The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (16 page)

And this is merely to try to protect those around him—he has started to proposition female nurses at his doctor’s office, trying to grab their breasts, begging them to touch him. Which he can’t do himself, as he can barely clasp his hand around a spoon.

As Ann notes, in an e-mail exchange we have about it: “That’s disturbing not in a having-sex-with-Donald-Trump way but in the sense of carrying a corpse up a flight of stairs.”

I am half tempted to hit my dad on the head with a frying pan just to calm him down, but then even I will go to jail.

It is, of a piece, heart wrenching and frustrating and terrifying and irritating and awful and thankless and hopeless and expensive—did I say expensive?

BUT IT
’
S
the bowl of fruit, finally, that does me in.

One afternoon, I am running errands for my kids and my dad and my dad’s caregiver, Thomas. (As he is the only caregiver who will stay with my father, Kaitlin and I now basically work for him. I have just completed a bout of fixing up a beater car for him and checking it and smogging it and getting it handicapped plates.) I stop in at Crate and Barrel, quite frankly, to smell some Lavender, Rose Hip, and Ylang-Ylang pillar candles. There, I’ve said it. I don’t buy those pillar candles, I just pick them up, close my eyes, and smell them, in order to ingest a little—oh, what do you call it?—happiness.

But on the way to the wicker-basket-flanked aromatherapy section, I come upon a sight that does me in. It is a soft-lighted display of perfect tangelos in a kiln-fired celadon-hued bowl. Of all the fantasy settings of Crate and Barrel that I always laugh off (really? I’m going to sit at a desk under a silver-framed photo of Hemingway and type on this antique typewriter?), it is this sight that stops me.

I am actually stopped.

Who are the women who maintain houses whose every room contains a bowl of beautiful seasonal fruit, fruit that is magically not rotten? It is unthinkable that, in my own house, there might be a ceramic bowl that is not full of old keys and dead AA batteries and rusty nails.

A glowing celadon bowl of perfect tangelos.

It cuts me to my heart.

Biting my lip to hold back the tears, I send Mr. Y an admittedly cryptic text: “
PERFECT BOWL OF FRUIT SO NOT MY LIFE. VERY UNHAPPY ABOUT JAM CITY AND HAVOC IT IS WREAKING
.”

His reply is that he is sorry I am feeling badly but will be home late. We can talk about it on Monday (five days from now).

He is
so not hearing me
.

Couples Therapy Round 117

M
R. Y DOES AGREE
to find a hole in his busy schedule into which he can fit some couples therapy. I haven’t been to couples therapy in years. It gives one pause when you realize you have lived long enough to have had couples therapy over several decades with multiple partners.

I admit that I have mixed feelings about therapy. In my experience couples therapy is typically a nice way for one person to say, “My crazy partner needs therapy.” But of course the crazy partners need to be driven to therapy, otherwise they won’t go because they don’t think they’re crazy, and then anyway on the upside you, the normal person, get the added midlife pleasure of watching a therapist in slow motion read your surprised crazy partner the riot act about what an unbelievable jerk he is.

That’s the dream, anyway. Sadly, though, I have found that no matter how provably wrong one’s partner is, therapists play this game where they don’t take sides. Instead of simply ordering your partner to stop doing what he’s doing, the therapist will just turn to one and ask: “How does that make you
feel
?”

Still, one tries, if one can, always to improve one’s relationship. So here I am again, as if in a dream, sitting in another little waiting room under another row of Tibetan masks, with the little light switch flipped up. We are seeing a Beverly Hills couple’s therapist with the enigmatic name of Dr. Stacey, at the suggestion, of course, of my friend Ann.

I survey my own internal landscape. The illustrative tale I used to tell about husband number one—if you’ll recall—was this. After being away for a month on the road, Mr. X would step onto the porch, put his bags down, look up above him, and say, “The roof needs retiling.” Because he didn’t first say, “And how are you?” I like to claim that there was an emotional connection, after twenty years of cohabitation, that had gone missing.

By contrast, Mr. Y and I have plenty of emotional connection, but we also seem, more and more, to fight like dogs. His show has been extended, which is glorious but not necessarily lucrative, not yet, it has a ways to go, and he has pledged to pick up his share of the housework if not more, but it’s not happening. So all our tension and strife starts to boil down into domestic affairs of the most mundane nature, which have come to represent our mutual incompatible personality differences writ large.

Dr. Stacey, a tall brunette with round glasses, a long sad face, and a knee-length maroon cardigan, regretfully flicks the light switch down and somberly greets us.

“So, Sandra,” she says, smoothing her skirt as she sits. “I’m interested to hear you describe your situation.”

“Well,” I say. “In a nutshell I feel that Mr. Y has thrown our life out of balance by coproducing this show without really thinking it through—and our home life is really suffering.”

“And how do you think he feels?” she asks gently.

I know the answer to that too!

Smartly I retort, “I would say Mr. Y, in turn, feels that he would like to pursue things he is interested in and I am too stressed out and too micromanaging of his time. What is the contract, though? I would ask. What is the contract?”

“What contract?” Mr. Y erupts. “We are partners—and we support each other in whatever we want to do in life! That’s what people who love each other do! It’s simple! We don’t need a contract!”

“Oh but we do,” I say, in a sudden deeper tone of voice.

“What do you mean?” asks Dr. Stacey quietly.

“Well, in the old days,” I say, “I did the art, Mr. Y managed the art, and then when we got together, well . . .” I turn to him. “You seemed more domestic than I did, you were a better cook and into all the kitchen stuff, I paid the bills, we were in a kind of flow.”

Mr. Y’s mouth is in a line, and he is shaking his head.

“What do you mean, you did the art?” asks Dr. Stacey. “I need a little background.”

“To be entirely candid”—I forge forward, not knowing what else to do—“during our ten-year partnership when Mr. Y was producing my one-woman shows, I was indeed, well, I’m sorry, that’s what you call it—the talent. That means when you have to go onstage in one hour and perform for one hundred or six hundred people who have paid forty dollars a ticket and you have a sore throat, someone will rush out to the corner and get you two or three flavors of cough drops. It is kind of amazing. I recall the first time I saw a professionally laid-out dressing room, when I first hit the repertory theater circuit (and hence, in my modest profession, the big leagues). In the corner, your freshly dry-cleaned costume will be hung up waiting for you, wireless microphone coiled and ready, shoes polished. In front of a mirror a fresh white towel will be laid out with Alka-Selzers, Ricolas, bottled water, tea makings, a basket of crackers, a bowl of fruit, or whatever else you have requested. Everyone’s job is to get what you requested.”

“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’?”