Trouble (7 page)

I was single at the time. My private practice was just beginning to flourish; I was twenty-nine and, although I wouldn’t have articulated it to myself in quite this way back then, I was in the frame of mind to find a husband. When the lecture was over, I made my way to the front of the room and waited my turn, then introduced myself to Anthony Bianchi. I admitted to him that I hadn’t understood much of his lecture, and said I would like to invite him out for a drink and interrogate him. He looked me over with the careful, acquisitive scrutiny of a customer being offered a bargain that might be too good to be true but too good to pass up, and said he’d love to, that he had no other plans.

Once he’d freed himself from the remainder of his admirers, off we went to a picturesque basement bistro on East Ninth Street. We sat knee-to-knee at a little table and drank wine. I found him seductively abstracted, even brusque; he was amused but impatient at my absolute ignorance about the things that most concerned him. But I was very pretty in those days, and young and bright enough, which didn’t hurt. I think I must have disarmed him with my frank, open curiosity about him; I got him talking about his childhood in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, his college years in Providence, at Brown. He was eight years older than I was; I loved the fact that he was a grown-up, a successful writer and professor. I loved the naïve, brash way he made me feel and act, and I loved the challenge of having to win him.

It turned out not to be all that hard after all: I went home with him that night and tumbled with him into his bed. We did not sleep much that night, or many of the nights that followed. Our sex was so urgent, we sometimes bit or scratched each other; it was always mutual and to the point, since Anthony didn’t trouble himself much with foreplay, and I didn’t need it, I was so turned on by him already. I proceeded to fall so passionately in love with him, I felt as if all the skin had been flayed from my body. This caused me to behave in ways I never had before. I wrote vital, hot, urgent love letters to him and sent them through the mail; they delighted him, he claimed, although he never wrote any back to me. All the corny, cheesy love songs I’d sung along to in junior high made startling sense to me for the first time in my life, so much so that they seemed to have been written expressly for the way I felt about him: “The Twelfth of Never,” “Top of the World,” “You Light Up My Life,” “I Can’t Live If Living Is Without You.” I could not get enough of his stocky, compact, willing body, could not believe how lucky I was to know his erudite, curious, cynical, funny mind. Watching his face over a restaurant table as he talked could cause me to lose my appetite from love. The smell of the back of his neck could make me swoon. Misunderstandings and missteps and painful fights had been there all along, and he had been condescending and fatalistic from the start, but instead of seeing these as warning signs, I allowed whatever feelings of frustration and doubt I had to be swept away with sex. That had possibly been my biggest mistake with him.

Now, I stood at the kitchen counter looking at his well-shaped head, watching him eat spaghetti that hadn’t been cooked enough, remembering how much I had adored him. I felt like crying, but I couldn’t cry. On his face was an expression of deep engagement in whatever he was reading.

He had squandered my love. That was what it came down to. I had no more to give him, and therefore it was over.

“Anthony,” I said.

“My sweet,” he said, turning a page.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he repeated. His voice held a certain amount of warmth, but he did not look up from his book. His reading glasses had slid halfway down his nose. His hairline had receded high up on his scalp; his graying hair spiraled down his neck in discrete, handsome curls. Under his V-necked blue sweater, his stomach had gone a bit soft. He wore black trousers and sneakers. He was beginning to look like Benjamin Franklin, with that firm, well-shaped mouth, those weary, intelligent eyes with pouches underneath, those incipient jowls. He was fifty-three years old, and he looked it, but he still had whatever quality it was that had originally attracted me to him. I could easily imagine, without a single pang of regret, some other woman scooping him up as soon as I had extricated myself from him. She was welcome to him; I had outgrown him. It was her turn now, whoever she was.

I looked at him, jangling with wakefulness and nerves. “Where’s Wendy?” I asked, my leg jittering up and down. I took a gulp of wine.

“She stayed for dinner at her friend’s house.”

“What are you reading?”

