The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  He stands up and braces himself on the doorjamb. This is no ordinary hangover. Maybe food poisoning, the burger he ate at the bar. But if so wouldn’t he be throwing up or at least sitting on the can? Instead, he feels like crying, giving up, giving in. Conscious of holding himself together, putting one foot in front of the other, he finds Jodi on the sofa, legs curled underneath her, not reading a magazine or a cookbook, not talking on the phone, not doing anything. He sits beside her, lets his head drop to her shoulder.

  “I’m spoiling your afternoon,” he says.

  “Not really.” She seems distracted, a little remote. “I’ll do some grocery shopping and then get started on dinner. Maybe a chicken soup would be the thing.”

  “You must have other plans.”

  “Nothing important. Taking care of you is what matters right now.”

  “I feel like getting back into bed.”

  “Why don’t you? Sleep it off. Get a fresh start tomorrow.”

  “Chicken soup sounds good. Are you going to make it with dumplings?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “What would I do without you. I’m sorry I’m not a better husband.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You’re under the weather, that’s all. I’ll make up the bed for you. Why don’t you lie down here until it’s ready.”

  7

  HER

  When her kitchen devilry, her little bit of domestic mischief, instead of going down in history retains its status as a private and incidental matter just between the two of them, she counts herself vindicated. The speed of his recovery—within twenty-four hours he was right as rain—was a meaningful confirmation of her good instincts. She didn’t think that eleven pills would kill him, and they didn’t.

  With disaster averted she is back in her comfort zone, able to laugh at her fears. Dean’s version of things is almost certainly unreliable; that’s what she’s decided. She’s come to the conclusion that Dean is not to be trusted. For the moment at least, he isn’t himself but a man whose basic assumptions about reality have been forced into abrupt revision. His oldest friend turns out to be a predator; his daughter is not the sensible girl he took her for. It’s a given that he’s temporarily out of his mind. Besides which Dean has always been too quick off the mark. Prone to theatrics. A bit of a prima donna. She, Jodi, is the one who knows Todd best, and one thing she knows for sure is that home is important to him. Not just for Todd but for most men, home is the counterpoint that gives an affair its glamour. An affair by definition is secret, temporary, uncommitted, not leading to the complications of a longer-term arrangement—and thus its appeal. Todd has no intention of marrying this girl.

  As a child Natasha was unremarkable, and after her mother died she ran wild. Jodi remembers her with black lipstick and spiky hair, a potbelly and chewed fingernails. It’s hard to imagine that she’s grown up to be in any way attractive. What Todd is drawn to is her youth, a girl half his age taking an interest in him. Men are like that; they crave the reassurance. Certainly Natasha Kovacs is not a force. Not anyone to be reckoned with. Todd is in it for the short term. That’s his pattern, and everyone knows that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

  It’s a good thing that she, at least, is stable, mature, and loyal, capable of holding a marriage together. The world is full of damaged people and without the sane ones to take up the slack no couple would be safe. She does it willingly, gladly, pleased to be the fully functional member of the union, the one with the clean bill of mental health, the one who enjoyed a happy childhood and emerged without a psychological deficit. She’s clear about this, the fact that she is capable and sane. During her school years she went through a course of psychotherapy. Her badge of self-knowledge has been hard-won.

  The psychotherapy came about through one of her profs at the Adler School, who thought she would benefit from finding out firsthand what it felt like to sit in the client’s chair. Delving into her own psyche, he said, would show her how to help others do the same. She knew that he didn’t make this recommendation to all his students and wondered why he had singled her out but never got around to asking. What she did know was that some schools make a personal course of psychotherapy a basic requirement for graduation. Jungian students, for example, are subjected to rigorous personal analysis throughout their training.

  After university, when she was making up her mind to do additional studies and before settling on the Adler School, she looked into the Jung Institute as one of her options. She liked Jung’s idea of individuation, the process of realizing oneself apart from one’s racial and cultural heritage, in Jungian terms a way of attaining wholeness. People must arrive at their own understanding of life and its meaning, aside from what their elders may have taught them. But on the whole she found the Jungian approach to be arcane, having a locked-box kind of appeal that arose from Jung’s attraction to mysticism and symbolism. A Jungian once told her that to live meaningfully would mean to experience herself as a participant in a symbolic drama—a suspension of disbelief that she could never quite attain. Adler appealed to her more with his pragmatic views on social interest and goal constructs.

