’m talking on the phone. Which you know is harder to do than you’d think, and besides which, nobody does it. If you’re going to put lipstick on, you set your stupid cell phone down. Which is, that’s all I was saying and then everybody stormed off the set.”

  He had heard a lot of crazy things as an entertainment reporter, but this creeped him out. And it was bad, that she had dropped the wig. You just innately knew that people were not going to have a sense of humor about that. “You have to call in, Alison,” he said. He held out the cell phone. “You have to do it right now.”

  She grimaced and for a moment it seemed like she was simply going to refuse. A fierce argument hovered, just behind her lips. It reminded him of the moment they had met, when she was so quickly irked by his pretentious babble. He wished that he had just taken her home that night, and fallen in love, and married her. Maybe you should just do it now. But she had taken the phone, and she was dialing dutifully. She smiled at him with a rueful obedience.

  “Ryan, hey, it’s me, Alison,” she announced. “No no, I’m fine, I’m fine. There was just a kind of misunderstanding at the set and I didn’t know what was going on, it sounded like we were finished for the day, so I took off and— Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ohhhh. Wow. No no, I am so sorry.” She actually was a good little actress. At least the phone call was a masterpiece. “Oh, God, no! I was ready to do the shot, and I was asking a few questions and then everything seemed to erupt, so—of course I’ll call Lars. I lost my cell phone, I didn’t—oh, it’s in my trailer! Of course it is. Well, I’ll call him right now. You call him too. It’s a total misunderstanding. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks.”

  She clicked the phone off. “This whole movie business is retarded,” she announced. “It’s a fucking police state. No kidding, they went into my trailer and found my cell phone. I have to call Lars immediately and apologize. When he was the one being mean to me.” She sighed and started to dial again. “I warned you, once I made a phone call, all the fun would be over.”

  Yes, she had warned him, and she had been right.

  twenty-three

  MARRIAGE COUNSELING was hideous. Van was eight months pregnant, and uncomfortable. And she didn’t want to be there. She had to be told point-blank that if she didn’t go to counseling with Kyle, he would refuse to even consider an annulment. The whole argument was circular and coercive: Unless you try to talk things through and save our marriage, I won’t admit that the marriage never in truth existed.

  Poor Van. She had more or less entered this miserable marriage because Kyle felt duty bound, as a Catholic, to wed the woman he had deflowered. Not, actually, that he had deflowered her. But he had deflowered himself. Which at the time had somehow seemed to be the same thing. And now she wanted to escape. But apparently she had fallen in love with a man who was every bit as Catholic as Kyle. He wanted that annulment, and he was not going to marry her without it. She was stuck.

  Kyle didn’t want to be there either. But the kindness of the monks to whom he’d fled for wisdom could not absolve him of the worldly responsibilities he had taken on with this marriage. No one ever said as much; in fact, those quiet, decent men said pretty much nothing at all. They accepted his sudden arrival as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They took him in; they gave him a bed; they let him sleep. For two days, no one asked him anything at all. They were simply content that they had something to offer him. They accepted that he understood the value of peace, and time, and prayer.

  And pray is what he did. He got up at four in the morning and sat in the plain wood loft, listening to the brothers chant below him. He went back to his room and slept, then got up at seven and went back to the chapel for more of the same. Then he wandered the grounds until he could go back to the chapel and listen to them chant some more.

  He phoned the office—emergency family leave—and then he texted Van to tell her where he was. Not that she cared, but he wasn’t going to give her any excuse to sue him for abandonment or in any way damn him further. The spectacular permutations of her logic in laying the blame for this at his feet overwhelmed him daily; a terrible rage would unleash itself like some sort of mindless undersea creature determined to strangle the life out of him. Her declaration that he was to blame for her infidelity, that he was responsible for her utter betrayal, after everything he had suffered, lost, mourned, on her behalf. His dreams of accomplishment and joy, gone. His children, taught to see him as an enemy. His parents, yearning for grandchildren she willfully held away from them. The woman was a fucking holy terror.

  He did not know how long this bitterness might consume him, nor did he know how long the good brothers would allow him to live among them without finally asking a question or two about his plans. By the end of his second week in retirement from the world, the steady hum of prayer and spiritual good will actually began to do its work, and he could go for longer stretches between seizures. He texted Susan, asked her to let his parents know he was on retreat at Gethsemani. He knew that simple detail would ease their anxiety, and in this moment of bewildered compassion—they must be worried sick—he began to find his way back.

  Brother Peter joined him in the cafeteria for a 5:30 breakfast one morning, and after they had prayed over their eggs and toast, he asked a gentle question.

  “Have you found comfort, in your time here with us?”

  “I have, yes,” Kyle responded, a little too quickly. It made him sound glib, which was the last thing he wanted. The few words you might use in a place like this should all matter.

  “How long are you able to be here with us?”

  “I would like to stay forever,” Kyle confessed.

