Trouble (3 page)

It was the oddest relationship I had ever had or was ever likely to have: This child I had rescued from motherlessness because I could not have my own, who was no relation to me, a foreign being, instinctively could not stand the sight of me. I couldn’t blame our lack of genetic connection. I knew from clients with recalcitrant, snotty daughters of their own that it might have been exactly the same if she’d been my flesh and blood; and meanwhile, most of the other women I knew who had adopted daughters had relationships with them as complex and warm as biological mothers and daughters. They shared jokes with them, hugged and kissed them, shared a bond as deep as any blood tie. But for reasons I couldn’t understand, Wendy and I had never managed anything more intimate or warm than a civil détente predicated on her knowledge that when she was finished with high school, she could go to college and be done with me. Her flat, pretty face was slammed permanently shut against me. I had no idea what this technically brilliant, mysteriously boring girl thought about, what she wanted besides the latest downloads of new albums by her favorite female singers and certain very particular items of clothing—pink leg warmers, faded skinny jeans, Juicy Couture hoodies, high-heeled boots. She seemed completely oblivious to her own intellectual potential, and, although she expended most of her energy on looking good, she didn’t seem to direct her svelte, toned figure and glossy hair at any boys, either in the aggregate or the particular. She hung out with a group of similarly self-involved girls who seemed to dress solely, identically, for one another. Her grades were no better than adequate. Given her IQ, I could not fathom why she wasn’t aiming her trajectory toward a physics lab at Bronx Science or a violin studio at Juilliard or at least a library. Instead, the only ambition she ever revealed, besides trying to be as pretty as possible, was to get away from me. To this end, even though she was only in eighth grade, she pored over college Web sites and gave herself (and scored unsurprisingly high on) sample SAT tests she found online. I knew this only because I regularly and secretly checked her laptop’s E-mail and Internet history just in case she was being preyed on by pedophiles. I was touched to discover that she seemed to have a fixation with UCLA, which I imagined appealed to her as a huge campus filled with palm trees and sunshine and photogenic, clean-cut kids as far away from home as possible. I was glad, because it was also, possibly but maybe not entirely coincidentally, academically challenging enough to wake up the slumbering giant in Wendy’s brain. But her going anywhere at all was a long way off, and of course this was only hopeful speculation on my part.

It was astonishing to me to realize, as I did over and over, how little advantage my clinical education, training, expertise, and experience as a psychologist had ever given me as a mother.

Thank God for wine. I was already half-done with this new glass. I counted how many glasses I’d had that night—five— and concluded that I was drunk. The fact that I didn’t even feel tipsy meant I had to be well into the manic zone of false bravado and foolish actions, which I knew all too well could lead to a night of sleepless, sheepish regret and a morning of pain both psychic and physical if I weren’t careful. I had had a bit of a wine-drinking habit in my youth—until I’d adopted Wendy, in fact. I had never entirely conquered it, only subdued it with dull duty and domestic habit, and here it was, still with me, like an old, beloved, but unpredictable friend. Like Raquel. I chuckled then, remembering my ill-fated flirtation with Mick. That would make a funny story for Raquel. I’ll call her tomorrow, I thought. I hadn’t talked to her in a week or so.

I came to the end of my glass of wine and pondered my next move. Another one meant certain pain in the morning, whereas going home now in a cab to drink a big cold glass of water with two ibuprofens and put myself straight to bed might mean a reduced sentence. Fuck it, I thought, fuck everything, and I hailed the bartender. As I did so, I caught the eye of the guy who’d bought me the drink. He was still in his spot at the bar, still alone, and he was looking at me. I looked away, but it was too late; he was on his feet and making his way toward me. The bartender handed me another glass of wine. Did I ask her for one? I wondered. I offered her some money and she waved it away with a jerk of her thumb at my pal, who had arrived at my elbow.

“You looked thirsty,” he said.

“I am thirsty,” I admitted. What the hell. He looked twenty-five or thirty, young enough to be my … younger something. He was harmlessly eager for my company, and I didn’t have anyone better to talk to at the moment. The wine I’d drunk since I’d arrived had mellowed me considerably, and the knowledge of what I was going to have to do about my marriage was pressing in on me from all sides like that shrinking room in the Poe story, or was it a Sherlock Holmes one? Anyway. The room was shrinking, and here was someone to distract me. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Drinks, plural,” he said.

