Trouble (5 page)

Instead of rolling her eyes at my clueless flat-footedness, she blew her nose and laughed. “Oh my God,” she said shakily, “you have no idea. I’ve never, ever opened myself like this to another person before. I’ve never exposed myself so fully and felt so adored. I can’t believe he loves me as much as I love him. It almost has no place being talked about here in therapy because it’s so … Anyway, we’re very discreet and no one suspects, but that can’t go on much longer. He’s married, too, of course, and of course he has kids, too. We’re fully aware of the damage this could cause. We’re trying so hard to stay grounded, but we both feel like we’re on massive amounts of crack. It’s not exactly conducive to rational thought. And don’t worry, we’re able to do our jobs as well as ever; we do not let this affect our patients. The Hippocratic oath is alive and well in our minds. Our kids, too. Our spouses, on the other hand …”

She was flushed and laughing now, giddy, exalted. She had lost weight; she had always been skinny, but now she was gaunt. But she looked healthy. She looked vibrant, in fact. As it often did in my sessions with her, the Dylan song was running through my head: “Corrina, Corrina/Gal, where you been so long?”

“You’re both angry at your spouses?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said impatiently. “I knew you’d get into that. Yeah, I’m furious at Andrew. Yeah, Pablo is new and unknown and forbidden. Yeah, he’s mad at his wife. Yeah, adultery is like drug addiction with a person instead of a substance. Okay, got it. Listen, I know. I know. I am fully aware. But I don’t give a flying fuck about any by-the-book facts about affairs.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I want to leave Andrew and be with Pablo. It’s been less than a month since I first had sex with him and I know. I’m fifty-three, not fifteen. Although I feel fifteen in some ways.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re worried about me. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, smiling.

“Well, you should be!”

I laughed. “You’re a big girl,” I said.

“Thank you for not expelling me from therapy,” she said.

“Why would I expel you? I promise you, I’m not here either to punish or to absolve. My job is to help you figure it all out, not tell you what to do.”

“In a way, it would be easier if you just gave me ten thousand Hail Marys.”

“If you really wanted that, you’d be back in church.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Whew.” She subsided back against the couch pillows and closed her eyes. “What a relief. I finally told you. Now what? What do I do now? How do I protect my kids and get what I want? How do I get out of this without giving up my own happiness and without everyone hating me?”

“Objectively, I’m not sure,” I said. “I think that’s something we need to look at.”

“Ya think?”

I laughed. “I think.”

By the time Corinne’s session was over, I was wrung out from vicarious panicky excitement. She left after promising me that in my absence she would keep the affair a secret from everyone; she would not tell Andrew about it or take any steps to change any aspect of her life; and she would encourage Pablo to do the same. Off she went into the cold, her coat flapping against her bony ankles, cheeks aflame, eyes feverishly glassy as a Victorian consumptive’s or laudanum addict’s.

I had a lot to write in her folder. The minutes ticked by as I scribbled, trying to remain detached, not entirely succeeding. I finished and took out Amy Margolis’s folder and went over the previous week’s notes, waiting for the buzzer. Almost fifteen minutes past the start of her session, it finally rang.

“Fuck!” Amy said, entering my office in a long down parka and wool stocking cap. She peeled them off and threw them on the couch. I had a coatrack in the waiting area, but not everyone liked using it. “Fuck! I missed my train by two seconds ’cause my MetroCard ran out, and then the next train took like forever to come and was so slow I thought I was gonna scream. I am so sorry!”

“Subway trouble is the worst,” I said.

“The worst,” she echoed. “Except, like, cancer, global warming, world war.”

I laughed. Amy sat down and blew her nose. She was a Barnard sophomore who’d grown up in the Hollywood Hills in an Italianate villa and had gone to elite private schools. Her mother had died of cancer when she was six, and her father, a studio executive, had rarely been home, so his not too bright, leggy, blond, much younger second wife had raised Amy, if
raised
was really the word. Melanie, the stepmother, had never forgiven Amy for not looking exactly like her. Amy, who loved to eat and was naturally “zaftig”—her own word for her body—was forced to go on every diet that came down the pike and was sent away every summer to fat camp; every fall, Melanie had taken her shopping for school clothes and ridiculed her in front of the other shoppers and salesclerks.

