The Pavilion of Former Wives Page 3

  “What I want, okay, is that Jay accept the fact that the marriage is over,” she said.

  “Why should Jay’s acceptance or not make a difference?” Leo asked her.

  “It just does,” she said.

  “She wants to hurt me,” Jay said, “but in a way that protects her from feeling bad about herself. She hates the sight…”

  Leo was quick to intervene. “Let her speak for herself, please,” he said. “The two of you seem to know more about the other’s feelings than your own. I understand that your feelings about Jay are intuitive, Lois, but it would be useful here if you gave some examples of what seems to be the problem.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear them,” she said.

  ‘Then tell them to me,” Leo said. “I want to hear them.”

  She had a hundred grievances against Jay, she had a litany of grievances—they often came to mind unbidden like the hypnogenic lyric of some ancient detergent commercial—but at the moment she couldn’t come up with one that didn’t seem hopelessly trivial. “He’s only interested in me as an extension of himself,” she said.

  “That’s not specific enough,” Leo said.

  “He doesn’t clean up after himself,” she said. “He leaves crumbs all over the apartment, which I end up having to deal with.”

  “What do you say to that?” Leo asked, turning his attention to Jay.

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” Jay said.

  The role she was performing laughed. “You see what I mean,” she said.

  Leo reiterated in paraphrase Lois’s complaint about his messiness.

  “She’s probably right about that in general,” Jay said, “but I’ve been better about it recently. I think even Lois would acknowledge that I’ve been trying.”

  “Too little, too late,” she said.

  “Let’s put this into perspective,” Leo said. “If, say, overnight, Jay no longer left messes that he didn’t clear up, became a sudden exemplar of neatness and consideration, would that alter your feelings toward him?”

  Lois wanted to say that it might, but since she didn’t believe it, felt the dishonesty of any such assertion, she said nothing, or rather mumbled something that was susceptible to a near infinite variety of interpretations.

  “What Leo’s saying,” Jay said, “is that the example you gave represents a petty annoyance and is hardly a significant factor in your disaffection toward me.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he’s saying,” she said. “Is that what you’re saying, Leo?”

  “Is there anything Jay can do or not do that would make you reconsider your decision to separate?” Leo asked.

  “What about her?” Jay interrupted, suddenly outraged. “Why is this whole discussion about my changing?”

  “There’s nothing he can do,” she said, “nothing that would make the slightest bit of difference.”

  “I hear you,” Leo said. “Jay, what changes would you like to see Lois make?”

  Jay started, then stopped himself. “Well, for openers,” he said, “she can stop fucking Roger or whoever it is she’s been seeing on the sly.”

  Leo seemed unfazed by the revelation. “And if she stopped,” he said, “would that make a difference?”

  “I’m sorry I said that,” Jay said.

  “What are you sorry about?” Leo asked. “It was something you felt, wasn’t it? You meant it, didn’t you?”

  Jay looked over at Lois, who seemed to have shut down. “I didn’t want to embarrass you,” he said.

  “I thought you thought I was shameless,” she said, and seemed, until she took a deep breath, on the verge of giving in to feelings she was hours away from acknowledging.

  THIRD SESSION

  They arrived at the therapist’s office together and Jay suggested that she go in by herself and that he would loiter in the lobby of the building, kill a few minutes, before making his appearance.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Well, I don’t see any reason to throw Leo off his game.”

  “As Leo would tell you, and as I’m sure you know, that’s exactly what you do want. Denial is a form of admission. What’s Leo’s game, in your opinion?”

  “I’m here to find out,” he said.

  She laughed. “Shouldn’t we tell him things are better?”

  “What do you think?”

  They entered Leo’s office at the same time, though not quite together, made their appearance in single file, Lois the first to enter.

  As they sat down in their respective seats, Leo looked over his glasses from one to the other, then jotted something down in the small notebook he always seemed to have on the table in front of him. “People, I’d like to try something a little different today,” he said. “I’d like to have you switch roles—Lois, you take on the role of Jay, and Jay, you present yourself as Lois—for the next twenty minutes.”

  Lois looked skeptical, while Jay seemed vaguely amused.

  “So Jay, putting yourself in Lois’s shoes, I’d like you to present your grievances toward your husband…”

  “She wears a 7B,” Jay said. “There’s no way I could get my feet in her shoes without cutting off my toes.”

  Leo ignored him. “And Lois,” he said, “I’d like you to begin to imagine yourself as Jay. I’ll give you both a few minutes to focus and then Lois—that is, Jay as Lois—will start. Otherwise, it will be the same format as last week. Once we start, I’d like you both to stay in character. Any questions?”

  “I don’t know, Leo,” Lois said. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

  “Let’s give it a try, okay, and see how it goes,” Leo said.

  “I’d prefer standing,” Jay said slyly, getting up and then sitting down. “One of the things about Jay that makes my hair curl is that he is incapable of empathy. That’s all I have to say at the moment.”

  “Jay,” Leo said, pointing to Lois.

