Confessions of a Falling Woman Page 8

  He said, “Everyone is happy there, so I had to come back to New York.”

  I was tempted to suggest that he has some kind of allergic reaction to happiness, but as I said, I was trying very hard to be adult.

  He looks great, by the way. He was wearing those flowered jams or whatever they call them and a Mets cap, which should look ridiculous on a forty-three-year-old man, but they didn’t. And that earring, this little diamond. I used to think that was the sexiest thing. His hair may be thinning a bit under the cap, but otherwise he looks terrific.

  Am I rattling? Honestly, I don’t know why I’m so unhinged. I run into an ex, ex-whatever, we exchange pleasantries, act civilized. The awful thing was, this is embarrassing, my heart was pattering away, I could hear it the whole time we were talking.

  We’re walking across the baseball diamonds, and I tell him I’ve moved over to a bigger agency, that I’m handling Diane Ladd and Ben Kingsley, and he’s telling me about Thailand, how serene and happy the people there are, and there’s this little outdoor café that I would love, it has monkeys that aren’t in cages, that perch on your shoulder while you eat.

  Mind you, all of this is said like we’re just old friends. Not old friends, like no time has passed, like we’re still the way we were. There’s no allusion to our parting, my parting. How would you phrase it? He was the one who suggested ending it, so technically I suppose he left me. The fact that I did the actual leaving is beside the point.

  I’ve never told you exactly what happened, have I? I went in originally because I was having trouble sleeping after my divorce. I won’t go into the reasons behind that—suffice it to say that I got over my insomnia within the first six months and kept going because for that one hour every week I was happy.

  Happy? I don’t know, not euphoric certainly, but I felt more at home there than I did in my own apartment. Time stopped in that room. For fifty minutes, anyway.

  His office was on the top floor of a brownstone in the West Village. You entered through a gate off the street into a courtyard, and then up four flights of stairs, very narrow and squeaky. And at the top was this wonderful garret, with a skylight and a door that opened onto a tiny iron balcony. The windows faced the back side of a convent and a garden that was maintained by the nuns.

  The room was so quiet and separate from the city. In the summer months the smell of lilies and cooking floated up through the open windows. Birds nested in the ivy, pigeons, but other birds too. Sparrows.

  We talked about my fears and my childhood, all the standard stuff, my trust issues, my dreams, et cetera. Not just mine, though, his as well. Douglas was never a classic analyst; he would throw in more than the occasional “How do you feel about that?” I got to know him rather well over the two years. When life was going well, we talked about fantasies. I know what you’re thinking, not just sexual fantasies, fantasies about being a child again or time traveling. He told me then that he wanted to visit Thailand, that he wanted to study with the monks there. He actually did go that Easter, and then again in August. That second trip, he brought me back a picture of Hanuman, the monkey general, painted on green silk.

  Mine? Well, I had one wonderful fantasy that the room we were in was actually in Rome, that the voices I sometimes heard from across the courtyard were speaking Italian, and that when I passed outside the courtyard, there would be piazzas and open plazas filled with women in black. This fantasy also included Douglas, of course, the city of love and all that. It was part of the transference process; even I had read enough Freud to recognize that. That knowledge, by the way, is no comfort. It’s disorienting enough to fall in love, without the added embarrassment of knowing that your feelings are as programmed as a laboratory rat’s.

  Douglas and I, in my fantasy, would float through the canals in a gondola. I know the canals are in Venice, not Rome, but in my fantasy they were in Rome. He stood at the rear of the gondola, pushing us through a dark labyrinth of canals, under bridges with smiling gargoyles. Pretty transparent, tunnels and a gondola instead of a train. Probably the only original thing in the whole fantasy is that he was singing chants. Buddhist chants, I suppose. I couldn’t understand the words, but the music was atonal.

  I don’t know. I guess the chants would be significant, the fact that I didn’t understand them. I don’t know.

