by Anne Bernays
“I haven’t found the right words.” I got up and started pacing around the room, then stopped by the window below which lay the bay, reflecting the moonlight in silver slashes. It got to me; every time I looked at it, the bay was saying something different. David talked behind me, still sitting at the table. I could imagine the slight frown that went with the pretty speech. He told me that it was hardly news that my marriage had languished to a point where it seemed unlikely to get up and dance again. “The guy doesn’t make you happy,” he said. “Anyone can see that.” He told me it was hardly news that he and I were great together, great in bed and out of it. “I make you feel good. You make me feel good. Tell me, Dannie, what’s to keep you where you are?”
“Momentum,” I said. “The known.”
“You’re afraid.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m terrified.”
The next day, after David left, I drove back to Watertown. No traffic. My neighbor, Alicia Baer, knocked on the back door as I was washing up after breakfast. “Something tells me you need to vent,” she said. “Do you have a cup of coffee for me?” I gave her the coffee and asked how she knew so much about me. “All this coming and going,” she said. “And always alone. Unnatural.”
“Well…” Not only had she been spying on me, but she showed signs of being a bit more confrontational than I was prepared for. I suppose she figured that taking care of Marshall gave her the right to speak her mind. Besides, there was something forceful about her that obliged me to talk. I trusted her not to spread my good tidings all over the neighborhood. So I briefly painted a picture of me bathed by indecision and panic. She asked me if I loved David (I didn’t tell her his last name) and I admitted that I thought so but I couldn’t be sure. “At the beginning, how do you know whether it’s love or lust?” Alicia didn’t try to give me an acceptable answer. “The trouble is,” I said, “by the time you find out which it really is, it’s probably too late. The bridges have been burned.” She reminded me that I didn’t have to marry David. I could simply move in with him. The children were grown and I couldn’t use them as an excuse to stay put. So the only real impediment was Tom. Wasn’t that true? Alicia asked if my HMO provided for therapy. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to talk to a person whose profession it was to help you climb out of some muck you’re in up to your eyeballs.
It was easy enough to find out that my HMO gives you ten almost free hours if you can convince your “primary caregiver” that you need it. Not for a second did I believe I was going nuts, but I was sure I could persuade my thirty-something doctor that my anxiety was as stubborn as a case of psoriasis. As it turned out, I didn’t even have to visit her. When I called her, she asked me, “How old are you now?” and when I said fifty-three, she seemed to think it was standard for a woman my age to need help. “Just wait, honey,” I thought. She gave me a couple of names and then reminded me that the kind of therapy they offered was strictly short-term. That was fine with me, as I wasn’t up to doing any serious archeology. I made an appointment with a man named Gerard Casell—emphasis on the second syllable, as he told me over the phone when I called him Castle. He turned out to be in his forties, wore chinos (this seems to be the uniform for guys who wish they could wear jeans to work) and a tan polo shirt. He plied his trade in an office smaller than Raymie’s new clothes closet. There were photographs on the wall—technicolor mountain scenes avec mist, which I assumed he had taken himself. We got down to business soon after “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” when he asked, “And what brings you here?” I couldn’t stop thinking of that scene in the movie You Can Count on Me, when the Laura Linney character goes to see her minister to confess to sleeping with her married boss and the minister refuses to tell her what she wants to hear, namely, “You’re a sinner and you’ll burn in hell if you don’t stop right now—and maybe it’s already too late.”
“I’m cheating on my husband,” I said. “If I were younger or a different sort of person, I assure you I wouldn’t be here at all.”
“What sort of person would that be?”
“A person who thinks it’s okay so long as the husband doesn’t find out. I guess I’ve got a fairly active conscience.”
“I see,” he said.
“So what do I do?”
Dr. Casell cleared his throat. “As I see it, you have two choices. Either you stop seeing this man or you develop a more passive conscience.”
“How does one do that? I mean the conscience thing?”
“I suppose you consider the short-term and long-term risks and decide with your head, not the other place. How much does your commitment to your husband mean to you as against your devotion to—what did you say his name was?”
“David.”
“David.”
“Is it true,” I asked, “that I’m somewhat old-fashioned? The younger generation is much cooler about sleeping around?”
“In my experience,” Dr. Casell said, “they think they’re cool, but no one wants his wife messing around with other men. It doesn’t sit well.”
“But it’s perfectly fine the other way around? I mean, men don’t think their wives will mind if they mess around—or maybe they don’t think about their wives at all?”
“It’s true,” he said, “that men outnumber women in that category.” He sighed deeply as if considering his own record.
Dr. Casell’s phone rang, a red light on its dashboard blinking on and off like an impatient eye. He ignored it. But I couldn’t. “You’re not going to answer it?”
He said they would leave a message, having understood he was seeing a client. But it just kept ringing. Finally, neither of us willing to talk over it, he picked up. “Jerry Casell,” he said. “When?” I looked down at my hands. The nails were permanently yellowish because of the paint. I wonder if he had noticed and figured me for a dirty person. “I’ll take care of it ASAP,” he said, frowning. Then he looked at me as if to say, “If you think I’m going to tell you what that was about, please disabuse yourself.”
