by Sally Koslow
Barry’s voice was even and soothing, waves at the beach. “Things haven’t been right for a while.”
Or ever, I thought. I glanced at the doctor’s hands. Wedding ring. Check. I looked at my own. Yup, still there. As married as yesterday.
“Why do you think that is?” Dr. Stafford asked.
She wasn’t the sturdy Margaret Thatcher I’d expected. I asked myself if I could stand to have a psychiatrist this attractive. The doctor was tall and slim as a bread knife, no more than forty-five, and wore a crisp Katharine Hepburn-esque white shirt and trousers of driftwood gray, which sat on the hips she barely had.
Barry gave the doctor his patient-seducing grin and it brought me back to Fifth Avenue. I knew this smile well. Its subliminal message was, You can rely on me—I reek of integrity. I’m a heck of a plastic surgeon, and an even nicer guy I would never screw up—at golf, at work, at anything.
Dr. Stafford, I decided, was going to like him best.
“We haven’t taken our vows seriously enough,” Barry said in the earnest tone of the Rhodes Scholar he’d missed becoming, he claimed, by this much.
Our vows? Could my husband have heard them at all when his mind was on a mission to meet up with another woman during our wedding reception? Dr. Stafford said … nothing, her silence an ellipsis that beckoned Barry or me to jump right in and spout whole paragraphs of well-constructed prose explaining why our marriage stopped short of bliss.
“Molly, do you want to weigh in?” she asked.
The session cost two hundred dollars an hour. I thought I’d better speak. “Barry’s right. We probably haven’t approached our relationship with enough …” I fished. Gusto? Sincerity? “Gravitas.” Gravitas? What kind of an op-ed word was that? I never remembered saying it, ever.
“Do you want to continue to be married to—may I call you Barry?” Dr. Stafford said, looking quickly at Barry and then again at me. “That’s one of the initial questions I like to ask in a first session.”
But why did you have to start with me? I wondered, although lately I’d asked myself the identical question at least once a week. “Yes, I do, definitely,” I said.
I did not want a divorce. Was my impulse due to the lack of an exit strategy—with or without Luke—or actual, albeit conflicted, love in which Annabel played no small part? More the latter. I did not want my daughter to suffer. That sentence sounded meager, but I hated to think that Annabel might ever be in pain, especially if I was the cause of it, and there was something we—Barry and I, together, her parents—could do to give her the childhood she deserved.
“And?” Dr. Stafford asked.
I assumed “and” meant “why.” Two pairs of arched eyebrows faced me.
“Barry’s essentially a good person,” I began. “He adores Annabel-she’s our daughter. Three and a half. He’s smart. He’s funny. We have a history.” As Nana Phyllis would say, he’s also a great provider, which I both took for granted and thought it was crass to point out. There were also, of course, Barry’s looks, which I’d stopped noticing, but were high in the plus column. “He makes me laugh.” Sometimes. “Oh, I already said that.”
I decided not to add, I haven’t been the best wife. I’ve screwed things up grandly all on my own, whether Barry knows it or not.
“Molly,” she said, “you could be describing a friend.”
“Actually, Dr. Stafford,” I said, focusing on a silky cord around her neck—which was easier than looking into her eyes—“that’s the thing Barry isn’t. I don’t think he even likes me much, and he definitely doesn’t get me, and so …” I felt I might have to live or die by these words; how to say it? “I don’t really trust him. I don’t think I ever could or have. In the most basic way, I don’t feel protected by him.” Which has nothing to do with the handsome income he generates, I realized. “I don’t feel safe around Barry, and that’s a bigger problem than anything.”
The room grew as quiet as Manhattan after a heavy snowfall. Dr. Stafford swiveled her chair to the left. Was she delighted that it hadn’t taken us even ten minutes to hit nasty?
“Barry?” she asked. As we both waited, my eyes wandered to an abstract oil painting hanging over my husband’s head. The scrambled rainbow colors could be a diagram of my emotions.
“I see where Molly would think that,” he said at last. “I can get very caught up in my work, with my hobbies.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. Hobbies? “I live for visits to small, out-of-the-way hotels and to explore the city’s finer cigar bars. You: available on nights when I’m ‘working,’ and for long walks on white-sand beaches near conferences in sunny locales.”
