Instead, you opened the phone book and called a marriage counselor with a pleasingly alliterative name.
From the beginning, it was a threat: we’re going to therapy, or else. Your husband agreed. Did he have a choice?
The therapist, Madeleine Minter, had flame-red hair and wore floral hoop skirts and tottered around on tiny little heels. Your husband thought she didn’t like him, that she sided with you, and he wasn’t wrong. You spent two weeks laying it all out, both of you. Even then, the story felt long. The drugs, the guy, Dr. North, trying to have a baby, the extreme imbalances of work and school. “Look, you’re both very intelligent,” she said. “If I gave you both an IQ test, you’d probably score around the same.” It was one of her few kindnesses, something you didn’t know you needed to hear. Aaron nodded, gulped. “But your lives are so radically different, they’re incompatible.” By the end of the second session, Madeleine Minter concluded that if things kept going the way they were going, you—you, only you—would be “vulnerable to an affair.”
What the fuck does that mean? your husband asked.
You did not want to have an affair, but to feel uniquely entitled to one—it made you shiver with a terrifying power.
Maybe she knew that he wouldn’t hear anything after that. Maybe she saw how deep in delusion you were. Maybe she sensed that the two of you weren’t ready for couples counseling. At the end of the second session, she pointed at you. It was you she needed to see, she said. Alone. Your husband had his own psychiatrist. You needed to focus on what you wanted, what you needed. You needed to find your voice. You needed to do some work of your own. You felt pinned to the back of your chair by a knife.
Was it work you were doing there in that office over the next year? You spent a lot of tearful solo sessions talking about your husband’s moods, his anger, his depression. You talked about how you didn’t feel connected anymore. You talked about how you hated fighting in front of the baby. You talked about what it would take for you to pack up the baby and leave. They were things you’d never said to anybody on the earth. It was important that you said them, that they moved outside your body into the room. You felt lighter, and also guilty, and scared. You reported one week that when you went to the mall your husband got so mad at something that he punched the concrete wall in the little vestibule between the two entrance doors, and she looked at you with such disdain that you felt carved in two—horrified at what you tolerated, and also protective of your wall-punching husband. You could see that she had already dismissed him, that in her eyes he was irredeemable.
When you sat him down on the porch swing that night, you felt sick to your stomach.
“She says it’s abusive. Your behavior. When you get so angry—”
“That word.” He actually put his hands over his ears.
“I know. I know you don’t like that word.”
“Okay,” he said. Like, I heard you.
His psychiatrist, for her part, was taking her own sides. His psychiatrist said you should have been more understanding when he made his confession. That you shouldn’t have lashed out. Maybe that was what therapists did, why people paid them. Instead of being in couples counseling, you reported back your own private revelations, lobbing them like grenades.
One time, another day after parking at the mall—what was it about the mall?—you opened the glove box and found a pack of Marlboro Reds. You were like a spooked horse. You didn’t wait for him to explain. You got out of the car and slammed the door and marched into the mall alone, leaving your husband with the baby. You wanted to punch the concrete wall in the vestibule. Instead, you called Meredith and spilled it. She didn’t quite get why you were so mad. It was just cigarettes. “Because he told me he was doing heroin. Fucking heroin. And I told him that if he kept anything from me again it would be the end.” You had never said the word aloud to anyone but your therapist, but you said it as you speed-walked around the mall, your purse banging against your hip.
“Oh,” Meredith said.
When you told your therapist, she looked at you with something like pity. Something like “I told you so.”
When he told his psychiatrist, she told him you shouldn’t have overreacted. You shouldn’t have left the baby in the car with your husband.
That did it. A little dart thrown at your mothering.
Fuck your psychiatrist, you said. What, he wasn’t safe with you? You’re his dad. Were you high? Why wouldn’t he be safe? Why do you get to get out of the car and walk away whenever you want, but I don’t? Because I’m a woman? A mother? Why the fuck do I have to be the responsible one? Why the fuck don’t I get to punch walls?
A faucet had been turned on, a hose hooked up to an endless tank of resentment and rage. It was his fault, all of it.
You went to visit your parents. You needed to get out of town. Took the baby, drove to your brother’s house, let yourself through the back gate. It broke you, the easy, peaceful way that gate always swung open for you. Your brother’s chocolate lab came and nuzzled your knees. Was there a safer feeling? You didn’t know how unsafe you’d felt until you came in that gate.
That night, while the baby slept inside, you sat with your mother at the patio table, back in that yard. That’s when you spilled everything. Well, not everything. You didn’t mention the heroin. But the fighting, the therapy. That’s when she told you about going to therapy with your dad. You told her some days you thought about packing up the baby and leaving.
“Do you?” your mother said neutrally. With one hand she held a lit cigarette. With the other, she ran her fingers through her salt-and-pepper hair.
You nodded. You cried like a baby yourself. Your face was slick with snot. You said, “It’s not my job to look after his mental health!”
Your mother ashed her cigarette. She was careful with her words. “Honey,” she told you, “that’s what marriage is.”
