“Oh, there’s no doubting that,” Dr. Finkelstein conceded.
Suddenly Coco began to cry again. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lecture you, Dr. Finkelstein. You really did help me a lot when I used to come here, but I simply wanted to tell you why I quit two years ago.”
“Yes, Mrs. Burman. But now you’re back.”
“Yes, I know, Dr. Finkelstein, but that’s because I flipped out over a particular thing. I’m having a crisis, and I need some intervention. Because I have really been functioning fairly well since I last saw you. At least, up until now. I haven’t been hysterical very much at all … until last night when Gavin told me”—Coco’s sobs began picking up momentum—“that he was having an affair, and that didn’t seem fair or right to me, because, well, I’m not having one, and, after all, that’s how we got married—from an adulterous affair. I mean, he was the adulterer, I wasn’t, and I don’t have anybody in love with me now, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t if he does, except that if you had four kids and four sections of freshman English and a big house and a billion-zillion things to do, you wouldn’t have the time either. And also I really feel extra badly, because women’s lib really has been very important to me and helped me put men into some kind of perspective that I never had before. You know, I used to gauge and gear my whole life around men, Dr. Finkelstein. Either Gavin or some other man on the side. And I used to dress up for them and be amusing for them and wait for them and look for them and want to be with them all the time. But now I understand how I got that way, and how distortive it was and how it took away my own dignity. Now I feel more at peace with myself than I ever did before. Now I don’t need a man to define who I am, and I don’t have to make myself be who they want me to be. But now that Gavin has done this, has started whoring around, it’s put me back.… It’s like I’m being held back a grade. I finally got over men being the most important things in my life, and now Gavin has started all this sex-love business again; so I’m back in the same bag again. It’s the whole bit all over. I mean, now I’m going to regress back to where I spend all my time thinking about men, so that my own life gets fucked up. And I haven’t been liberated from that shit long enough to have made something of myself in the meantime. I mean, that damn American University is still only paying me $7,490 after seven years of teaching! I mean, is that equality? Is that job opportunities for women for you?”
Coco breathed deeply and looked over toward the Aztec Indian Kleenex box by the empty chair, where patients who actually got promoted (instead of dropping out) could sit in upright position. But then it occurred to Coco that graduating patients probably didn’t have to cry very much anymore, so it was clearly very hostile of Dr. Finkelstein to locate the fucking Kleenex where it wasn’t even needed.
Dr. Finkelstein didn’t make any sound.
Surreptitiously Coco turned her head a little. Dr. Finkelstein’s eyelids were lowered. He was either looking at his fingernails or his notebooks or sleeping.
“Dr. Finkelstein?”
“Yes?”
“What I’m really afraid of … well I know I always sort of act a little bit crazy, but this time I’m afraid that I might really flip out. Like that time I was involved with Jeffrey. That corporate executive in natural gas. Remember Jeffrey?”
“I’m afraid it’s time, Mrs. Burman.”
Coco checked her watch. It was 3:49.
“We’ll have to stop now,” Dr. Finkelstein said. “We can continue on Monday. I have eight o’clock free all this month on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Will that be all right?”
“Oh, yes, thank you, Dr. Finkelstein.” Coco got up. She wiggled her thighs a little to release the crotch of her panties, which had crept up between her buttocks. Then she noticed Dr. Finkelstein watching her curiously from his chair.
Coco clutched her purse. “Well, good-bye,” she said abruptly, and slithered laterally across the office and out through the doorway.
five
Coco took a taxi home, because she was tired, frustrated, hungry and believed that taxis could function as semicolons between parts of the day, and she very much wanted to put a punctuation mark after her highly unsatisfactory return to therapy. When she reached home, she let herself in very quietly, stood in the hallway long enough to ascertain the whereabouts of Gavin and the children, and then glided up the staircase to her bedroom without being caught. But the moment she flung herself down on the bed, the telephone on her dressing table started to buzz and rang several times before she could answer it.