  “Lois tends to be a perfectionist,” she said, “and so tends to be what I call hypercritical. The way I see it, there’s nothing I can do to please her no matter how many times I apologize for being oblivious. She has an idea of how people should be and if you don’t live up to that idea, you’re in trouble. You never know exactly where you stand with her.”

  “Could you give us an example of what you mean?”

  “An example? Well, one night after a hard closing, she comes home from work and finds me sprawled out on the couch, watching TV—a basketball game, most likely—and she says something like, ‘You’re supposed to be working on your book, not watching TV, aren’t you?’ And then it comes out that I’d neglected to do the little bit of shopping she had asked me to do and I get some more grief from her. I don’t answer and then I offer an unfelt apology, but when she keeps at it I put my coat on and go out for a walk. Some hours later, when I come back, I find her talking on the phone to someone I think I have reason to assume is her lover.”

  “How does that make you feel?” Leo asks.

  “How does that make me feel? I let her know how angry I am by knocking over a few chairs and then I order her to get off the phone. It’s not the best way to handle it, but I have to do something and I haven’t the faintest idea what else to do. I’m bigger than she is and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get my way.”

  Jay waited a few minutes before speaking. “Look, I’m not going to let myself be bullied by him in my own house. I have a right to talk to whoever I please. His behaving like a jerk only makes me more determined. His bad behavior, which I may have provoked—you get to know the right buttons—is embarrassing to me. He knows I hate scenes. And so I get off the phone, which makes me hate him even more, but not before telling my friend that I’ll call him back.”

  “Do you ever, after the dust has cleared, talk about what went on?” Leo asked Lois.

  “Not usually. Mostly we avoid each other. One of us goes in the bedroom and the other stays in the living room.”

  “What happens the next morning?”
Leo asked Jay.

  “I don’t as a rule talk much in the morning, and when we do talk we tend to be excruciatingly polite, as if one wrong word might cause irreparable damage.”

  “Do you have breakfast together?” Leo asked Lois.

  “I…excuse me…Lois doesn’t eat breakfast. She has coffee and sometimes a toasted bialy but it’s not a sit-down breakfast. On the other hand, I have designer cold cereal in the morning and tend to read the sports page while making music chewing my granola.”

  “If you don’t discuss your fights, how do you ever reconcile your differences?” Leo asked Jay.

  “Time heals,” Jay said, “and sometimes doesn’t.”

  Lois cut in just as Jay was completing his sentence. “My policy is to ignore problems and hope they go away,” she said.

  “When I feel wronged, I can be absolutely unforgiving,” Jay said, “and it’s possible that Jay has been burned too much to be willing to risk making a gesture he knows will be scorned.”

  Lois pursed her lips. “I guess when the going’s tough, I don’t have much backbone, do I?”

  Jay picked up a flyer that had been lying on the table and folded it into a paper airplane.

  Leo’s bearded face showed a minor crack of concern and he suggested, after Jay had launched the paper airplane in Lois’s direction and Lois had stared daggers at Jay in return, that it might be a good idea to stop the role playing at this point and return to their former selves. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get back into your own heads.”

  “This was useful,” Lois said. “When he was going on about me being hypercritical and unforgiving, I got the impression he was really talking about himself. I learned something from that.”

  “Hey, weren’t we both talking about ourselves?” Jay said.

  “You’re so clever,” she said. “Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?”

  “You’re the princess of snide,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry I threw the plane in your direction. It wasn’t really meant to hit you, it was to make you aware there was someone else in the room.”

  “You never say anything that means anything,” she said. “Why is that? You are the prince of self-justifying incoherence.”

  Jay got out of his chair with apparent difficulty, as if fighting some kind of invisible resistance, and retrieved his coat.

  “Why don’t you just leave,” Lois said.

  Leo turned his head just enough to glance at the clock on the wall.

  “We still have some time left, people,” he said.

  FOURTH SESSION

  There is no fourth session.

  SEATTLE

  For weeks they argued, as if the terrifying unimaginable were at stake, over something that had happened (or had not happened) fifteen years back. Or perhaps seventeen years back, as Genevieve continued to insist. The dispute concerned a trip they had taken to Seattle— that much was sometimes agreed on—in which they had both behaved badly, a trip that had very nearly ended in the dissolution of a long-term marriage. It had come back to Josh in barely discernible disguise, provoked into memory by a startlingly vivid dream.

  When he woke in a tattered rage, he replayed the dream in his head, not wanting to lose it as he had lost so much else in recent years, juggling its shapeless fragments in the imaginary air while waiting for Genevieve to open her eyes.

  Finally, outmaneuvered by his own impatience, he woke her.

  “I just had this disturbing dream…” he started.

  She anticipated what came next. “And you want me to listen to it? Is that what this is about?”

  “You were in the dream,” he said.

  “Was I?”

