City Boy (20 page)

Chloe said, “That’s a totally negative way to think. Marriage equals problems equals cancer equals death.”

“If anything I say is going to be used against me, I don’t want to keep talking.”

Pat Rubin said, “Let me ask you this, whose idea was it to come see me?”

They did look at each other then, shrugged. Chloe said, “Mutual, I thought. I didn’t expect Jack to operate in bad faith.”

“Not bad faith. Fear. There’s a difference.”

Pat said to Jack, “Is it fair to say that change frightens you?”

“Yes.”

“You’d rather go along in the same old just-getting-by way, instead of taking a chance on life getting better?”

“Yes.”

“Care to say why?”

Jack only shrugged. Pat Rubin said, “What, you thought we weren’t going to get into the good stuff? Okay, let’s back off, take it slow. Let’s—”

“I mean, are we here to solve problems, or so you can tell us we don’t really have any?”

He hadn’t planned on saying it. The words had squirmed out of him of their own accord. He swallowed, too late. Pat said, “Maybe you should tell me.”

“Maybe that’s your job.”

Pat didn’t look offended at that. She didn’t look anything, except calmly interested. She was probably following some sort of therapist playbook where you checked off client reactions: anger, denial, defensiveness, check check check. Chloe said, “Jack can be very inflexible. I think he needs to work on that.”

“Chloe wanted to come here so you can tell her that not having a drink for a week or two is all she has to do. It’s not that simple. I think she’s an alcoholic.”

The room seemed to push away from him, as if he’d set off a bomb that scrubbed the air with deafening sound. So now he’d done it. Gotten into the good stuff.

Chloe said, “I wish I could say I stopped drinking a month or six months or a year ago, but I can’t yet. It is so unfair of Jack to hold that against me, when there’s not a thing I can do about it. So now he’s calling me an alcoholic. That’s his way of getting back at me.”

Jack said nothing. He wanted to keep the taste and weight of silence in his mouth. Pat said, “Somebody has to tell me what happens when Chloe drinks.”

“If Jack wants me to say what a drunken pig I was, okay. I was. But it wasn’t like I was always so out of control. I could have one or two glasses of wine, leave it right there. Then other times, say I was trying to unwind from a really bad day, I just kept going.”

“And then what?”

Chloe’s turn to keep silent. Jack said, “She gets very emotional, and sometimes hostile.”

“Hostile, how?”

This time neither of them spoke. Pat didn’t seem impatient to move things along. She sat comfortably and let her gaze travel between the two of them. She was making some sort of point, Jack knew, but he didn’t feel able to rise to the occasion, respond, perform, confess. He wondered how he’d managed to walk into this office thinking that he and Chloe were basically a happy couple, but the longer he sat here, the worse he felt. His eyes rested on the blue-green fabric of Pat’s dress. He floated away, let the colors ease over him.

He roused himself when Chloe spoke. He wondered if he’d been staring at Pat’s boobs or anything like that, dropped his eyes hastily. Chloe said, “I can’t remember a lot of what I said. When I drank.”

“Do you remember enough to agree with Jack’s characterization, hostile?”

“We were both hostile.”

“Jack?”

Some new fight Chloe was trying to pick, but he didn’t want to fight back, couldn’t will himself to. “I guess so.”

“Physically? Verbally?”

“I would never hit Chloe. Christ.”

“I wasn’t assuming that. Does Chloe ever hit you?”

Jack shook his head, laughed a little. “No, she hasn’t tried that yet.”

Chloe said, “I don’t think you should even joke about something like that. Besides, it never happened.”

“I’m hearing something very interesting here. Jack says ‘drinks,’ Chloe says ‘drank.’ That tell you anything?”

They were dull children in front of a teacher. Teacher knew the
answer, but she wanted to hear them say it. Chloe said, “Jack thinks it’s going to keep happening. He thinks I’m going to keep drinking. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I just don’t think we’re out of the woods yet on that one.”

