by Joel Derfner
When I asked again on Wednesday, he said, “Would you stop badgering me about it? I’ll get to it.”
“When?”
“When I get to it.”
“Fine. We’ll do what you want and just leave it until the last minute and—”
“What I want,” said Mike, “is to be involved in the process of planning this wedding without having to discuss every single detail of every single decision with you for an hour.”
“It might help if you ever bothered to tell me a single thing about what you have in mind.”
“Fine. I’ll look at them later tonight.”
He didn’t.
“Why,” he said when he got home the next day, tense, “is there a message from a caterer on our voicemail confirming a meeting with you tomorrow?”
“Oh, I called Cathy’s friend Marcus to talk to him about catering the party.”
Irritation flooded his voice. “And you were going to tell me this when?”
“What? I figured you’d want me to take care of it.”
“Oh, my God. Can you not tell the difference between things that are important and things that aren’t?”
“That’s it,” I said. “We’re going to couples therapy.”
7
Taking Stock of the Relationship
So,” said Dr. Basescu during our first meeting, “what brought you two in to see me today?”
“Well, the short version,” I said, “is that I made Mike go on a reality show and now he’s deeply resentful but we’re getting married in two months and we’ve wanted to do couples therapy for a while anyway and his individual therapist said you were terrific and gave him your number.”
“And the long version?”
“That,” said Mike, “is a little more complicated.”
I have been online for an hour looking at pictures of my wonderful, handsome, dashing, brilliant, charming husband and thinking about how wonderful, handsome, dashing, brilliant, and charming he is.
Not my husband Mike, but my new husband, Cole. I’m sure Mike will understand, though; he’s a reasonable man, and I’m almost positive I’ll give him the ring back, so he won’t be out all that much.
Cole is my new husband because I saw him in a reading of a musical last week (he’s an actor) and friended him on Facebook along with a message telling him how daring and generous I thought his performance had been, and then I saw him in a reading of another piece again yesterday (it’s final project season at the musical theater writing program where I teach) and ran into him beforehand; he thanked me for my message and apologized for not writing back and I told him it was no problem and then he started asking me about myself and all I wanted to do was gaze deep into his eyes and reveal my soul to him but I was in the middle of helping some student with a problem or something—that’s the trouble with students; they always want you to take the time to teach them things—so I told him we’d talk afterward, but then when I came up to him afterward he was looking in another direction and couldn’t see me and I was too scared to try and get his attention because what if actually he didn’t really like me after all and if I just avoided him then he could never break my heart by rejecting me so I ducked into the men’s room and washed my hands for five minutes thinking about what I would cook when he introduced me to his parents and then I came out and he was gone.
(This is an indication, by the way, of how much better medicated I am than I used to be. If this had happened in my early thirties, I would still have ducked into the men’s room, but instead of spending those five minutes washing my hands I would have spent them crying.)
I loved couples therapy. Part of the reason for this was that, rather than being an exploration of what we’d both unwittingly been doing to make the relationship more difficult and a journey to discover what each of us could do to bring the other closer, for the first month and a half it consisted of the therapist telling Mike how he was wrong.
(I am perfectly willing to admit that this was my subjective experience and that in fact our couples therapist may simply have been a brilliant tactician who actually spent a month and a half telling me how I was wrong and making me believe she was doing the opposite.)
“Mike, do you hear what Joel is saying about what he needs from you as far as participation in the wedding planning?” she would say, but she never asked me whether I heard what he was saying, because it was obvious that I did.
“Mike, can you see how Joel might get frustrated when you use language like ‘just take care of the little stuff with the ceremony and check with me about the important things’?”
“Mike, would you be willing to have the sort of conversation Joel is asking for about the ketubah?”
The best part about all of this was that she had been recommended by Mike’s individual therapist, so if he didn’t like it there was absolutely nothing he could say.
According to Mike’s friend Tony, every couple has one problem. Every time they get into a fight, every time they start calling each other names or wishing secretly or openly for a cliff to push each other off, it always boils down in the end to an expression of that problem. This makes a lot of sense to me, as whenever Mike and I get into a fight, it always boils down in the end to an expression of the problem that he is an asshole.
One Saturday a few years ago, for example, we went to the movies. I take full responsibility for the fact that we were late, as I was dawdling when I ought to have been getting ready to go. We got to the theater just in time to catch the beginning of the movie, we thought, but once we had our popcorn and Peanut Butter M&Ms (for me) and nachos and cheese (for Mike), we realized we hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that this theater had eight floors and escalators that moved at the speed of evolution; when we reached our screen on the top floor, therefore, the movie—not the previews but the actual movie—had already started, so I said we couldn’t go in.
Mike exploded. He sat on a bench in the lobby, his rapidly cooling nachos perched precipitously on his knees, and yelled at me for half an hour (by which I mean he spoke sharply to me for like four minutes). I knew it drove him crazy to be late, he said, and if I’d made us late then I had no right to say we couldn’t see the movie once it had begun, and he was sick and tired of my never considering his feelings, and didn’t I realize that he needed taking care of every once in a while, and he didn’t get why this was so difficult for me to understand.