“We don’t have much time left,” he said. “My suggestion is, when you get home, make two lists on the same page. On one list I want you to write down all the reasons to stay with your husband that you can think of, including the little things, things you might think of as trivial, like what you do together on your birthday. Then, on the other list, all the reasons you can think of to leave him and be with David. Did I get the name right?”
I nodded. This man was asking me to reduce my earth-shaking, life-altering problem to two columns on a piece of paper. I couldn’t believe he was serious. My face must have registered my skepticism, because he asked me whether I thought this “aid” was too mechanical. I nodded again. “Well, yes.”
He told me it was just one of a number of ways of trying to solve a seemingly unsolvable life problem. “Why don’t you just give it a try? It can’t hurt. Do it right away, as soon as you get home. Make sure you write everything down and bring it with you when you come back.” He looked straight at his clock. “I’m afraid that’s all for today.” He got up, edged toward me; he seemed so anxious to get me out of his office that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the hall.
On my last birthday Tom was in Minneapolis, at a conference.
I compiled the lists as instructed. Under Tom, for instance, I wrote “loyalty—mine,” “companionship,” “his pay check.” Under David: “passion,” “conversation,” “his work—I resonate.” In the end the lists were virtually equal in number and substance; they canceled each other out. I went back to see Dr. Casell a few times, then quit, having thanked him and feeling that it had not been a complete waste of time—at least I had reduced my problem from a whirlwind to something that would sit still for a few minutes. I considered talking some more to Alicia Baer. But I suppose the thing that made me want to be by myself so much had come from the same place as my reluctance to bother my next-door neighbor with my problems, especial
ly since all around us things seemed to be coming apart, wars erupting all over the globe as if peace itself was the menace.
In spite of everything, I managed to keep on working, illustrating another book for David, a book for six-to-eight-year-olds about a little girl who wanders away from her family’s vacation cottage and into the woods nearby, where she meets several animals who talk to her and teach her how to live off the land. Eventually, of course, she wanders back, happier but wiser. The story, incorporating an ounce or two of terror, was a cut above the usual drivel. Meanwhile, David bombarded me with e-mails, sometimes several a day. Sometimes he sent jokes. All the jokes were funny. I added that to his list: “great sense of humor.” He sent weird pictures of George Bush, one looking through binoculars with the lens caps on. Other times the messages were personal: “I keep thinking of our shrine in the Rhinelander.” I assumed he was trying to be cryptic, having taken to heart the warnings about privacy on the Internet. But anyone with half a brain could have figured that one out. I put something on Tom’s side: “good judgment.” Almost every night I dreamed about David. Sometimes in the dream David didn’t look anything like the real David, but I knew it was him. He was very tall, with blond curly hair. He had a mustache and wore a striped suit. He was twelve years old and carried a fishing rod, like Tom Sawyer. He was an old-fashioned doctor with a long white coat—all David. In every dream we shared passionate kisses, then engaged in steamy sex. Sometimes I woke up and realized that I had had an orgasm while dreaming.
Beth too sent me e-mails, though not so often as David. My affection for this method of communication deepened and I wondered how we all managed before the Internet. Instant talk, love, attitude, assurance. Beth was getting along “okay.” This probably meant that disappointment had colored her life black. Otherwise she would have sounded enthusiastic. I asked her what she did all day. It seems that a good deal of time was spent either breaking up fights or trying to get the kids “off their asses” to do some work. The food was “crappy” (what had she expected?). And among the other so-called counselors, she had made only one friend. The rest were “losers.” I sighed for her, hoping at the same time that she would get fed up with the job and come home where she belonged. As for Mark, this kid amazed me: he sailed through life as if it were a constant lark, laughing off things that would have sent other people reeling—being fired, having his apartment broken into and half his stuff stolen, a speeding ticket for two hundred dollars. Nothing seemed to cloud his sunny disposition. He came to the house for dinner several times a month, often with a girl in tow, never the same one twice. He usually brought me something he’d picked up at one of the neighborhood food shops. How had he come by his wonderful ballast? Not from me, certainly.
Chapter
8
DOES INERTIA TRUMP denial, or does it work the other way around? A mildly engaging question if you have nothing better to do than split hairs, but why ask it since both denial and inertia put you in the same, morally limp place.
On a sun-drenched morning in April, while I was loading the dishwasher after breakfast, Tom sat at the kitchen table, drinking his third cup of coffee, when he said, “Dannie, there’s something you and I have to talk about.” For any collector of ominous phrases, this ranks right up there near the top.
“Well,” I said, not turning around to face him and talking over my shoulder, “we haven’t really talked much for—how many weeks? I’d say four or five at least. What do you have in mind?”
I guessed what was coming but I didn’t want to make it easy for him; I wanted him to squirm and, in this, he obliged me. “I think, that is, I’m sure that our future together went off the tracks sometime last year. I don’t know what happened, but we seem to have lost whatever it was that used to keep us connected. Damn, I don’t know how to say it.”