It was the only thing he could come up with. Goddamn lame. He should either be properly furious at all the bad behavior Chloe had subjected him to, or he should properly forgive her. But he was equally balanced between resentments and cowardice. He looked to Pat Rubin, waiting for her to push him in one direction or the other. How quickly he, both of them, had come to depend on her to referee things, tell them who they really were. And she’d done it by simply sitting there and asking a few questions. He guessed she really was good. That, and he had always known there was something within himself that looked to women, depended on them, sought them out. Even in the face of his own fear and reluctance, Pat had won him over. Women were necessary to him as they might not be to other men, or maybe other men had to hide their needs behind jokes and complaints and sex talk. Men gathered in places that excluded women, bars, firehouses, sports teams, and the need in them twisted into a shape they could manage and diminish. And was he better or worse than they were, more or less of a man, because he could not do the same?

But those thoughts made him uncomfortable, and he concentrated instead on Chloe’s slim foot in its elegant shoe, tapping out a syncopated rhythm on the carpet. So she was agitated also. Good.

Pat said, “In the time we have remaining,” and Jack and Chloe came close to exchanging glances. They hadn’t been aware of time, but in fact the session was close to over. Pat said they would concentrate on putting things back together now, giving them a road map, a plan, positive steps they could take. She didn’t want them or anyone else walking out her door still in crisis. The word alarmed Jack. But maybe this was what a crisis was, what it felt like, and you never knew until you put a name on it.

Pat said, “Chloe, I’m going to recommend doing an alcohol assessment. We can handle that at a separate appointment. You shouldn’t
look on it as an accusation or a judgment or a threat. It’s just a way of getting more information.”

Chloe nodded. It would have been hard for her to do anything else. Not agreeing would make her look resistant and uncooperative, in other words, a lot like an alcoholic. But he knew, because he knew Chloe, that it was killing her not to argue back.

“And Jack, let’s see if we can’t get beyond the fear. The future is always an unknown. But you don’t have to dread it.”

His turn to nod. He wondered again what he must look like to Pat. A man in crisis, trying desperately not to be.

“What I’d like you both to do is tell me about a time when you felt something strongly positive about each other. A high-water mark. A happy memory.”

Chloe said, “I had bronchitis last winter and Jack always got my prescriptions and fussed over me and took care of me. I was so sick. My lungs were like sandpaper. One night it was really bad, I could hardly breathe, and he didn’t want to scare me, so he acted like he was kidding around, he said, ‘You ever wonder how long it takes them to get an ambulance out when you call? Want to give it a shot, see how good they are?’ I mean, I talked him out of the ambulance, we drove to the emergency room, but he was really …”

They did look at each other then, smiled, looked away, as if it was more embarrassing, more personal, to share good times than bad.

“Jack?”

“The first time I ever saw Chloe, she was sitting in a classroom wearing these crazy ripped-up jeans with black lace stockings underneath. And she got into a big fight with the professor and I kept thinking she was going to cry, but she didn’t, she just kept slugging it out with him, and when class was over she walked out of there like a queen and I wrote bad poetry about her for weeks.”

“You did not.” Chloe smiling.

“Yup. Really bad.”

“You should have seen Jack when he was a college kid,” Chloe told Pat. “He was a
babe
. Those big blue eyes, and that California-guy long hair, and he was just so ready to grow up and stop being shy.”

Jack allowed the two of them to give him fond, appraising looks. He didn’t think he’d been a babe. He didn’t even think he’d been shy.

Things seemed to be winding down. Pleasantries. Reminiscences. Jack supposed it had gone pretty well. He felt sluggish, he’d hoarded his energy to get through the session, and now he had none left. Nothing too bad had happened. The wheels hadn’t come off. He’d said alcoholic but maybe that had to be said. Pat could talk to Chloe about drinking, or not drinking. He liked that better than the idea of her going to AA meetings, which would be populated by attractive, dissolute men who would get Chloe to feel sorry for them and invite her out for coffee, the better to feed her some line about how much the two of them had in common, mutual suffering of the sort her pain-in-the-ass husband could never understand, while he, Jack, would have to trail them to the coffee shop, lurk outside in the parking lot, confront the sorry mother-fucker and punch him out, get arrested, sued, go on probation, and wind up back in Pat’s office for court-ordered counseling.

Pat said, “I want to make clear, these sessions aren’t necessarily about fixing or saving your marriage.”