“Of course,” I said, “I didn’t ask for them.”

“Sure you did.”

I shook my head at him, smiling.

“My name is Peter,” he said.

“Josie,” I told him.

We clinked glasses. I took a gulp.

“What do you do, Josie? Besides being someone’s wife?” He pointed to my wedding ring.

“I’m a shrink,” I said bluntly; I wouldn’t lie about that again. “What about you?”

“Hold on,” he said, “we’ll get to me in a minute. What kind of shrink?”

He wasn’t nearly as interesting-looking as Mick. He was skinny and his hair needed cutting. He wore a black sweatshirt that said
DETROIT
in white block letters on the front. His face was smooth and boyish; he had a small mouth with sharp teeth, eyes of indeterminate color set rather closely together, and a crooked nose. But he was appealing somehow, possibly just because he was so young and pushy, or maybe because I was so drunk and feeling reckless.

“No particular kind,” I said. “I make it up as I go along.”

“You what, just hung out a shingle or something?”

“I have a Ph.D.”

He looked skeptical.

“I’m trained, all right. I know all the techniques. But I don’t ascribe to any particular methodology or school—you know, like Jungian or behavioral or whatever. I don’t do therapy by the book. I invent something new for every client, or at least I try to.”

“How much do you charge?”

“A lot.”

“Do you have a sliding scale?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can I come and see you?”

“I’ll give you my card.”

“Actually, can I have a session right now? For another glass of wine?”

I laughed.

“I mean it,” he said, but he was laughing, too. “I’m crazy. I need help.”

“Okay,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to decide how to answer that,” he said with a suggestive look at me. I looked blandly back at him; this was certainly my night for frank male sexual interest. Where was it coming from all of a sudden? Alcohol? No one had been sexually interested in me, to my knowledge, for a long time. Maybe I was emitting some sort of weird premenopausal pheromone. “Okay,” he said after a beat. “I’ve been having nightmares. Horrible ones. I mean I wake up sweating and screaming. That’s why I’m here tonight, to stay awake. If I go home, I’ll fall asleep.”

“How old are you?” I blurted.

“Thirty-nine.”

“You are?”

“Don’t tell me I look younger than that; it’s the fucking bane of my existence. Anyway, what does that have to do with my nightmares?”

“It doesn’t. I just wondered. Most people would be happy to hear that.”

“Well, not me. I’m a teacher.”

“What do you teach?”

“Not much. So anyway, in these dreams, my father is alive again and he’s fucking molesting me. He never touched me in real life. It’s literally unbearable. I wake up yelling and freaked-out.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Often! A couple times a week, lately.”

“When did he die?”

“Thirteen years ago. I always liked him fine. I never had major problems with him. Now he’s butt-fucking me in my sleep.”

I laughed.

He laughed, too. “I know, it’s funny, right?”

“No,” I said, “but yes.”

“Right,” he said. “I feel so much better already, Doctor.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“No, I actually sort of do,” he said, and leaned against me. I leaned back against him, because I liked him now, all of a sudden, and why the hell not, and we stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder. “And you know,” he said, leaning in even closer to talk into my ear, “what’s even weirder is that when I first saw you tonight, I thought, I have to talk to her. I don’t know why; it was just something about you. You looked totally sane, but I had the feeling you could listen to my story and get it, and I was right.”

“So what are you going to do? You have to sleep eventually.”

“I need someone to come and sleep with me,” he said.

I held up my left hand.

“I know,” he said. “I wish I could just borrow you, though. It would calm me down a lot.”

“There are plenty of girls in here.”

“They’re five years old. The only reason I’m in here is that basically I live upstairs.”

For some reason, I found this very funny.

“Thank God you have a sense of humor,” he said.

“My marriage is over,” I announced cheerfully. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“So you’re separated?”

“No,” I said. “I just realized it tonight. I’m still living with my husband. He doesn’t know yet. In fact, you’re the only one who does.”

“That’s a nightmare of its own making, right there,” he said sympathetically, and it was about then that I fell into temporary love with him.

An hour later, we were still standing there, still leaning against each other as if for warmth and stability in a terrible storm. Both of us had reached the state of drunkenness at which the identity dissolves and becomes so fluid, it merges with the identity of whoever else is around. We had become psychic twins, my new friend Peter and I. Every now and then I would recall with an unpleasant sharpness Anthony and Wendy and the next day’s four clients, and then I would push all of that from my mind by saying something loudly and confidently that justified the very real and important reason why I was staying out till the wee hours getting shit-faced with a strange man.