I could almost, summoning all the empathy I possessed, imagine how Melanie must have felt, faced with the task of raising an imperfect girl in a world of didactic, almost-medieval physical requirements and constraints for women. But I still secretly wanted to throttle her. Amy was healthy and sexy. Her hair was glossy black, her skin like porcelain, her lips cherry-red, like Snow White’s; she was beautiful, but it would take a long time before she would be able to know that. Her self-loathing was so profound, she often considered killing herself. She was also intermittently bulimic and given to disastrous relationships with distant but needy men and critical, demanding female friends.

I smiled at her and immediately felt my face make that annoying furrowed-brow shrink-empathy expression I had worked so hard to eradicate from my repertoire. I hastily tried to smooth my features.

“Quit it,” said Amy. “Don’t fucking feel sorry for me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I sometimes make that expression without meaning to. I don’t feel sorry for you.”

She laughed. “Thanks for validating my experience.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“I was being sarcastic, dude.”

“I can take it.”

“Do you ever lose your shit in here, like yell at someone or have a meltdown or just, you know, totally lose control of yourself?”

“Do you wish I would lose control of myself?”

“It’s weird how you have all the power in here. You sit there like you have it all together, and I’m the fucked-up loser on the couch. And then I pay you. Something is wrong with this picture.”

“What do you wish I would say to equalize things?”

She thought about this and then laughed self-consciously. “Probably I’d be horrified. I need you to be perfect and have your shit together.”

“You think I’m perfect?”

“Well,” she said. “Let’s see. You’re thin, you have a Ph.D., and you’re married. You make a good living, and you’re really pretty. How bad can your life ever be?”

I laughed. “You’re right: We’re not here to discuss my problems,” I said.

“Right, ’cause then you’d have to pay me, and I’m totally unqualified to help you. But you know what I mean, right?”

“You mean it’s a different kind of relationship. Not like any other one you have.”

“Yeah,” she said.

I nodded and waited to see whether she had more to say. When she didn’t say anything, I said, “How are you feeling about going home for the holidays?”

“Like slitting my wrists,” she said.

“You remember you promised to call me if you ever seriously think you might try that?”

“I meant it figuratively.”

“Good,” I said.

“This time,” she added.

“Okay. Let’s see if we can figure out a way to get you through the visit so you don’t even think about slitting your wrists.”

“Xanax?”

“I’m thinking more like survival strategies. How you can take your stepmother’s power to hurt you away from her.”

“Xanax?”

I laughed. “We’ll keep working on how you feel, but for the purpose of this visit, let’s try to give you new ways to react outwardly to the things she says that hurt you.”

“Like, ‘Oh my God, Amy, that freshman fifteen looks like it turned into the sophomore thirty! I will juice you some organic pomegranates right this minute.’ I hate her so fucking much. I miss my mother. She loved me.”

She cried gutturally for a while, then wiped her tear-smeared face and sighed, then laughed. “That fucking cunt bitch. I want to pop her boobs with a chopstick.”

“A knitting needle might work better.”

“I want to tie her up and force-feed her Cheetos. You know, I’ve fantasized about putting weight-gain powder in her stupid flaxseed, like the mean girls in that movie. I wish my father would dump her for a younger woman. Or, like, ‘Hey, Melanie, your neck looks like shit! Maybe you ought to get it Botoxed!’ All fake concerned. Old crone.” She looked at me. “Sorry. She’s not that old.”

“No need to apologize,” I said. “She’s probably much younger than I am, but your point is well taken. Fight fire with fire.”

“You have any better ideas?”

“Let’s take that statement. ‘That freshman fifteen looks like it turned into the sophomore thirty.’ You could look her right in the eye and say, ‘You may not insult me like that ever again as long as we live. I am your husband’s daughter, and I deserve respect and kindness from you.”

Amy giggled. “Yeah, right, as if,” she said.

“It’s a thought,” I said.

