He glared at her. Then he said: “I’m Jewish, Sarah.”
“We’re all Jewish. That’s not the point.”
He exploded. This being another of his sand traps, one they had not previously trod upon in therapy, but so similar to the others (his career, his parents’ interference, his now pubescent daughter’s sudden lack of outright adoration for him) that Grace could, from the comfort of her armchair, plot the hills and valleys of the forty minutes remaining in their session. So he raged on, both women uncharacteristically silent. Grace looked past them both to the venetian blinds covering the window behind them and through those angled slats to the glass pane that was grimy with New York dust. Sometimes she gave the doorman, Arthur, some extra money to wash the outside of the pane, but it had been awhile. She could slip out now and do it herself, she thought, and neither of them would notice, and then at least she would have accomplished something today, and the sun would come in. If there was sun. She suddenly could not remember whether there was sun.
When it ended, she used what remained of her wherewithal to resist apologizing to them and saw them out with a request that they not discuss the Christmas travel issue before their next session, but that they each think carefully about what they wanted the holiday to represent for them and for their daughter. Then she used the five minutes before her next patient to check her phone and e-mail.
There was nothing. At least, there was nothing from Jonathan. A Sue Krause from NY1 had left a voice mail asking for a statement about “the situation” at Rearden and wondering whether she had any memories of Malaga Alves she would like to share with her seven million fellow New Yorkers. That this unpleasant request had materialized on her office phone was of course preferable to finding it on her cell phone, or in her personal e-mail, or God forbid her home phone, but it still galled her. No, not everyone was eternally eager to thrust himself before a television camera in order to toss some “Me too!” filament of non-information onto a genuine tragedy. Grace deleted the message, but even as she did so, the phone rang, emitting its silent “in session” blink. She didn’t recognize the number, a New York cell, but she played the message as soon as it materialized.
“Dr. Reinhart Sachs, it’s Roberta Siegel from Page Six.”
Spoken as if she were supposed to know who that was. But in fact, Grace did at least know what Page Six was. Everyone knew what Page Six was, even those who—like herself—declined to indulge in the daily download of so-called boldface names. That Page Six was showing an interest in what was going on at Rearden boded very ill, for where Page Six went so went the nation. At least, the nation of those with too much time on their hands.
“I’ve been told you were a good friend of Malaga Alves, and I wonder if you have a few minutes to talk to me.”
Grace closed her eyes. How she’d been upgraded from fellow committee member to “good friend” was a mystery, but not, she supposed, one worth solving. This message, too, she deleted, but not before wondering whether Sally Morrison-Golden, another “good friend,” had also heard from Page Six. She hoped not.
Her next patient arrived and began, without much preamble, to cry. This was the woman who had canceled her appointment the previous week, the woman whose husband was now somewhere in Chelsea, address withheld, and reachable only at work (and there only by leaving a message and awaiting a callback). He was no longer interested in counseling, said the wife—wailed the wife—other than the legal kind. Her name was Lisa, and she was in her thirties, muscular, on the short side, and by her own definition “sort of a klutz”—something Grace herself could have confirmed, as there had been innumerable bangings against one particular corner of the coffee table. This week she had indeed been advised of the end of her marriage—in a kindly enough manner, she reported to Grace almost defensively—and given the name of an attorney her husband had hired, as well as a few names of divorce attorneys that attorney had recommended—for her. (Was that absurd politeness? Grace wondered. Or plain old shady?)
She cried for a long time, crumpling tissue after tissue, alternately covering and uncovering her face. Grace did not try to stop her. She imagined it must be hard to find time to cry like this, with a full-time job at one of the city’s more beleaguered public agencies and those five-year-old girls, just barely in kindergarten. With the husband already moved out, Grace worried that she would no longer be able to afford her apartment or the private school she wanted to send the girls to next year. Or therapy, for that matter. Not that therapy would be an issue. Grace had been in this situation once or twice over the years and had always managed to carry her patient at least through the crisis.
The husband, it turned out—surprise!—had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend had a tricked-out duplex on a tree-lined street in Chelsea, where—surprise again!—the husband was now living. She had followed him there, the woman said, sobbing. “I had to. He wasn’t answering the phone. And I left a message for him at his office and he didn’t call me. And Sammy kept asking why Daddy wasn’t walking them to school, and I finally thought, I am lying to my kids. And I have no idea why.”
“That must have been very painful,” said Grace.
“I mean,” she said bitterly, “okay, I get it, he’s out of the marriage. I get it. He’s gay. But we still have these kids. What am I supposed to tell them? He went to the Korean grocer for cottage cheese and he hasn’t come back? Oh, and by the way, Mommy’s an imbecile because when this handsome man supposedly fell in love with her and wanted to marry her and have a family, she actually believed him?”
Grace sighed. They had been down this road before.