“Hello.”
“Coco?”
“Oh, Daddy. Hi.” She waited a second to see if Gavin would pick up another extension, but there was no click. “How are you, Daddy?”
“Fine, sugar. But how are you?”
“Oh, just fair.” And then Coco began to cry, soundlessly, releasing soft sweet strokes of tears that slid down her cheeks like warm puffs of baby breath when Joshua put his mouth near her face.
“What’s happening, sugar?”
Somewhere along the North Shore of Lake Michigan, Morrie Silverman was looking out of a glass building at a Great Lake that he viewed as his own Little Pond and preparing to tackle his daughter’s problems with speed and efficiency.
“Oh, Daddy, nothing, really. I’m just sort of feeling uptight. You know, Gavin and I are sort of having some problems.”
“Yes. That’s what Mother said. But what the hell’s really going on there?” Mr. Silverman didn’t like to wait for taxis, waiters, information, airplanes, explanations, sales clerks, answers, operators, or breakfast. “Has … Gavin been seeing someone else, honey?”
“Yes. Yes he has, Daddy.”
“Hell. Well, what do you want to do about it?” Mr. Silverman, the most successful prize-fight promoter in Chicago, had no patience for the indiscretions of anyone outside his immediate family—which did not include in-laws.
“I don’t know yet, Daddy.”
“Son-of-a-gun.” Mr. Silverman paused incredulously for a moment. “Well, is it serious?”
“I don’t think so, Daddy. But I do know he’s been—”
“All right, sugarplum,” he interrupted clearly not wanting to hear the details. The Silvermans had never totally accepted Gavin because he had been married once before—to a shieska. “I think what we should do is wait a few days to see what develops. If he’s ready to behave himself and act decently, I think you should let him. But if he’s going to keep it up, then he’d better pack his stuff and get out of there, because it won’t do you or the kids any good having a man around who can’t keep his pecker in his pants.”
Coco smiled at herself in the mirror as salty tears washed down her face.
“What you’ve got to do is keep a cool head on your shoulders, sugarplum. Check out the situation so you’ve got a bead on it, and then we’ll talk again in a couple of days to see whether or not he intends to shape up.”
“All right, Daddy.”
“How are the children?”
“Oh, they’re fine, Daddy. We bought Mikey a two-wheeler a couple of weeks ago.”
“You don’t let him ride in the streets around there, do you, honey?”
“No. He just rides on the sidewalk or over at the park.”
“You know, I think maybe you should send them all out here for a couple weeks. Maybe not the baby, just the big ones.”
“Well, I think I better wait to see what’s going to happen, Daddy. Anyway, I told the university that I couldn’t teach there this summer.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just feel too uptight and done in. I’m terribly tired, and I think I’d rather hang around the house this summer and get things straightened away with Gavin and everything. You know.”
“Sure, sugarplum. But are you going to keep the schwartza?”
“Oh, Daddy. Please. Please don’t call her that.”
“Well? Are you going to?”
“Yes.”
“So how
are you going to pay for her? And what’s this Mother said that you wanted to go to a psychiatrist? What’s the matter with you? Are you nuts or something? You know how I feel about psychiatrists.”
“Yes, I know, Daddy.”
“Please, sugarplum, don’t start in with any of that crap. And I’m going to send you out a check to help you get back on your feet. How’s that?”
“Oh, that would be nice, Daddy.”
“But don’t you spend it on any psychiatrist. You hear me, Coco?”
“Okay, Daddy.”
“You buy yourself a couple new dresses or something. Or take the kids out to a nice restaurant for dinner a couple nights and give yourself a vacation from cooking.”
“I will, Daddy. Okay. Thank you. Have you been feeling all right?”
“Sure. Why shouldn’t I? But you take care of yourself, sugar, and make sure you’re eating enough.”
“Okay, Daddy. And tell Mother not to worry.”
“We’ll be talking to you soon. Kiss the kids for me.”
Click.