Mike, making this passionate speech while some kid played an arcade game behind us, seemed angrier at me than he’d ever been. Enough time had passed since the beginning of our relationship that I was no longer limited to my instinctive reaction, which would have been to freeze any hint of emotion out of my face and look coldly at him without moving a muscle the whole time he was speaking and then, when he was finished, say, “Okay,” and turn on my heel and leave, imagining a meteor falling down from a clear sky to crush him (no; not protracted enough) violent explosion of something made of glass that sent tiny glass shards flying into every part of him, beginning with his eyes and making sure not to miss his genitalia (no; even if he went blind the rest of him would heal eventually) creeping, leprous infection of a type contracted only by speaking sharply in movie theaters to people who didn’t deserve it, an infection that both kept him in agonizing pain for years and deformed his countenance monstrously so that his outsides would reflect the rot that was in his soul, and he would be aware the entire time that this wouldn’t be happening to him if he hadn’t been so mean to me.
But, as I say, by this point my conflict-resolution skills had matured somewhat, so I was able to offer sincere apologies mixed with expressions of frustration at what I perceived as Mike’s inflexibility and need to control things.
We made a sort of peace eventually and left the theater to go to the Barnes & Noble next door, where we browsed for an hour or so. I bought a couple books and a little box of four Godiva chocolates, which I started eating while we waited for the subway home. “Hey, can I have a bite?�
� asked Mike as he eyed the caramel-filled half piece of chocolate in my hand.
“No,” I said.
“What?” he said, apparently taken aback. Then he decided I was kidding. “Funny. Give me a bite.”
“No.”
“Why not?” His eyes had narrowed.
“Are you serious? You just disemboweled me in public and you don’t understand why I won’t give you a bite of chocolate?”
“Fine.” He stalked a few yards over to lean against a pillar, and I stayed where I was, which meant that when the subway came we got into separate cars. I was fuming and I’m sure he was too. We walked home from our subway stop separately, which was the first time that had ever happened, and when we got home the first thing we did was have another, even bigger fight, this time about the kitchen.
Let us pause briefly while I explain the extent to which I am not a neat person.
It’s not that I don’t care. I really do like things beautiful and orderly and lined up and clean and sunshine and bluebirds and fabric softener, and I really wish I could keep them that way, but I can’t.
The good news is that it’s not my fault; I fell on my head as a baby.
“I told you to watch him!” my mother shrieked when she got back from lunch to see blood pouring out of my two-year-old scalp.
“I did!” said my father. “I did watch him! I watched him climb up on the sink, I watched him lose his balance, I watched him fall, I watched him hit his head. . . .”
For most of my life I thought that the one-inch-diameter bald spot on top of my head was my sole memento of the fall, but a few years ago, for reasons too tedious to go into here, I had a brain scan, and it turns out that I’m brain damaged. The part of my brain underneath the bald spot is sluggish, as is, to a lesser extent, the corresponding part on the other side. The first sluggish area, my doctor told me, is the section of the brain that processes visual information, which explains a great deal (why I had to stop playing video games in 1984 when they started coming out in 3D, because I found them overwhelming; why I hate art), and the second area is the section of the brain that governs organization, which also explains a great deal. So my tendency toward messiness isn’t a fault; it’s a disability—not only can’t I organize things, I also can’t see that I’ve neglected to organize them—for which I should receive special consideration and perhaps a parking space.
Mike, on the other hand, is a very organized person; he’s also a very visual person, and decided to become a psychiatrist only after considering and rejecting the idea of becoming a painter. (“The ratio of success to starvation was way too low for me,” he said.) So when I got home, having walked a block and a half behind him from the subway, it was only to be confronted with his fury in the kitchen. “You told me you were going to clean this up,” he said hotly, indicating the counter, which had a great number of towering stacks of paper on it, along with several books and a half-empty tin of brownies. “You said that two weeks ago, and it’s still a disaster. It’s like you’re not even aware that I exist. You know how anxious I get when things are messy, and all I can think is that you just don’t fucking care.”
“Oh, you mean like how I didn’t care yesterday when you texted me that you were having a bad day at work and I went to get raspberries so I could make you peach Melba for dessert and I had to take the subway an hour each way to get them because you made us move into a ghetto in the middle of nowhere where they don’t even sell raspberries? And like how I didn’t care when I spent three hours writing those recommendations for your students on Thursday because you’re just shy of dyslexic? You mean like that not caring?”
We went on like this for half an hour or so, and this time we didn’t come to any sort of peace. Mike stormed upstairs and I decided that if he wanted a clean kitchen he was damn well going to get one. So I moved all the papers and books into my office, ate the remaining brownies, including the corners, which are Mike’s favorites, and took everything else in the room, put it in garbage bags, and dragged it down to the basement. And by “everything” I mean everything. Not just the knife stand and the blender, so that the counter would be clear, but everything in the drawers and cabinets, too. Dishes, silverware, glasses. The ice cream maker. The colander. The Cuisinart. They all went into huge thirty-gallon trash bags. Pots, pans, pie dishes, cake tins, the citrus zester. And the pantry. Cereal, flour, honey, pasta, spices, extract of orange, baking powder, all of it. The delivery menus. The refrigerator magnets. I almost took the food in the fridge and freezer down but left it simply because sometimes when I can’t sleep I eat instead and I didn’t want to risk going down to the basement in the middle of the night and consuming a snack that had turned and getting salmonella.