  The therapist she chose, Gerard Hartmann, was an Adlerian and like herself a counseling psychologist, but Gerard was older and had more credentials and more experience. She was in her twenties then, and he was in his forties. On Tuesday mornings she arrived at the vintage high-rise on Washington Street near the park in time for her ten o’clock appointment and sat with him in a room that was heated and air-conditioned indiscriminately, which got her into the habit of bringing a couple of sweaters, whatever the temperature outside, that she could put on or peel off as needed. The other important thing she brought to her sessions was her understanding of the underlying premise of psychotherapy, a premise that broadly cuts across the schools of thought, namely: Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you grew into your present shape and form in the garden of your early childhood. In other words, your orientation to life and the world around you—your psychogenic framework—was already in place before you were old enough to leave the house without parental supervision. Your biases and preferences, where you are stuck and where you excel, how you circumscribe your happiness and where you feel your pain, all of this precedes you into adulthood, because when you were very young, in your naive, impressionable, developing self, you assessed your experiences and accordingly made decisions having to do with your place in the world, and these decisions took root and grew into further decisions that hardened into attitudes, habits of mind, a style of expression—the you of you with whom you have come to identify deeply and resolutely. Having understood this theoretically through her schooling, she was prepared to encounter it practically in her therapy. Her ease and composure in facing this prospect sprang from her belief that in her case it would be painless, given her good beginnings and healthy outlook.

  She took an immediate liking to Gerard, who had a large measure of the kind of manliness that emanates from sheer size and bulk—big head, big feet, broad chest and shoulders, impressive height. He was hairy to boot, with a lush, dark mane and sprouting wrists, and he smelled of cigarettes and car upholstery, smells that she associated with men and masculinity—her father, her uncles. Gerard also had a bit of a squint. The way he looked he could have been a cowboy, but he fought that image by always wearing a suit and tie and never removing his jacket, apparently oblivious to the fluctuations in the temperature of his consulting room.

  Sitting across from him on the first day, taking in the pen and notebook that he kept on the arm of his chair but rarely used and his habit of giving her all the time in the world to answer any question, she thought he looked tired, even worn-out, had been through too many difficult wrangles with clients. But his habitual rueful expression said that he regretted their pain, and hers, too, and that he was caring, sympathetic, and safe.

  “Tell me the very first thing you remember” was the way he began, and she recounted t
he memory that came into her mind.

  “I was in the hospital having my tonsils out, but that part my mother told me later. The part I remember is standing up in my crib and looking around the room at the other babies in cribs and feeling distraught when one of them started to cry.”

  He waited, so she said, “I couldn’t understand why that baby was crying. And I wanted to find out.”

  Still he waited, and finally she said, “I guess I had an early calling to psychotherapy.”

  That made him laugh. She was glad he had a sense of humor.

  He asked for more childhood memories, and she came up with another half dozen, and then he asked for still more. She was of course familiar with the Adlerian approach to early recollections and knew that Gerard wouldn’t care if her accounts were accurate or even true. To an Adlerian, your memories are simply your stories; their value lies in the way they reflect your attitudes. Fertile ground for the therapist, but she had never applied this filter to herself. Not being the sentimental type, she did not keep memorabilia, not even a photograph album, and she rarely thought about the past. What surprised her now was the groundswell of feeling that each recollection brought with it. The remains of days gone by were not the antiquities she thought they would be, not fossils, but fresh, still alive and jumping.

  She remembered a party dress with a tartan pattern and velvet trim, her mother using a curling iron to set her hair in ringlets, the time her tongue stuck to an icy railing, spraining her wrist falling out of a tree, baking cookies with Granny Brett, her father reading her stories, her older brother pushing her on the swing, playing house and hopscotch and clapping games with the other kids, giving her friend a bracelet that she would have preferred to keep for herself and when her friend lost the bracelet regretting her generosity. From school she remembered a pretty girl named Darlene who she wanted to emulate and a girl named Penny who gave a wrong answer to the question: How many in a trio? Penny said two. With each event came the appraisal, what she had decided at the time: She liked being a girl, was not going to benefit by being a show-off or a daredevil, men were nice to her, playing with others was fun, it was okay to be selfish when it mattered, she could copy the things she liked about Darlene (her excellent posture, for example), she was smarter than Penny, and she had the potential to make something of herself.

  The disclosures continued over the next few sessions. She told Gerard about her entry into psychology, that she’d seen it as a calling—but may have been misled. From the age of seven or eight she’d been known in her family as the house shrink, the one who could pacify her younger brother, Ryan, who was prone to nightmares, tantrums, and self-biting. “Get Jodi,” they said when he was bleeding or thrashing around in his bed.

  She doted on Ryan. She’d hold him close and rock him to sleep or distract him with jokes and games. The upshot was that her parents praised her and she took the praise to heart. But comforting your little brother bears no resemblance to working with clients on their blind spots and grappling with their anger, jealousy, loneliness, and greed.

  “We do our best,” said Gerard.

  “What if your best isn’t good enough?”

  “If your clients know that you care about them, that’s half the battle. Emotional support in itself can do wonders. After that you rely on your training and your wits.”

  “What about aptitude? That has to count for something.”

  “It’s like any other job. You work at it. You get better with practice.”

  Gerard grew in her esteem, became an anchor that kept her stable in uncharted waters and also, in a way, her muse. A nod, a word, a gesture from Gerard could be a marker and a prompt. His dependable squint and mellow vowels were coconspirators in the enterprise of drawing her out. Even the room itself, the neutral colors, the uniform light, and the quietude, with only an occasional burst of voices from the hallway or a distant bump or thump as of a door closing, but muffled, as if under water, could turn the crank of her memory, take her back to the jurisdiction of her earliest years, bringing them once again to life.