“A book about post-Communist capitalism in Eastern Europe.” He held his book up briefly to show me the dark, scholarly-looking cover; then he found his place in it again. “He’s a Marxist,” said Anthony as he continued to read, “who can’t accept the fact that Communism failed because of its inherent flaws, not because of history. He actually skewers certain of his fellow Marxist sociologists for failing to demonstrate the proper optimism.” Anthony said the word
optimism
with ironic emphasis. It was a quality he had little patience for.

“How did your radio interview go this morning? I had clients; I missed it.”

“All the NPR announcers are doped up on Xanax. Cozy little world we live in, cozy little people.”

“What are they supposed to do, scream with horror? They’re just reporting the news.” He had no response to this. “Sounds like it went well, actually,” I said.

“All I was doing,” he said, his eyes in his book, “was preaching to the choir. The Prius-driving, recycling, low-carbon-footprint choir.”

Anthony could talk and read at the same time. But his eyes trumped his ears: He usually remembered what he’d read while talking, but he never remembered conversations he’d had while reading. He was like a sleepwalker who grocery-shopped and paid bills in his sleep and forgot it all the next morning. Most of our conversations were now conducted with a book between us— his book, of course. When I read, I shushed him ferociously, for all the good it did me; he had never accepted the fact that other people didn’t possess his unique facility for ingesting words with his eyes while spewing them from his mouth.

He turned a page, scratched his forehead. He had barely looked at me since I had entered the kitchen. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed, but now that I had been awakened to the fact that this marriage was dead, I took it as confirmation. I sat across from him with my plate of spaghetti. I began to eat, because I was hungry, but I had to force the food in, chew the undercooked strands hard and swallow hard to get them past the tight constriction in my throat. The wine tasted like life’s blood to me; I took another acidic, thick red gulp. The wine and spaghetti roiled in my stomach. I forced more of everything down.

I didn’t know how to say it. I couldn’t even begin. I had helped and guided so many clients through moments just like this one. In fact, I thought of myself as an advocate for and expert in how to leave your partner, a sort of breakup maven. But this expertise was couched in the context of my being a happily married therapist. Like the frog in a pot of tap water on the stove, I had thought things were still room temperature between Anthony and me even as I was being cooked alive.

I imagined returning from my office to some quiet new apartment, shedding my work clothes, rummaging through the fridge, all alone. Wendy was somewhere in the background in this fantasy; it didn’t exclude her, but the point of it was that Anthony was nowhere to be found in it.

“I have to hop out of the pot,” I said absurdly.

“Ha-ha,” he said automatically, not listening.

“I mean it, Anthony,” I said.

“Mean what, my love,” he said. This wasn’t a question; it was a soothing pat on the head, meant to appease me while he stayed happily submerged.

“I mean I want a separation,” I said.

He looked sharply at me.

“I want a separation,” I said. “From you. From our marriage.”

He put his fork down on his plate and coughed. He continued to stare at me, blinking.

“You heard me right,” I said.

It was out; I had said it. I had broken the hymen of this virgin topic, and now everything would take its own natural course from here. I took another gulp of wine. I watched Anthony’s face as he absorbed what I had said and formulated his response to it. I knew his expressions so well, knew his very thoughts, even. This conversation might as well have already been scripted, I thought, for all the surprises I’m going to find in it.

“I have to ask the obvious question,” said Anthony. He blinked, took a sharp breath. “Have you met someone else?”

“There is no other man involved here,” I said, and then I waited for his next question.

“Are you sure about this?”

“I am absolutely sure,” I responded promptly, right on cue.

“Is there anything I can say to change your mind?”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t. I want to move out. We can talk about what to do about Wendy. In the immediate future, I want to find myself a place. You can have this apartment; it was yours to begin with.”

He took off his reading glasses and set them down next to his book. A fugitive vapor of old, old passion crossed his face like a tissue-thin wisp of cloud being blown across a clear sky by a rogue wind. The planes of his face contracted slightly with the impact of its passing, and then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.

“Yes,” he said. “The apartment was mine to begin with. And you’re much more adaptable than I am to new places. I’ll help you in any way I can, of course. But I suppose you’ve figured it all out already, down to the last stick of furniture.” He gave me a sad smile. “I always loved that expression, ‘stick of furniture.’ So Victorian.”

