The Astral (17 page)

“Sit down, please,” said Helen.

“Is it clear to you now what I’m doing here?”

“Sit down, please.”

“I will sit down,” I said, “because we aren’t finished talking. You haven’t apologized yet. That’s the first thing you have to do.”

I backed away from her and sat down on the couch, but my fists were still balled up.

“Okay,” she said, “I would like to establish that it may have been necessary for you to say those things to me, but it was extremely inappropriate. Extremely, Harry. Inappropriate and out of control. The therapeutic process as I practice it is not ever threatening, on either side. You may not threaten me again. Is that clear?”

“What’s clear,” I said, “is that this conversation is not over yet. And you’re not in control here.”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs and gave me a glinting smile. “There’s plenty of time left in our session,” she said. “Let’s talk about why you’re really here. Let’s examine your fear of taking charge, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate any reality but the one you’ve decided is the only true one. Let’s talk about your marriage and the real reasons Luz ended it. We can delve as deeply as we have time for into how terrified you are of living without your wife, the person you’ve been completely dependent on for decades. This little posture of threatening violence you’ve just performed was very instructive for me; it gave me a real window into your psyche that will be very helpful in our work together.” She gave that same glinting smile again. “We can use ass-raping as a point of entry, if it makes it easier for you.”

“That’s never been a particular fantasy of mine,” I said, “but if it gives you a thrill, I’m willing to go with it.”

Helen’s phone rang, so I reached under the couch, fished it out, and checked the caller ID screen to see who was calling.

“It’ll go to voice mail,” she said. “I don’t answer calls during sessions. I meant to turn the ringer off, but you snatched it away from me.”

“It’s Lisa,” I said. I hit the talk button. “Lisa,” I said. “It’s Harry. I’m in Helen’s office. Can she call you back when we’re done talking?”

“It’s me, actually,” said Lisa’s husband, my old friend James Lee, the guy Marion had had an affair with all those years ago. He had told me, around the time of the affair, that when he’d complained to Helen that Lisa, who was also Helen’s client, didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, Helen had urged him to hire a prostitute, and then she’d offered—jokingly, according to James—to have sex with him herself. “Can you tell Helen I won’t be in for my session tomorrow? Celeste has the flu. I’ll call back to reschedule, but I just wanted her to know.”

“Sure,” I said. “Good to hear your voice, it’s been a while. We should have a drink.”

“Anytime,” said James. “That would be great.”

“How about tonight? Marlene’s?”

“Marlene’s?” said James, as if I’d suggested meeting at a gas station or a school cafeteria. “No, come over. Lisa will be out, so I have to stay home with Celeste and Ethan. Come for dinner, actually. Can you come straight from Helen’s office?”

“I’ll come straight from here,” I said, and rang off. “James won’t be in tomorrow,” I told Helen. “He’ll call back to reschedule.”

She shook her head. “I asked you not to pick that up,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was trembling. My rage was still, even now, continuing to mount; apparently according to my body, I had not even begun to vent it. I hoped I wouldn’t really strangle Helen, but at that moment, I understood that I actually had enough built-up rage to provoke me to act violently, something I had never done before.

“No,” she said, “it really wasn’t okay.”

“I answer the phone at my job,” I said. “I like to think I have a kind of rough charm. Anyway, where were we?”

“I was offering to help you examine the real causes of the end of your marriage.” She seemed so controlled, so unperturbed. But a few minutes ago, I had struck a nerve. I had been right about her love life, at least; that much, I knew. I could see it in her face, a webby desiccated disappointment around her lips and eyes, a papery, powdery lonesomeness in her cheeks. No adequately loved woman kept her hair in that smooth helmet of shining, artificial blondness. Adored well-fucked women allowed their hair to be mussed, to tousle and even curl a bit. I had never thought about this, but now that it occurred to me, I couldn’t fathom why I hadn’t observed it before.

“What we were doing,” I said, “was waiting for an apology from you for wrecking my marriage.”