“The more tightly a spring is coiled, the more violently it springs forth,” I said.

“That’s so true,” said Peter, laughing. “Is that a quote from somewhere? Who said that?”

“Me, right now. Describing myself, right now.”

“You’re springing forth?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Well, that’s good news for me.”

This man smelled like toast and jam; his shoulder felt young and strong against my older, bonier one. Thirty-nine was fair game; thirty-nine was a fine, adult age.

God, I was angry at Anthony. His sins were legion: He had not looked at me in years, had not expressed a bit of concern about the state of our marriage, had, in fact, refused repeatedly to go to therapy with me. Evidently, he expected me just to wait patiently for him to stop being depressed without medication or clinical help. And worse, I had fallen for it. I had waited. Well, no more. His time was up. I’m still young, I thought boozily, still viable, still beautiful, even. Whatever I’m doing now, it serves him right for ignoring me.

“I’m springing forth,” I said, “with a vengeance.”

“Come upstairs with me,” Peter said, “please. Just to sleep, or whatever you want. It would be so nice. We could both use the company, it seems to me.”

We climbed the stairs to the floor above the bar together and walked through the dark apartment to his bedroom. We lay together on his bed, fully clothed, kissing slowly with our arms around each other and our bodies pressed together. Peter kissed me probingly, as if he were asking me question after question, demanding answers from me, refusing to be deterred, exactly the way he had pursued me in the bar. When the room began to spin slowly, and then faster, I crawled down his body and unzipped his jeans, took his cock into my mouth, and sucked and licked and stroked it until he came all over my hand. Then I sat up, rapt with sudden cold horror, and said, “I have to go.”

The next day, I remembered smeared lights jerking hazily out the cab window, then, when I got home, some difficulty finding the keys to my apartment door. I don’t remember crawling into our bed and falling asleep next to Anthony. I woke up the next morning in bed alone.

 
walked into the kitchen, wearing my bathrobe, my hair going in a hundred unflattering directions, reeking of stale wine and guilt, my skull crackling with pain.

“Hi,” Wendy said, not looking at me, taking a granola bar out of the box and putting the box back into the cupboard and the granola bar into her backpack. She already had her coat and hat on. “I’m so late. I overslept. Oh my God. I missed first period.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Where’s Daddy?”

“He had a morning radio thing. No one woke me up!”

“Sorry, Wendy,” I said contritely. I began to make coffee, groping behind a mason jar of rice for a filter, standing at the sink while cold water ran from the faucet, forgetting momentarily what I was supposed to be doing with the glass carafe. “You want to go with me to Indrani’s after school today? I told her I’d help her clean up the party. She said she’d love to see you.”

“No thanks,” she said. “I want to go over to Ariel’s after school, if that’s okay with you. Her mom will be there.”

“Sure,” I said. “Will you have dinner there or come home?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me know by six.”

“Okay,” she said. “Bye, Mom,” and she was out the door.

I wandered around the empty apartment with my coffee, looking into Anthony’s study, into Wendy’s room, irrationally searching for evidence of my own transgression, or at least some explanation for it. Anthony’s cramped study off the kitchen, formerly a walk-in pantry, was littered with newspapers and magazines. Wendy’s bedroom was a tangle of clothes. Crouched in his cage, her hamster, an animate wad of hair she’d named Melvin, ignored me. Neither room offered me anything of what I was looking for; the contents of both were at once dully familiar and wholly opaque in their unyielding, private loyalty to their proper occupants.

