“You didn’t seem to mind about the humping part. Not, I gather, that you’re in desperate need.”
There was a conversation stopper, at least for a few minutes. The problem with silence, so welcome at some moments, was that it could mean anything: “How dare you suggest such a thing” or “How did you find out?”
Finally, Russell said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me, Russell. Why should I have to do all the work in this relationship?”
Thinking back on it as he walked away from Peter’s newly minted neighborhood, Desmond saw that the conversation had, at that point, hit a patch of black ice, one of those invisible hazards of driving in unpredictable climates, and gone into a swerve. The only way to wrest control of the vehicle, he’d been taught, is to steer into the swerve—face it head-on—which unfortunately happens to be completely counterintuitive. Rather than discussing the book and the eyeglasses and his own suspicions and calmly pumping the brakes, he followed his heart and swung the wheel back and forth wildly, as if he were driving a bumper car. In the volley of indirect insults and evasions that followed, they’d narrowly missed hitting a tree, but had ended up stuck in a snowbank on the side of the road, Russell acting as if Desmond had offended him, Desmond refusing to beg for more information.
When he looked up again, he realized he’d sauntered downtown and was walking along the edges of Times Square. He glanced around, looking for a familiar landmark. In the years before he met Russell, he’d often wandered down here when he was feeling lonely, stuck in his work, or swamped with unspecified anxiety. He would stroll through the movie theaters, the bookstores and arcades, the strip joints, until he was anesthetized by the sweet stink of flesh and the heat of anonymous intimacy. Nothing looked familiar today. The community of furtive men—bound together by rampaging loneliness and lust—had been replaced by groups of shopping and sun-dazed tourists. Families in loud, insignia-emblazoned T-shirts and sneakers swarmed the streets, clutching shopping bags, carrying children, stupefied by spending. It was all supposed to be so much more upright, now that the porn and prostitutes had been driven out; yet there was something far more obscene about this vulgar hunger for stunningly pointless stuff. And at least the cock and pussy hounds of old had the decency to display a little guilt and self-hatred.
He should leap on the subway, go to Russell’s store, tell all and make amends. But like Peter, he’d have to do it when he was ready, and he wasn’t ready yet.
When he looked up again, he was standing in front of the Disney store. The doors were open, and they seemed to be sucking their victims in, right off the street. It made the peepshows and plastic penises, the inept photography of the porn magazines and grimy amateurism of the banished theaters seem quaint, cozy, and downright wholesome. In the five years he’d been with Russell, the world had changed completely. If he’d ended up here with the unconscious intention of avenging Russell’s betrayal of him, he’d come to the wrong place. But there was cool air blowing out from the store, and inside he could hear the siren call of lush, cheap music. If you couldn’t fight your own fate, how could you possibly hope to fight Disney? Maybe there was some childish thing in there he could buy as a present for irascible Gerald.
Fourteen
Specific Plans
1.
If Dr. Berman had been merely overweight, it was very likely Jane wouldn’t have noticed. She herself made no claims of physical perfection, and she rarely scrutinized bodies, male or female, looking for flaws. These days, people talked about an extra ten or twenty pounds as if they were a sign of emotional or moral decay, which just went to show how prudish and puritanical the country had become. But Berman was obese in an exaggerated way she found distracting. As soon as she walked into his office last summer, after a two-year vacation from treatment, she could tell that he’d added another thirty or forty pounds to his frame.
She sat opposite him in his office—a tidy sterile room he’d painted yellow, probably in the hopes that patients would find it cheerful—trying not to notice the way he filled up his chair to overflowing. Almost as disconcerting as his size itself was the fact that it seemed to matter to her. Not that it was anything she could discuss with the good doctor. He frequently coaxed her to talk about their relationship, a topic she found entirely beside the point and nonetheless embarrassing.