“Well,” Helen said. “Your wife asked you to move out. She has no interest in reconciling with you. She’s made it clear she doesn’t want to see you or have anything to do with you. This is her decision. I have no influence over her. All I can do is to help her better articulate and understand her feelings. That is all.”

I stared back at her so hard my eyeballs vibrated in their sockets. “Liar. You told her to assume that Marion and I are sleeping together, even though we’re not, even though she found real evidence that we’re not and never have been.”

Helen shook her head and made a dismissive clucking sound with her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “I suggested that, given the fact that she wants to end the marriage, it doesn’t matter. Who cares what you did or didn’t do? She doesn’t want you back. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“She does want me back,” I said.

“Do you know what she thinks of you? Do you know what she says about what it was like being married to you? I do, because I listen to her.”

“She’s hurt and angry,” I said. “And she has no reason to be.”

“She married you because she thought you were a genius. She worked her ass off for years to support you and your writing. She thought you were the next Shakespeare. The truth began to dawn on her years ago but she tried to shake it off. Finally she couldn’t anymore. She thinks you’re a rotten writer. She destroyed those poems because they were bad. She kicked you out because she was through with you.”

“I never said they were great,” I said. “They were works in progress. And she told me all that when she threw me out, and I did listen.”

“Your marriage is over.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. You’ll see.”

“As long as you remain deluded and in denial to this extent, you’ll be stuck. You can’t move forward until you accept the truth. She wants a divorce.”

“As long as you keep controlling her and lying to her, this breakdown she’s having will get worse. She’ll go off the edge.”

“In my own marriage,” said Helen with pointed deliberation, “I often find that my husband won’t listen to me until I repeat something eighty times. My children,” she added with even more pointedness, “call it ‘dadtardation.’ Harry, you are exhibiting dadtardation. That’s my professional diagnosis. You’ve got to listen to your wife.”

“I do listen,” I said. “She won’t speak to me, but she told our daughter, just yesterday, that this whole question of my affair with Marion is driving her crazy, and it’s getting worse. She’s started fabricating incidents and rewriting memories of our marriage.”

Helen cocked her head and didn’t answer. She appeared to be waiting for me to say something more.

I inhaled through my nose, hard. “Forget the fact that she wants a divorce. Causing her to call the entire marriage into question is wrong. It makes her believe things that hurt her and aren’t true. It causes unnecessary pain. It does matter, what I did or didn’t do. It matters more than anything else to her. At least let her have the truth, at least let her rest.”

“No, you let her rest, Harry. Give it up, let her go. She’s finally done what she wanted to do for so many years. Don’t make it harder for her than it already is to get free of you. You say you love her. If you really do love her, which I’m finding very hard to believe, then accept that she’s through with you.”

“Why is it hard for you to believe that I love my wife?”

“Because you’re invasive and controlling. You won’t listen. You moved back into her building, for God’s sake! She told me in our session this morning that she feels stalked and spied on. And now you’ve threatened her therapist. You’re the one who’s out of control; you’re the one who’s going over the edge. You’re losing your grip on reality.”

“Luz has no grip on reality! All I want is for her to believe the truth and decide accordingly!”

“She’s considering a restraining order,” said Helen. “She’s about to serve you with divorce papers.”

I gazed at Helen through a sickening cloud of disbelief. She gazed back at me with no expression on her face at all.

“You know, Harry,” she said, no doubt marking and enjoying my distress, “she told me she’d come home from a day at work and find you in the exact same place she’d left you in. She cooked dinner, she helped the kids with their homework. She said it was worse than living alone. She told me it was an ongoing heartbreak to live night after night with someone who wasn’t really there. Now that you’re gone, she can breathe.”

“I washed the dishes,” I said. “I was there! I was home. I didn’t go out. I didn’t run around. I slept right next to her every night. I didn’t hog the covers.”

When the session was over, I told Helen with weak defiance that I wasn’t going to pay her; she owed me.

“Well then.” She smiled without any apparent concern. “I’ll address the bill to you and send it care of Luz’s address.”

