Lost in the Reflecting Pool

by Diane Pomerantz

  The spring became summer, the children were registered at new schools, and we were about to move. Around that time, when I pressed the issue about Victoria and the plants, Charles told me that the relationship with Victoria, his “soul mate,” had ended; she had ended it. He still wouldn’t admit that she had given him the plants that were now in our living room.

  One evening before our move, coming out of the house on St John’s Lane, I walked onto the porch where Charles was sitting, hiding his cell phone as I opened the door. I started to ask him how he was feeling about the end of the relationship with Victoria. I was still trying to connect with him, still beating my head against a brick wall, but all I got was stony silence, and I retreated back into the house. He began going out for a swim every night, sometimes staying out for hours. Later I would discover that he and Victoria would rendezvous at our pool, on our porch—under the stars, Victoria wrote—while the children and I slept just walls away.

  Damn it, I needed him, and he had no clue about being there for anyone, about love or compassion. It was as if there was nothing inside him; he was just an empty shell. I had had only glimpses of this earlier in our relationship, but for the most part, I had pushed it away. Now, I couldn’t push it away anymore. It had gotten too big; it had become the elephant in the room. His sense of inadequacy was so disguised that I didn’t fathom how fragile he really was.

  By this time, it wasn’t the blinders that kept me with him. A harrowing year of surgeries and poisons flowing through my veins, blasted directly at my body, had beaten me down. I weighed less than one hundred pounds; when I looked in the mirror, I saw the body of a concentration camp inmate. It was there, at the lowest point of my vulnerability, that I began to really discover Charles’s betrayals, who he was and wasn’t, but I had nowhere to go, nor the energy or money to get there.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT DIDN’T MATTER WHAT I KNEW, WHAT I DISCOVERED; I still longed to see Charles as different than he was. I didn’t want to give up all the memories of our life together. But then, suddenly, I was forced to confront the possibility that he had always been unfaithful, even early on, even when I had thought things were going well for us.

  I had just gotten off the phone with Anne, Elli’s former nanny. I stood there, my mind replaying the entire conversation over and over again.

  “Why does it surprise you?” she had asked, upon hearing of Charles’s relationship with Victoria. “He’s always done that!”

  I stood there, silent. My grasp on the phone tightened; my stomach twisted like a wet, dank, wrung-out dish towel.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.

  “He was having an affair with Faith for years.”

  “What makes you say that?” I didn’t think my trembling voice was noticeable.

  “Di, she told me. Good gracious—he’s a psychiatrist; she was his patient. Why would I think up such a thing on my own? It wouldn’t occur to me in a thousand years,” she said. “Faith told me she was waiting for him to leave you. It astounded me so that I came home and told John. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “John said, ‘Just watch the baby, nothing else! It’s not your place.’ He told me, ‘Keep your mouth closed.’ I suppose I did agree with that back then. Now I wish I had said something.”

  I felt a fluttering in my chest; it was a sensation I’d had for years, but I’d never known what it was until now. Dazed, I thought of his patient Faith. He had seen her for many years, up until fairly recently, and had always described her as “crazy.” I thought, Anne doesn’t understand psychotic transference. I still wanted to give Charles the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to trust him implicitly, as I had for all of our years together.

  Then I remembered. Elli must have been an infant. It was before we moved to St. John’s Lane, when we lived in the little cottage in the country and used an even smaller cottage on our property as our office. We were there for nine years. Charles started working with Faith close to when Elli was born. Anne watched Elli when I was working, and Charles did mention to Anne that she might recognize people who came on the property, because he knew she and Faith both went to the same church. We both reminded her about the need for strict confidentiality.

  I remembered that Faith used to leave long letters for Charles in our mailbox. I would find them almost every day: fat envelopes, taped closed, Charles written in a chunky, childlike hand on the front. I didn’t think much of it, since our professional mail also came to the same address. One day, though, Charles left one of Faith’s letters lying on the windowsill in the treatment room. I picked it up to put it on his desk, and I saw what at the time seemed to be a sexual fantasy. I only glanced at it, but I still have a clear memory of what I read:

  I love to suck your cock. I dream about it every minute of every day and wait anxiously for the next time I can have you come in my mouth, sucking you, loving you, having you become part of me.

  When Charles came home one evening, I told him, “Charles, I couldn’t help but read that letter from Faith that you left in the treatment room this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, her transference is really intense, isn’t it?” he said, as he got something from the refrigerator.

  “Charles, I was thinking, after seeing the letter and knowing she writes to you almost every day, that maybe it’s too intense; maybe she’s acting out her wishful fantasies.”

  Charles looked up, considering what I was saying. “You’re probably right.”

  “Maybe exploring the meaning of writing the letters would help her contain her acting out and gain some understanding of the behavior.”

  “I thought I was doing that, but maybe not enough. I’ll work on it,” he said, and the letters did stop coming.

  However, Charles had then said to me, when he was about to have an appointment with Faith, “She’s really jealous of you, Di, and I think it would be better if she didn’t see you around.”

