“I’
M DETECTING,” SAID
D
R
. P
UREFOY
smoothly, “a certain resentment on your part today.”
“That could be,” I admitted.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asked the doctor, resplendent in a sharkskin suit, an open-collared white shirt and tapering Italian shoes. It was our fifth session together, and the one, I’d already decided, in which I was going to make a clean break. I waited patiently for his long hands to be steepled together, doing my best to conceal the intensity of my pleasure when, after about ten seconds of fraught silence, his forefingers touched.
“I can try,” I said. “I think I feel dissatisfied during these sessions, especially lately, because, well, in all candor, Doctor, they seem to me basically a waste of time and money. We’re getting nowhere at all, at least from where I’m standing, and on top of that it’s like there’s some kind of subtle agreement between you and
my wife that puts me at a disadvantage as soon as I walk in the door.”
The doctor tapped his forefingers together in a gesture that signaled either thoughtfulness or applause while a single eyebrow, with astonishing independence from its twin, rose and then fell. “Disadvantage?” he asked. “What kind of disadvantage?”
“A kind of shadow suspicion, I guess: that I’m the real problem in this marriage, that I’m…either a liar or someone so emotionally bogged down as to be useless, and that I’m somehow not worthy of her finer feelings. That kind of disadvantage.”
The doctor nodded as if expecting this and said, “Hmmm.” After waiting a few seconds, he went on to say, slowly, as if marveling, “Very good, Nick. Very very good. Do we need a more obvious sign of the progress we’re making than this new eruption of candor? Anger in these circumstances is good, it’s honest, it’s something to go on. In distinction to what you said a moment ago, I think we
are
getting somewhere, and I think your…aggression is proof of it. We’re accessing those core truths you’ve been afraid to touch till now, and I applaud you, Nick, for what you just said and how you said it. I believe it signals a new clear channel of feeling between not only you and me but you and your wife as well.”
Once, even a few months earlier, this would have been enough for me. I would have been too eager to please to contest it. But things were different now. I said, “Thanks for the appreciation, Doctor, but it doesn’t change the fact that I just don’t feel good in here. I feel I’m being subtly undermined by you, and I’d like to take this moment to
tell you that I’ve decided to end my participation in these sessions. Of course, you two should feel free to…keep doing whatever you’ve been doing. But I’m opting out.”
Dr. Purefoy had continued nodding encouragingly, even admiringly, I thought, while I spoke. But after I stopped, there was a long silence during which his face, with incredible subtlety, mainly around the eyes and mouth, grew cold. When his voice next came, it contained the specific tone of pitying condescension that had put my teeth on edge from our very first exchange many years earlier.
“I suppose you’ve never heard of the phenomenon of projection, have you, Nick?” he asked.
“Let me put it this way, Doc,” I said calmly. “I think you’ve got a thing for my wife, and what I’d like to tell you is, if you need to talk to me about it man-to-man sometime, then that’s okay.”
Afterward, in the parking lot, Lucy was pale with rage.
“I despise you,” she said, on the edge of tears, “and I’ll never forgive you for what you just did.”
“I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t stand that guy. Your anger will pass.”
“No it won’t.”
“Yes it will, and when it does, you’ll understand that the reason you’re pissed at your husband is because he crashed your little fantasy love boat.”
“You’re a loathsome man,” she said.
“Stop it.” I caught up to her and grabbed her sleeve.
“You really are ill.” She shook me off, yanked open the car door, plunked herself violently down on the passenger seat and crossed her arms.
In response, I exaggerated the slowness and care with
which I opened my own door and sat myself down on the tufted seat.
“You do have a thing for him, admit it,” I said in a throaty, pleasant voice, starting the car and putting it in gear. “Not that I blame you, understand. He’s a handsome guy, and those fancy French shades he wears in his breast pocket alone must cost two hundred dollars, easy. I’ve never heard of a shrink who wears as many fancy clothes as this guy does, and in Monarch no less. Who does he analyze, Barbra Streisand?”
Staring out the window, she said slowly, “He told me you were fixated at the anal-sadistic stage, but I actually think you’ve begun regressing further back.”
“Where to?” I was enjoying this exchange, in a peculiar fashion. “My mother’s fallopian tubes? The thing that really gets me is the way you sit around in front of him with your tongue practically hanging out, and then write him a check for the privilege of having done so.”
She turned to me.
“Thank you,” she said, blotting her eyes with a tissue.
I nodded. “For what?”
“For making everything that’s about to happen so much easier.”