“I was always this totally pragmatic, totally rational person, you know? I mean—duh!—I wasn’t skinny and blond. I’m not a babe. I’m not going to date the football captain. I know this! And it was okay, because the truth was I didn’t really want the football captain. And I had all these nice boyfriends who appreciated that I didn’t act like I wished I could do better. I could have had a great life with one of those guys, but suddenly this great-looking man comes along and it’s like, ‘You mean I could have him?’ And like that, it’s all gone. I guess he thought I’d be so, like, blinded and pathetic that I wouldn’t notice he was full of shit when he said he wanted to get married and have kids.”
“But, Lisa,” Grace told her weeping client, “I think a lot of what Daniel told you was probably the truth. He really did want to be married and have a family. Maybe he even said to himself, ‘I want that so much that I’m going to … to try to excise the other part of me that wants other things.’ But he couldn’t. Most of us can’t do that. The pull toward what we really crave, it’s just too strong.”
“I don’t give in to everything I want,” Lisa said a little petulantly.
“You’ve never tried to not be attracted to men,” she said. “You know, men used to enter the priesthood because they wanted to be protected from their own homosexuality. That’s how terrified of it they were. To actually go out looking for a way to not be sexual for your entire life is a big gesture, obviously; you’d really have to hate or fear your sexual identity for that to seem like a good idea. And then there’s the fact that Daniel obviously loved you—loves you—I think he wanted very badly to be a husband and a father. He tried to do something that would make that happen, and he failed—and that’s his own issue, not yours. Your issue is that you had an opportunity to anticipate this, early on, and that opportunity passed you by. At some point, I do think it’s going to help you to look at that, but not today. Today is about being sad, which you’re absolutely entitled to be.”
“You mean I should have known,” she said bluntly.
Yes, Grace thought.
“No,” she said. “I mean that in the context of your real love for him, and your trust in him, and the fact that you wanted the same things he was saying he wanted, your ability to see clearly what you might have seen in other circumstances was compromised. You’re a human being. You’re fallible, not criminal. The last thing you
need to be doing right now is punishing yourself for not having seen this. It serves no purpose, and it takes a hell of a lot of your energy, and you need every bit of your energy right now to take care of yourself and the girls. Besides, I know that Daniel is beating himself up about his inability to be honest with you.”
“Oh, goody,” she said, reaching for another tissue.
They sat in silence for a moment. Grace felt her thoughts begin to detach, against her will. She wanted to stay with this, with someone else’s problem, even though it was a very bad problem. Her own problem, which was probably going to turn out to be not really much of a problem, hurt too much to think about.
“Did you know?” said her patient.
Grace frowned. “Did I know what?”
“About Daniel. Could you tell?”
“No,” she said. But this was not really true. Grace had suspected from the beginning and known shortly after. She had watched what felt like an epic war play out inside him, in which the part of him that truly wanted to be married to Lisa slowly, inexorably, succumbed to the cataclysmically greater force of his sexuality. In their eight months as her patients, she had never seen him touch her.
“He has a Rothko.”
“Daniel?” said Grace, wondering if they were going to start talking about financial settlements.
“No. Barry. The guy on Thirty-Second Street.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say “boyfriend,” Grace knew.
“Is that significant to you?”
“He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace in his brownstone. Which I saw through the window while standing outside on the adorable tree-lined street in highly desirable Chelsea. I’m sharing a box with two little girls on York Avenue. I’ve produced his children so now he can be a father on the weekends like he always wanted, and spend the rest of the time being his ‘authentic self.’”
“Authentic self” was a phrase Daniel had brought into therapy. It had attained “Rosebud”-like status, apparently, to Lisa.
“I’m certainly not going to tell you you’re not entitled to your anger.”
“Oh, good,” Lisa said bitterly. Then she said: “You’d like to tell me something else, though, wouldn’t you?”
“What is it you think I’d like to tell you?”
She followed Lisa’s glance to—or was it her imagination—the galley of her book, there on the corner of her desk. She had not specifically informed any of her patients about the book (she thought it was improper, like a doctor pushing his own products at the front desk), but a few of them had seen or been told about the Kirkus review, and one, who worked for Good Morning America, had been privy to her competitive courtship by all three network morning programs.
“That I could have avoided all this. I could have listened more carefully.”
“Is that what you think I believe?”
“Oh, don’t give me that Freudian shit!” Lisa leaned forward. She had said it fiercely. She had suddenly, and without warning, turned a corner to some well-thought-out and very focused anger. The focus, Grace realized, c’est moi.
“I mean,” she continued, now with discernible sarcasm, “if I’d wanted somebody to sit there and just toss it all back to me, I’d be in analysis. Obviously, you think I should have seen this, I colluded in this. I know you’ve been thinking from the beginning, you know, How come she didn’t know she was marrying a gay man? I’ve been watching you for months, thinking that. So, okay, it’s abundantly clear to me that you’re not going to turn into some warm and fuzzy person who’s going to comfort me, but I could do without the judgment, thanks.”
Breathe, thought Grace. And don’t say anything. There’s more to come.
“I didn’t want you. I wanted the other one we went to see, last January. This therapist near Lincoln Center. He was enormous. He had sideburns. He was like this big bear. I thought: I feel safe here. I feel supported. But Daniel wanted you. He thought you were tough. He thought we needed tough. But I’ve got plenty of tough already, thanks. I mean, do you ever show any feeling?”