  Our last session, or rather the next to the last, I was rambling on about something, much as I’m doing now, and he was turning his pen over and over in his hand, with this look on his face. Like his dog had died. He never developed the ability to appear raptly attentive when he was not, and he’s not a good liar. I would imagine this candor is a professional liability, but it was one of the things I really loved about him. His emotions were very close to the surface, almost in a feminine way. Most men, I think, seem to regard their feelings as awkward and embarrassing, like a second pair of hands.

  I asked him what was the matter, was he all right? At first, he tried to evade the whole thing, asked me to please continue. I said, “Listen, I consider you a friend, and something is obviously bothering you.”

  Finally he said he wanted to discuss the possibility of my ending therapy, “graduating,” I believe was his term. He felt I had come so far, that I was ready to move on. And he would be leaving for another vacation to Bangkok in a month, so the timing seemed apt, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t remember his exact reasoning, but anyway, how would I feel about this?

  I felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. I felt much worse than when my husband, Eric, moved his things out. What I said was, ready or not, I liked being there, I liked being with him.

  He said, “I like you being here, too, Abby, and I’ll miss you when you go. But, frankly, I can’t go on taking your money simply because we enjoy each other’s company. There are ethical considerations.”

  I still don’t buy that. I had a good settlement from Eric, and I was making not a bad living besides. If I wanted to spend it on being with him, that was certainly as valid as spending it at Sak’s or going to a spa. And since when do therapists decide you don’t need them anymore? Okay, I know that’s the goal, but I’ve never heard of a person being dumped by their shrink before. You’re supposed to leave them. I guess he didn’t see it that way.

  We spent the next session talking about closure. That was his agenda, in any case. In reality, I spent the hour making a complete ass of myself, telling him that I loved him, that I didn’t give a damn whether it was transference or not. And how could he be so sure? Transference is endowing the therapist with the qualities of the ideal mother or father, right? Well, you tell me, when have you fallen in love and not done just that?

  He reassured me that my feelings were natural and nothing to be ashamed of. His exact words. Nothing to be ashamed of. Which, of course, made me feel perfectly foolish and angry besides.

  “I’m not the one who’s ashamed of his feelings,” I said. Listen, I know about countertransference. More to the point, I know love when I see it, when I’ve seen it. I looked in his face and it was all there.

  I said, “Do me a favor, Douglas. Explain to me why only the patient has human feelings. How come I can’t ask you how you’re feeling and get a straight answer?”

  You know what he said? He said, and I quote, “I have human feelings, Abby, but you are more important here than my feelings.” And then he went on to tell me about the bodhisattvas. They’re Buddhist monks, but they’re teachers. And they make this sacrifice. Instead of floating off to Nirvana, they stay behind so they can help other people.

  Which sounds real impressive until you ask yourself, “Do I want someone who renounces his feelings telling me how to be happy?”

  We were supposed to have another couple of sessions, but suddenly I just didn’t see the point. I had this moment of clarity, and I realized that there’s no mileage in trying to convince someone to recognize happiness when it comes. You can talk and talk and talk and talk, and the truth gets further away. Some truths aren’t go
tten to through words. That’s heresy in your profession, I know, and who am I to be criticizing? After all, here I am. Still blathering on. Of course, I’m not exactly happy now either.

  How much time do we have left?

  The cherry trees are blooming in the park now. Douglas and I walked the length of the long meadow and through this place over near the library called the Vale of Kashmir. It’s pretty run-down now, broken beer bottles, et cetera, but it must have been beautiful once. The cherry trees were thick with blossoms, and every little riff of breeze snowed petals on us.

  Douglas was telling me a story about a monk he met who can amplify his heartbeat. He sat in a room, in Thailand, with this monk and he listened to the pulse of the man’s heart, this slow drumming swelling louder and louder. Douglas said it felt like being inside the womb, like a memory of perfect contentment.

  The funny thing is I nodded and smiled, like I’d been there, like I remembered it, too. The room, the feeling of peace. Like a déjà vu or something. And then I realized it was the sound of my own heart.