“Let me try,” I said. “Our marriage has ground to a halt. Fuel tank’s on empty. No more water in the well. Whatever.” And even as I tried to be clever, I was reeling from the blow that seemed unexpectedly brutal. Hadn’t I been aching to exchange Tom for David for weeks now? But having Tom say I’m through first left me sprawling, with him standing over me, a broad smile of triumph on his face. I wanted it both ways: I wanted the cake and I wanted to eat every last crumb. What was I thinking? Who has it both ways? And while I was sure he knew nothing about David—chiefly because he didn’t care enough to wonder about my trips to New York, my distracted behavior—in less than a minute I had joined the company of abandoned wives. Or, not so pretty, dumped. Tossed, along with the broken lamp, the burned-out toaster, the collapsed deck chair. The damaged wife sits on a shelf in the swap shop at the dump waiting for someone to notice her and bring her home and fix her up.
“You can’t be all that surprised,” he said. “You spend more and more time in Truro, I’m here by myself. How did you think I was managing? Or did you think about it at all?”
“Jesus, Tom, why didn’t you say anything? I can’t read your mind. You want me to read your fucking mind? How would I know if you never said anything? You’re so focused on your work and your conferences, I thought you liked it this way. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I shouldn’t have to. The way we were living isn’t normal. And I can tell you I don’t appreciate the way you’re talking to me!” His cheeks were getting blotched, turning spotty with something—anger or sorrow.
“Who wants to be normal?” I said this in a voice louder than I had intended, and having turned to face him, I realized that he was actively suffering. Tears had started down across his cheeks and his hands were twisting the paper napkin as if it were a tiny neck.
“I thought maybe things would be better when you came home this time, from Truro, but they haven’t—they’ve gotten worse. What more can I say?” He got up from the table and started to climb the stairs to the second floor. I followed him into our bedroom.
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Does this have to do with what’s-her-name, your little kiss-ass student—or would this have happened anyway?” It had come to me better late than never that Tom had a girlfriend and her name was probably Judith.
“What’s-her-name’s name is Judith Levy. Maybe you won’t believe me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but this was probably inevitable. Judith happened to come by at the right time.” While we talked, he “packed.” That is, he was shoving underwear and other essential items into a duffle bag. “Where are you going?” I said.
“I’m not sure yet. I may eventually move in with Judith. She’s got a condo in the South End. Plenty of room.” How effing convenient for him. What was Judith doing with a condo in Boston when she lived in Philadelphia? This maneuver must have been in the works for quite some time.
Tom straightened with a small effort, a small grunt. He looked around our bedchamber as if it were a hotel room and said, “I’m sure you’ll find someone quickly. Maybe you have already?”
“You men think a woman can’t live without a man. What makes you think I want to find someone?” That seemed to leave him baffled. “I just assumed,” he said.
“Please don’t assume anything. I stopped assuming anything to do with you a long time ago.” I was fangs and bristles. His leaving erased, in one swift moment, all the good things we’d done and had together. If the last thing you taste is bitter, then your entire past seems bitter.
“I’ll come by for the rest of my stuff later,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything.”
I considered that a truly patronizing remark, a remark he had no right to make. “I’m having a hard time not throwing something at you.”
“Please don’t be so angry,” he said. “It’s not all that easy for me either.”
“You could have fooled me,” I said, my inventory of ill will and fury filling up faster than it was emptying. “You really are a prick,” I said.
“I think it’s time for me to split.” He scribbled something on the pad
next to the phone. “Here’s where you can reach me—should you have to.”
An hour or so after Tom left the house (during which time I sat down in the living room and tried to put myself back together again), I called Raymie, while strangely light-headed, as if this couldn’t be happening. My reaction to Tom’s leaving reminded me of September 11, a year and a half earlier, the unrealness of it, the sudden, hideous theatricality. This when the bogus turns out to be real but also more demanding than human understanding can absorb.
When I called Raymie to tell her what had happened, she said, “You can’t be exactly caught off guard, can you?”
“It’s the shock,” I said.
“It’ll take a while,” Raymie said. “Then you’ll get on with your life.”
“What is my life?”
“Whatever you make it,” she said.
“I’m too old,” I told her as shame began to melt into self-pity.
“If this was the Middle Ages, you’d be dead. It’s two-oh-oh-three, so you have the chance to live maybe another thirty years. Find yourself a guy and—”
“Raymie!” I said, interrupting. “How can you say that? Tom hasn’t been gone an hour and you’re already suggesting a substitute. How do I know I want to live with another man—who’ll turn out to be just another prick?”
“Not all men are pricks,” Raymie said. “May I ask you something?”
I told her to go ahead.
“Do you know what happened to make him leave?”
“Judith Levy. That’s what happened.”
“What’s she got that you don’t have?”
I said I didn’t know, except she didn’t seem to have the requisite number of scruples.
“Did Tom ever ask you not to stay in Truro alone so much of the time but to spend more time in Watertown with him? Did he ever tell you he was lonely?”
“No.”
“Well, he told me.”