  Not only did I work in the same office as Charles did, but I also was his wife. As skilled a clinician as I thought myself to be, I questioned none of it. Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe in Faith’s internal fantasy world it was true, and from that world she spoke to Anne, believing her own words. I will never know the truth about this. I do know, though, that had I ever questioned Charles, his indignation would have been of mammoth proportions. He would have been hurt beyond words.

  “You’re delusional,” he would have said, truly believing his own accusation. Once more, I would have been cast as the villain, he would have usurped the role of victim, and this dynamic would have further justified his contemptuous disdain.

  His disdain. I recall a time when I was standing in the kitchen on St. John’s Lane, before my diagnosis. Albert, Charles’s father, a slight, bearded man, mouselike in his manner but also mean-spirited and critical, stood next to me by the kitchen island. Marcy, Charles’s mother, was at the table, harmlessly chattering about the weather, as she often did.

  “Marcy, cut it out,” Albert chided her, speaking to her as if she were a three-year-old, with disdain and disrespect. Just a simple phrase, but the tone, the scorn, was so familiar. That was the first time I really heard it, the first time it really penetrated my solid internal wall and resonated deep within me. It was Charles. This was his model of what a marriage was, and this was the way he spoke to me now, the way he had spoken to me for years. It was at the root of my rages.

  “He is such a bastard,” I blurted out to no one but myself after my phone conversation with Anne. The call had stirred a flood of memories, and I was unable to contain them, remembering Albert and thinking of Faith. They spewed out effortlessly, just as they had all those times in the two years before I began my analysis. And I allowed myself, for just a moment, to imagine disemboweling Charles and his girlfriend Victoria with a carving knife that lay invitingly on the kitchen counter.

  PART THREE

  August 1999–September 2000

  Chapter Nineteen

 
IN JULY, WE MOVED OUT OF THE HOUSE ON ST. JOHN’S LANE and into a rented townhouse. A small part of me was still blindly hopeful that our marriage was salvageable.

  By the time I finished my thirtieth radiation treatment, close to a year since it had all begun, I had been through two surgeries, eight rounds of chemotherapy, and high-dose chemotherapy with a stem cell transplant. It was late August now, and we were taking a trip to Cape Cod. When we had planned the vacation, I hadn’t even considered that a camping excursion after twelve months of treatment might be strenuous. Charles certainly had not considered it, either, or if he had, what it meant for me was of no concern to him. There was a conference he wanted to go to—that was what was important. At that time, I was just glad he wanted us all to do something together.

  The sky was gray and foreboding—an omen, perhaps, of what was to come. Elli and Sammy were bickering in the back of the Suburban, their way of dealing with the heaviness that filled the truck. Packing up for the trip that morning hadn’t gone well, and the tension between Charles and me was thick. I hadn’t planned on saying it—the thought had never even crystallized—but as we drove, I found myself asking, “Are you still having contact with Victoria?”

  Without a pause, Charles replied, “You didn’t believe me when I told you I wasn’t seeing Marissa anymore.”

  And so we drove for hours, saying nothing more. It was at just that moment that I knew with certainty that something had been irrevocably lost. On the radio, Barbra Streisand pleadingly sang, “What Kind of Fool”—words that couldn’t have been truer.

  After many hours of driving, we arrived at the campground. It was nice, in spite of the cold drizzle that fell as we unloaded the truck. In my excitement about Charles’s desire to take a family vacation, I had found a place where we could camp in a big tepee. I thought the kids would enjoy it, which they did, even the pungent odor that woke us each morning, a nocturnal gift from the skunk that sprayed the tent each night. In retrospect, though, I wonder if the skunk was a messenger of the stink that was to come.

  Charles went off to his meetings each morning, and the children and I ate breakfast, hiked, rode bikes. When he would come back, we went to the beach. He was remote and irritable.

  “Daddy, we’re going fishing today. Will you put the rods together that Momma bought?” Sam jumped onto Charles’s sleeping bag before his eyes opened one morning.

  “Fishing? You want to go fishing?” Charles slid deeper into his bag and went back to sleep.

  “Elli, I’ll get things together for fishing. Why don’t you take Sammy down to the arcade with your bikes? When you come back, we’ll have breakfast, and then we can go over to the lake,” I said, knowing that fishing was going to be an issue for Charles—though I didn’t realize just how much.

  The kids washed up and dressed and then took off on their bikes. I got out the fishing rods I had bought at BJ’s for $10 each and started to put them together.

  Suddenly, Charles approached from behind and said, in his most formal and pedantic tone, “You know, Diane, it’s just like you to do whatever you want to do, never thinking of me. You could have at least asked me if I wanted to go fishing. You know I hate fishing. What a waste of money. We don’t have extra to spend, and you go and buy two fishing rods.”

  I didn’t say it, but I thought, He dragged me camping days after finishing a yearlong treatment for cancer, and I never think of him? My only mistake was agreeing to this!

  Sometimes at night I would awaken and discover that Charles was not in the tepee. I would walk out and see him sitting in the darkened Suburban with the engine running. I didn’t notice that he was talking on his cell phone, or perhaps I just put on my blinders because I didn’t want to consciously know what he was up to. However, several weeks after we returned home and the cell phone bill came, it became clear that in one week he had run up over $250 worth of calls to Victoria. This was the same man who complained about the $20 I spent on fishing rods for our children.

