Lost in the Reflecting Pool

by Diane Pomerantz

  “It’s delicious. Thank you, Poppy!” She threw her arms around her grandfather’s neck and then sat down, savoring each bite. My dad and I watched her and smiled.

  By noon, my dad had left with the kids and I found myself feeling very down. Lydia, my dad’s friend, called and invited the kids and me to dinner that evening with her family.

  “Thanks so much, Lydia. That would be so nice, but I don’t think I’m up for going out yet,” I told her.

  When I hung up, my mood had plummeted even further. I knew that the kids and I would get lots of invitations, but while we were still all living together, Charles was going to feel excluded from those events. I told myself I couldn’t allow myself to think about that. He had made his choices. Despite his depression, he was the one who said he wanted out of the marriage.

  I had kept a fire burning all day. I loved the warmth and the fragrant crackling of the wood. I made rice pudding, my favorite comfort food on days like this. Then I just lay on the couch and listened to John Coltrane and Cleo Laine. This is what it should be like when someone’s just had major surgery, I thought. This is what a partner who cares should want for the person they care about.

  Elli arrived home around six; Sammy was still at Colin’s house. At about six thirty, the phone rang. “I just finished with patients. I don’t feel well. I don’t even want to see the kids. I guess I could get home by seven. Call me when Sammy gets home; I’m sure I’ll hear the phone.” Charles’s voice was dull, and he sounded lethargic.

  Part of me wanted to reach out to him, but I didn’t want to get sucked in. Either he was pulling more of his shit or he really was very, very depressed, which I believed he was. In fact, I knew he had started on an antidepressant the week before. But by now I also knew there was manipulation in everything he said and did. I wasn’t even really sure that he was at the office. Would he go to such extremes to make me feel crazy? He had certainly done it before, when he’d taken the money from our bank account.

  Charles arrived home at about seven-thirty. Elli and I were working on the wallpaper in a dollhouse we had built. Charles acted as if he didn’t see her.

  “I’m going up to my room to draw,” she said, looking directly at me with puzzlement in her eyes.

  “Okay. I’ll be up in a little while, sweetie,” I told her.

  Charles seemed to be in another world. He lay on the couch, put his head on my lap, and started to ramble, pant, and cry. It went on for hours. He said all kinds of things in his ramblings and groans.

  Some were apologetic: “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Many were veiled barbs: “The sickest have the most power.”

  And there were accusations: “The only thing I did wrong was to not stop you from having the surgery. I should have called your doctor in order to stop you from ruining us.”

  He said all this with the grandiose and manipulative drama of the decompensating narcissist. He really believed that if he had called Dr. Kealz or Dr. Putman, they would have paid attention to him. He was oblivious to how others saw him. Somehow, I was able to remain fairly detached. He certainly did not pull me in the way he had in the past. Nevertheless, I didn’t stop him. I sat passively, the “good, acutely vigilant” therapist, and I listened. I listened to every word.

  When he began to lament about money, I gently brought up ways to reduce expenses.

  “Perhaps you could think about giving up your DC office. It’s over one thousand dollars a month, and you use it only one day a week. You could rent space in DC for the patients who can’t make the drive to your office here,” I said, in a very gentle tone. His moans and panting became even more intense.

  When I suggested that he get a job for five to ten hours a week for a short time, his groans became louder and he said, “You are on a different planet.”

  Every so often, he took a deep breath, sighed, and said, “I just need to get up. I’m indulging myself,” but as quickly as the words fell from his lips, the groans, moans, and panting resumed.

  “If only there was any way we could stay together,” he said several times, then added, “but we’re too different.” I said nothing.

  I suppose those were the moments when I might have been able to try to do something to save my marriage. I knew he was struggling with his decision. Nevertheless, as much as I didn’t want to end my marriage, in the depths of my being I had come to realize that I could not be with Charles. The problems were much deeper than his relationship with Victoria. That relationship, that betrayal, I could get beyond. It was his ability to be so sadistic to me and so contemptuous of me that I could never surmount. I could never, I would never, trust this man again.

  Charles finally fell asleep in the bedroom. I was so tired, I just wanted to collapse. I finally just lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

  When I awoke and walked into the kitchen, Charles and the kids were sitting around the table, eating breakfast.

  “Sammy said that he’s going over to Jack’s house for a sleepover, and Elli said she’s spending the night at Leah’s house. I’ll drive them, and I was thinking I would go for a hike on the trail. I think it’ll help my head.” Charles’s voice was still pretty monotone as he spoke; his facial expressions were flat and distant.

  “Okay, that’s fine,” I said, thinking about the weather report, which called for temperatures below zero with the wind chill.

  Charles did take the children to their friends’ houses. I had another quiet day at home. The question of whether Charles was really spending the entire day hiking in this piercingly cold weather or was with Victoria pricked my mind frequently.

  The sun had already set and the evening had turned bitterly cold and icy by the time Charles walked through the front door.

  “It sure is cold out there.” He shivered as he moved close to the fire, taking off his gloves and hat. “It was a good hike; it was good for my head.” He didn’t make any eye contact as he spoke.