Your mother has a younger sister who was married for years to a man not unlike your father. When their sons left for college, they divorced, and your aunt moved to Belize, where she opened an inn on the beach, wore a bikini, wrote romance novels, and fell in love with a younger man. Was it you, or was your mother a little annoyed by this? Meanwhile, your parents lived together in your brother’s basement. For forty years, one would start the crossword, leave it in the bathroom, and the other would finish.
If instead of sponsoring your dysfunctional marriage, your mother had said, “Come stay with us for a while. Figure out what you want. You’re young. You’re twenty-nine, for God’s sake. You have a baby to think about. We love Aaron, but it looks like he has some stuff to figure out, too. If you want to leave, you’ll be okay without him. You’re strong. You deserve to live the life you want.” If she’d said that, would you have moved into that basement apartment with her? Would you have listened?
Or would you have done what you were determined to do anyway? Would you have just dug in your heels deeper? Would you have resented the implication that your marriage, your husband, was unsavable? Would your mother’s words just add fuel to the fire, like every word from your therapist’s mouth?
You went home. You kept going. Nothing had changed, except now he was smoking in the open.
“Aaron,” Madeleine Minter told you, “is a limited person.” She said it like, come on, we both know this to be true. It felt like a key, but a key to the gut.
True, went a voice in one ear.
Cruel, went a voice in the other. Was there anything crueler than to call someone limited? Was there anything that limited a person more?
It was a challenge. There wasn’t much fire left in you, but that fanned it. You started scowling through your sessions. Arms crossed, like a moody teenager. That hose of rage, it could be turned on your therapist, too.
You’d lie to her, then, and to yourself. You’d stay in your marriage and quit therapy.
If she’d said, instead, “Look, your husband has been on and off drugs all his life, and he’s never been to rehab.
Maybe you should look into that,” would you have listened? Or would you have balked at the word “addict,” the way you balked at “abuse”? If she’d said, “Look, there’s a great program called Al-Anon, and it might save your life and your marriage,” would you have gone? Would you have been ready?
In your last session, when you broke up with her, she said, “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“We’re trying to have another baby,” you told her. It was what you knew, how you coped, how you kept on. And you knew she’d look at you like you’d failed her test. You had found a voice, but you didn’t use it in the way she’d wanted.
She was exasperated. “It’s entitled,” she said. “To have a new baby, while you’re in financial distress, while your marriage is in crisis, it’s incredibly entitled.” She flung her hands in the air, like, what more could she do for you anyway?
He was limited. You were entitled. Another key to the gut.
* * *
The financial distress. There was that. Do you need a whole separate book for that? How to describe the financial funk that filled the rooms of your beautiful house? The organic Pottery Barn crib sheets, the organic mashed carrots, the Bugaboo stroller, the giant shipwrecked sectional couch, the marriage counseling copays, the satellite TV, the phone, the other phone, the car, the other car, the gas in the car, the mortgage, the mortgage, the mortgage—it had added up, was adding up every hour. We watched our bank balance plummet. The down payment on the house had been Morris’s money. We had sold the condo, his last property, for far less than we’d hoped. Now all his money was gone. All our money was gone. We got one month behind on the mortgage, then two. One morning, in order to get to work, I had to pay for gas with my parents’ credit card number at the mom-and-pop station across the highway, reading the number off a Post-it while the cashier keyed it in. I held my breath as the gas flowed from the pump. The shame was like a too-bright day I had to close my eyes against.
Aaron was working two jobs—he’d picked up weekend retail shifts at the mall. That winter, into the spring, he worked and worked and I worked and worked. I applied for a tenure-track teaching job in Ithaca, and tried to finish my novel, and tried to get pregnant. Entitled, said Madeleine Minter in my head, again and again. But we didn’t expect something for nothing! We were just trying to make something from nothing. Make it work.
Aaron, for reasons beyond my understanding, was becoming Catholic. He was taking classes at the Roman Catholic Church in Charlottesville, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. There was something vaguely embarrassing about it, something inaccessible. Hadn’t the therapist said our lives were too radically different as it was, that what we needed was integration? But there was something beautiful about it, too. He was looking for something outside himself, bigger than himself, spiritual structure, belonging, a path. That was good, right? What did it matter if I wasn’t on the path with him? He didn’t miss a class. Not since he took the weekly classes at the NYPD had he been so disciplined.
His mother visited that fall, the one and only time. Flew from New Mexico to Virginia. It was a nice visit. She complimented my corn chowder. She read to the baby. Held his little hand as he toddled up and down the porch steps. Look at the baby walk! Look at the baby talk! Look at the baby say Da Da Da, chasing after him. We told her nothing of the drama, of course.
I thought maybe she would approve of Aaron’s conversion to Catholicism. Maybe he thought she would, too. She’d been raised Catholic. Aaron had changed his last name from his father’s to his mother’s, and now he was changing his religion from his father’s to his mother’s. She was agnostic on the issue, though. She had parted ways with the church herself, something about being annoyed with the priest at her congregation in Santa Fe. It occurred to me that Aaron wasn’t choosing his mother so much as choosing not-his-father. He was choosing another father, a Heavenly Father, and Father Geoffrey, who led the classes. He came home talking about him with the same respect and admiration he’d had for Dr. North.