Grace, aware of the extreme tension in her back, in her crossed legs, made herself wait another moment before she said, very carefully, very deliberately: “I don’t believe my feeling is going to be helpful to you, Lisa. Therapeutically. I’m here to bring you my expertise and, if appropriate, my opinions. My job is to help you work through the issues that brought you here. It’s going to be much less useful to you to have comfort from me than to learn how best to comfort yourself.”
“Maybe.” Lisa nodded. “Or maybe you’re just a cold bitch.”
She willed herself not to react. The moment stretched, in all its misery, as a car horn blared outside. Then Lisa leaned forward and plucked another tissue from the box.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking past Grace to the door. “That was uncalled for.”
Grace nodded. “Therapy isn’t a social occasion. I’ll recover. But I’m curious as to why you wanted to continue seeing me. Especially since I seem to have been Daniel’s choice, not yours. Maybe, in spite of what you perceive as my lack of warmth, you’ve come to believe that I can help you.”
She shrugged miserably. She had started to cry again, a little.
“And I do think I can help you,” Grace went on. “I see how strong you are. I’ve always seen that. Right now, you’re angry at him and at yourself, and obviously at me, but I know that’s nothing to the sadness you feel about losing the family you thought you had. And the truth is there’s no way around these feelings of anger and sadness. You’ve got to go through them to get to the other side of them, and I’d really like to help you do that, so you can have some peace for yourself and the girls. And peace with Daniel, because he’s going to be in your life, regardless. So I may not have facial hair or a cuddly disposition, and believe me, you’re not the first of my clients to point that out to me—”
Lisa emitted a moist little laugh.
“But if I didn’t think I could help you, I’d have told you so already. And I would also have helped you find a more bearlike therapist, if that’s what you really wanted.”
She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. “No,” she said, sounding exhausted. “I know you’re right. But … it’s just … sometimes I look at you and I think, Well she never would have fallen for this. I’m, like, personally a disaster and you’re personally composed. And I know we’re not supposed to talk about you, and I don’t really want to talk about you, but sometimes I just see: composed, and I think: cold bitch. Which I’m not proud of. And … well, of course I checked you out, back in the spring when we started. Which I hope you won’t be offended by, but you know, today we practically do a background check on a plumber, let alone someone you’re going to tell all your secrets to.”
“I’m not offended,” Grace said. And she shouldn’t have been surprised, either.
“So I know you’ve been married for ages and you have this book coming out about how not to marry a psycho or something. And here I sit, your, like, target moronic reader.”
“Oh no,” she said evenly. “My target reader isn’t a moron. She’s just someone who isn’t through learning.”
Lisa crumpled her current tissue and shoved it in her purse. Their time, they both knew, was nearly up. “I guess I better read it.”
Grace did nothing to suggest that this was a good idea. “If you feel it might interest you, certainly,” she said. She turned to her desk and began writing Lisa’s invoice.
“It will help me next time,” she heard Lisa say.
And despite herself, Grace smiled. Good girl, she thought. It boded well that even in the depths of her present misery, Lisa could conceptualize a next time. She was going to be all right, Grace thought. Even poorer than she was now, and more burdened, and possibly humiliated, and with her husband in an art-filled brownstone on (Grace knew perfectly well) one of the loveliest streets in the city, she still saw a glimpse of future.
Then again, thought Grac
e, at least she knows where her husband is.
CHAPTER TEN
HOSPITAL LAND
After the last couple left, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She couldn’t bear to stay in the office, listening to the phone not ring and dreading the ring that wasn’t coming. But then again she couldn’t stand the thought of going back to Rearden, retracing her steps from the morning no wiser and no less scared even than then. She didn’t want to count the news vans or see the self-consciously frantic parents in the forecourt, and she didn’t want to hear anything that Sally Morrison-Golden might say to her on any subject, but especially the subject of Malaga Alves. She had no idea what had happened to Malaga Alves, and with every passing moment she found herself caring less. Malaga, the poor woman—the dead woman—had nothing to do with her, but there was an asteroid on the horizon, and it got bigger, denser, and more terrible with every passing hour.
Where was Jonathan? Where was he, and why wasn’t he letting her know that he was safe? And how dare he disappear so thoughtlessly? What was she supposed to be telling their son about where he was, had Jonathan thought of that? What was she supposed to tell her father? And fucking Eva, who needed to know how many plates to set at the table? Start your text here…
She could not remember ever having been so angry at him. Or so terrified.
Grace left her office at two and walked into a wall of bad weather, something neither the New York Times nor the earlier sky nor any of her arriving patients had given her any warning about. She pulled her coat around herself and found that she remained very cold and more than a little wet, and she leaned into the wind, feeling the strangely not unwelcome bite of it and the wetness of the rain on her face. Everyone’s face was wet. We could all be crying, it occurred to her, and she reached up with one very suddenly freezing hand to brush her own cheek. She was not crying. She was just … not right at the moment. Which was not a crime, and frankly no one else’s business but her own.
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