  “I was concerned that you were out in that freezing cold for so long,” I said, mostly to see what his response would be.

  “I didn’t even notice how cold it was. I just walked. I dressed pretty warmly. I think I’ll have some of that hot chocolate you’re drinking,” he said, as he walked into the kitchen.

  When he emerged, holding a cup of hot chocolate in one hand and a bowl of rice pudding in the other, he said, “I’m pretty wiped. I think I’m just going to go downstairs and pass out. Good night, Di.” And down the stairs he went, leaving me once again feeling like a fool.

  I had avoided reading his journal and e-mails for weeks, but after the previous night and his disappearance for hours in the freezing cold, I couldn’t help myself. He left his journal out, and I did read some of it. He was “falling apart, making no sense,” yet his writing was so lucid and the clarity with which he spewed his negative feelings about me, despite my attempts to soothe him, was still there. . . . There was no evidence of the distress of the previous night.

  Again, I was being conned. I recalled my first therapist, long before Charles even existed, referring to something I did over and over again by saying, “So, you’re knocking your head against the wall; how long are you going to do it this time?”

  Yes, that was me, doing the same thing over and over again, thinking—or not thinking at all, really—that the result would be different. Hoping to understand my world, to give myself a feeling of control, was what drove me to read Charles’s journal and e-mails over and over again. I was always hoping to gain some understanding of, to find a way to believe, something that I found incomprehensible. However, I just needed to stop, and instead to use a scripted language for myself, to find a way to interact with Charles, until I was out. I needed to “fake it until I could make it.”

  The next morning when I awoke, Charles was in the kitchen.

  “I think I’ll go out for another hike this morning,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the newspaper. “What time will the kids be home?”

  “Around lunchtim
e, I think. Lynn is coming over with Ally this afternoon, and I think Jack is going to spend the afternoon here,” I told him in a very detached tone of voice.

  “I’ll be back by the time they get here,” he said.

  I nodded and continued making my oatmeal, and then I started a fire.

  Charles and the kids got home at about the same time. Shortly after that, my friend Lynn and her daughter, Ally, came by. Elli and Ally took off to Elli’s room. Elli and I had been working on wallpapering the dollhouse, and Lynn said she would drive me over to a nearby shop to pick up a few supplies we needed.

  “Yeah, go on—get out for a bit. It will be good for you, Di. I’m going to be here, so go. I can watch the kids,” Charles said, as if this were how he always acted.

  This was my first trip out since the surgery. We weren’t gone much more than an hour, when I tried to call Charles but got no answer. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Lynn and I walked back in to find popcorn all over the kitchen floor.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked Sam, as Jack looked on.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said, with a bit of defensiveness in his voice. “He went to the office, I think.”

  I looked at Lynn and rolled my eyes. “So, what happened here?” I asked. “You know that you’re not supposed to be doing things in the kitchen that involve using any appliances, unless someone older is with you.”

  “Well, Mrs. Mandel, we did ask Elli and Ally if they wanted to make popcorn with us,” Jack piped in.

  “Yeah, but Elli told us to get lost and not bother them,” Sam said indignantly. “And she should get in trouble for that,” he added.

  “Well, no one is getting in trouble, but everyone is going to help clean up the mess. I’ll set the timer for ten minutes. Let’s see if we can beat the clock.”

  Lynn and Ally stayed a while longer, and then Lynn offered to drive Jack home when they left. Elli decided to make picture frames for the dollhouse, and Sammy continued building with Legos. I sat by the fire and let my mind drift wherever it chose to go.

  I realized that Charles did believe that his dramatic purging of the previous few days was his punishment for how he had been treating me and the children. He had paid retribution. Now he was free.

  When he got home a couple of hours later, I didn’t say anything to him about his having left the kids home alone. I did ask, though, “Did you see Victoria today?”

  He paused briefly, and then he said, “Yes.”

  It was a while before I said anything else. Then I said, in a soft but even tone, “Charles, the next time you feel really anxious or depressed, or the next time you’re having a panic attack like the ones you’ve been having, deal with it with Victoria; don’t come to me.” I was composed; my eye contact was direct. I had no doubt about what I was saying. Not that I wouldn’t have internal doubts in the future, not that I wasn’t feeling excruciating pain at that moment, but I would deal with that agony on my own.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  IT WAS A NEW YEAR. ONE AND A HALF YEARS HAD PASSED since I had gotten my diagnosis and started my yearlong treatment journey. I was still alive. The process of being in treatment had kept me busy. It had given me focus and direction and no time for depression. Now, without that focus, I was confronted with the unavoidable reality of what had become of my life.

  The most recent surgery and Charles’s intense response to it had exhausted me, taken something out of me. I felt as if I had taken steps backward. Although I got up each day, put one foot in front of the other, and did what I needed to do, I often awoke in the morning with the thought I wish I were dead. The other thought that always followed was, Help me, Momma, help me. Although I was finding myself more irritable with the children, the third thought, the one that would finally get me out of bed, was, My kids need me.