“Like I’m gonna say that to her? A lightning bolt would probably strike me in the head.”

“I will bet you’d be surprised,” I said.

“How do you think she’d react?”

“I’ll bet it won’t be anything you’d expect.”

“Of course, it’s not really that simple,” she said. “Or that easy.”

“But it’s a start,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s all very fun to think about that here with you, where I’m nice and safe,” she said, “but I still have to lug these thirty pounds back to L.A. and face that witch, while you get to stay here all perfect in your perfect life.”

“You seem,” I said mildly, “a little angry about that.”

“I know I’m a total fucking spoiled brat, poor little rich girl, but that just makes it
worse
! I have no right to complain, and I’m so miserable, I could fucking die! Why is there no comfort? Why is everything so hard?”

“Amy,” I said. “You’re not a spoiled brat. You’re in a lot of pain for some very good reasons. I promise it will lessen, and there will be comfort. I know it seems like it will take forever, but it will happen faster than you think.”

“I wish I could believe you!” she said.

I wanted to take her into my arms and hold her close, the way her mother would have, but instead I said with as much conviction as I could muster without sounding annoyingly patronizing, “You’ll just have to trust me.”

“Right,” she said, “I have to. I’ve got no better options.”

And that, I thought, was a great description of the therapeutic process.

 
stepped out of the elevator into Indrani’s hallway just before three o’clock. Her building was lavishly appointed, as they used to say in some bygone era. The corridor was paved with a plush gold-and-black patterned carpet; gilt mirrors and sconces decorated the black-and-cream flocked-wallpaper walls. The hallway was silent and odorless, as if all sensory information were scrubbed from the air by some invisible, powerful machine. I walked without making a sound down to 11F and knocked. Indrani came to the door in a bathrobe, cradling a mug in both hands.

“Sorry, I forgot you were coming. The party is still going on, sort of.” She whispered as I came in, and she closed the door behind me. “My damned brother. They’re all doing crystal meth.”

“Who’s still here?”

“Ravi and his pals are out on the terrace doing God knows what, blowing bubbles and telling one another’s fortune, for all I know. I rudely told them to go home at seven in the morning, but they wouldn’t leave, so I went to bed. I just got up, and they’re still here, drinking all the leftover wine. Want some coffee?”

We hugged and kissed. She was very warm and smelled like coffee, shampoo, and sleep.

“I feel like shit. Look at me,” I said. “I could barely function at work today, but I hope at least I did no harm.”

“You look gorgeous,” she lied. “And you left early last night! Why did you—oh, right, you had a headache. Are you feeling better?”

“No,” I said. “But yes, so much better, in another way. I’ll tell you the whole story after I’ve had some coffee. And maybe something stronger. I have a lot to get off my chest here.”

We went into her kitchen. I looked into her liquor cupboard and extracted a bottle of rum. I poured some into the cup of hot coffee she handed me and stirred it with my finger, licked my finger, and said, “Aaah.”

“I started cleaning up last night when they wouldn’t leave,” she said, adding some rum to her own coffee. “I put all the food away, loaded the dishwasher and ran it, wiped all the surfaces, and bagged the recycling. I thought they would take the hint, but they were still here, so I unloaded the clean dishes and ran another load and then I put away all the booze and picked up some of the trash. Crystal meth! Like he’s twenty-five? I think it was that English guy who was so hot for you—I think he brought it.”

“Mick,” I said. “He’s still here? Oh God. What else did I miss?”

“Not one thing,” she said. “I was wishing I could go home and go to bed, too. Which is rather inconvenient when it’s your own party.”

We went into the salonlike living room with our cups and curled up across from each other on the two long, white, downy couches. There was a silver bowl of unshelled walnuts and clementines on the coffee table between us. Through the enormous thick-paned windows to my left, the sky was white and still and heavy, as if it were about to snow. Indrani’s Christmas tree was festooned with old-fashioned popcorn-and-cranberry strings, gilt balls, handmade wooden ornaments, and colored nonblinking bulbs. A fire burned in the deep fireplace to my right, which was set into built-in mahogany shelves and cupboards and had a marble hearthstone, a Victorian screen, a basket of kindling and logs next to it. Over the mantel hung the prophetic gilt-edged mirror that had informed me the night before that I had to leave Anthony and change the entire structure of my life.