“And Barry, do you want to be married to Molly?” Dr. Stafford asked.
Barry leaned forward. “Unequivocally,” he said, looking only at her. “My wife’s beautiful, sensual, talented, a great mom, but none of that’s as important as the simple fact that”—he leaned to reach for my hand, a foot away from him—“I love her.” I jolted slightly at his touch.
“And only her?” the doctor asked.
Dr. Stafford was smarter than I thought.
“Only her.”
Do I know you? I wondered.
“Molly says she can’t trust you,” the doctor said. Her tone was purely reportorial.
“Yes, I heard her.”
“We’ll get into why not later, I hope, but for now, Barry, I want to know—can you trust her?”
Is this where I break down in tears, wipe away my snot, and interrupt? Hold on—let me tell you why you shouldn’t. Because I’m coloring outside the lines, too! On the bad-wife scale, I’m an eleven.
“Yes, I think I can,” Barry said. “But Dr. Stafford, if she’d seen the need to … have another relationship … I could understand where Molly might be coming from.”
He was still looking only at our shrink. I could have been in Sri Lanka. His handsome-doctor grin had been replaced by the seriousness of a Senate candidate apologizing for the hooker in his hotel room.
“Doctor,” Barry continued, his fingers clasped and flexed, almost as if he were praying, “I haven’t always been faithful.”
Oh, really?
“But that’s going to change,” he said, without a scintilla of visible shame. “Or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Barry, go a little deeper with this. That is, if you agree, Molly?”
I nodded. Sure. Drill deep. Right through my heart. Spit out all the gore. If it helps, refer to notes. This counseling had been my idea, but I’d begun to feel that everything Barry might get off his chest would sink into mine like darts.
“I’m already trying to change,” he said. “Only yesterday this extremely attractive patient invited me to lunch, ostensibly to talk about becoming my publicist, but I’ve already told my receptionist to cancel her.”
Would that be Stephanie, or Sherry, or Shelley someone whose card Delfina had found in Barry’s pocket before she brought his coat to the dry cleaner? On the back, he’d scrawled an address and apartment number. Riverside Drive. Now I wished I hadn’t told Delfina to throw away the evidence. I also wished I could believe Barry.
Dr. Stafford looked in my direction. The half smile she’d used with Barry had collapsed into a horizontal line. She’d definitely taken his side. “If there were one thing you could change about your husband, what would it be?” she asked.
I’d like him not to stare at my thighs as if he thought they should be Photoshopped to 70 percent of their size. No, I can do better than that. I want Barry to like me as much as he does his mother and give me half as much attention. Maybe Dr. Stafford would let me ask for two changes. In that case, I’d like him to think that one in ten of my idiosyncrasies is endearing, not worthy of the kind of reform you plan every New Year’s. But she did ask for one change. I had to pick.
“During dinner, I’d like him to ask me how my day was,” I began, “and listen, actually listen, to my answer.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Barry, how about you?” I th
ought Dr. Stafford’s tone implied, That wouldn’t be so hard, would it, man? I hoped she’d goose him in that direction, but instead she asked, “What would you change about Molly?”
As if he were spiking a volleyball, Barry bounced back. “I want her not to be so dubious. To believe I want a fresh start.”
“Okay,” Dr. Stafford said like a pleased parent. “Where do we go from here?”
At these rates, why is she asking us? The three of us sucked in air and waited for something to happen. I turned to glance outside, but the shades were drawn. I felt like a bug who’d walked into a roach motel. Then I decided that dishonesty was a luxury I could not afford.
“Doctor,” I said, “can we dial back? Because I haven’t been entirely honest. I’m probably being naive about marriage and maybe entirely unrealistic,” I began, wishing I could ditch the habit of apologizing. Barry never did, nor Kitty nor Brie nor Lucy. Especially not Lucy. “But I think I just set my expectations a little too low.”
Dr. Stafford tilted her chin in my direction. Her skin was the kind of flawless that comes from a power higher than Bobbi Brown. I couldn’t find a sunspot or a squiggly red vein, and yet she appeared radiantly Botox-free.