I drove the rest of the way home in silence, trying to tell myself I was glad that something, at least, had been broken open between us. This ebbing sense of triumph accompanied me through the rest of a glacial evening. All of this, I insisted to myself, plumping up the pillow and settling into a thin and dreamless sleep, was for the best. But the next day, without wanting to, and for the first time since marrying her, I abruptly entered into a phase of
wondering what my wife was doing with all her late mornings and early afternoons. I’d never wondered before. I had always simply assumed she was engaged in her daily round of tasks and let it go at that. Over the years, my visual memory of Lucy had begun to fade a little bit from vividness, the detailed daily imagining giving way to a warmly abstract buzz.
But suddenly, for the first time in recent memory, I “saw” my wife. I saw the sexual composite of flat stomach, breasts, and fine nose, and I imagined her moving through the world with those qualities exposed to the eyes of passersby, and weirdly, uncontrollably, I found myself uneasy at that fact. I tried to turn the unease into the more reasoned state of indignation. I told myself that it was unnecessarily provocative that she still be firm and desirable and show it off with clothes that could have been looser, less shaped, more concealing of her essential form. I told myself that this was a kind of disloyalty on her part, and that she better shape up. I watched her in my mind’s eye in line at the supermarket, and I found myself remembering the heavy, hanging open face of the butcher as he’d handed her her package of meat; how the traffic cop who’d stopped her for speeding had leaned in the window in a bizarre access of friendly intimidation and clearly ogled her breasts (and there was something fundamentally sick and twisted, anyway, about traffic cops giving tickets to women in cars and having licensed sanction to look down their shirts the while, wasn’t there?); or the way a certain neighbor, when drunk at backyard garden parties, had let his whole head fall forward in admiration of Lucy, his mouth dropped lewdly open, his nose stuck
out emphatically in the air in front of him in a way, I saw now, that most clearly resembled a penis.
The world was full of men trying to get women. What was there to prevent Lucy from tossing her pretty head and shattering the delicate marital enclosure in which she was (willingly) penned? When we’d gone to the sex club, hadn’t she admitted to a kind of flush of excitement at seeing people doing it in public? The arousal of my wife, a fact that I’d worshipped over the years, also frightened me a little. I’d always depended on her self-control. And yet I knew that when moved to it, she was capable of orgasms far larger, more violent and engulfing than my dribbling evacuations. Once tapped, her desire was a forest fire, a force beyond her or anyone else’s control. I thought I understood, now, why the Islamic world bridled and bitted its women with flowing tunics and darkened masks: because the female form is a nearly insane incitement to men. Tits and asses! Legs and pussies!
A strange new tic installed itself in my nervous system. It was a kind of swallow and retraction of the head, as if quizzically observing some piece of new information freshly alighted in the visual field. Driving my car to work, eating lunch with colleagues, I did the tic. I watched myself doing it. I didn’t like it but I did it anyway. I was simply holding too much inside. I knew I was. Lucy was right that I’d always believed there was something “strong” about this kind of impassivity. She was correct that I’d always connected manliness with swallowing the nasty thrusts and cuts of life in silence. It was she, after all, who had told me after an earlier visit to Purefoy that I was “stuck in a classic male holding pattern” and added, straight-faced,
that I needed to acquaint myself with “the adult pleasures of vulnerability.”
Vulnerability, as it turns out, was not long in coming—although whose vulnerability remained to be seen. One afternoon, about a week after the last visit with Purefoy, the phone rang at work. The phone often rang at work. But rather than a peevish lab tech asking for a raise or a university professor pleading special consideration for a grad student, the voice on the other end was low, sultry, and thrillingly raw: “It’s me.”
“Belinda.” My desk chair whiplashed forward with a squeak of springs. “Well, hi.”
“Hey,” she said, “how’s life?”
“Life?” I looked around the room on reflex, startled, and then pivoted in the chair, extended a foot and toed the office door shut. “I’d give it a solid C plus.”
“Too bad, but maybe this’ll cheer you up.”
“What’s that?”
There was a pause. “I’m breaking up with Taunton,” she said. Taunton was her spoiled rich-kid boyfriend.
“Tell me it ain’t so!” I cried in mock anguish.
“Affirmative, Nick. When I met him he was a regular person with a job and a working set of balls, but ever since the inheritance kicked in, he does nothing but lie around the house buying things off eBay and having ‘enthusiasms’ about things. Do you have enthusiasms about things?”
“Rarely.”
“That’s what I love about you, Nick. From the beginning, it was clear you’d never amount to much, and that’s been a huge comfort to me over the years.”