Instead of talking about them, she should be telling him exactly what had happened in New Hampshire, the entire disastrous course of events, which, she’d promised herself as she drove out here, was what she was going to do, no matter how humiliating, demeaning, and painful. Berman had his stubby fingers laced together and resting on his belly and was gazing at her with his patented look of calm, benevolent inquiry, his head tilted toward his right shoulder at a nearly imperceptible angle. She loathed these awkward moments of silent staring, but she knew that if she didn’t allow them every once in a while, didn’t force herself to sit, speechless and utterly still, he’d think she was chattering to fill time and avoid an important issue. She wanted to be sure—and hated herself for wanting it—that he didn’t think of her as one of those neurotic time bombs she saw in his waiting room, pinched, nervous men and women sitting there, ready to implode.
The hideous vertical blinds over the window were directing sunlight in her eyes. Best not to start complaining about that, she reminded herself, or Berman would see the whole thing as another diversionary tactic. The session was almost half over and so far she’d managed to talk exclusively about Sarah, another useful time filler.
As the silence began to stretch thin, Berman’s eyes opened wider—his speechless “Well?”—and she saw that he was rapidly approaching boredom.
“I think I mentioned that I went to Dale’s wife’s family’s estate over the weekend.” She kept the tone casual, as if it were of little consequence.
“Yes, you did mention it.”
Of course he wasn’t about to ask her if she’d had a good time, something as direct and simple and conversationally normal as that, something as helpful as that. Better to hand her some rope and see if she used it to hang herself.
“It’s a lovely place—trees, water, mountains. Or maybe they’re officially hills. It’s New Hampshire, so they’re probably mountains. I wasn’t taking in much of the scenery. Among other things, it was unseasonably hot. Not that there are reliable seasons anymore. It’s one of those old family estates Grammy or Gammy or Bammy bought back in the good old days, when you could have indentured servants and didn’t have to pay taxes. I’m sure the acreage is haunted by the ghosts of people who died keeping the Wade family in firewood and ice.” Maybe she was beginning to sound unappreciative and resentful of Caroline, who had, after all, been lovely in every possible way. Considering what had happened, she couldn’t even utter Caroline’s name. “Still,” she said, “an impressive place in its self-reverential way.” She brushed some lint off her skirt and adjusted her wristwatch. “We came back a day early.”
The head tilted just a fraction more to the right. “Oh?”
“Dale was involved in some business crisis back in Boston. He was completely preoccupied, and we felt we were in the way.”
“Both you and Thomas felt you were in the way.”
It was one of those annoying statements that was really a question, a prod in a particular direction, not asking for information directly, but restating what she’d said in the hopes that she’d stumble along and reveal more than she’d intended to reveal. After all these years, she knew every one of Berman’s tricks, the inflections and wordings he used to prompt her. Somehow, she still fell for them; before she could stop herself, she was saying, “Yes, we had a family discussion and we agreed we were in the way, with all the phone calls and his bad mood and whatever was going on behind the scenes.”
“You and Thomas discussed it and were in agreement.” He was nodding, not necessarily an indication that he believed her.
“Yes. And then we left.”
Th
at should be blunt and unambiguous enough to satisfy him, nothing to echo back to her as a verbal trap. It was the truth, too. They had left. So why did she feel so hollow and defeated right now, so magnificently frustrated? She could see her plan for telling all slipping out of her grasp. Not that she intended to go into detail. Some people claimed to give their shrinks the whole hard-core, X-rated version of their lives, fantasies included, but that was mostly bragging and flaunting of conquests. It would take some doing to make the episode on the chaise longue pornographic; she’d been fully clothed throughout, a detail that mattered very much to her at the time and mattered more, as a point of pride, now. But clothed or not, she’d been so undone, physically and emotionally, by the way Dale had touched her—kept touching her, refusing to stop—and by the smell of his body and the hot sting of his breath, she’d been unable to move for half an hour after he straightened himself out and left the room. And when she finally did get up, she felt bruised and raw, still tender from the release of all that pent-up passion, still wet. Two hours later, she had to sit at the dinner table having polite conversation with Caroline and Thomas, with Gerald sitting there scowling at her as if he’d witnessed everything. When Dale stood behind Caroline and put his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck, she’d felt a wave of jealousy and relief that was so confusing, she went out to the porch and smoked one of Caroline’s cigarettes.