And let me tell you, by the time I was done, that kitchen was fucking clean.
Altogether this took me an hour or two, at the end of which time, feeling very satisfied with myself, I went into my office, shut the door, and started making notes for a short story in which a cruel, sadistic psychiatrist is tortured and killed by the patients he has victimized.
It wasn’t too long before I heard the sound of Mike coming down the stairs, followed by the sound of Mike going into the kitchen, followed by a short period of silence, followed by what might reasonably be termed the Door Slam Heard ’Round the World, followed by the sound of Mike storming back up the stairs. Then I went back to my notes for the story, realizing that I had neglected to include a scene in which the fiendish psychiatrist begs his victims to have mercy on him and they just laugh and laugh and bring out longer knives.
“I’m really sorry,” I said in my voice mail message to Mike the next day.
“I was livid,” he said in his answering voice mail message, “but to tell you the truth I was also kind of impressed. And I’m really sorry too.”
Over the next few days I brought most of the kitchen stuff up from the basement and put it back. Some of it I left down there because we didn’t really need it (I’m sure I had a very good reason for taking that handblown monstrosity of a candleholder off my friend Dave’s hands when he was moving but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what it was).
The problem was the lids for the pots and pans.
They were nowhere to be found.
I swear to you, I scoured that basement for hours—days, months—looking for them, and they had vanished. Every once in a while during the next few years I looked for them again, but nothing doing. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to replace them; when I needed to cover a pot I just put a pan on top of it and vice versa, which was actually really inconvenient.
“Mike,” asked Dr. Basescu, “do you understand what Joel is asking for when he says he wants you to be specific about how you’d like to be involved in planning the wedding?”
“But I am being specific,” he answered. “I don’t know how I can be more specific.”
“All you’ll say,” I said, “is that you want me to take care of the details and check in with you about important things. But it’s a mystery to me what you think is a detail and what you think is important, and you never tell me, and you get annoyed when I ask, so I’ve stopped asking, and I just have to guess, and I hate that.”
“It should be obvious.”
“Honey, when I say I’ve talked to Sugar Sweet Sunshine about getting cupcakes you get annoyed that I didn’t ask you to taste them first, but then when I ask you to sit with me and make a list of who we want to invite you get annoyed and say we’ve already talked about it and I should just go ahead and invite them.”
“That’s because we have already talked about it, for days, and we made a list, which took us hours, and you lost it.”
It was around this time that the couples therapist started asking me whether I understood what Mike was expressing.
I think that the historical event most damaging to the institution of marriage, far more than divorce or same-sexers getting married, may have been the birth of romance novelist Kathleen Thompson Norris in San Franci
sco on July 16, 1880. Upon her death in 1966, the New York Times described her as a militant feminist, but Time called her novels, which had sold over ten million copies, “relentlessly wholesome.” In 1926, she published a book called The Black Flemings, about the tempestuous love between Gabrielle and David; on page 345 one reads the following words:
“‘When I was away from him, I had time to think it out logically and dispassionately, and I knew he was—the one,’ the girl resumed, ‘and when I saw him—whenever we were together, although I couldn’t think logically, or indeed think at all,’ she said, laughing, and flushed, and meeting his eyes with a sort of defiant courage, ‘I knew, from the way I felt, that there never could be, and never would be, any one else!’” (Page 345 of The Black Flemings also contains the line, “‘But after I got home from Paris I saw him again,’ the girl offered, lucidly.” I feel that if somebody who writes like that can sell ten million books I am clearly going about this whole author thing in the wrong way.)
This is, in any case, the earliest instance I’ve been able to find of the use of the unmodified term “the one” as shorthand for something like “the person I’m meant to be with in a match made by destiny.” The idea of love written in the stars has been around—well, really from the beginning, when God saw that Adam was lonely and knew just the companion to give him.
The One.
I love Mike, and I believe myself immeasurably lucky that he has allowed me (thus far, at least) to yoke my life to his. But every day I pass twenty men to whose lives I fantasize about yoking mine, and each one of them, in the moment I see him, is better than Mike; each of those twenty men, in the moment I see him, is The One, because Mike certainly isn’t. He snores, he’s rigid, he likes black-and-white movies. He’s balding and he’s a bad speller. He’s full of energy during the day, only to come home from work listless and tired, whereas I’m listless and tired during the day, only to be full of energy in the evening, when all he wants to do is watch goddamn home and garden shows on HGTV. He nags me to eat vegetables. He makes me come along with him on trips to Home Depot. In the drugstore he stands paralyzed for minutes at a time, two minutes, five minutes, unable to decide whether to buy the Dove soap for $1.29 or the less appealing Ivory Spring soap for $1.19. He rises early on the weekend and gets grumpy when I want him to spend time lazing in bed with me. If we’re having a conversation walking down the street he is constantly distracted by architecture.