  A weird sound in the truck started a few days before we were due to head home. The next-to-last day of the trip, Charles took the truck, as usual, to his meeting and came back with a rental car. The truck had died; it needed major work and wasn’t going to be ready by the time we needed to leave. We decided that Charles would fly back to Cape Cod and then drive the truck home the following weekend.

  “I wish we had the money so I could go with you,” I said, thinking how nice it would be to have some time just to ourselves.

  “Well, that just isn’t possible!” he said, and he stuck to that response even when my father offered to pay for the other ticket and to stay with the children.

  THE day after Labor Day, the children started back at school, and it was my first day back in the office. I had a couple of appointments in the morning, and to celebrate my return to work, Charles and I walked over to Eddie’s, a local coffee shop, for lunch.

  As we sat at the counter, on red leather stools, I heard conversations buzzing around us and tried to penetrate Charles’s wall, but to no avail. He responded to nothing I said. When we walked back to the office after lunch, Charles a step or two ahead of me, I skipped to catch up with him, to put my arm through his, but he jerked his arm back. I withdrew, and we walked in continued silence.

  Charles’s office was on the ground floor of a small yellow house we rented. It was right next to the secretary’s office and could be entered from there or the waiting room. He also had a door that led outside. Charles, Bernice, our new secretary, and I were standing in Bernice’s office. I was facing the two windows that looked out onto the driveway, at the outside door to Charles’s treatment room.

  As I stood there, a woman appeared suddenly, walking up the driveway. She paused and looked at the white rental car that was parked there. She then moved on toward the door to Charles’s office. I saw her only from the back, a medium-built woman, wearing an unbuttoned white lab coat, with long, dark, wavy hair reaching down her back. It had obviously been colored dark and had begun to oxidize; it had the reddish streaks of hair that needs to be re-dyed. I was very aware of hair, as I had little more than fuzz.

  As I watched her, I almost said something to Charles. When we’d lived in the cottage, we had often joked that it was diagnostic if someone came to the house, instead of the office, no matter how explicit the directions to the office had been. We’d said that the person always turned out to be schizophrenic. So now, as I saw this woman walk up the drive, stop by the rental car, and walk to Charles’s office door—the wrong door—I almost asked, “Is she schizophrenic?” These were words that in the past had connected us. This time, however, I asked only, “Are you expecting someone?”

  “Someone’s just dropping off some medication,” he replied, and said nothing more.

  The next day was Charles’s day in Washington. He left early. I got the children up and drove them to school. Elli was now in middle school, and Sammy was also in a new school. After dropping them off, I headed for home, not having to be at the office for several hours. I came to the light at Park Heights Avenue and, without knowing exactly why, turned left, instead of going straight. Two more turns, and I was at the office, all the time not really thinking and somewhat dazed.

  I parked the car, unlocked the doors, keyed in the combination, and walked in. There were no lights on because no one was there yet; it was early. I went straight back to Charles’s office and directly to the shelves above his desk. I reached up, pulled off the first book and looked for an inscription. There was none. Then I reached up again and there it was, exactly what I was unknowingly looking for: a letter from Victoria. Articulate at times and in tortured English at others, clearly trying hard to match the intellectual depths she imagined the recipient to possess, she wrote:

  My dear Charles,

  Hovering just beneath the surface, caught in my throat, admittedly, but with increasing insistence, is the impulse, thought, perhaps feeling that next weekend’s planned escapade to Cape Cod is not in my best interest
and likely not in yours either, although I hesitate to speak for you. . . .

  When our relationship veered from its intended path, I lost my safe witness. . . .

  I and the others inside, with aching hearts and souls, cannot bear to watch your pain or endure our own pain. . . .

  I fear that you are not actively working on your relationship with Di for fear that your efforts might actually bring the two of you into alignment and place me in some psychological danger. . . .

  If it is our karma to join together, in body and soul, in this universe or another, so it will be. . . .

  I wish you love,

  Victoria

  These are only excerpts. I couldn’t read the entire letter just then. With a deep well of emptiness echoing inside me, I walked into the secretary’s office, turned on the copy machine, and made ten copies.

  Chapter Twenty

  “DI, I STOPPED AT BORDERS AND GOT THESE BOOKS,” Charles said, as he tossed two paperbacks on the table. He smiled as he sat down. “Our anniversary is in a couple of weeks. Let’s get away. Camille can stay with the kids. You pick the place.”

  I glanced at the titles of the books: Intimate Weekends for Two and Romantic Weekend Getaways. It was hard for me to say anything. I looked at Charles incredulously; then, without warning, I got up and ran into the bathroom and retched out the dinner I had eaten an hour earlier. My head was dazed, my skin cold and clammy. Then, spent, I lay down on the tile floor and curled up with my cheek pressed hard against the coolness, not daring to move.

  “Wow, what happened? Are you okay, Di? That was weird!”