  CONFESSIONS OF A FALLING WOMAN

  If this letter reaches you, it will have to be by some divine accident. I know you are no longer living at this address, and the phone company no longer lists you in Chicago. That doesn’t surprise me; after all I was the one who loved cities, not you. All your talk, after the accident, about going back to Minot, working on your dad’s farm, how you wanted to sleep in the dark again. Anyplace but North Dakota, I used to think. It might please you to know that I’ve come around to your way of thinking, Russ. Not geographically, but I have a small garden. A few tomato plants, some basil and mint, a row of spinach. It’s not ambitious, but things grow in it.

  In fact, I took a shot and called Information in Minot. I also tried to get in touch with you through Audie, and I’m sorry to hear of his passing. He was a sweet man, and he treated me like a daughter, even after the divorce.

  So my only hope, absurd perhaps, is that you’ve left a forwarding address and the postal service will find you for me.

  You must be wondering why I am trying to contact you now, after all this time. Perhaps it will strike you as a thoughtless invasion of your privacy, or worse, a deliberate unkindness, an attempt to open up old wounds.

  Another possibility occurs to me: that you have put our life behind you entirely, and I will have to rely on idle curiosity. I’m trying to imagine you now, wherever you are, holding this letter in your hands and glancing over the lines, like a plea from some charity. What does she want from me?

  Here it is: I want you to hear me out. An apology is a limp thing, I know that, and it’s late by about eleven years, but here it is.

  Do you remember the night in the hospital, we were in the waiting room, and you said you had noticed the tires on the Chevy the week before, that they were a little bald? It was just something you muttered, you probably don’t remember. You were saying a lot of things, and your hair was coming out in handfuls, little tufts of hair coming off in my hands when I stroked your head. The medic said it was shock. Still, you might have noticed that I didn’t shush you, that I didn’t say “No, honey, it’s not your fault.”

  The brakes had locked, and I realize now that new tires wouldn’t have made any difference. But at the time, I heard an explanation in your words. Our child couldn’t die unless someone had been irresponsible, I thought, unless someone was to blame. I don’t remember much else of that year, except being tired. It took so much effort to keep that image of balding tires at bay, to keep on loving you, to keep silent when I wanted to scream. Listening to you talk about moving to Minot, as if the city were at fault. And then when you came home from work with the name of a counselor, a grief counselor, as though we required instruction on grieving. You said we had to come to terms with Megan’s death before we could go on. What you didn’t know, of course, was that I had already found a way. God knows, I didn’t want to blame you, but the alternative was unthinkable, random horror. Forget what I told you when I left, that you didn’t meet my needs, that I needed my space, or whatever was the current jargon. I traded you in for the illusion that the world still made sense.

  I didn’t know it then, that you can let go and still live. There’s a story I heard recently, a parable about a man who falls off a cliff. As he’s falling he grabs onto a branch or a root sticking out from the cliff. He hangs on for dear life, clutching that thin twig, but he’s not strong enough and his grip is slipping, and finally his fingers slip loose. And he falls…six inches. I clung to that image of balding tires for almost a decade. For what it’s worth, I want you to know that I’ve finally let go.

  About seven months ago, I was pushing a cart down the cereal aisle at the Grand Union. (You may have noticed the postmark; I bought a small house in Croton a few years ago. It’s an hour to New York, the best of both worlds.) You know how they play Muzak in the supermarkets? I was pushing the cart, and this song exploded in my head, very loud. It was Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” Except it was inside my head, like picking up a radio station in a gold filling. I just stood there, terrified, gripping the handle of the cart, listening to Tina blaring in my brain. And then it stopped, she clicked off. I looked around to see if anyone else had heard it. A woman in a pink sweat suit picked a box of All-Bran off a shelf and glanced over the print on the side of the carton.

  That was the first time; it happened again. Of course, I didn’t tell anyone, not even the man I’m seeing. Peter is a good man, and he has since surprised me with his reserve of humor, but our relationship was not yet intimate enough to admit insanity. You see, I also smelled burning rubber sometimes. That was what made me think it was a sign: the stench of tires burning. At the time, I was sure that God or my psyche was trying to tell me something. Something to do with Megan or with you.

