“And you thought that would continue when you moved in with Mr. Y?”
I know this is tricky territory, but I am lulled by the facts that Dr. Stacey’s expression is completely nonjudgmental and that the tone of her voice is absolutely neutral. I know we have entered that weird, beautiful therapy space where you can say things and they simply hover.
“Okay, well—as embarrassing as it is to admit, I guess some dinosaur part of my brain thought some part of this was going to continue. When we were just business partners Mr. Y would run across town to help me on a number of things, some business related, some more domestically related, particularly when Mr. X was away. He would drop everything because, I now see, I was the client. When he’d escort me around socially, which was also largely for business, I did come to think of it indeed a bit like . . . well, Jackie O and Maurice Tempelsman. There, I’ve said it. But don’t all working warrior-esses secretly want a chivalrous man to hold out an umbrella as we step tremulously out of Doubleday into the rain? And believe me, if you’d been there, you’d have seen that not only was Mr. Y always perfectly dressed for the role of gentleman escort, he actually seemed to get a kick out of it. ‘Madame!’ he’ll always say, conspicuously rising from the table when a lady rises. Although of course, having lived with him for two years, I am coming to see all those elaborate WASP manners as a kind of straight-man drag, the performance that goes with the tie.”
“A performance?!” Mr. Y exclaims. “Oh please! You’re just jealous that I have anything else to do in the world! It’s sick!”
“Wait,” Dr. Stacey says. “Let her finish. So what did you think your lives together would be like?”
“Well, I”—this is frustrating but in a way also disturbing and interesting—“I guess I did have the idea that as my work flow became more centered on writing, we would become more of a couple like, damn it all anyway, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. If I earned the privilege by doing the work and making the money—while resisting the urge to put stones in my pockets and wade into a river—which in that sense puts female writers like me ahead of Ms. Woolf—what’s wrong with that?”
Mr. Y can keep silent no longer.
“What’s wrong with it is that it is demeaning to describe someone as the Ethel to your Lucy and to think of them as a kind of human golden retriever!” (Whoops—is that language he got from me?) “Look at me. I am your partner. Your partner. That means if I want to work on Jam City, which is my profession and which even allows me to do some recorded voice-over, which I enjoy, I’m not going to lie, you are supposed to be supportive of me in the same way I have been tireless and happily supportive of you all these many years! You’re supposed to show the same interest in my projects as I have shown in yours!”
Mr. Y looks at me dramatically, with big moist eyes.
“How do you feel about that?” asks Dr. Stacey.
“Well,” I say. “I’m weighing how I feel about that, and honestly it feels very unsexy.”
“Oh my God!” he exclaims.
“What can I say? I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I wanted Maurice Tempelsman holding an umbrella in the rain! If I asked Mr. Y to drive the elephant today, he would be insulted! And that was the whole point! He was the guy who would drive the elephant! That’s why I fell in love with him! That was it! Men who work are a dime a dozen! But men who will drive the elephant—”
“What elephant? I don’t understand the reference,” says Dr. Stacey.
“You’re just a big fat diva!” Mr. Y shouts.
“Sure I’m a diva!” I shout back. “What was your first clue? I made my living doing one-woman shows! At this rate, I could have stuck with Mr. X, be left alone as usual, but I’d still be ahead on the home repair, which Mr. X managed very, very well! With the amount of time you put into your projects and small financial returns and the wreck the house is in, I’m essentially tolerating your hobbies!”
“You’re insane, you know that?” he says in a fit of pique. “You’re a complete ass. You have literally no idea what producers do! You have no respect for my profession! And you know why I spend so many hours in the theater? Maybe I like to get out of the house! Maybe it’s fun! Maybe sometimes I prefer it to being with you! Look at what you’ve become! It’s like you’re a person who needs help wiping her own ass!” This is all so terrible we end up apologizing to each other, fairly quickly, our faces white and pained.
Therapists being what they are, though, Dr. Stacey finds our clash so interesting she feels—to get quickly up to speed—that she needs a separate individual session with each of us. This technically will result in even more of an overbooking problem, at least on the part of Mr. Y, and yet I remember that the therapy was my idea. If he is going to come to his senses he does probably need a lot more therapy time.