Coco changed tactics that night, because while she was in the bathroom waiting for Nicky to put his entire naval fleet through their war maneuvers (after reading the terrible bathtub tragedy in Rabbit, Run, Coco never left any child alone in the tub) she had time to put on makeup. Then, later on, when Mike came into her bedroom to talk, she hid behind her closet door and wiggled into her favorite white T-shirt dress. (Coco’s 11:00 M-W-F had read Oedipus during spring semester, which made her super-wary of seducing her eldest son.) So on the basis of having had time to repair herself while getting the kids to bed, Coco decided to lay some sugar on Gavin instead of vinegar. She paid Mike a quarter to read Jessica and Nicky two chapters out of Barbar (unfortunately, they were each in different parts of the book), and feeling potentially sexy, hurried back downstairs, where Gavin was watching the network news.
Then Coco set the stage in the dining room for her evening performance. She arranged fake flowers in a vase on the table, put out her best orange linen napkins, liberated one of the last bottles of white wine from the broom closet, splurged on glass goblets (which couldn’t be put in the dishwasher), hurried the box of Uncle Ben’s wild rice absorbing water on the stove, and several times finger-tasted the chicken Kiev that Mrs. Marshall had boned, seasoned, and baked. Finally Coco tossed a self-consciously stylized salad with three kinds of lettuce (excluding boycotted iceberg), and then, feeling supercompetent, summoned Gavin into her theater supperclub.
While serving the food, Coco mentally reviewed her agenda of conversation topics. After Gavin had punctured his chicken so that the tarragon-flavored sweet butter blurted out over his shirt, Coco gently provided a damp paper towel from the kitchen, she sat down and began to chat disarmingly. Like a guerrilla directing enemy attention away from a strategic site about to be sabotaged, Coco asked Gavin about several of his current cases, particularly the suit being brought by several survivors of the D.C. 10,000—who were suing the police department for brutality during the May Day demonstration.
After passing Gavin the oven-hot butterfly rolls, she mentioned that the City Council was considering the enactment of a schooltime curfew for anyone under sixteen. With Youth Wants to Know ingenuity, Coco asked if such a regulation might be unconstitutional. Since Gavin’s great passion was constitutional law, Coco felt she had scored several points by having found a constitutional issue in the City Section of the Post.
Over salad and their third glass of wine, Coco casually mentioned various sorts of summer vacations, one with the children and one without, probably during the late part of August. Gavin strained to seem pleased and contributed two exotic vacation-spot suggestions which were fairly imaginative but which made him look sick, since he hated to travel. For dessert, Coco produced some instant Jell-O Chocolate Whip, which she casually called mousse and served in small earthen brown pudding cups.
And Gavin, impressed by the friendly dinner and eager to believe in Coco’s miraculous resurrection as a self-controlled, self-restrained wife, smiled happily. At frequent intervals he sent Coco looks of loving passion down the long table above the tops of the candles, the now-empty wine bottle, and the tall fake flowers. He had obviously convinced himself that Coco, somehow—for some reason—had, during the afternoon away from home, forgiven him his indiscretion, forsaken her hysteria, forgotten her excessive outrage at his semiconfessed peccadillo, and come to understand how, in many ways, she was responsible for pushing him into adultery.
After finishing his second cup of coffee, Gavin leaned back, looked through the dim light, and said, “Tonight we’re going to go to bed early.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think we slept more than two or three hours last night.”
Coco finished her last glass of blanc de blanc, smiled in a manner which made her eyes glisten, and chose an appropriate opener against her now de-fused and disarmed enemy.
“I saw Dr. Finkelstein today,” she announced casually.
Gavin’s head jerked up, and his eyes went on alert. Dr. Finkelstein meant trouble to him, either in the original or in translation.
“Already? He saw you already?”
“Yes. He had a cancellation this afternoon.”
“Oh. So that’s where you were.”