Horrified at the thought of Luz opening a bill for my session with her own therapist, I paid Helen in cash and walked out. Not only had I not punished her, I’d had to pay her for my failure.

Chapter Fifteen

  T
he defeated feeling lasted two blocks, and then I was enraged again. That fucking lying bitch of a stuck-up stone-faced shamanistic manipulator, so that was how she did it—she said whatever it took to maintain her control over her clients. She tapped into their deepest, most private, irrational, ancient fears, confirmed those fears as real in one massive terrible landslide of diagnostic flimflammery, and then pretended to offer them a shovel to dig themselves out from under the avalanche she’d caused, but as the client shoveled and shoveled and shoveled, she kept heaping more dirt on until they were buried alive. I didn’t give a fuck that this metaphor was overblown and overextended, I could do whatever the hell I wanted in the privacy of my own head; that was one of the only good things about being alive. And then, when they were well and truly buried, she kept them there, mummified in their fear and weakness, and bled them dry of a hundred and fifty bucks a session. It was a good racket, like dealing heroin. I could see exactly how she did it, but somehow I was immune to her tricks. Maybe I wasn’t invested enough in optimistic self-improvement. Or more likely, I was so calcified in my own self-generated cocoon of skepticism, I was impervious to anyone else’s influence.

But that was a big steaming load of manure, what she’d said about Luz. Helen was egging her on to think those things about me and our marriage, and Luz was susceptible to authority, unlike me. And unlike Marion, for that matter. Luz wasn’t a practicing freethinker, as Marion and I had called ourselves with broad, winking self-mockery when we were younger. Luz needed structure, craved dogma. Knowing her as well as I did confirmed my long-held suspicion that people who espoused religions and belief systems did so because they were inherently spineless. They lacked a moral compass and ethical core, and therefore, they didn’t know how to live correctly, how to answer to their failings and trespasses, without some external prod. I’d always felt superior to my wife because of her need for confession and prayer. She was weak because of that. I was always determined to muddle through on my own, fucking up and apologizing and learning from my mistakes and moving on. That was what grown-ups did; that was the responsible way to go about things.

Luz was a child, a simpleton, a Boleslaw. She couldn’t fathom human complexity: everyone had to be either all good or all bad. She herself was complex, but she didn’t know it. She was blind to herself, and therefore blind to everything and everyone, especially me. She was both simplistically moralistic and mulishly stubborn: a fatal combination. Forgiveness was conditional. Learning from past mistakes was apparently not something she could imagine anyone doing, because she was incapable of such a thing herself. She lacked imagination. Marion was right. That was her fatal flaw.

And that was why she needed me, the primary reason. From me, Luz had derived a vicarious sense of what it was like to live according to your own damn ideas. She needed the artificial life support of religion and authority herself, but she loved watching me operate, she got off on my ability to breathe on my own, like a little polio patient in an iron lung watching a healthy kid playing in the fresh air outside the sanatorium window.

Here I was, going around in these same circles again with no way out.

I wish there were a god to blame
,

Some hard-fisted, furrow-browed jehovah

I could impugn in clotted voice with pointed finger
.

Or better yet, a slippery and sycophantic satan—

I could take my pick of those, but what’s the use?

There’s no one to blame for our shared

Privation and loneliness, each of us stuck here

In our husks of flesh, unable to sleep

Without the other’s body to lie beside

After the easy grace of habitual sex
,

Back when every night was a rehearsal

For the grave, or so I thought
.

Goddamn her. And goddamn that self-righteous bitch of a shrink. She was causing Luz to suffer even more under her so-called treatment than she’d been suffering alone. Helen was as bad as the Catholic Church, inventing sin where none organically existed, positing a higher authority to strip away autonomy and internal bearings, creating a stringent but illusory system of self-castigation and expiation, and making people pay, pay, pay. Therapy wasn’t the problem. I wasn’t that naïve. A true, dedicated therapist might have helped her recognize her own crippled state and offered her a temporary crutch, moral exercises, a genuine, painstaking means to self-understanding and eventual self-reliance. Helen had to be killed. Or maybe she needed something a little more figurative than that.