Jack hadn’t expected that, and from her suddenly rigid posture, neither had Chloe. Pat said, “Don’t worry, I’m not making a diagnosis here. It’s what I say to all my clients. Counseling is about deciding what it is you want, both separately and as a couple. So that’s going to be part of your homework. Determining goals, and identifying the behaviors that keep you from achieving them. Sorting out what would make you happy. No, don’t tell me. Think about it for the next time.”

Jack tried to look as if he was settling in for some serious, protracted thought. But he already knew what he wanted. To go back to that classroom and see Chloe all over again for the first time. And then to travel step by step through all the events of their life together, but this time to be better, kinder, wiser, stronger. It wasn’t anything he could tell Pat, hell, it wasn’t even possible. But it was his heart’s truth.

Chloe said, “Umm, if it’s all right to ask, how long do you think we’ll have to keep coming? I mean, how messed up are we?”

She laughed, but it came out sad. Jack watched her folding and refolding
her hands, gathering them up into a smaller and smaller bundle. What would Chloe say, what would make her happy? He didn’t know. It was a lonely feeling.

Pat said, “That’s not one of those clinical terms I like to use, messed up. But you want to know what I think, okay. I see two very intelligent, very verbal people. Which makes my job both easier and harder. Easier because we can discuss things with a high degree of complexity and comprehension. Harder because people like yourselves—young, attractive, bright, healthy, prosperous—tend to think they shouldn’t have any serious problems. It’s unfair, it’s calamitous. It’s not. It’s just life. Sometimes it catches up to you.”

Jack wondered if this was meant to be a comforting thought. He didn’t find it so. Some voice he could no longer remember, saying the same thing about Chloe, how she always expected things to work out perfectly …

Pat was letting that one sink in. Jack was beginning to recognize a pattern or technique in the way she spoke, something subtle but measured, designed to get people to listen. She was good at this. She already knew things about them that they didn’t themselves. Jack imagined coming back to Pat on his own, or maybe just running into her on the street or somewhere, asking her privately and urgently what she thought of him and Chloe,
how messed up were they?
But she was speaking again.

“As for appointments, I ask people to commit to a six-week period. Of course it can be extended, and of course I can’t drag you here if you decide not to come. But that’s my recommendation.”

It was the end of June. Fourth of July was coming, and after that the heart of summer. Before Labor Day this might all be over. They could get some kind of diploma, be certified a functioning, happy marriage.

There was some awkwardness involved in getting themselves up and out of there. They didn’t want to look too relieved, or as if they were fleeing, although they were. They shook hands with Pat, thanked her, made another appointment for next week, turned their back on the indirect lighting and soothing pastel walls and hardwood flooring and all
the apparatus of expensive professional intervention. They stepped out of the well-kept doorway into the long summer evening’s last sunlight. They didn’t speak until they reached the car.

Chloe said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but boy I’d love a drink right now.”

“I can definitely understand that.”

“Not that I would.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“I’m glad you said that. I’d hate to have to run right back inside and tell her we couldn’t get out of the damned parking lot without another talking-to.”

There was a Mexican restaurant they liked in Oak Park, an old-fashioned family place that displayed, without irony, sombreros and paper flowers and piñatas and
retablos
and holy candles, all the artifacts that in other restaurants now were meant as inside jokes. Jack and Chloe ordered a pitcher of iced tea and fajitas. Their usual was a pitcher of margaritas. The waiter brought the tea and poured out two glasses and they watched the condensation form and bead on their surfaces. A simple, predictable, observable phenomenon involving water vapor and temperature. Jack thought this must be what the world looked like to scientists. A rational place where the laws of physics and thermodynamics kept order. It was probably too late to decide to be a scientist.

The last time they’d been here was a few months ago, before the move to the city. They’d finished two pitchers of margaritas and giggled lewdly at each other through dinner. As soon as they got in the car, they’d put their hands on each other and Chloe had hiked her skirt up and rolled down her underpants and they might have done it right there in the parking lot if another car hadn’t pulled into the lot, its radio blaring an old Beatles song, one of the silly ones, We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine, and it was too absurd, he couldn’t keep his erection going. It was just as well. They could have hurt themselves trying or gotten stuck or some other idiocy. Instead they laughed themselves sick and somehow they managed to drive home, where they’d done it up right.