“Is that a hardcover book in your pants or are you just glad to see me?”
He’d laughed, then reached into his jacket and handed me a book of poems. “I was so bored I forgot to give it to you.”
As I looked at the book jacket and the pages in disbelief—I was thirty-five years old and no man had ever given me a book of poetry until that night—he touched a wisp of hair that had come loose from my ponytail. “And just so you know, when it’s your reading, I’ll go and I’ll stay through the whole thing.”
“Well, you’ll have to. Because I’ll have to stay. Because I’ll be the one reading.”
“That’s true. Besides: leaving early alone isn’t nearly as fun as leaving early together.”
I’d looked at the book again and then leaned into him, putting my forehead, then my ear, on his chest. I remember hearing his heart beating underneath his T-shirt, a sound I was still getting used to, a language I only partially understood. There may or may not have been tears in my eyes when I’d whispered, “Someone’s getting lucky tonight.”
But I was the one who’d gotten lucky: I’d gotten an answer without having to actually ask a question. And I’d gotten someone loyal and loving beyond measure.
That was a lifetime ago. Now, a few hours before our teenager will be home from school, the book is a relic, a souvenir of a time and place I sometimes don’t believe actually existed. I flick the elastic a few times with my finger and wince at its flat tuneless sound. “What’s with the rubber band?” I say, looking at the book’s spine to see if it has somehow split and would explain the need for something to keep it together.
“Some of the pages came loose. Because I read it so much.” He takes the book from me, puts it on his lap, pets it. A little too lovingly, I think, until he throws his head back and sighs loudly. “God, what happened to us? We had such promise. Now we can’t even afford to separate like normal people.” He stares somewhere off into the middle distance. “Maybe I should just go back to law school already.”
I look at the book in his lap, then at the dog in the sling in my lap. Our marriage, our finances, our life are in ruins. I sigh. “It’s time.”
Gary sits up. “I’m not quitting pot. I can’t. I’m not ready. Nothing, not even Klonopin, touches the anxiety like weed.”
“I know. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
It takes him a second or two to understand, but when he does he shakes his head. “Oh, no. Not again.”
“We have to. We have to find another therapist.”
“Do we?”
“Don’t we?” I, too, would rather die than go back into couples counseling, but if we’re going to continue this separated-but-living-together-under-the-same-roof arrangement, we’re going to have to be able to talk about things like Gary’s pot smoking, my wearing the dog, how to deal with seeing other people—not that I can imagine having any interest whatsoever in ever dating again—I haven’t had a normal libido since before Teddy was born—but he does.
“We went through three therapists last year,” Gary says. “With all the money we wasted on them I could have moved out already.”
The thought of dredging everything up again makes me want to slide off the chair onto the floor and stay there. But then we’d still be here, in this same place, this awful purgatory, and I’d feel even deader than I do now.
And then there’s Teddy. Whether what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is having an effect on him.
I stare at the train table, lean forward to touch my fingers to the scratches and grooves where he used to run his trains back and forth on the wood, before he learned how to snap the tracks together and build loops with curves and straightaways and tunnels and bridges. “Remember when he would stand and play at this table for hours?”
Gary looks at me, then at the lighter in his hand, then at the table. Of course he remembers. It’s as if Teddy is right there in front of us, with his tiny pants and minihoodie-sweatshirt, clutching a train car in each hand and pointing at us to watch.
Couples Therapist Number Four
We sit on a long couch facing Deirdre Nussbaum, MSW, whose name we got using a new therapist-rating-and-locator app I’d written about for Well/er (“If Open Table and Yelp and Headspace had a baby, 50Minutes would be it”). Sporting boxy cotton separates and giant wearable-art earrings, she smiles and takes our new patient clipboards from us, leans in as she scans them, then looks up at us soulfully.
“How can I help?”
I clear my throat, wait for words to come, but none do. They never do. For all my alleged ease with them, I am more often than not at a total loss for coherent sentences, stammering out half syllables, especially in stressful situations like this. I scan the walls, then the bookshelves, tilting my head slightly to read the titles: The Dance of Anger. Un-Coupling. Children of Divorce. There’s a Bird on Your Head . . .
“Judy?”
My lips finally move, but the words don’t feel like mine. “We’re trying to negotiate our separation. In terms of our son.”
Deirdre kicks off her boiled-wool clogs to sit crisscross-applesauce in her midcentury leather shrink-chair. Then she points to the sling. “Is that your son?”
I laugh, too loudly at first, flattered to be considered young enough to be wearing a baby, then uncomfortably at the weirdness of the truth. “No! No. That’s the dog.”
Gary sighs. “She has anxiety issues.”
“Wait,” Deirdre says, looking at us over red half-glasses. “Who has anxiety issues: Judy or the dog?”
Gary, the one with the actual anxiety problem, sits up a little straighter, raises an eyebrow at me. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, the eyebrow says. He’s wanted to discuss Sling-Dog Millionaire for a while, but until now the time has never been right.
“She was a rescue,” I lie, the way I always do, too ashamed to admit that we got the dog from an actual pet store, which I like to think means we actually did rescue her, and which conveniently makes it less of a lie. “She needs constant reassurance that she’s safe and loved.”
“Judy was also a rescue,” Gary adds until I shoot him an annoyed look. “Just kidding. Judy doesn’t need reassurance. She knows she isn’t safe or loved. Nothing you can tell her can convince her otherwise.” He shrugs. “It’s how she was raised. Literally without hope.” He then mentions my grandparents.
Deirdre shifts in her chair. “We can come back to the dog, and to Judy’s childhood, but let’s focus first on what brought you here.” She looks down at our clipboards but can’t seem to make sense of much of what we’ve written. Except for one phrase that I wrote in block letters, which Number Four now points to and reads out loud:
“It says ‘Separation anxiety.’”
Even though it isn’t funny, why we’re there, we smirk at the joke. The pun of my inability to separate from the dog and our inability to separate from the marriage—and Gary’s actual acute clinical anxiety—is suddenly extremely funny. Every time we see a new therapist, our effort is a spectacular failure. We’ve never found one with a sense of humor, and Deirdre’s obvious lack of one now on the clipboard test proves that today will be no exception.