There is really no need for you to try to keep all of my therapists straight. There have simply been too many of them. My most recent therapist was named William, and he had vertigo. I for one had always suspected that vertigo was a made-up condition, the sort of thing moviemakers come up with to explain why the hero can’t cross the bridge to save the girl, but William had actual vertigo. It got so bad that during our sessions he’d sort of worm down out of his chair and lie down on the floor at my feet. “Go on,” he would say. “I’m just having one of my attacks.”
“Maybe I should go,” I said the first time this happened.
“Why should you go?” said William. He was staring up at me from the carpet. “Does this make you uncomfortable?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why are you uncomfortable?” said William.
“Because my shrink is lying on the floor,” I said.
“My lying on the floor is a reasonable response to my attack of vertigo,” said William. “Why should that make you uncomfortable?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just does.”
“Does it trigger any sexual feelings in you?” said William.
“None whatsoever.”
“I find that hard to believe,” he said.
“And why is that?”
“Because you are attracted to unavailable men, men like Tom, who even though he is your boyfriend is emotionally unavailable to you, and I as your therapist am by definition unavailable.” All of this from the floor.
“You don’t seem that unavailable, William.”
“Do you mean you think I have sexual feelings for you?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
“Well, I do,” he said. “Shall we explore them?”
I should of course have stopped seeing William, but I didn’t. You have to keep in mind that I was paying only thirteen dollars a session, and for thirteen dollars a session I was willing to put up with a certain amount of unconventional behavior on the part of my therapist. And I didn’t want to make any waves at the clinic, because if anybody ever really examined my file, they’d figure out pretty quickly that they should raise my fee. Which is, unfortunately, exactly what happened approximately three weeks before the night of the dinner party. When I showed up for my regular Monday morning appointment, the director of the clinic poked her head into the waiting room and ushered me back to her office. She sat me down in front of her desk and calmly informed me that William wouldn’t be working at the clinic anymore. He’d had to be carted off to the loony bin in a straitjacket and everything, although the director didn’t tell me that part, Yolanda the receptionist did. Apparently it was quite a scene. Anyhow, it turned out that I was the only one of William’s patients who hadn’t complained about him, which is how come I’d ended up in this woman’s office. She figured I must have some sort of problem. Of course, everybody at the clinic had problems, she just figured I must have really BIG problems.
All of which is to make the simple point that, although I had been in therapy for just over eleven years, I did not, at the time of the events in question—the events that make up this story—have a therapist. Nor, I might add, was I fixed. I did, however, have a certain affinity for, and interest in, and familiarity with the inner self. Which is why, now that I stop to think about it, the fact that all of this came as such a surprise came as such a surprise. I mean, eleven years of psychotherapy! A father who left when I was five! You don’t even have to dig that deep to get at my subconscious—it’s all right out there in my life, masquerading as fate. The truth is, I could draw diagrams of why what happened with me and Tom happened; I just haven’t been able to figure out how you get from understanding
why
the bad things that are happening to you are happening to the point where you manage to avoid them altogether. That’s the part that eludes me at every turn. That’s the part I’ve never been able to get a straight answer on, not from any of my therapists. I actually put the question to Janis Finkle—my last real therapist, the one who immediately preceded William—at our final session, and she said to me, “You don’t.”
“You don’t?” I said.
“You don’t,” said Janis.
“Then what’s the point?”
“What do you think the point is?” said Janis.
Well, I haven’t figured out what the point is. Another thing I haven’t been able to figure out is whether the religion of my childhood is the source of my neurotic problems or the cure for them. I have figured out a few things, of course, but for the most part, none of them seem to apply.
L
ATE THAT SUNDAY NIGHT, MY DOORBELL RANG. I HAD SPENT
the previous twenty-four hours at home, alone, waiting for just this moment. And I was fully prepared. I had a long speech worked out in my head, a speech that opened with a blanket condemnation of Tom’s despicable behavior and segued into a psychological study of all three parties involved and eventually worked itself around to the idea that I loved Tom and he loved me, and we could get through this thing together, with the two-pronged proviso that he agree to see a couples’ counselor and promise never to speak to Kate Pearce ever again. It was a pretty good speech, and the truth is I was anxious to try it out. I went over to the front door and peered through the peephole.
“I have something awful to tell you,” a man who was not Tom said through the door. “Your boyfriend is having an affair with my girlfriend.”
I unhooked the chain and opened the door.
“You must be Andre,” I said.
“How did you know?” he said.
“I know all about Tom and Kate,” I said, “so I figured you must be Andre.”
There were several things about Andre’s appearance on my doorstep that made me feel better, but the most obvious was that he was so clearly in worse shape than I was. I’m not talking about what he was wearing (a green tracksuit), or the fact that he obviously hadn’t shaved in some time—rather, that Andre’s going to the trouble of tracking me down and knocking on my front door was so plainly an act of complete and utter desperation that I felt relatively sane in comparison. I let him in, and we sat down at the kitchen table and immediately started in on a bottle ofTom’s good scotch.
“Tell me everything you know,” Andre said. “And then I’ll tell you everything I know.”
I didn’t know much. Actually, the only thing I really knew was that Tom and Kate had been having lunch together, and Andre just nodded his head impassively at that, because he already knew about the lunches. Andre, it turned out, knew everything. He’d been spying on the two of them for months—for five months, to be precise, which is exactly as long as the affair had been going on—and whatever he hadn’t been able to figure out by spying, Kate had told him outright when she’d finally broken up with him four days before. She’d wanted him to move out of their apartment, and Andre had stubbornly refused to budge—believing, or so he told me, that they could work things out as long as they didn’t do anything drastic—so she recounted humiliating detail after humiliating detail about her affair with Tom, hoping, I suppose, to appeal to his sense of pride. I’d only known Andre for about fifteen minutes, but I had a sense that appealing to his pride was the wrong approach.