  Charles was giving me money for groceries only every couple of weeks by this time. I was juggling air in order to make ends meet and provide the things the children needed.

  “If I give you money, you’ll spend it,” he said, when I told him that our children needed things.

  When bills arrived, he started presenting them to me, saying, “How are we going to divide these?”

  I looked at him in astonishment. We were still married. I had virtually no income.

  “You can send them all to my attorney,” I told him. “He and I will go over them and decide what to do with them.”

  “Just remember, I’ve been supporting you and the kids for years. Now it’s going to be your turn!” He seethed with every word he spoke.

  I just couldn’t wrap my brain around why he hated me so much. I certainly hadn’t been perfect in the marriage, but his hatred was beyond anything I could understand. His concept of marriage and of family and mine were universes apart. And yet I kept trying to understand.

  That January, the temperature was frigid. The icicles hanging delicately from the tree branches, although pretty, never melted. The frozen fields were the tundra of my internal existence. The black ice on the road was impossible to see but an ever-present peril I always felt. The kids needed me, and I was there physically, but my emotional presence was not constant.

  In an attempt to be proactive, I finally moved my office in mid-January and had my name removed from the sign outside the former office. I wanted my professional association with Charles to be completely erased. I was now part of a group practice. That was the first step. Once they began providing me with referrals, money would hopefully start to come in. Despite these steps forward, my racing thoughts were exhausting me. My head was filled with Charles and Victoria. In addition, I had just started taking antianxiety medication, which left me feeling as if I were moving through a sea of molasses.

  It was in January that it also became clear that my patient Jeb was dying. I had just been discharged from the hospital after having my stem cell transplant, eight months earlier, when Jeb had called me and told me that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer. Now he was in home hospice care. It was so quick. He had managed to survive the hot and steamy jungles of the Vietnam War, but this was a battle he was not going to win.

  After I had reopened my practice in September, Jeb had been able to make it to a few sessions, but then his worsening illness had made that impossible. So I visited him each week and we had sessions in his home. As he became increasingly ill, I visited him no longer as his therapist but as someone who knew him and with whom he had shared his life story.

  A disabled Vietnam vet, Jeb had appeared in my office five years earlier. His unsteady gait was evidence of his shattered leg and pelvis, the outward remnants of an explosion that had killed his buddy in the foxhole where they had been hiding in the dark, humid, overgrown jungle outside of Saigon. He returned to the States broken and isolated. Flashbacks of the foxhole, of his friend’s dismembered body, of his sergeant wearing a necklace of human teeth around his neck as he ordered Jeb to shoot into a village of old women and children, were constant. These were the images that filled every fiber of his being. It was not surprising that the woman he married before he went off to war found that he was not the same man when he returned. They divorced. Our work together was intense.

  I wonder how much of the intensity of all the pain and horror I listened to each day I had absorbed. I wonder how not having a safe and loving refuge in my marriage had added to my cancer. I love my work, and I have always been really present for those I work with. When things were good with Charles, I think perhaps it was easier to detach from all that pain and horror. The pain of Daphne, who at eight watched her mother fall to the floor, bleeding from an aneurysm and then die in her arms. Then there was Eve, abused, who at eleven shot and killed her beloved grandmother. All of these stories, I heard and relived with the intensity of having been there myself. How much pain did I absorb? Did I not protect myself enough? Could I have protected myself more if I had had a loving and safe partnership with my husband? My marriage had certainly not been a refuge for me for many years.

 
Oddly, as much as Charles was contemptuous and disdainful toward me, he was still referring patients to me. One evening when he came home, he said casually, “Di, I was speaking with one of my patients today, and she’s going to call you so you can see her sixteen-year-old daughter.”

  I paused. I wanted to be clear but not condescending, as he always was to me.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Charles. I think there are too many boundary issues that I don’t want to get involved with.”

  Looking somewhat blank, he accepted what I said without objection. He went on, “You know, I sent a note to Jeb today telling him my thoughts were with him,” then looked to see what my response would be.

  When I had first started working with Jeb, I had referred him to Charles for a consultation for medication. Jeb did not feel comfortable with Charles—he found him to be arrogant—and so I referred him to someone else, with whom he continued to work with for his medication management.

  “Oh, that was very nice,” I said, thinking that it was much easier for Charles to show “compassion” for Jeb. Writing him a note required only hollow words; filling that empty space by giving of himself was beyond what Charles was capable of doing.

  I still occasionally read his journal. Despite everything I knew, my insides still tightened when I read lines like:

  I find it impossible to be around her. There is nothing redeeming about her.

  I cannot stomach living under the same roof with her.

  I know that I can turn things around with Di if I choose to. The question is, do I want to?

  What arrogance. It was true that if he had not given me that letter in September, saying he wanted out of the relationship, saying that there was no chance of reconciliation, I probably would still have been where I was in my marriage. I doubt I would have initiated leaving. But for him to think it was up to him to be able to “turn things around” if he decided to do so? He had no idea with whom he was dealing.