Because she had this power over my wife and so many of my friends, Helen had no doubt thought she could suck me in and make me believe her version of reality, too. But she had underestimated me. I knew what I knew, and no one could tell me otherwise. My own experiences were the highest authority I had. A hard-won, cumulative knowledge of what was real and what wasn’t was one of the other only good things about being alive.

I’m the boss of myself, I muttered, as Karina might have when she was four or five.

All of this transpired in my brain as I rode my bike down to Delancey, over the bridge, and along the waterfront to Greenpoint. By the time I got to Noble Street, I had wrestled my mood into some sort of shape for socializing, but it took some doing. I climbed the steps of James and Lisa’s house and rang the bell, realizing too late that I had come empty-handed.

“Come on in,” said James, his slight, soft body encased in a big butcher’s apron smeared with what looked like, and turned out to be, blood.

“Are you performing surgeries?”

“On dead rabbits.”

In the big, tracklit, gleaming, technically tricked-out kitchen, he handed me a glass of wine that tasted fine and was, I knew, ridiculously expensive. James always had to have the best of everything, whether it was a car, an upright bass, a pair of shoes, or something for his kitchen. Or a mistress. In all our discussions about his long-ago affair with Marion, I always had got the slightly creepy feeling that she had been another of his superior acquisitions. James was pragmatically cold, deep down, for all his seeming generosity and caring. That was how he stayed married to Lisa: he required no genuine connection. He was very comfortable hating his wife, defying her in invisible but profound ways while appearing to kowtow and accommodate.

James and Lisa had started their own business straight out of Wesleyan, where they’d met as freshmen, both scholarship students, in the early 1970s. Back then, they had been promising musicians; James was a fantastic upright bass player and Lisa was a trumpet virtuoso and singer. With three other college friends they’d had an avant-garde cabaret-rock band that was allegedly on the verge of being signed to a major label. Whatever might have happened with that, they would likely have gone on to become rock stars, but Lisa abruptly decided that she and James should get married and become wealthy burghers, and all that potential glamorous superstardom went out the window.

Lisa was a redheaded thunderbolt, hard-nosed and funny, moody and insecure, pragmatic and full of inchoate fears. She made all the major decisions, and James, who was dreamy, earnest, and meek on the outside and a volcano of frustrated creative energy on the inside, agreed to anything to keep the peace with his wife. They were both native New Yorkers, both the children of poor immigrants. James’s Chinese parents had run a shoe repair shop on the Lower East Side. Lisa’s German political dissident father had escaped from the Nazis in 1939 and barely supported his Romanian wife and their two kids by translating scientific and technical tracts. James and Lisa therefore had no illusions, either of them, about the romance of struggling. Lisa’s decision to invest their collective marital talents in a solid business instead of a mercurial, risky music career had paid off in exactly the way she’d hoped it would. Custom Case, their instrument-case design and repair shop, was housed on an entire floor of a lovely old warehouse in Red Hook. They designed and built cases for classical-music icons, rock stars, and ordinary kids who wanted cool cases for their trumpets and guitars and violins. Consequently, Lisa and James were now millionaires with a beautifully renovated brownstone on Noble Street; their oldest son worked for them and would no doubt take over Custom Case someday, their second son was becoming the rock star his parents had failed to become, and their two youngest kids, both adopted when the older ones went off to college and Lisa freaked out and informed James that they needed more kids, lived at home.

All appearances to the contrary, their sexless, detached, bloodless marriage gave both of them exactly what they most deeply needed and desired. It worked because each had a sphere of power in which the other never interfered. The whole thing rested on a precisely calibrated fulcrum of control. He ran the business, she ran their lives; they observed the outward forms of proper married etiquette. James’s affair with Marion had caused some brutal repercussions, the most obvious of which was that the two couples, formerly friends, no longer spoke; Lisa viciously bad-mouthed Marion to anyone who would listen, injecting our whole group of friends with her venom. James, in his guilt, then gave Lisa carte blanche to control his time, his freedom, and his expenditures even more stringently, but this, I suspected, was what he had unconsciously wanted all along. James and Lisa had one of the most successful marriages I’d ever seen.