Alone in my office, I suddenly relaxed in a way I hadn’t in days and cracked a big smile. “Belinda.”
“Hey,” she said, and laughed.
I laughed too, deeply, and then said, “How nice to hear your voice.”
“That’s what friends are for, to quote that shitty song.”
“Amen to that.”
“Right, and now that I’m officially alone I’m feeling freshly freed up for other, uh, possibilities.”
Blood stood up in my chest. In a casual tone of voice I said, “Cool.”
“I’m glad we agree.”
There was a pause. I felt the balance pans of the scale at the center of my marriage tremble, suddenly.
“So are you coming back soon?” I asked.
“Not soon enough. Curtis, out!” A dog barked, high and rapid, and then squealed as she kicked it with her foot.
“Actually,” she went on, “that’s why I’m calling.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m coming back in four days, sugar, and I’ve got you penciled in—and underlined as well.” She giggled.
“Well, great,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll be home for about a month, and you know what?”
“What?”
“I just can’t wait to see you, Nick.”
“Can I let you in on a little secret?” I said, as one of the pans, now filled with engorged weight, dropped toward the bottom of its travel.
“Please do,” she said.
“I feel exactly the same way.”
I
N DISGUST, AS
I
WOULD LATER THINK OF
it, at the deepening squalor of my private life, my father then had a heart attack. I’m not particularly mystical, but the timing of his event—on the same day as my phone call with Belinda—seemed to cry out for connection. Termed a “cardiac incident” by doctors, it was bad enough to put him in the hospital for several days. My mother told me the news in a voice pared to a single filament of exhaustion, and I made the snap decision—and paid a staggering ticket premium for my filial loyalty—to fly out there immediately in a show of support. As we taxied down the runway, I felt relief at rehearsing this literal movement up and away from the dark confusions of late, and when the plane reached cruising altitude, I ordered a vodka tonic as a hedge against my own anxiety. After a few minutes of staring out the window at America—from seven miles up an endless, rolling lichenous green plaque—I fell asleep.
It seemed only seconds later that the tires chirped and the plane shook me violently awake. My first thought was to ask for another drink, but then I looked out the window and saw the bright, irrefutable fact of Phoenix, Arizona. It was the longest I’d ever slept on a flight, and was evidence, clearly, that the recent domestic stresses were taking a toll.
The cab ride to Sunnyside Acres was half an hour, and for its duration, I lay back against the cushions, filled with premonitory dread and ignoring the washed-out desert tones of the landscape around me. I wanted to bolster my father in his moment of need. But I also wanted some questions answered. Against the live backdrop of my love for my sons, the deficiencies in my own upbringing seemed more glaring and inexplicable than ever. I shut my eyes a moment and, thinking about the boys, tried using our attachment as a prism through which to filter information about my own past.
Was one of my sons more obviously like me? Yes. And did that produce between us a more obviously clean channel of feeling? Yes, but only slightly. Was that enough to push the other so utterly outside the inner circle of charmed attention that he felt he’d been chuted into their lives like an errant air-mail?
Absolutely not.
Eventually we turned off the highway and not long after were curving through the grandiose entrance to Sunnyside. In the distance, hundreds of identical cute bungalow-style “villas” dotted a landscaped series of slightly convex hills, looking at a glance like jacks in the palm of a huge hand. Amid these were the elderly, in every
variant of stooped, leaning, pitched and wobbly, congregated in the patches of shade beneath trees. The only time they moved quickly, my mother told me, was when exposed to the direct, killing rays of the sun. The irony was not lost on me that the very thing they worshipped and adored from behind double-paned windows was precisely that thing they feared most. I paid the cabbie, and with a beating heart, stepped to my parents’ front door and rang the bell. The door swung open.
“Nick!” My mother leaned forward, embracing me in a crush of flesh and lilac powder. Behind her I had a dim impression of darkened space. They kept the blinds closed at nearly all hours.
I stepped inside. The house was tidy, spruce, miniature. A slant roof gave the living room a faintly Alpine impression. I spied my father near the modular sofa. Back from the hospital only the day before and wearing baby blue pajamas, he had been installed in an easy chair in a kind of levee of towels and pillows. Instead of getting up, he stared coolly at me.
“So, you’re here,” he said. “Hello, son.”
“Hello, Dad.”
I put my rolling bag down.
“Whyn’t you come over here,” he said. I crossed the room to him and when I leaned forward, he craned upward and in a vaguely papal way, rested his hand on my shoulder a minute. In a moment of reduced expectations, this would have to suffice as greeting. I pulled back and stared at him, the public voice in my head saying, “He looks well.” But I did not utter those words.