  The brother nodded. So much silence. It was different from his own silence, which too often placed a wall between himself and Van, or the girls, or the nurses. He remembered that Alison once accused him of using silence as a weapon.

  “My wife,” Kyle began. He faltered. What was there to say about Van? Was she really his wife? She said she wasn’t, but if not, then what was it that they were to each other? “She wants to end our marriage.”

  “That must be painful.”

  Was it painful? Certainly the rages which overwhelmed him when he considered her vast betrayals were painful. Less so the distance, the time, the fact that he didn’t have to face her determined disappointment every single day. “The situation is painful, but I find my time here to be wonderful,” he said. “I don’t want to go back.”

  Peter nodded at this and even smiled, rueful. “Everybody’s trying to escape,” he admitted. “Most days, I’d give anything to escape from here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t find it a little prison-like? Those tiny rooms? The marching to chapel every three hours to pray for half an hour? The work details? The monotony?”

  “I think it’s great.”

  “Try it for ten years.” It sounded like blasphemy but Peter was completely content to admit it, and seemed to have no fear of being overheard. “But life isn’t something we’re meant to escape. Or rather, we are meant to escape it, profoundly, in death. While we are here, we are meant to live it.”

  “Then you don’t see the monaste
ry as an escape.”

  “For me it was a choice. Were I to abandon it, I would be abandoning myself. Which would be the same as abandoning God. So I wish to escape, but I choose to live through that wish, to discover what wisdom God might choose to bestow.”

  “Might?”

  “Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? He might just decide to bore me to death. But I suspect he has better plans, for both of us.”

  This ruthlessness of choice was completely belied, of course, by the life of their saint Mr. Merton. Kyle was finally permitted to accompany one of the older monks to the site of Merton’s hermitage, down a simple path through a few charming thickets to a clearing where a humble cinder-block structure stood. He had long known the story of the famous writer, who actually couldn’t decide between a life of prayerful seclusion or a life in the world. But those fates were afforded to great men. The longer Kyle stayed and pondered God’s will, the more he felt the constrictions of his psychological trap. These good monks would not send him back to his life, but neither would they make him one of their number. Unlike Merton, who found a way to straddle two identities, Kyle would be left floating between them. And so he got in his car and drove back to Cincinnati.

  Which frankly threw Van into a rage. When Kyle reappeared on the threshold of his own home, she practically spit in his face, and not over the fact that he had left in the first place. It had actually suited her just fine to have him disappear for a whole month; she was free, in that time, to do as she pleased. She and the girls had fallen into a routine that fit them, and her besotted suitor had even taken the opportunity to begin insinuating himself into the role of husband and father. Not that Van admitted as much; Kyle had put that one together when he found a half-eaten grilled rib-eye in the refrigerator and she had fumbled her explanation of what it was doing there. The whole thing was appalling, but he wasn’t going to get into some circular argument about it. His new goal was simply to make his choices functional. He called the parish office and asked for a recommendation for a couple’s counselor.

  Van had no intention of making this marriage work, but once he registered the problem with parish leadership, she had nowhere to run. Refusing to enter counseling would have made it impossible to get that annulment. And once they were stuck in that room with Roger, their kindly, white-haired Teutonic mediator, no amount of determined and circular logic passed muster. Old Roger had a truly excruciating idea of communication: He insisted on slowing everything down to a snail’s pace, and then once you were down there with the snails, you had to explain every thought three times before you were allowed to inch forward to another one.

  “So what you’re saying, Kyle, is that you were upset when Van admitted to you that she had been unfaithful to your marriage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you tell that to Van?”

  “Van, I was upset and hurt, actually, when you admitted you were unfaithful.”

  “He wasn’t hurt, he was enraged. He was furious! And terribly threatening.”

  “Okay, we’ll get to that in a minute, Van. What I’m hearing is that you felt frightened.”

  “Of course I felt frightened, he frightened me.”

  “But I really need you to take this one step at a time. When feelings run away with us, it’s hard to understand what is at the core of the misunderstanding.”

  “It’s not a misunderstanding. He never loved me. He was in love with another woman when he married me and he never pretended otherwise.”

  “I was not in love with Alison.”

  “LIAR.”

  “I hadn’t seen her in YEARS.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa. You see how quickly this can run away from us! We’re going to slow this ship down. Slooooow dowwwwwn. Just repeat back to Kyle what he said to you.”

  “What he said was a lie.”

  “That’s a judgment, Van. We’re not going there, remember? What I heard, from Kyle, is that he was upset and hurt that you had been unfaithful to your marriage.”

  “So?”

  “Is that what you heard?”

  “Yes, I heard him say that.”

  “Could you tell Kyle that that is what you heard? And that’s all we need you to say.” He started to coach her. “‘Kyle’—”

  “Kyle,” she snapped. “I heard you say that you were upset and hurt that I was unfaithful to our marriage.” Admitting that Kyle had in fact strung those dozen words together clearly felt like an outrageous loss of the moral high ground she had staked out with such unflinching determination.