On a butcher-block cutting board, James had laid out two skinned bunnies, which looked like the naked, hunched carcasses of miniature human children, Hansel and Gretel maybe. Something was cooking in a pot on a burner of the huge state-of-the-art chef’s stove. Above James’s head dangled a cluster of copper pots and cast-iron skillets suspended from hooks in a stainless-steel grate. His knives were arrayed on a magnetic strip in a cruel-looking row. The counters were made of some kind of extra-sparkly granite, fool’s-gold flecks, maybe. The floors were buffed oak planks that had absorbed who knew what manner of grisly splatters and spillages. It was a medieval torture chamber of a room, aggressively culinary, not cozy or peaceful at all.

“How are you, Harry?” James asked in his dulcet voice. His head was the shape of a chickpea, round with a pointed chin. He had short, thick black hair, skin the color of green tea, and black-almond eyes. His expression was often innocently merry and sweet. Marion had told me that she’d fallen for him because of his appearance of openness and enthusiasm, which had been as refreshing to her as cool water to a parched desert crawler. Her own husband had been tough-minded, crusty, and skittish, and during that era, he and Marion had catapulted themselves into distant orbits from each other in that usually temporary but often terrifying way of most long-married couples. Compared to her distracted, always-working husband, James had seemed so completely present to Marion. She had only later become aware of his real qualities. Affairs were like that, of course. I knew all too well how dazzlingly perfect the secret lover seemed compared to the dull and obligatory spouse. This delusion was a species of insanity, but no one ever realized it except in hindsight. Knowing now what I knew about Samantha, it was clear to me how unsuited to each other we had been. Whether or not I should regret learning this, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d needed to make such a colossal mistake to avoid making other, even worse ones in the future.

“I’m all right,” I said, perching on a stool at the island in the middle of the room. I swilled some wine. “Been better. You’ve heard all the gossip, I’m sure.”

We were dancing around my presumed affair with Marion.

“How was your session with Helen?” James asked. “I didn’t know you saw her. But I’m not surprised. Are you seeing her individually, or with Luz?”

“This was a one-shot thing,” I said. “I went in to tell her to stop manipulating Luz. I told her she was ruining Luz’s life. I think I threatened to kill her at one point.”

James stopped deboning bunnies and looked up at me, laughing. “I bet she loved that. She’s always up for a challenge.”

“She didn’t seem to love it,” I said. “Not especially.”

James kept his eyes on me. He was still smiling. “You might have misread her.”

“James,” I said. “The woman is the devil incarnate, to use the term very loosely. Why do you people all keep going to her? How much money do you think you’ve given her through the years? You see her alone every week, and you go to group twice a month, and you and Lisa see her together once a month, and Lisa sees her. Have you sent your kids to her yet?”

James turned back to his carcasses. “She’s worth it. I’m going to keep seeing her until she retires or I die, whichever comes first.”

“Did you ever take her up on her offer to fuck you?”

James laughed like a promising but unseasoned actor who was practicing his guffaw. This was his normal laugh. “Ho, ho, ho,” he chortled. “I told you she said that? She was joking. It’s her humor.”

“She joked about ass fucking. With me. If she was really joking.”

“Helen’s a provocateur. She likes to verbally goose her clients, make us react, get us thinking in different directions. She’s very open. There’s nowhere she won’t go. She’s a genius.”

“If you call brainwashing genius.”

James gave a modified, lesser rendition of his trademark laugh. “Brainwashing?”

“She’s convincing Luz that our marriage was a mistake. She’s encouraging her to think heinous things of me. You know how easily influenced Luz is. She loves cockamamie theories that let her avoid reality. Helen is full of those theories. The two of them together are like gasoline and a match, and I’m the pile of trash they’re igniting.”