  He couldn’t remember when it started or even precisely how it started or if it had always been this way. He would have something in his hand or there was something in his sight he was thinking of picking up, something—whatever—he had plans for, and then in the next moment it was nowhere. Once it had vanished, he could look everywhere for it, he could tear the house apart, and not find it. How furious it made him, furious both at himself and the disappeared object, his reading glasses, say, or a book he thought he might want to read, furious at being thwarted. Genevieve hated his rages, but what else could he do, it was the only revenge powerlessness allowed.

  Shortly after that, or perhaps concurrently, was Josh’s burgeoning failure to come up with words (sometimes names) that had previously been available to him. It was his habit to do the Times crossword puzzle every night before going to sleep. His skill, which he secretly prided himself on, began to fail him, answers that were on the edge of memory denying him access. And more than once, perhaps even several times, he lost the names of people he knew perfectly well when running into them unexpectedly. If he worked at it, which he did—it was almost all he did—he was certain he could defeat the problem.

  “I’ll listen to your dream after I have my coffee,” she said.

  He followed her into the kitchen impatiently, rehearsing the opening of the dream in his head. They were riding in a rented car, an Audi wagon, going to a party at an old, sometime friend’s house.

  “I have a feeling I know how this is going to end up,” she said, sipping her coffee.

  “I was anxious in the dream,” he said, “because the host was someone you had a one-night stand with in Seattle. I wanted to turn back, though the trip had its own momentum.”

  “I never had a one-night stand with anyone in Seattle, for God’s sake,” she said. “Who did you have in mind?”

  “The trip seemed to go on forever, though it was supposed to be three hours at most. Maybe we should go back, I said. It’ll be longer going back, you said. Let’s just get there and get it over with. Then suddenly the house appeared—it was as if it were in the middle of the road—and we had to pull over to the side not to run into it. Pulling over, we slid into a ditch and you said you knew this would happen. I promised you I would find a way out, but you seemed skeptical. Anyway, we got out of the car and went into the house without knocking or ringing the bell. We were obviously very late because the party seemed in its last stages, couples lying on the floor, drunk or asleep, a few having sex in what seemed like slow motion. The hostess appeared—the man’s wife—and she said to make ourselves at home, but that she was sorry to say all the good wine had already been consumed. I had brought a bottle but it was still in the car and I excused myself to go out and retrieve it. Don’t leave me, you whispered, but I went out anyway, stopping at the door for a moment to embrace the hostess, whose name I had forgotten.

  “And then I was in the car, looking under the seat for the bottle of good wine I had brought. I came up with a dusty bottle of Pinot Blanc I had never seen before—it was not the bottle I remembered taking—and handed it to the hostess, who was on the floor of the car on her knees next to me. ‘I know this wine,’ she said to me. ‘It was my absolute favorite before I quit drinking and carousing altogether. I don’t know how to thank you. Will a long, lingering kiss do the trick?’

  “I didn’t think an answer was appropriate. Then we got out of the car and started back to the house. She took me around the side, where there was a picture window, and we looked into the master bedroom together, her small breasts pressing against my back. There was a couple on the bed, fooling around, his head under her skirt and she said, ‘That’s my husband and your wife.’ It was odd because I didn’t recognize you at first. ‘What do you want to do about it?’ she asked me.”

  ******

  “Is that it?” Genevieve asked.

  “There was more, but the rest comes and goes. The point is, it was just like that time at the party in Seattle where the hostess and I found you in the upstairs guest room with her husband. He had been a high school sweetheart or something of the sort.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “That never happened. When is this supposed to have happened?”

  “The trip, don’t you remember that terrible trip we took—we had picked up yo
ur mother’s car in Annapolis—I don’t remember what it was doing there—and we were delivering it to them in Seattle. It was fifteen years ago. I never wanted to go. We fought over everything. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember because it never happened. Josh, we haven’t been to Seattle together in seventeen years.”

  “It could have been seventeen years ago, but it doesn’t seem as if that much time has passed. You asked my forgiveness, don’t you remember, and you said it would never happen again.”

  Genevieve laughed. “You’re out of your mind…. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. If anything, you’re conflating several different events. Yes?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m right about this.”

  She left the kitchen and, after deciding not to, he followed her up the stairs. When he reached her—she was in her study, sitting at her computer—he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say.

  “I can’t live with your suspicions,” she told him the next day or the day after that.

  “This was fifteen years ago,” he said.

  “You’re the most ungenerous man I’ve ever known,” she said. “It didn’t even happen.”

  He waited until she was sitting at the table to make the point he had been thinking about much of the previous night. He had lost it temporarily but now it was at memory’s fingertips. “If it never happened, why does it disturb you if I mention it?”

  She had no answer and then she did. “How would you like it,” she said, “if I constantly reminded you of the time twelve years ago that you hit me.”

  “I never,” he said, aggrieved. “I don’t remember ever hitting you.”

  “That doesn’t mean it never happened,” she said, “does it? You have an awful temper and you know it.”

  He remembered the car, an oversized Chevrolet that had a habit of stalling at red lights. And so he brought it up to her when they talked again several hours later, reminded her of the car’s various unnerving tics.