“I want more from my marriage than for Barry to pretend to listen to me yak about my day. I want to come first. We can count off my flaws from here to the Fourth of July, but I want him to find at least some of them endearing.” I swallowed a big bubble of air. “I want Barry to look at my face and melt.” Like my dad does with my mom, even when she’s just come out of the shower. That, especially. “I want him to feel that the happiest accident he ever had was meeting Molly Divine, that I’m in every breath he takes.” Was I sounding like a bad greeting card? I didn’t care. I had the undivided attention of the other two people in the room and was determined to continue.
“I need to feel my husband is absolutely bonkers about me—that our home isn’t the Twilight Zone.” Good job, Molly, I thought, liking that phrase. “And”—I turned toward Barry—“if I can’t have this, then maybe we shouldn’t be married, because I think I’m at least as deserving of love as the next wife, and I’ve obviously sold myself short.”
I felt as if I’d delivered a commencement address.
“Is there anything else?” Dr. Stafford asked.
“One more thing,” I said, watching Barry size me up with the undisguised curiosity he usually reserves for comely females at other people’s dinner parties. “I want to feel exactly the same way about my husband. About you, Barry.” I touched him with my eyes.
What could Dr. Stafford possibly say that would change my mind now that I finally knew it? But she began talking. I saw Barry’s mouth move, and then the doctor’s. Him, her, him, her, him for a long time. My mind had switched off the sound.
As my phone audibly vibrated, both of them looked at me. I felt their eyeballs, but checked the caller’s number nonetheless. It was the fourth time Luke had tried me over the last few days.
“Do you have to take that?” Dr. Stafford said.
“No, it’s just a work call. Sorry.” Deeply sorry. Luke had already left two messages pleading with me to reconsider the previous week’s conversation, to make a date to meet him or at the very least to call back. I hadn’t responded, not even when he described a trip to Paris for late January. He couldn’t wait for April. We’d be staying in a hotel hidden away in a seventeenth-century building on the Left Bank. Visits to the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Cinémathèque Française. Dinner at a candlelit, Michelin three-star restaurant in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Nutella crêpes morning, noon, and night if that’s what my wounded heart desired.
“Molly,” Dr. Stafford said, “is there more you want to add to our conversation?”
“That I’ll try,” I said, “if Barry will.” I meant it.
“So,” Dr. Stafford said, “it’s time to stop.” She looked first at me, then at Barry. “I’d like to see you after Christmas. Then we can dig in with some real work.”
I bet Dr. Stafford couldn’t wait for her next appointment of the day, where the couple actually had worries they didn’t manufacture-serious, sympathy-worthy anguish brought on by losing a child, a breast, a job, or a Pomeranian. She’d probably already classified our problem in the subbasement of hair and waistline loss.
We all did a dance with our calendars and picked weekly slots. Couples counseling would be the gift that kept on giving twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, at three. I shook the doctor’s hand, which felt smooth and small.
We walked out to Fifth Avenue and began to head south. Barry put his arm around my waist and pulled me close, leaning in. It was a gesture that I like as well as a kiss, although I don’t recall ever having mentioned that to my husband. I could feel the warmth of his compact physique. Neither of us spoke.
Across the street, workers at the Met were hanging a blue banner. All I could see was the flourish of a name. Cézanne. I repeated it to myself, and it buzzed in my ear like catchy French music. This caused my mind to make an unfortunate involuntary leap to strolling hand in hand with Luke along the Seine, stopping at the stalls of several bouquinistes. I tried to cancel the image and concentrate on Barry, who I saw glance toward the Met as well.
As we got to Seventy-ninth Street, where he would turn left to return to his office on Park, we stopped. “I have an idea,” he said. “What do you say to a second honeymoon? I’ve always wanted to stay at the George V. April in Paris? I’ll call the travel agent tomorrow. Why don’t you sign up at Berlitz?”
“I’ll get right on it,” I said.