  I made a list of the songs and the times when I had heard them. The rush-hour train home, between Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown: Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. While taking my dinner out of the microwave: Dean Martin singing “White Christmas.” In the shower: “Something’s Coming,” from West Side Story. I bought the tapes and listened to them at night, over and over again, trying to decode their meaning. Tina Turner was telling me that love was a secondhand emotion, but Dean Martin suggested that the memory of family and home are the things that sustain you through loneliness. Maybe the message had something to do with treetops glistening, a pastoral scene, but that discounted West Side Story. “Something’s coming, something good.” I tried anagrams. Finally, I went to an analyst for help. He sent me to an MD, who sent me to a specialist. As it turns out, I have a brain tumor.

  I’ve been told that as a tumor grows it presses against the brain tissue and sometimes things misfire. The songs I heard were random bytes lodged in my brain, not even favorite songs. The smell of burning rubber is a common symptom, by the way, if I had known what I was looking for. Perfectly logical, but there is no meaning attached to any of it.

  Are you still with me, Russ?

  There’s no logic to a brain tumor, to a car spinning out on a few wet leaves. It doesn’t make sense to die. Not at five, not at forty-three or -four, not even, I suppose, at ninety. It’s very hard not to take it personally. Not to think God’s out to get me, to punish me for something. But for what, Russ? Living?

  And everything else that has happened to me—you, Megan, Peter, my entire life—it doesn’t form some grand pattern. Not one that I can recognize, anyway. It seems so ridiculous now that I could have blamed you for Meggie, for our unhappiness afterward. There is no one to blame this time around. I can’t tell you what a relief that is, finally.

  I don’t hear music anymore. They removed the tumor, although there are still bad cells brewing in there, despite a first round of chemo. I suppose the odds are against me, but then I don’t believe in odds anymore. I believe it could just as easily go my way as not.

  You should see me, Russ. I’m learning to do quite stylish things with scarves. I look a
t my face in the mirror and don’t recognize it; however, I do look vaguely like Georgia O’Keeffe, which pleases me. My eyes look stronger than they did when I was well, and the bones in my face have come out like a landscape. All the fat has been carved away. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not reappearing in your life with any ulterior motives. I expect and hope that you have remarried; I can’t imagine you alone. And to be honest, I can’t afford a regret that huge. It seems like a form of suicide to regret any part of my life, even the mistakes, and suicide, at this stage of the game, seems like gilding the lily. Redundant, anyway. Still, I imagine different sequences. It’s like a parlor game. I back up a few moves and try to see how else I might have played this, what other lives were open to me. I imagine the possibilities, the maze of random choices. And I always come back to you. It doesn’t change a thing, but I think it’s important to say.

  I never told you this, in the morning it had seemed too silly to talk about. Remember that first summer after Megan was born, when we went out to North Dakota to show Audie his new granddaughter? There was a night I couldn’t sleep. The bed in your old room was too narrow for both of us. So I sneaked downstairs, threw your coat on over my nightgown and went outside. I started walking down the road from the house out toward the main road. There was no moon, no neighboring lights, nothing but an icy dust of stars from one edge of the earth to the other. At some point, I saw a slow beam of headlights in the distance, tracing a line across the dark, as straight and steady as a satellite. I walked toward it for what must have been a long time, although neither of us seemed to change position.

  I had no sense of how far I’d gone, until after I turned around and started to head back. The sodium vapor light on the side of Audie’s barn glowed like a firefly. I suddenly felt dizzy—the enormity of black space, the emptiness of the planet. You and our daughter slept inside that tiny light, and our three lives seemed in that moment so tenuously connected, like a miraculous accident of crossed paths. I was too frightened to sleep when I returned. I felt like someone who had been visited by angels, struck dumb by the sight of terrifying beauty. You said the next morning I looked haunted, and I told you I’d had bad dreams.