It was strange that this was the remark which triggered her anger. Coco sipped a little empty air from the bottom of her wine goblet and felt her lips tighten with rage. “Oh? Were you wondering where I was, Gavin?” An edge of ice crept into her voice. “Did you feel a little uncomfortable stuck at home while I was off wandering around in the big outdoor world?”
Gavin set his small features into a miniature wall of resistance. “Oh, so we’re going to get into it now, huh? I was feeling pretty good since that was the first decent dinner you’ve fixed in months, and now we’re going to have to hear all about it again, huh?”
“Well, what did you expect, darling?” Coco murmured. “The car key and my Diner’s Club card to charge your hotel bill?”
Gavin pushed his chair away from the table. “Look. Don’t start in again. I can’t stand anymore hysteria. I mean it, Coco. I can’t take anymore of it. It makes me sick to my stomach. That shit doesn’t go anywhere, and it doesn’t settle anything. It’s fucking counterproductive.”
“Well, what did you think, Gavin?” Coco asked again in the same flat voice as before. “Did you think it was all right for ipsy-bipsy to go fucking around while I worked full time with a hundred and seven freshmen—freshmen shipped here from Long Island. Did—”
Gavin stood up, blew out the candles, and walked quickly out of the dining room.
Coco piled the leftover food onto the serving platter, pushed it into the middle of the table, where Happy couldn’t reach it, and then ran into the den. Gavin was lying down on the couch, so Coco folded herself into the green corduroy armchair near the television set.
“Dr. Finkelstein thought if you made a clean breast of things, if you told me everything I want to know, it would help me get over it quicker.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” Gavin said without looking up. “No decent psychiatrist would ever say anything like that.”
“How would you know, Gavin? You’re too good to go to a shrink, aren’t you?” Coco pulled hard on her cigarette, happy now that the enemy had been engaged and the battle begun. “You’re the only man in the world who leaves a perfectly fine first wife to marry someone else without ever going to see a shrink to find out why you did it.”
“Oh, keep quiet,” Gavin began. “Just forget it.”
“Forget what, Gavin? Forget that you’ve got a girlfriend?” She paused. “Actually, maybe I could forget it if you would just tell me how it was.”
“How what was?”
The ten-o’clock anchormen were trying vainly to capture Coco’s attention with a come-on series of international crises.
“It,” she said.
“It?”
“I mean, with her.”
“Oh, Coc
o. Please. I’m not going to talk about that. If I tell you anything, you get hysterical, and besides, there’s no reason to talk about it. It’s all over. It’s done. I wouldn’t have even mentioned it if it was still going on.” Gavin pulled the big pillow from beneath his head and placed it on his stomach. He began watching the news.
Coco went into the kitchen, made herself a gin-and-tonic, and then returned to the television room. “Oh, Gavin, I wish I could stop thinking about it,” she said melodramatically, standing near the couch and half-watching to see what the late movie would be. “If you just tell me everything, once and for all, then I’ll be satisfied. I promise I won’t talk or ask about it ever again.” She smiled alluringly, although she couldn’t tell if Gavin was looking at her or at the television set. “I mean, maybe if you and Ann had been able to talk about me, your marriage wouldn’t have broken up.”
Then she went back to the green corduroy chair, sat down with her legs tucked neatly beneath her, and began again. “You know, I really don’t like to feel like a dentist extracting teeth, one detail at a time. That really freaks me out. I mean, all day today I’ve been wondering what restaurants you went to or if you ever bought her a present, or did she wear a nightgown, or is she prettier than me, or how old she is.”
“Look,” Gavin said, drumming time on the pillow with his fingertips, “I know that it hurt you, honey, but I’ve promised that I’ll never see her again. Trust me now. I never gave a damn about her, and I swear I’ll never touch another woman ever again. But you’ve got to knock off the hysteria, or you’re going to drive me out of my mind—not to mention out of the house!” Then he turned to study the credits for Splendor in the Grass over the tops of his shoes which protruded several inches past the end of the couch.
Loose Ends Page 6