Thinking about what had happened that afternoon, she felt a miserable trickle of arousal. With the sun shining in her eyes, she felt needled and panicked. Berman wasn’t going to help her sort all this out, she could see it clearly now, and she wanted out of this room. Either that or to collapse against Berman’s big, soft stomach and make a full confession. She was so desperate, the thought of his plump hands smoothing down her hair struck her as appealing. And yet, she could see the distance between what she wanted and what she knew she was going to get opening up in front of her. “The sun,” she said, way too loudly, “is right in my eyes!”
“Would you like me to close the blinds?” Berman asked.
“No,” she said. “I’d like you to dim the sun. Of course I’d like you to close the blinds.”
Berman heaved himself up out of his chair and fiddled with a beaded cord, letting in a wider flash of white light, and then, finally, shutting it out altogether. The room was suddenly dark, as if a lamp had been turned off, quieter somehow, the atmosphere more unexpectedly intimate. He returned to his seat and looked at her with his bland, forgiving expression, refusing to be insulted by her tone.
“Now I should apologize for my sarcasm,” she said.
“Do you want to apologize?”
“Oh, please, Dr. Berman, please. I’ve been coming to you for a total of three years, off and on; I’ve poured thousands of dollars into your bank account, I’ve talked my throat dry, and you’re still tossing rhetorical softballs at me as if I hadn’t progressed out of the batting practice stage. As if I’m just another one of your patients.”
She looked up at him. Nothing. He appeared to have absorbed this comment as unflinchingly as he absorbed everything else she said. Their eyes met for a few seconds and then he reached over and turned on the light beside his chair. “Oh shit,” she said. “Now I have to apologize for that slip and explain that I really do know I am just another one of your patients and that I’m not some special case, but that—shoot me—I’d like to think I’m a little bit more sane and sensible and self-aware than that sunburnt skeleton I see in your waiting room every Tuesday or some of the other wrecks—whose lives, I know, believe me, I know, are undoubtedly more organized and orderly and focused than mine—and would like to hear something from you other than the usual, predictable, textbook therapeutic, Psych 101 jargon.”
Jane clutched the arms of her chair, trying to prop herself up, trying to look in control, even though she felt a peculiar weakness in her thighs. She was melting. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. That at least would be something concrete, something you could slap a label on. Berman was his placid self, but in the soft shadows, his face looked handsome and disconcertingly sensual. She’d probably have to lift her shirt and unhook her bra to get a reaction out of him. Fortunately she hadn’t said that out loud. He raised one eyebrow and crossed his feet at the ankles, like a polite schoolgirl. Expensive brown socks with flecks of gray, she noted, undoubtedly presents from his wife.
“All I mean,” Jane said, “is that I’d like you to say something unpredictable. Does that make me a horrible person? And please don’t bounce that question back in my face; it’s obvious I think it does make me a horrible person or I wouldn’t bother to ask.”
Berman shrugged, a gesture she hadn’t seen him use before, and the newness, the unpredictability of it alarmed her. In an unfamiliarly stern tone of voice, he said, “Maybe you’d like to say something unpredictable yourself.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Jane, you.”
“Such as what?”
“It’s up to you. But if you’re looking for a suggestion, you might start by telling me what happened in New Hampshire.”
Had he ever, in all the years she’d been coming to see him, called her by her first name before? She thought not. In phone messages, he called her Ms. Cody and in person, he avoided her name altogether. “I thought I just told you what happened.”
There was something hard and determined in Berman’s eyes. Apparently she’d insulted him with her earlier rant and now he was getting back at her. “I know you think you did,” he said.