  “Good. Good! Marriage is about communication. We’re just here learning to communicate. Now that you have told Kyle what you heard him say, let him know how that made you feel.”

  “I already told you; it makes me feel like he’s an insane liar.”

  “That’s a judgment, remember? We’re going to try and stay away from those. Let’s just stick with feelings for now.” Kyle wanted to strangle old Roger, but he couldn’t help enjoying how panicked it made Van to have every single word put under the microscope like this.

  “I feel—frustrated,” she finally said.

  “That’s good, you feel frustrated.”

  “How is that good?” she asked, with bitter common sense.

  “It’s good because now Kyle knows what you felt, when you heard him say that he was hurt and upset when you—”

  “I did not ‘betray’ our marriage. How can you betray a marriage that never existed?”

  Roger nodded at this, endlessly patient. “We’ll get there, Van. We will get there. One step at a time. Kyle, what did you hear Van say?”

  “She said a lot of things,” Kyle pointed out.

  “Let’s just stick with the one statement. How she felt when she heard you say that you were hurt and upset—”

  “How come we have to hear that again?” Van asked. “How many times does he get to repeat that—that—”

  “Van,” Kyle interrupted. “I heard you say that you feel frustrated.”

  “Good!” Roger was ridiculously pleased that Kyle was cooperating. “And how do you feel when you hear that she is frustrated?”

  “I feel sorry about that, actually. I wish she wasn’t frustrated.”

  But Kyle’s trivial success in maneuvering the rules of this absurd exercise only annoyed Van further. When they got home, she informed him in no uncertain terms that she thought that the counselor had already taken his side against her, and that she found the whole process unfair in the extreme. Kyle thought momentarily about pointing out how unfair it was of her to blame him because she had cheated on him and was having another man’s child. Instead, he thought for a moment, and said, “What I hear you saying, Van, is that you find this whole process unfair. Is that what you said?” Van just stared at him. “So that makes me frustrated.” At this, Van stalked past him, into the kitchen. He heard Maggie coo, “Mommy, Mommy!” and then the sound of the back door slamming, as Van blew by her daughter so she could go outside and call her lover on the phone.

  Kyle was well aware that she spoke to the guy six or seven or eight times daily. She was careful not to use their landline but he dug through her purse one night at three in the morning; the cell phone was chock-full of calls placed to and received from “RT.” He then went to the parish phone book and paged through all the R’s and T’s; none of the names popped out at him as a likely suspect. Which led him to understand that even the initials were a code, a secret language, between this utter stranger and his wife. Before he could go any further—just hit send, call him, insult him—his better brain stepped in and reminded him, with mournful dignity, that this unhappy situation called for more wisdom, not less. While Van clearly felt that taking the girls away from him and putting a new household in place around this other father was what needed to happen, Kyle had to consider the endless years of shuttling children back and forth between double homes and double parents, not to mention ever-multiplying sets of grandparents. The scenario filled him with unspeakable dread.
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  The whole situation was already a mess. The girls knew that Mommy was no longer theirs; she drifted by them with the kind of self-contained indifference she previously had reserved only for Kyle. She still tended to their snacks and crayons and diapers and dresses, but a weary impatience had set in. Neither one of them was Mommy’s beloved anymore. That was reserved for the baby in her belly, and the man who had put it there. Increasingly, Kyle found himself trapped in an unrelenting worry for these small strangers. He started sneaking little treats into the house for them—Waffle Crisp cereal, apple juice, those long squishy Go-Gurt things. Maggie somberly tried to tell him that she wasn’t allowed to eat Go-Gurt, and then she burst into tears. He held her on his lap and the two of them, together, figured out how to open the plastic tube and squeeze out the sugar-hyped goo. Van was out somewhere; who knew where. It was easy these days to sneak such nutritional outrages into the home. Her attention was not there.

  “I feel worried about the girls,” Kyle asserted clearly at their next session.

  “Van, how do you respond to that?” queried their guide to marital communication.

  “That’s hilarious, is how I respond to that.”

  “What I’d really like you to do, Van, is repeat what you hear Kyle say—”

  “I am aware. Kyle, what I hear you saying is that you are worried about the girls.”

  “Is that what you said, Kyle?”

  “Yes, that is what I said.”

  “And Van—”

  “Yes, I know what comes next,” she informed him, suddenly deciding to behave. “This is how I feel about what you have said, Kyle. I feel frustrated that it has taken you so long to express any interest whatsoever in the well-being of your children.”

  “Kyle—”

  “Thanks, I think I have this, Roger. Van, I hear you say that you are frustrated because you feel that it has taken me a long time to express interest in the well-being of our girls. Is that what you said?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.” No matter how much you distilled this stuff down, there was still so much attitude attached that there was no way not to know that she held him in the highest contempt for his neglect of the children.