I wandered to the living room window and stood looking down at our quiet, unremarkable stretch of West Eighteenth Street. Behind me, our rather scraggly but jaunty Christmas tree gave off a faint piney smell. I thought I could almost hear the tinsel moving in the air currents with a glassy rustle. It was 8:30; I had to be at my office by 9:45. At two o’clock, I would be free for two weeks. I always took a two-week vacation this time of year, even though it was famously the darkest, most suicidal time for therapy patients. This year, I had no particular plans besides staying home and reading a couple of long nineteenth-century novels and maybe, if I felt inspired and enterprising, painting a little. I rarely went anywhere during my winter breaks; I just needed a vacation from helping people around the holidays. The rest of the year, I had no problem focusing on my work. Taking this vacation was the one act of selfishness I ever permitted myself, and I needed it. And it wasn’t really so selfish, in the end. I had learned through the years that almost all of my clients did surprisingly well during my winter breaks; surprising to them, that is, not to me. Interestingly, most of them dreaded my absence and acted out in various ways beforehand, and then during their break they discovered unsuspected reserves of strength and self-reliance and came back renewed and purposeful and proud of themselves. Only one or two had ever had meltdowns while I was gone, and those had been handled just fine by the substitute therapist who was on call then, my colleague, Susan Berg, for whom I returned the favor in August.

I yawned. Oh my God. Last night. I had had roughly four hours of sleep and more wine than I cared to recall. The taste of Peter was excitingly strong in my mouth, and the visceral feeling of his mouth on mine was overwhelming. I took a mouthful of scalding coffee and forced myself to hold it there to make it burn away the sense memory from my tongue.

In the shower, I scrubbed myself all over, washed my hair twice, brushed my teeth till they squeaked. I had been too drunk the previous night to do anything but fall into bed half-clothed, reeking of God only knew what. I wondered now whether Anthony had somehow suspected anything. Sometimes he fell sound asleep in his study and roused himself at three o’clock, awakened by his bladder, and then he took a pee, brushed his teeth, and came to bed. If this had happened the night before, he would certainly have noticed my absence and wondered about it. And if he had awakened during my brief tenure in our bed, he would have smelled the booze on me, unless he was so boozed up himself he couldn’t tell the difference between his alcoholic breath and my own.

But no matter what, he would never think, not in a thousand years, that I would do anything as foolish as what I’d done. I was the model of sober rationality. Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency, I thought. It was useful camouflage, now that I had lapsed.

While I blow-dried my hair, I studied my face in the mirror, dismayed. I looked like shit. I had puffy bags under my eyes that did my crow’s-feet no favors, folds by my mouth and nose, forehead creases. Staying out all night and getting drunk used to leave no mark whatsoever anywhere on me; now, especially at this time of year, I might as well have hung a sign around my neck that said
I’M PAYING THE PRICE FOR NOT ACTING MY AGE.
That beautiful woman I had seen in the mirror the night before must have been a wine and candlelight and lust-inspired mirage. I put on lipstick and mascara, which did nothing to help my plight, but it cheered me up a little. I dressed in a pair of tailored black wool trousers, low-heeled ankle boots, a cream-colored sweater, and a charcoal gray blazer. With a pair of earrings and a slender gold bracelet, as well as a black wool coat and cashmere scarf, my disguise was complete. In the unimpeachable persona of a successful middle-aged Manhattan clinical psychologist, I rode the elevator down to the street and walked to my office near Union Square.

The streets of Chelsea were filled with twinkling Christmas lights, grimy ice and snow, merchandise aggressively displayed in windows with boughs of holly and pine wreaths, decorated, lit-up trees. The Christian Advent was a dark, difficult time of year, a season of soul-searching, stress, and loneliness, short days, long nights, obligations, insomnia, family tensions, financial worries, longings and regrets, the ghosts of old fears and sorrows. I looked into the faces of the people I passed and felt compassion for all of them, no matter who they were—that fat old guy with bushy eyebrows who was wearing a quilted olive green jacket, those two young Latinas in tight jeans and down coats with fake fur trimming on the hoods, that mother with baby twins, pushing a double stroller and talking emphatically on her cell phone. All of them were struggling to get through their days as well as they could. All of them were faced with things they didn’t want to deal with, people who didn’t treat them kindly enough. I smiled warmly at anyone who met my eyes and silently wished the rest of them a Merry Christmas even if they celebrated something else. “Merry Christmas” was, to me, a coded catchall phrase that meant “I hope you get through this mess with as little pain as possible.” The rest of the year, Jesus was a grown-up with a beard, but in this season, he was a needy, tender little baby just like the rest of us. To me, saying “Merry Christmas” just acknowledged this general vulnerable-newborn status. It struck me as nothing but good manners and common sense.