“God, your apartment is nice,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said warily. Indrani was a little touchy about having a trust fund and then, to gild the lily, having inherited a buttload of money from a doting great-uncle when she was thirty, something like eight million dollars. She did everything in her power to deflect any whiff of envy or resentment from the people she was close to, so I tried to mute my lust for her apartment, not to mention her Montauk beachfront house and her furniture, wardrobe, and art collection. She was almost embarrassingly generous with everything she had, and the irony, of course, was that all she really wanted was a husband and a kid or, ideally, two. I would have traded places with her in a heartbeat, but that evidently wasn’t an option. Why someone hadn’t come along and married her, I could not begin to imagine. She wasn’t especially picky. Her last boyfriend had been Vince, a sweet-talking but shifty-eyed much younger man who said he was a “music producer” and thereby justified his many late nights out without Indrani. That relationship had finally ended, after nearly two years, when Indrani had come home unexpectedly early one day, having cut her office hours short. She had caught him in her own bed with, of course, a younger woman. One of the few things Indrani didn’t have was common sense about men, probably because her father and three brothers were all ne’er-do-well charmers and her mother was an insecure doormat.

Vince had shattered her trust and her heart. She’d been alone ever since, and, according to her, she now had not one husbandlike prospect in sight. She was beginning to resign herself to more or less permanent singleness, and she was forty-five, so unless she adopted pretty soon, she was probably not going to have any kids, either. Indrani and I talked a lot about aging, trying to figure out how to accept it with as much dignity and as little Botox and embarrassing attempts to cling to youth as possible. So far, we were doing all right, but we were aware that pretty soon everything on our faces and bodies was going to slide into tragicomic ruination, and we’d start feeling desperate, and then God only knew what we’d resort to. However, implicit in these conversations was the unspoken but ever-present fact that, unlike Indrani, I had a husband, and so presumably didn’t need to panic about losing my looks, whereas she needed them to catch a man.

“So?” she said.

“So,” I said. “Hang on, sweetheart, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

“Is Anthony having an affair?” she asked.

I looked at her, so shocked I laughed. “Not that I know of,” I said. “But you never know. I wish he would, in a way; it would mean he was still alive.”

“Really?”

And then I told her everything, all about my realization the night before that I was still youngish and fairly vital and, most important, sexually functioning, that my marriage was a dead duck floating in pond scum, that I needed to get out while I still could, and that I had behaved extremely foolishly with a nice young man I had picked up in a bar, but that was a symptom of a larger problem, not a problem in and of itself. I couldn’t help allowing a kind of giddy hilarity to creep into my voice, even though I knew this was serious, knew things were very bad. Still, when I talked about Peter, the blow job, I described the whole thing airily, a little sardonically, as if it were akin to shoplifting or sneaking through a subway turnstile, a prank, a madcap adventure on the wrong side of the law. My voice bubbled with excitement, fear, adrenaline. Meanwhile, Indrani listened raptly, without blinking or moving or drinking her coffee. I took big gulps of my own, and when I was pretty much finished with the rough outline of the story, I went into the kitchen for more coffee, but especially more rum. When I came back, she was watching me, her face as still as a cat’s.

“Go on,” she said. “What are you going to do now?”

“I guess,” I said, “I’ll talk to Anthony tonight, which I’m dreading, tell him I want a separation, and figure out where to go. It’s his apartment, or at least it was all those years ago when I moved in. And I’m the one who wants to leave, so I should be the one who mostly deals with the upheaval.”

“You sound so calm about it all,” she said.

“I’m scared and sad, but mostly it’s a relief. I realized last night that I’ve felt dead for so long.”

“You know,” she said, “it’s strange; I never had the slightest idea you felt this way. You always said things were going well.”

“I don’t think I could admit it even to myself. I think this has been brewing a long time, underneath, the way things do when you try to avoid them.”