  In spite of all this she did not have high expectations, did not foresee much of anything coming from her work with Gerard. Her inclination was to take it for what it essentially was: part of her education, another leg of her training. Because, after all, it wasn’t as if she had come here with problems. Indeed, her life at the time was going exceptionally well. The client who had shattered her confidence by committing suicide, young Sebastian, was slowly but surely receding into a measured distance where the picture included factors other than her own negligence, and meanwhile she and Todd were in their blissful third year of being a couple, still in the brash, lingering phase of going everywhere together, going out just to be seen in all their concupiscent glory. She had never been more in love and had never entered so fully into the pleasures of the flesh, not even in her first year of university when she went through a phase of what she could only describe, even then, as wholesale promiscuity.

  Inevitably, she and Gerard got onto the subject of her parents’ marriage, especially their silences, which apparently struck him as fertile ground for discussion, judging from the way he kept coming back to it. But it was old terrain for her and held no surprises.

  Gerard: How was it for you when they weren’t speaking to each other?

  Jodi: I guess it could make things tense for us kids.

  Gerard: Did it make you tense?

  Jodi: Sometimes it made me laugh. When there were dinner guests and my parents were fawning over them—you know, focus on the guests so you don’t have to talk to your spouse—I’d look over at Ryan and he’d be crossing his eyes and clutching his throat and I’d start to laugh and then he’d start to laugh and we’d be sitting there shaking with laughter and trying not to spit out our food. That happened a few times, actually. That kind of thing.

  Gerard: Laughter is a great release.

  Jodi: I don’t know that it was such a big deal, them not speaking. I mean it was for them, obviously. But I didn’t see that till I was older.

  Gerard: What did you see?

  Jodi: What he put her through. What she had to put up with. It was a small town and everybody knew what was going on. I think it was the humiliation that got to her more than anything. The idea that people pitied her. She felt demoralized.

  Gerard: So your father was unfaithful and your mother felt demoralized. What was the effect on you?

  Jodi: Funny, I just remembered this. I followed him to her house once.

  Gerard: Tell me.

  Jodi: She was a customer. She’d come into the pharmacy. And I’d always notice what she was wearing and how she acted and what she bought. Cough drops, usually. And Valium. He was always filling her prescription for Valium. She’d get dressed up—lipstick, skirt, heels—it was all so obvious. She was very unashamed, and I found that shocking in a way.

  Gerard: Go on.

  Jodi: She came in one Saturday when I was there helping out, and as soon as she left with her purchases he took off his lab coat and asked me to mind the store, but I closed up and followed him instead. I guess until then there was room for doubt. But it was very graphic, very final, seeing him climb her porch steps and ring her bell, and seeing her open the door and let him in.

  Gerard: Did you say anything to your mother?

  Jodi: What would be the point?

  Gerard: Did you talk to him about it?

  Jodi: No. I think that even then I understood. This woman, she was a widow. It was one of those Vietnam stories—husband comes home in a wheelchair and a few months later dies of an overdose. My father started something that he may have regretted, but he couldn’t just abandon her.

  Gerard: And your mother didn’t leave him.

  Jodi: It would have meant breaking up the family.

  Gerard: In her position, what would you have done?

  Jodi: If I had three kids? I guess I would have done the same. Stuck it out. But you learn from their mistakes, right? I won’t put my
self in that position.

  Gerard: How do you mean?

  Jodi: I won’t get married. I won’t have a family.

  Gerard: You say that very emphatically.

  Jodi: It’s how I feel.

  Gerard: In a way it puts you in the position of paying for their mistakes.

  Jodi: I want to be in control of my life. I want to be happy.

  Gerard: Happiness is not something we can prescribe.

  Jodi: If I ended up like my mother I would only have myself to blame.

  But her parents’ troubles were adult troubles and hadn’t much affected her life as a child. It would have been hard to improve on her thriving middle-class family with its solid core values of hard work, earning power, community spirit, and education. Or on her stable, balanced childhood filled with summer holidays, piano lessons, swimming practice, church on Sundays, and sit-down family dinners. Growing up, she was loved, praised, disciplined, and encouraged. She did well at school, made and kept friends, went on dates with boys, and entirely missed going through any sort of awkward phase. An only girl in a family of three children, she was cushioned between an older and a younger brother, and in her talks with Gerard it came to light that this, too, had worked to her advantage. She was spoiled but no more nor less spoiled than the baby of the family, her younger brother, Ryan. And her older brother, Darrell, was enough years older to be a mentor and not a rival.

  At times, during her work with Gerard, her undeniable advantages could make her feel awkward, even apologetic. The way he looked at her (quizzically, hopefully), his habit of waiting for her to say more, to add something to the mix—this could cause her to falter and question herself. There were moments when she felt like a fake—or like he must think she was a fake. It became a concern that he suspected her of dissembling, hiding some deeper truth about herself, failing to disclose a darker, bleaker side of her story, resisting him, resisting therapy. But he never actually said such things, and so she had to conclude that it was all in her mind, a smattering of paranoia, a slight discomfort with the psychotherapeutic process.