Yet I can also see that, because Mr. Y has offered to drive the girls to school on Friday morning before going to work, he will have a conflict with his individual Dr. Stacey session. So I e-mail Dr. Stacey, copying Mr. Y, reminding all that his Friday morning session will need to be moved. (This being the sort of follow-up task Mr. Y sometimes forgets.)
Dr. Stacey thanks me for my interesting e-mail, and says we’ll discuss it, which surprises me, since my e-mail seemed fairly routine and uninteresting to me. And, indeed, at our next session, Dr. Stacey opens with, “So, Sandra, let’s talk about your interesting e-mail. I found it interesting that you e-mailed me about Mr. Y’s therapy session. Without telling him?”
“I copied him.”
“Yes, but you took it upon yourself to basically reschedule his session.”
She turns to Mr. Y. “Do you think Sandra has control issues?”
Mr. Y perks right up. Oh my! He has been flung such a meaty bone! He starts into a monologue. The case freezer I bought, so I can buy sixteen chicken breasts at a time at Costco and so I can freeze milk, to ensure that we never run out of milk. Or the fact that I never buy less than thirty-six rolls of toilet paper—to me, buying four or six rolls at a time is like buying none. The fact that I like everyone to be punctual for dinner, preferably at 6:00, not 8:00 or 8:30. I am not terribly tolerant of smoking, Mr. Y’s unfortunate habit. When I’m on a writing deadline I cannot tolerate seeing the New York Times first thing in the morning because it violently jars my morning concentration. (I tend to say, “If I see all that great writing already there in the New York Times, it makes me think, then why does the world need me to write also?”)
I am shocked at the bewildering turn the session has taken.
“The reason I sent the e-mail,” I cry out, stung, “is that I knew if Mr. Y forgot, which he sometimes does, you would charge us for the full session anyway! What is the difference between taking care of business and control issues?” I ask. “What is the difference between courteously buttoning up your pants in the morning and being ‘obsessively fixated on closure’?”
“Very interesting,” Dr. Stacey breathes. “So . . . did you feel abandoned by your mother? Where does this anxiety come from? How old were you when you started feeling that?”
And I say, “I don’t feel like talking about my mother! I want to talk about how Mr. Y and I divvy up the housework. I want to talk about the fact that I ask him to do something, he doesn’t do it, I ask it again, I am the noodge, he doesn’t do it, and then I finally decide to do it myself, which he takes as evidence that I am always pushing rudely forward without him when he claims that he was going to do it anyway! But when?”
Dr. Stacey says, more gently, “Aha. Why don’t you feel like talking about your mother?”
And I say, “Dr. Stacey? I would love to talk to you about my mother for hours and hours if you and I were naked in a hot tub at a women’s retreat and we were being plied with wine and hummus. I could cry for you, get into the fetal position, ruminate about our breasts—whatever. I could give you a very good performance. However, Dr. Stacey, we are paying you God knows what an hour to help us live together, which is why I do not want to waste time on
my mother who is dead and who does not live with us and who cannot help with the dishes no matter how much she may want to!”
At which point I throw a coffee cup (“Fresh Air with Terry Gross”) at the therapist.
Or at least I want to. I shove it at her but then worry about the light carpet. But believe me, my feelings are unbelievably violent. And I am—oh my God—so hungry.
THANK GOD the girls are going out of town with their dad on a two-week rafting trip.
I would have Mr. Y move out, but I am so sick of my own house I check into a hotel because I want to move out of my own life.
And my article still isn’t done. Christ!
Rental Dog
I AM WALKING ON a nature trail in the morning, listening determinedly—as I have so many times in my life—to Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
I crunch along the trail in some brand-new twenty-dollar Costco trek shoes I am happy with.
Coming toward me is a beaming, well-put-together fifty-ish or sixty-ish or seventy-ish (who knows?) woman, with a great sort of open Meredith Vieira face, completely hale and hearty, who is being pulled along by a gorgeous golden retriever. The two of them vibrate with health and goodness. They look so awesome I want to applaud. Her jogging suit looks organic and breathable, her sunglasses rock, his coat is shiny, his paws trot high, and he appears to be smiling.