His head came over again and his dark, small eyes narrowed and he unclasped his fingers and put his hands somewhere in the direction of his hips and she saw the whole situation very clearly: he knew exactly what had happened in New Hampshire. He’d probably known what had been going through her mind from the moment she mentioned having coffee with Dale, had probably known it had been drinks that first time, not coffee at all. So in addition to the humiliation of him knowing that she’d been carrying on a heavy flirtation with her ex-husband and had had a—what would you call it? A fully clothed orgasmic encounter?—he knew she’d been avoiding full disclosure. He was now in a position to sit in judgment on two counts. And, on top of it all, she was paying him for this.
They were back to their staring contest. She commanded herself not to blink. “I did tell you what happened.”
“Good,” he said.
She experienced a moment of triumph and then, somewhere deep inside her, heard a door slam shut. She glanced over at the digital clock beside Berman, the clock with the vast, bright numerals, just so no one could mistake the time and squeeze another sixty seconds out of his day. She had another six minutes to fill. It was like being trapped in a vault with a time-release lock. She hated most sessions with Berman these days, but these early morning sessions were the worst. What a way to begin the day. She should try yoga or meditation, something where you didn’t have to pay for the privilege of providing all the entertainment yourself. “So as soon as we got back from New Hampshire,” she said, “Sarah came over to the house to tell us that her heat wasn’t working. As if we didn’t know it had been in the eighties all weekend.”
But now Berman was merely staring at her, not nodding, not encouraging her with his usual, subtle head movements. A numeral clicked over on the digital clock. Five more minutes.
2.
The morning air, damp and with a trace of Canadian cool in it, woke her up as soon as she stepped outside. The entire session had been like one of those brief, intense naps that leave you drooling and disoriented. It was over, that was the best you could say about it. She could cancel her next appointment, just to show him . . . something. She turned right and walked along the sidewalk, buoyed up by the sudden appearance of autumn and the cancellation plan, then realized she hadn’t left her car in this direction. She turned around and walked back, past Berman’s building. But after walking another half block, she couldn’t be sure she’d left it in this direction either. A light changed on
the corner and traffic roared up Commonwealth Avenue. The trolley through the center of the street screeched along the tracks. She looked across the trolley tracks, hoping she’d left the car there. She was edging toward panic. She’d find the car eventually, but it troubled her that there was such a wide, dark hole in her memory.
She looked down the street, vaguely in the direction of Back Bay. Somewhere in that tangle of buildings was Desmond’s small, quiet room with its circular windows and pretty, obstructed views. What a joy it would be to live in that kind of stripped-down, uncomplicated arrangement, one in which there wasn’t room to hide anything. So what if you had to walk down the hall to reach the toilet. Her throat tightened, and her breathing became more strained.
If Berman looked out one of his windows, he’d be able to see her, spinning in circles, muddled, pacing back and forth like a lunatic. He wouldn’t look out one of his windows; he lined up his patients with barely a minute between appointments. A truly crazy person who didn’t have control over herself would grab one of the passersby and beg for help. She wrapped her jacket around her more tightly and it came to her at once: she’d left her car on a side street just steps away.
But as she headed in that direction, she thought about Desmond again, about his simple room, his simple, absentee relationship. Maybe he was unhappy from time to time, unsatisfied, lonely, but surely he wasn’t misplacing his car and walking zigzags at ten in the morning. That was what she wanted, that simplicity. There was only one thing to do, one way to turn the day around, make up for not having told Berman about Dale: prove Berman’s suspicions wrong. Call Dale and call the whole thing off. By the time she went back for her next session, the whole business would be in the past and it wouldn’t matter that she hadn’t brought it up. Her life would have the simple clarity of Desmond’s and she’d use all of this energy to move their joint project forward. Progress. Going to Berman had done her some good, after all. It wasn’t time and money down the drain.
True Enough Page 23