“And then when she realized I wasn’t going anywhere, she finally left,” Andre said.
“Where did she go?” I said.
“That’s one of the things I thought you might know,” he said.
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “And I don’t see how knowing that would do either of us any good.”
Andre just looked at me like I was utterly and hopelessly naive. Clearly it would be necessary to ascertain Kate and Tom’s whereabouts if he were to continue spying on them.
“Why do you want her back so badly?” I said.
He took a deep breath. “She’s like a drug.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“I can’t get enough of her,” he said.
We just sat there a moment, Andre with a lovesick look on his face, and just when I was about to suggest that it might be time for him to leave, he turned to me and asked what Tom was like in bed.
“I’m not going to tell you that,” I said.
“Come on,” Andre said. “I need to know what I’m up against.”
“I don’t think how anyone is or isn’t in bed is what this is about.”
Andre stared at me blankly. “Then what do you think it’s about?” he said.
“I think Tom’s going through a stage, and he needs to figure some things out.”
“Really?” said Andre.
“Yes. And I’m not going to overreact,” I said.
“You’re very together, you know,” Andre said. “You seem like a very together person.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’re nice, too,” he said, nodding his head thoughtfully.
“Thank you.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“My mother is dying. She has cancer of the pancreas,” he said matter-of-factly, and then he reached across the kitchen table and took hold of my hand.
Now, this made for an awkward moment. I couldn’t tell if we were holding hands because Andre’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, or because our lovers had left us, or because we were both drunk. I gently pulled my hand away.
“I’m sorry,” said Andre.
“It’s okay,” I said.
I swirled the scotch around in my glass with my liberated hand.
“I guess you could be right,” Andre said. “It could just be a phase.”
“I think it’s a stage,” I said, “not a phase.”
“What’s the difference?” Andre said.
“A stage implies growth,” I said. “You go through a stage, you come out the other end up a level.”
“And a phase is what, then, just nailing some stranger?”
“Yes, and like I said, I don’t think that’s what this is about.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Now that we both know about it, it won’t last much longer,” Andre said.
“Why do you say that?”
“She’ll get bored with him,” he said. “And then she’ll kick the shit out of him. And then you’ll get him back.”
This wasn’t exactly how I pictured Tom coming back to me—brokenhearted, tail between his legs, shit kicked out of him by his demon lover—but it would do. It would have to.
I love him,
I thought.
“I love her,” Andre said. It sounded much worse when he said it than when I thought it. “I can’t help myself.”
“Ninety-five percent of happiness,” I said, “is picking the right person to love.”
“What’s the other five percent?” said Andre.
“That I don’t know.”
Andre eventually left, but not before giving me his card and taking down my phone number and making me swear to alert him if I found out any new information and promising to alert me if he found out any new information. I didn’t see how new information was going to do me any good, especially since the information I had just received was more than enough to send me right over the edge. I mean, if there’s one thing I know about a woman who is like a drug, it’s that she’s better in bed than I am. Not that Tom and I had any major problems in that department, it’s just that I’ve come up with my own definition of great sex as being sex without any need for discussion, and sex without discussion is pretty much impossible for me.
Anything
without discussion is pretty much impossible for me. Sometimes I wish I could be one of those people I see walking down the street who appear to have no inner world whatsoever—although it’s certainly possible that these people have inner worlds, I suppose that one of the definitions of an inner world is that it is not apparent to others when they see you walking down the street—but you know the sort of people I mean. People who manage to go through life without
thinking
about everything all the time.
I know that when something like this happens to you, when your boyfriend or husband leaves you because he’s been having an affair with another woman, you’re supposed to say something like, “It’s not the sex that bothers me, it’s the lying”; but the truth is that in my case it was the sex. I was always very clear on that. Getting all worked up about the lying seemed altogether beside the point. Even after Andre left and I started piecing things together, reconstructing various lies Tom told me about late nights at work and six-hour Saturday afternoon squash tournaments and weekend business trips—all of that was never anything more than an intellectual exercise, a masochistic one to be sure, but still. The part that really got to me, the part that woke me out of a dead sleep, was always Tom and Kate together, Tom and Kate having sex. I thought about it constantly. I’d picture me coming home early from work, unlocking the front door, walking up the stairs, unlocking the door to our apartment, putting my purse on the hall table, kicking off my shoes, walking into the bedroom, and catching them having sex. I’d make a little yelp of surprise and then I’d run away, down the stairs and out the front door, because it seemed like what one would do in such a circumstance, but also because I wanted to see if Tom would chase me. I wanted to see if Tom, in my fantasy, would at least have the common decency to get of bed and wrap a towel around his waist and chase me out the front door yelling, “Jesus, Alison! This is not as bad as it looks!” I played this scenario over in my head so many times that I eventually stopped running away; I’d just walk in and stand in the doorway and shoot them a look of cool disgust, just like Gwyneth Paltrow in
Sliding Doors,
so much like Gwyneth Paltrow in
Sliding Doors,
now that I think about it, that I’m pretty sure I stole the whole thing outright. Even so, I considered that progress.
I realize I’m in danger of attributing too much importance to sex, if that is possible (which I secretly doubt—but perhaps that’s only because I attribute too much importance to it). I’ve always thought that if I’d had a little more experience in that particular area, if I’d slept with more people, I’d be better off. I’d have more points of reference. I didn’t, though. I worry about telling you how many people I’d slept with, so I’ll just put it at less than five. More than one, less than five.
And not four or three.
Part of the problem was that I lost my virginity late, absurdly late really—I was twenty-five, which I think you’ll agree puts me at the freakish end of things—and I probably wouldn’t even have done it then if it weren’t for my therapist, who talked me into it.