I hear myself think: I want a dog! I want a dog just like that!
At which point I realize that, no, in fact I do not want a dog. I do not want a dog at all.
I think of the home-ware stores—Restoration Hardware, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn—which I continually wander through, both in person and in my mind. I always walk into a home-ware store and think, “Oh, what beautiful indigo Mexican hand-blown wineglasses.” But then I will put them in our Energy Star dishwasher, which for some reason seems to be covering all of our glassware with a weird chalky coat, and then I will have to put them in the too-high cabinet where they don’t quite fit.
Admiring the glassware, I think I am falling in love with a quartet of beautiful indigo Mexican hand-blown wineglasses, but I am really falling in love with a magical world where someone else always sets the table.
Which is to say I want that dog in that moment, yes.
I want a dog to pull me along the trail and to make me feel awesome.
But what I would want at the end of the trail is for a van full of twenty-something interns to pull up and take the dog from me. They can feed the dog and shop for kibble for it at Costco and give it the vaccinations it needs and they can go around their own homes sweeping the hair up. They can also go for the run I was supposed to have gone on, for that matter.
To the Bowl of Fruit meme and the Mexican Hand-Blown Wineglasses meme I suppose I can also add a Dog meme.
I suppose what that means is that I want a rental dog. I want to rent a dog to get only the good parts of a dog. To “essence” the dog.
When they train dogs to mix cocktails and deliver food, without me having to listen to mine natter on about its dog days, I will maybe entertain the thought then.
House Cat
THE GLOOMINGS ARE MORE frequent.
The darkies attack often.
The wraiths reach out.
That night in the hotel, a Westin, with blessedly crisp sheets, I lie awake at 3:24 A.M. as usual—melatonin, Tylenol PM, paired with a bottle of wine, and I can still drive an eighteen-wheeler. As I stare up into the darkness, all at once, the name Brian Hong surfaces in my consciousness, and I experience not a passing wave of despair, but despair simply moving in as a cold, straight tide.
I have no idea who Brian Hong is—I am filled with horror simply because of the name. Perhaps there is in fact a lone forgotten yellow Post-it, somewhere on my dining room table with its gas bills and Discover card solicitations and Blue Cross health-insurance forms, that reads “Brian Hong.” Perhaps Brian Hong is the head of a small Asian nonprofit who several months ago earnestly if a bit keeningly e-mailed me, citing as a referral the name of a mutual friend, to ask if I would drive an hour down to San Pedro to give a free speech at a fund-raising benefit for a flailing youth center for depressed gay minority teens at 10:00 A.M. three months from now on a cloudy Wednesday.
On the one hand, as a longtime veteran of these sorts of appearances, I can no longer afford to humor the endless requests to do everything for free, particularly because no one treats you worse than the penniless. On the other hand, though, for me to categorically say no seems like a kick in the teeth to all the kids in the world who are already down; the result of this discomfiting indecision being that I never replied to Brian Hong at all, and so now, like that forgotten spongy corpse, he is coming after me in the middle of the night to gently (because that is Brian Hong’s passive-aggressive way) but persistently (because that is also Brian Hong’s passive-aggressive way) haunt me.
Or is Brian Hong a head person on one of my father’s ghost checking accounts, an account I inadvertently share with him and then other dead Chinese relatives? And instead of coming after my father, who has cannily—as usual—left no trace or marker, is the ghost of Brian Hong coming from the far ends of the earth . . . for me?
AFTER TWO nights in a hotel, I know I should go home, but I just can’t.
I have told Mr. Y to get out, and he has, moving his things to his coproducer Wilson’s spacious Studio City abode, so it isn’t a matter of needing a break from him, and from us.
It’s just that the house is still there.
If only I could break up with my own house. I can’t write there, think there, or focus there.