“How are you, Dad?” I said.
He nodded, slowly.
“I’ve been better.”
I tried to smile. “You took quite a shot, it sounds like.”
“Nick, it was a little like being clubbed to death from inside your own chest.”
I sat down on the couch, and took in the age-mineralized features, the defensive ice in the eyes, the big nose and the fleshy lips. The lips opened.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Lawrence, stop it,” said my mother, sitting down across from us and smoothing her dress. I felt her scrutinizing gaze against the side of my face.
“You do look a little underslept,” she said softly.
“That’s because I am,” I said.
“Aren’t we all,” said my father.
“Would you like something to eat or drink?” she asked.
“No, not quite yet.”
There was a pause while it was borne in on me that none of us knew quite what to say. My relationship with my parents had been conducted intermittently and by phone for so many years that in the face of my actual, physical presence, we were all a bit self-conscious.
“What’s the prognosis?” I asked.
“Bed rest,” said my father, “some pills, as little fun as is humanly possible, and maybe I’ll scrape by.”
“What your father means”—my mother’s lips drew down into a disapproving crimp—“is no drinking.”
“Verboten, sonny,” said my father. “The end of joy in life. From here on in, when I wake up in the morning, that’s as good as I’ll feel all day.”
“It was a warning shot,” my mother said, “what happened.”
“I doubt it’ll be that bad,” I said.
“Doubt all you want,” said my father. “It will.”
He leaned back on his green Barcalounger. “But enough of all that. Tell us something good, Nick.”
I paused before the breadth of possible answers, and decided to stick with a safe response. “Well, the boys and I went to shoot bows and arrows recently. That was fun.”
“Ah, and how are the boys?” asked my mother, eager to reenter the conversation on solid ground.
“Fine.”
“And Lucy?”
“The same as ever,” I said.
“What’s that mean,” my father said, “her heart still beats, her eyes still open and shut?”
“Lawrence,” said my mother, “stop it.”
“I don’t mind you asking, Dad. Things are okay at home, but sometimes I feel that I don’t do enough with the boys.”
“But why would you say that?” she asked. “You’re a very good father.”
“Am I? It seems to me there are so many ways to be a bad father that it can be a bit overwhelming. Sometimes I think that for mothers it’s easier. They have a kind of genetic playbook on how to be with their children. But the fathers are always improvising, making up ways to build bridges to their kids. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” my mother said.
“No,” said my father. “‘Bridges to their kids’? What are you, in some kind of men’s support group now?”
“Lawrence,” my mother said again.
“Actually,” I said, “on certain days I think I’d find the idea of a support group like that appealing.”
Weakly, my father blew derisive air through his nose as my mother stood up.
“I’ve got a cold tuna casserole and I’m just going to whip up some salad. Does that sound good to you, Nicky?”
“Great, Mom.”
She went into the kitchen while my father and I sat in stolid silence for several long moments, interrupted by my mother’s return with a tray of heaped appetizers and drinks. Dinner, following promptly thereafter, was a strained attempt at high-heartedness, and the return to a kind of willful gaiety I remembered all too well from the years after Patrick’s death, when at my birthday parties in particular, a rotely festive atmosphere reigned.
We were all exhausted, and went to bed early. I slept badly, on the rippled mattress in the guest room. The next morning, having forgotten to shut the blinds, I was awakened early by a shaft of sun in my face. My mother was still asleep. But my father, to my surprise, was already sitting in the easy chair, wearing a pained, somewhat weary expression. I entered the room quietly, still in my pajamas, and acknowledged him with a tentative smile.
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
“Groggy, thanks.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine for now.”
I approached the lounge chair, and sat on the couch. There was a moment of silence, while both of us stared at the louvers of the main patio window beyond which
the watered green backyard staked a brave, wavering claim against the desert.
“I’ve always loved the morning,” he said quietly.
“Really?” I said encouragingly. “Why’s that?”
“You know, when everything’s shining, and nothing’s happened, and the whole day is just waiting for you to go forward into it? It could be a lottery-winning day, it could be a completely average day, but you don’t know yet, and that’s part of what’s so special about it. It’s like every animal, when it opens its eyes, probably has that same morning moment.”
I was touched by the vein of poetry suddenly opened up in this normally dry pragmatic man. I’d have liked to encourage it, but I knew that in only a few minutes my mother would wake and we’d be returned to our more formal triangulation, and I had some questions I wanted answered. I said, “That’s nice, Dad, that you appreciate that. But can I talk to you a second about something else?”