I stopped in at my favorite deli, then crossed Union Square and walked a block down Broadway to my office building. I let myself into the building, climbed one flight of stairs, unlocked the office door, and went in. It was dark and a little chilly in there. I placed the deli bag on my desk, turned on the lamps, turned up the thermostat, and took off my coat and hung it in the closet. I loved my office. It had a thick rug, two comfy club chairs, a long leather couch, a tiled coffee table, bookshelves, and a small cherrywood desk. The lamps cast a warm, flattering, cozy light. A translucent curtain hung like a scrim in front of the window to let in daylight but soften the harshness of the cityscape. The walls were thick, the window double-paned, so the only noises that filtered in were muted, almost unnoticeable. The room’s atmosphere was intended to suggest hopeful possibility and nonthreatening comfort in equal measure.

I sat at my desk and unpacked a toasted everything bagel with melted Swiss cheese. I hit the play button on my answering machine, hoping everyone had canceled, but there were no new messages. I ate my bagel and drank hot black coffee while I reviewed my notes from the previous week’s session with Sasha Delahunt, my first client that morning.

The taste of Peter remained through toothpaste, coffee, and food. The sensation of his cock in my mouth would not go away. It was a pleasurable, shocking memory. And before that, the excitement of my conversation with Mick remained, too, the heady triumph of being sexually alive again. I dreaded seeing Anthony later; I hoped Wendy would come home for dinner so I wouldn’t have to eat alone with him. Maybe I’d stay at Indrani’s and eat party leftovers with her. I was so relieved to be going over there that afternoon after work; thank God for Indrani. She was so easygoing, such a warm, familiar, comfortable friend. Even the thought of her gently plaintive neediness didn’t bother me now. I felt grateful for it, in fact. Right now, I was very glad to be needed by someone who would listen, someone I could confess everything to.

The buzzer rang. I pressed the button that opened the door, then put Sasha’s folder back into my desk drawer and cleaned up all evidence of my breakfast. I sat and stared into space for a few minutes, collecting myself. I fluffed my hair, checked my teeth for poppy seeds in a tiny mirror I kept in the top drawer, put the mirror away, and then, at exactly ten o’clock, I got up and opened my office door with a welcoming, reassuring smile.

“Hello, Sasha,” I said. “Come on in.”

Sasha was a pixieish, skittish fashion designer with a pathological fear of her boss, and, for that matter, anyone in a position of authority or power over her, including me. She had been terrorized by her two older sisters and her father, and meanwhile her mother had been meek and apologetic and no help at all. I had been working with Sasha for almost a year, and she was just beginning to be able to enter my office without visibly cringing. She reported similar progress at work; apparently, she was now able to make eye contact with her boss in meetings or when she met her in the hallway during the workday.

I not only empathized with Sasha’s plight in a general way, but I secretly considered my work with her to be a kind of penance for terrorizing my baby sister Juliet with many of the very same techniques Sasha’s own older sisters had used on her. These included telling her direly in a hushed voice, as if it were a terrible family secret, that she was retarded or adopted, or both; reading her diary and correcting her spelling and grammar and writing comments in the margins; enchanting all her friends at her slumber parties and stealing them away from her; and putting manufactured notes into her textbooks, ostensibly from whatever boy she currently had a crush on, telling her she smelled of BO. Even my parents’ general outlines, domineering father and repressed mother, had been similar to Sasha’s. Needless to say, Juliet lived in London now and was distant and wary at our rare family gatherings. I wasn’t proud of my earlier incarnation as her tormentor. Nor was I proud of the fact that to this day, my sister Jane and I shrieked with horrified, guilty laughter when we remembered what we’d done to her. Such was, of course, the Darwinian way of sibling birth order. As the responsible firstborn, I was glad to have the chance to help a client who was grappling with such a strikingly similar family history.

“He doesn’t seem to take me that seriously,” Sasha was saying about her new boyfriend, whose name was Kent. “He’s like, ‘You can sleep in tomorrow, but I have to get up and work.’ Like my work doesn’t matter or something. You know? Like I’m lazy.”

“What tone of voice does he use when he’s saying this?”

“He’s laughing, but I can tell he’s pretending he’s just joking as a cover for telling me I’m not serious or ambitious enough.”

“Have you asked him what he means by making this joke?”

“Yeah, and he acted like I was overreacting and being hypersensitive, you know? Which just compounded it, right? I mean, it was like, Wait, you’re making fun of me; that’s bad enough, but then you make fun of me for noticing and being bothered by it? How can I win here? That’s just not fair!” Sasha was near tears.