Thirty-five
COSMIC LAVENDER
elfina Adams treats my Annabel as if she were her own blood. She detangles curls, dries tears, sells her on asparagus because of its double wallop of vitamins and fiber. Delfina can make the junk mail disappear, set a table to the standard of the First Lady, and never let the shrunken Marx family run low on apple juice, Fig Newtons, or peanut butter, but cleaning is not her métier, nor is it expected of her. Miracle Maids, a battalion of earth-friendly elves, arrive twice a week with dancing mops and lime green noncarcinogenic potions.
The germs, streaks, and smudges in this apartment are gone. I, however, am still here, surprised to see Delfina tenderly polishing my desk. As if she were massaging its creaky two-hundred-year-old bones, she rotates a supple linen dinner napkin retired from active duty. I inhale the lemon scent, an aphrodisiac designed to seduce women into performing homely household tasks. After ten minutes, Delfina stands back, squares her tall, competent frame, and smiles in appreciation of the result. In the burnished mahogany, I see her oval face reflected with its high cheekbones and eyes as warm as brown sugar.
Delfina opens the double doors on the desk’s hutch top. “Oh, Lord,” she says out loud. “That missus sure could make a mess.”
Tidy on the outside, tumult inside, me to a T Shelves sag under a pile of unpaid bills and envelopes, many envelopes. Roller ball pens-black and only black—discarded pocket calendars, an expired passport, friends’ Christmas photo greetings (“Happy everything! Love and kisses, the Cohens and Mugsy”), and dog-eared business cards crowd the cubbyholes along with thirty-nine-cent stamps, a tape measure (that’s where it is), and, inexplicably, a plumy purple feather.
Delfina whistles. “Okay, Dr. Barry said to empty the desk.” She looks at the clock on the nightstand. Ten-fifteen. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she says, to offer herself encouragement. She sets aside an overdue library book and begins to pluck out the obvious trash. Into a carton saved from the last Fresh Direct delivery go magazine subscription notices, bunches of faded receipts, and an ad for twenty-dollar opera seats. Damn, why hadn’t I bought one? For years I lived twenty-five blocks from Lincoln Center, but I never once saw Madame Butterfly.
I am recalling other items on my lengthy to-do list—learn to tango, bake sourdough bread, build a house with Habitat for Humanity, plan a trip to the beaches of Croatia, take pole-dancing lessons—when I spot it,
a pale lilac envelope carefully sealed with wax, as if the sender were nineteenth-century European aristocracy. Delfina’s slim hand, tastefully manicured, reaches for the envelope and, with efficient dispatch, drops it on the heap. It lands right side up.
To my darling Annabel, the envelope says in my loopy penmanship. Based only on the p’s and b’s, a graphologist once sized up my self-esteem as alarmingly low, but I took care with this document. Every letter is precise and, I hope, pulsing with ego.
Delfina does a double take. “Lord, what is this?” she says, wrinkling her brow. She lifts the fat, square envelope to the light, as if a seventy-five-watt bulb could reveal its secrets. The heavy paper ain’t talking.
Delfina stands utterly still, breaks a sweat, and looks around the room to make sure she is alone. She removes a cell phone from her pocket and calls Narcissa. “Can you talk?” she whispers.
“Of course,” Narcissa says. In the background, Delfina and I both hear the Food Network. I, a charter member of the Rachael Ray Sucks Community, am forced to hear that loudmouth reel off fifteen ingredients, ending with truffle mousse pâté, that her ravenous disciples need for her thirty-minute hamburgers. I hope that anyone who believes that life is fair will be disabused of that notion when they consider that I’m in the Duration and Rachael rules the world. Narcissa snaps off the television mid-“yum-o!”
“There’s a letter here, hidden, from the missus.”
“My, my, my, my, my,” Narcissa says. “Imagine that. After all this time.”
“What should I do?” Delfina continues to whisper.
“Mail it?”
“It’s the kind of letter you just hand to someone.”
“Open it, woman! Read it out loud!”
“I can’t do that—it’s not right.” Delfina lives by her church’s principles. I was reminded of this on a regular basis, when she would hit me up to buy raffle tickets. Once I won a free meal at a Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn. Excellent jerk chicken. Her pastor’s son owned the place, and as I recall from his family photo on the wall, Delfina’s Reverend Moneybags visited the same barber who coifs the Reverend Al Sharpton.