She hesitated, as if she had something to say and was trying to think of the best way to put it. “You and Anthony have been married a very long time.”

“Fifteen years. The first five were good.”

“My grandmother would say to you, ‘Does he beat you? Is he a drunk? Is he in prison? No? Then why are you leaving him?’ That’s what she said to my mother when she left my father.”

“He ignores me,” I said. “I’m so bored by him, I could throw up. He won’t do anything to improve matters. He thinks this is just the way marriage is.”

“He’s a catch,” said Indrani. “Seriously. You’re lucky to have him. He’s brilliant and good-looking, and he makes a good living and comes home every night and is a good father.”

“All true,” I said. “But that’s not enough. I realized last night that I am withering on the vine, so to speak. Anthony is like the perfect shell of a husband. All the insides are missing.”

“So you picked up a guy in a bar?”

“He didn’t matter,” I said. “He was just a symptom.”

“Anthony doesn’t know any of this yet, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

She waited for me to go on.

“It was a stupid thing, what I did last night,” I said, “but like I said, it’s a symptom, not a cause. It wasn’t the point. Anthony refuses to go to marital therapy. He refuses to address our problems. He does not see me anymore. He might not even notice I’m gone; that’s how indifferent he’s become to me.”

“I hope he surprises you,” said Indrani.

“He won’t surprise me,” I said.

“Are you willing to give him the chance?”

I laughed. “Anthony? I’ve given him nothing but chances.”

“Oh, Josie,” she said. “This whole thing makes me sad. If you guys can’t make it, then who can?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Please. That isn’t what I need right now.”

“Are you sure?” she said, watching me closely. “I feel like maybe you haven’t thought this through entirely. It feels a little hasty to me, a little extreme.”

“Maybe so,” I replied. “But I’m not asking for advice, I promise.”

“I believe,” she said, “that friends have to question each other. We have to be sounding boards for each other. We can’t just take everything the other one says and does at face value and accept it blindly. I would feel like I wasn’t being a good friend if I didn’t say these things.”

“I agree that friends should be honest,” I said. “And I appreciate your concern. But I can’t help feeling a little judged, or something.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe no one can be totally nonjudgmental about anything. I’m sure you think I was a fool about Vince. How could you not? You were very understanding and supportive, it’s true, and maybe I’m not as good a listener as you are; maybe I’m not as tactful. But you must have secretly thought I was an idiot for letting Vince live with me for so long, for spending all that money on him, and you were right.”

I had a sudden clear memory of sitting with her in this living room after she’d caught him cheating and kicked him out, my arms around her, handing her Kleenex and assuring her over and over that she would be all right, that she would get over this.

“I didn’t judge you,” I said.

“I was a fool, and you know it.”

“We’re all fools, Indrani.”

“I don’t want you to end up alone, like I am,” she said.

“I would rather be alone than lonely in a bad marriage,” I said. “It’s the worst kind of loneliness. It’s like a deadweight. Actually, I feel sort of excited about leaving. Sad, too, but mostly relieved. I feel like I just woke up from a coma.”

“What about Wendy?” Indrani asked.

I looked searchingly at her for a moment. Her lips were pursed; she was squinting at me. Cruelly, I noticed that the skin around her eyes seemed to have softened and melted slightly. I always tried not to see signs of aging in my friends; the fact that I was allowing myself to notice Indrani’s meant that I must have been angry at her, no matter how hard I was trying not to be.

“It will be hard for Wendy at first, I imagine,” I said. “She can choose whom she wants to stay with. Maybe it’s best for her to stay with Anthony, but that is up to her.”

The French doors to the terrace opened and Mick tumbled in with Indrani’s younger brother, Ravi, and three gorgeous young women, one of whom was Indrani’s teaching assistant. The five of them were laughing and windblown and pink-cheeked, manic. A cloud of cigarette smoke had blown in with the fresh air. They all wore their coats and hats. They all carried empty wineglasses. “More wine!” Mick said. “Indrani, come and join us! Oh, hello there, Shrink; it’s snowing out there.”