I feel I’m being strangled by it, by all these people’s stuff—mine, Mr. Y’s, and my children’s. All the nests. I can no longer stand to be near any of it. It saps my chi. I don’t want to be near any stuff I might remotely be considered to be responsible for. I don’t want to be near that structure where everyone cants their chins up to the ceiling and says, “Where is—?” waiting for the food and the ketchup and the toilet paper to rain down magically. I don’t want to be where socks go missing and smoke-alarm batteries need replacing and where my girls will say things to me like, “Mommy? According to this health unit we’re studying, you need to buy pesticide-free vegetables,” or “Mommy? I think you need to compost,” to which I’m increasingly inclined to say: “Actually no, you have mistaken me for the sort of mommy who cares. Do it yourself. Or take your tiny almost-nonexistent college fund and hire someone to compost.”
Thank God the girls are away for another ten days.
In my twenties and thirties I was into expansion.
Nearing fifty, I am now in retreat.
Full of loathing for this mortal coil, I just want to step outside the shell of myself, leave it behind like a wrinkled skin, and drift on, perhaps becoming a point somewhere beyond, hovering in space like an infinitesimal dust mote.
THE GOOD thing at midlife, though, is that if your friends have hung with you for as long as they have, they really do accept you. There really are fewer and fewer judgments. They are increasingly people to whom you can make the most awkward, rambling, inexact phone calls.
To wit: “Uh, hi, Judith? Where did you tell me you just bought your new house? Was it off Coldwater somewhere? I’d love to come see it sometime to get some . . . er . . . remodeling tips. Would it be convenient to come around in, say, oh, I don’t know . . . one hour?”
And here comes Vague Gambit Two: “I’m going to be in your part of the Valley anyway. I’ve been thinking of maybe renting an office there, as when I do my girls’ school drop-offs and pickups I have all this time to kill in the middle of the day.” This is technically true: I have been thinking about getting an office in the Valley, but for what I can afford it would be a shoebox, and then I would have to haul in some furniture and a coffeemaker and it’s like starting all over again at the Pirate’s Cove and I’m already tired.
What I would prefer is to wash up on the porch of one of my girlfriends with a lovely well
-kept home in the middle of the day with my computer and my work satchel, as though her house were some kind of benevolent public library. If peckish I would like to do a little light refrigerator raiding. If thirsty I would like to pour myself Pellegrino that I myself have not hauled in in a case from Costco. I would like to be a houseguest in my own sunny cottage who works during the day and then appears at 5:00 P.M. for cocktail hour and light chatter before we all sit down for a robust evening meal, cooked by Hannah Gruen (the motherly housekeeper in the Nancy Drew books) or similar. Or I could even curl up in a basket at the foot of somebody’s bed. I could be someone’s cat.
Amazingly Judith returns my call immediately—she happens to be in, and would love to show me her house.
JUDITH LIVES on—can you believe it?—Sunswept Drive. These are the street names found only in fiction! And in Los Angeles.
It is impossible to find—nested in a zillion twists and turns. This makes me love it even more. It is a place to truly get lost.
“Welcome!” Judith says, arms out, in a muslin shift and ballet slippers, gliding up the drive. “Welcome!” Oh the lightness of step of the child-free!
What ensues is a short whirlwind tour of her pretty amazing property—it’s nestled on a hillside with multiple angled levels and skylights. Above the glittering pool is a vast and gleaming open floor plan. It’s something you could practically roller-skate through and then arrive, skidding slightly, at the perfect lipstick-red art nouveau divan . . .
But most amazingly of all, there is no clutter. Books are so perfectly arranged in custom-built walls of bookshelves that they actually look like art.
“Roland did it—isn’t it wonderful?” she says.
“I can’t even imagine how he did that,” I say.
Judith and Roland are an interesting couple. Judith is a screenwriter, Roland is a sculptor. He is Swiss, and he has a discreet, comfortable amount of family money. While they’ve been together for more than ten years, they have never married. And I must say, curiously, I find the most remarkable facet of their cliffside home is that Judith and Roland have separate entrances. Up above is her work space, a sunny if fairly tiny aerie; below is his rambling bachelor office and studio, overlooking the pool. (“I don’t swim,” she says. “I hate water.”) In the middle level are the vast open living room and dining room and giant kitchen.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 13