I began to cry, racking heaving sobs that made me gasp and hiccup. I cried and cried. He sat with me while I wept, didn’t say a word or move to comfort me, as if he had already realized that all our sorrows and joys would now be experienced apart rather than together.

“You’re not even going to fight for me,” I yelled through streams of mucus, my mouth contorting with weeping so absurdly I could hardly get the words out. “You’re just going to let me go.”

“Here,” he said, handing me a Kleenex.

I blew my nose, but I could not stop crying.

“Josie,” he said. “I think you’re being a little ridiculous, but I know better than to try to talk you out of something you want to do.”

“I would hardly use the word
want,”
I said hotly. “
Need
, maybe. You never even look at me anymore. We haven’t had sex since last spring, and that was just because I got drunk and threw myself at you. You don’t see me. I feel like a ghost to you, like I’m dead. Like we both are.” I lost control of my face then and had to struggle with my cheek muscles for a moment. “You would never go to therapy with me,” I added.

Anthony closed his book. “You know why, Josie,” he said tightly. “I was this way when you met me. I haven’t changed. You’ve changed, and I accept that, although I would vastly prefer you didn’t leave me, and that’s an understatement. Of course you deserve a man who’s more compatible with you. I am so sorry I’ve failed you.” He said this last sentence as if it were a line in a school play he was mocking. I hated it when he did this, couched something that ought to have been genuine and touching in ironic glibness. It seemed cowardly; it was nothing but a sign of how limited he was.

“I think I should move out as soon as possible,” I said. I gave a small vestigial hiccup, which annoyed me; it undercut my righteous anger at him. “We should tell Wendy tonight, when she gets home. You’ve made this very easy for me, Anthony. There doesn’t seem to be anything left to say.”

“You’ll be back,” he said.

“Not until you stop being condescending and impervious,” I told him, my anger suddenly gone, just like that—poof— replaced by something like giddy relief. I was leaving; I was free. I began to eat my spaghetti again. “You make the worst spaghetti,” I said, laughing.

I noticed that he had not reopened his book. I had his full attention, it seemed. “All of us Italians know how to make spaghetti,” he said. “It’s in our blood.”

“Well, yours is horrible,” I said. “Undercooked and glutinous.”

“I follow the directions!”

“The directions are fallible.”

He shook his head. This was by no means the first time I had pointed this out to him. “I like it like this,” he said.

“That’s very sad.”

“Maybe I just have different taste in pasta doneness than you do.”

“Maybe you’re totally out of touch with the sensory world.”

“Maybe not entirely,” he said, looking fondly at me.

Now it was my turn to feel the old, old pull of passion for him.

“You know, if you would agree to just a few therapy sessions, I might be able to stay,” I said. “What’s the harm in just trying?”

“If we can’t work it out on our own, we can’t work it out.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” I said.

“Nevertheless,” he said.

“You think if you use a word like
nevertheless
, it makes your argument viable?”

He rubbed his hands over his face and blinked a few times. “Listen,” he said. “I can’t say I’m totally surprised here. So you want to go? Go. I predict you’ll come back eventually. I feel like you need to do this. I am not going to fight you, but that’s only because I believe that you will come back in the end.”

“You’re kicking me out?” I said.

“Not exactly,” he replied.

“You’re just being preemptive,” I said. “You macho guido.”

We both laughed.

“If I thought therapy would do a thing, I would go,” he said. “No offense to your profession.”

He had always mocked my profession; I had never been the least bit offended. Now I wondered why the hell not.

“If I were our marital therapist,” I said briskly, “I would force you to exercise regularly, cut down on the booze, and take vitamin B supplements.”

“Right there, you’ve lost me,” said Anthony. His tone was predictably laconic.

“And then,” I said, “I would send you and me on a weeklong vacation to somewhere like Glacier National Park to stay in the lodge and hike all day and canoe on the lake, then come in and take a hot shower, have cocktails, eat a big dinner, and go to bed early and have sex every night.”