When you get three months behind on your mortgage, you get foreclosure notices, and then the foreclosure notices appear in the newspaper. And then your Realtor calls you and says, “What happened?”
We went to a free financial counselor. She took down our income, all our expenses. I felt like I was in Madeleine Minter’s office again, in the principal’s office. At the end of the session, she said in the most neutral voice available to humans that she recommended we file for bankruptcy.
* * *
You dug in your heels. That’s what you did under pressure: showed all those fuckers what you were made of. When the fire got hot, you sold the Subaru. A stranger sat at your dining room table in one of the lime-green painted chairs and wrote you a check for $10,000. You paid off the past due mortgage and with what was left over, bought a thirty-year-old Mercedes station wagon with 200,000 miles on it—These things run forever! Aaron said—with stiff leather seats and no power steering and an engine that needed ten minutes to warm up. Whatever. You had avoided, for now at least, foreclosure and bankruptcy. Made it work.
And then, you do. It does. Did. All of the work, tears, effort: something from nothing. In a span of a week, you were offered a job contract and a book contract. One way out, then another. When your agent called to tell you, you sank to the kitchen floor, leaned your head against the cabinet, and cried.
Then your husband took your hand, raised you to your feet, and you danced.
* * *
What saved us then—our livelihood, our marriage, our self-respect—wasn’t a great new insight earned in therapy—we’d earned little—but good news, fickle, with its sweat and luck. A survival instinct, the jungle cats in us clawing out of the cave. Our love for each other and for our child and our hope for a new one, for a new start.
That spring I rewrote Ten Thousand Saints. Went to Mudhouse with my manuscript, my editor’s beautiful pencil scrawled on every page. I was willing to revise. I was writing a new story for us. It was a book made from Aaron, something we’d birthed together, an offspring of sorts.
The week before my deadline, I printed out a fresh manuscript. “It’s your last chance,” I told Aaron, “if you’re going to read it.”
The next two days, he went to Mudhouse and read my book. For nine years I had been building a fictional universe out of the scraps of his childhood. What if he hated it? What if he saw too much of himself in it, or too little? What if I’d gotten the whole world wrong? Toward the end of the second day, I drove Nico to the coffee shop and bought a piece of vegan chocolate cake and we sat down next to Aaron as he turned the last page.
“I like it,” he told me.
I smiled. Nico, in his high chair, stuffed his mouth with cake. Sweet relief.
“Only thing is, Gorilla Biscuits would never tour with the Cro-Mags.”
* * *
When Aaron finished his classes and was ready to be baptized, my parents came to visit for Easter weekend. They took care of Nico while I went with Aaron to the very large church, sat through the very long Easter Vigil by myself, and at the end, watched as Aaron stepped barefoot onto the stage in his long white robe, like a child entering from behind the curtain in a school play. I sat up in my seat to see him better. With a crystal bowl, Father Geoffrey poured the water over his head three times, in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit, and then my husband was redeemed.
OLD BOYS
Aaron isn’t out of the psych ward long before my dad starts dying. He needs to rest on a stool between the coffee machine and the dining room table. His feet begin to swell into cold blue balloons. We’re at the doctor every week. The doctor employs his theatrical metaphors. He shuffles around his meds, orders more tests. Before a CAT scan, I help him strip off his undershirt and to lie on his side on the table. His long, ancient body is flat as an ironing board between my hands. I see the seventy-year-old scars that crisscrossed his ribs. I see the boy he was. He is still that boy, with the same body—how is
it true?—that traveled from there to here, from south Georgia to upstate New York, and around the world in between, and now he cranes his neck to see the technician’s screen, the cloudy picture of his insides. I want to see his insides, too. Where is the problem? How can we fix it? “How much longer do we have to do this?” he jokes at these appointments, but he also says, with relief, when the test results are good, “I thought I was a goner.” I see that he wants to die and that he wants to live.
The CAT scan reveals emphysema in his lungs. Not a surprise, given his lifelong love affair with his pipe. “I didn’t really inhale,” he points out.
Mostly it’s his heart, though. His heart has been failing for years and now his lungs are in the marathon, too, and there isn’t much to do about it.
“How does it feel,” Stu asks me, “to watch your dad get sick?”
I’ve started seeing Stu on my own. Aaron still doesn’t trust any doctor, even Stu. “I love him,” he clarifies. But trust is another matter. He is careful about these words. He loves his parents, for example, but he doesn’t respect them. He says this so often that our children sometimes recite, as a means of understanding, “Dad loves his parents but he doesn’t respect them.”
Stu accepts this new reality with grace. In reply to his question, I cry. This seems to be Stu’s strategy: get me alone in order to make me cry. In order to give me a space to feel my own feelings. To remind me I have other things, other people, to cry about and worry over, other than Aaron. He has a point. And I need it: I’ve stopped seeing my other therapist. My week has filled with so many doctor appointments, so many therapy sessions, for my dad, for Aaron, for the kids, that blocking off another hour on Google calendar is more stressful than it’s worth.
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