“Of course.”
“What it is,” I said, “is the stuff that came up in that phone call we had recently.”
“What’s that, son?” He turned toward me with a smile.
“You know, about childhood and Patrick?”
I watched the smile crumple from the inside out. “That again?” he said “You came all the way down here to tell me you’re still upset about something I said to you on the beach thirty years ago? Nick, please, I’m not supposed to laugh, it’s bad for my heart.”
I swiveled my gaze away from him, and stared at the wall, holding the image of the kind of candor I wanted in front of me. I addressed that candor, saying slowly, “What it is,
Dad, is that I’m going through a difficult phase right now, and I’m trying to get clear about things, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the disproportion between the way you treated me and the way you treated Patrick and the cold kind of arm’s-length feeling I had, growing up. Over these last few months it’s been preying on me, I don’t know why. Not to beat a dead horse, especially now, with you being sick, but if we could talk about it a little bit—if we could clear the air and dispose of it once and for all, that would be a very good thing.”
My father looked at me—really looked at me—for what seemed the very first time since I’d arrived. I was amazed to see how, within the rather washed-out territories of his face, his eyes were full, rich, shining.
“Your mother said there was some difficulty at home. Is
that
what all this is about?”
“No, yes, I don’t know.”
“What’s going on there?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Honestly, I don’t know, but this is not a great period.”
“How bad is it?”
“I think we may be separating.”
“Christ,” he said. “Really?”
Another silence.
“I hope not, but maybe. But you know,” I began, “I’d still like to discuss this other—”
“Pardon my asking,” my father interrupted, “but do you still love each other?”
“Love?” I said, and felt some formless thing shift under the surface of my skin. “Yes,” I said slowly, “I think I do still love her. I still find her attractive. I still enjoy her
company, and feel some kind of gratefulness…for everything.”
“Then what is it?”
Gently, persistently, cunningly, my father continued to deflect my inquiries. It felt bad enough to be bringing up this ancient material at all, especially given his condition. Worse still was that he ignored it.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“I’d be lying if I told you I knew,” I said. “She claims that I’m absent lately, simply not there, stuff like that. But”—again I shrugged my shoulders—“I don’t know. She’s gotten insanely jealous recently as well.”
He cleared his throat.
“Well, it’s never easy,” he said in a low voice.
“What?”
“Marriage.”
“Don’t I know.”
He cast his eyes once around the room. “Do you? In my day, there was no alternative to it. You didn’t ‘live together.’ You didn’t have a ‘summer of love’ in your pajamas. No, you tied the knot, and if it was a hangman’s noose, well, tough titty on you because you didn’t even
think
about slipping it. But nowadays, what’s marriage? Kleenex is what. So it didn’t work? You wad it up and throw it out. Come here.”
I picked up my chair and crab-walked over to him, sitting down close. He beckoned me closer, and as I leaned toward him I noticed the faint, sourly fleeting aroma of the hospital. “I’m only human, you think there weren’t times I wasn’t distracted in my marriage to your mother? I was gone, AWOL, somewhere else entirely, and for years too.
We passed a good long time in the deep freeze together, your mother and I, and sometimes I regret it, but not for me, for her,” said my pale, drained father, recently granted a reprieve from the grave, and in the wake of it, unnaturally eager to talk about his feelings. “I regret she didn’t get more of what she needed from me. Look, if you want your wife, you can find a way to keep her. She’s your wife, for Chrissake. And if it’s her happiness you’re after then you gotta”—incredibly, he slowly waggled his hips under the bathrobe—“make her happy by wooing her a little, if you get my drift. Make nice with her in bed, and cozy up.”
Where had the autocratic cold father of my childhood gone? For a moment, this barrage of deathbed sincerities almost made me miss him.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Life is short. Concentrate on the essentials,” he said.
“Right.”
“Breakfast is served!” announced my mother, mysteriously appearing at the living room door; I hadn’t even heard her wake up. “To the table, gentlemen!” she cried, in a voice that mimicked the sound of happiness but was drained of it. Obviously, this line of conversation with my father would have to wait. We had returned to our more formal configuration of three, and I sensed (correctly, as it turns out) that I wouldn’t get another chance to be alone with him before I left. On the heels of that perception, getting to my feet to eat, a deep deflation swept over me. Not that this deflation was shared by other members of the family. “Take her to bed and remind her of who you are,” whispered my merry, heartsick father, rising from the vault of his sea green lounger like a submarine.