The Children's Crusade (18 page)

“Is Kari protected?”

“That’s stupid. She’s a baby. Of course she is.”

“What about you?”

“I’m making a wall at home.” She unfolded herself and got onto her knees. “It’s going to be really high.”

“What will be outside the wall?”

“There is no outside. It’s all inside.”

“I see. What’s inside?”

“It’s not what, it’s who. Everyone but you.”

The session was just about over, and I told her it was time to put the toys away. After, I walked her back to the waiting room. Her mother was where we’d left her, with Kari still in her arms but asleep now, her head thrown back and one hand draped over her forehead like an actress overdoing a sickbed scene. I remembered Robert once arranging the sleeping baby Sammy to look like an old man clutching his stomach after a heavy meal, and how this prompted our father to say mildly that one of the hardest parts of being a parent was boredom, the difficulty of waiting for your child to reach the next phase of development.

The blonde from the parking lot was in the waiting room, too, and when she saw me she got to her feet. “Dr. Blair?”

“Yes, just a moment,” I said, and I crouched down to say goodbye to Alissa. It was Friday, so I wouldn’t see her for a few days.

“I changed my mind,” Alissa said. “You can be on our side of the wall.”

“You wanted to make sure to say that.”

“I had to.” With that she bolted for the door, and her mother stood up and trailed after her, trying simultaneously to smile at me, adjust her diaper bag on her shoulder, and support the sleeping baby in her arms.

The blonde watched her go and said, “God, I’m so glad to be past that. The
stuff.
You seriously
don’t
know how you’re going to manage.”

I looked harder and realized she was Lewis Vincent’s wife. I’d never met her, but I’d seen photos of her in the house when I was there with James, including a few in which she was dressed as she was now, in riding clothes.

“I’m Lisa Jansen,” she said, holding out her hand. “I got your name from a friend and was going to call you, but I happened to be in the building this morning, and as I was leaving I saw your name on the directory and figured, Hey, I’ll just pop in and see if she’s there.” She hesitated. “Oh, God, you’re going to want to know my friend’s name! I’m such a space cadet, can you believe I don’t remember? She’s not really a friend, I just met her. I’m sure we will be friends, I can always tell. But in our conversation, our short conversation, she mentioned that she’d heard really good things about you. And I just wanted to talk to you maybe once about my daughter.”

Lisa had woven a far more tangled web than was needed to obscure the fact that she was married to the person to whom I’d already said no. I should have been more careful, but I needed to get to my notes about the session with Alissa, especially important because of the supervision.

“Ms. Jansen,” I said. “I think there may be some confusion.
I’m
confused.”

Her face filled with color. “Actually, maybe I should just call you—I’m late for a riding lesson, anyway.” And she lunged for the door.

I returned to my desk and wrote up my notes, but the strange intrusion and my clumsy reaction hung over me for the rest of the morning, and I realized I was blaming James because he was behind the chain of events that had led Lisa to my office. I was glad I was seeing my own analyst in a few hours. How would she have handled Lisa? I was making her into an authority, as I so often did. “We never get over it,” she said to me during one of our first sessions together. “What’s that?” I said, and she said, “Having started out as children.”

• • •

I woke into what I knew immediately was the middle of the night. This time there was no dream in the background, no intense emotion to metabolize.

Then I heard James’s voice. Our house had an acoustical oddity that funneled kitchen sounds into our walk-in closet, and after a moment there was no mistaking the fact that James was upstairs talking to someone. I strained and at last heard a second, fainter voice—a woman’s.

I put on my robe and made my way to the bottom of the stairs. I hit the light switch that would illuminate not just the stairway but also the main hall light upstairs, which James would see from the kitchen. By the time I got there, he was alone at the counter, his chin resting in his hand.

I said, “That’s so strange, I could have sworn I heard voices.”

“Maybe you did.”

His cell phone, which I hadn’t previously noticed, began to buzz, and he reached for it, pressed a button that silenced it, and began composing a text. I saw that his laptop was also in arm’s reach, its lid closed.

“Hang on,” he said, “or better yet, go back to bed.”

“Who were you talking to?”

He stared at the screen, texted, stared some more. Then he looked up and said, “Want to meet someone?” He opened the computer, waited a few seconds, and it began to chirp. “Come say hello,” he said to me. “I want you to meet Celia.”

She was his girlfriend: his paramour, he said, almost without irony. I
had
heard him talking to someone—she’d been sitting at her computer up in Eugene, and they’d been video-chatting. She had shoulder-length brown hair and big dark eyes.

She held her hand up and waved it back and forth, tiny waves like the trembling of a dial on a scale settling back to zero. She said, “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s really nice to meet you, but I wish I didn’t look so disheveled.”

We chatted a little—it had been raining for weeks in Eugene; no, it was still dry in the Bay Area—and then James said it was time to stop.

I told her it was nice to meet her. James waited until I was downstairs before he spoke again. I used the bathroom and drank a glass of water, and by the time I was back in bed the house was silent.

He was in love. That’s what he told me the next morning—he’d never felt this way before, not with anyone. He said he was glad I’d come upstairs and interrupted them; it had made for an awkward introduction, but now that I knew about her, now that I’d met her, he was realizing he’d needed exactly this, to talk about it with me.

As he spoke, I felt myself fill with hope. During all his years of wandering he’d been a drifter of the heart as well: a serial bigamist,
he sometimes joked. There had been nothing lasting, nothing that required having his house key copied or buying an extra toothbrush to leave in a woman’s bathroom. Was it possible he was truly settling, had truly settled, into a satisfying relationship? Maybe at last . . .

He told me about her gentleness, how he was only now realizing how often and unfortunately he’d been drawn to sharp women. Celia was soft, she was softness personified. She listened with so much empathy. And she was smart, the kind of person who makes a seemingly random observation that you don’t fully consider until days later, when it comes back to you with the force of a self-evident truth.

She was from Los Angeles, an only child. She’d gone to Eugene for school, back in the nineties. She was, he said, a good person; it seemed very important to him that I understand this.

Something wasn’t making sense, and at last I recognized what it was. “Why didn’t you mention her earlier?” I felt a pang of worry, remembering our conversation in the guest room and how he’d said things were weird in Eugene.

He hesitated, looked away. Cleared his throat. Said, “There are some issues.” And then, “She’s married.” And then, “Actually, it’s more than that.”

“There aren’t
children
?”

“There are.”

I had a somatic response before I’d even registered the emotional one. My heart raced and I began to sweat lightly. My body was in fight-or-flight mode, but my mind lagged behind, unable to do much more than recognize the hazy outlines of various unhappy thoughts and feelings as they assembled on the horizon.

We were both silent. He shrugged elaborately and said, as if the issue were why I hadn’t figured out the situation rather than its heartbreak, “I mentioned her to you the other night in the context
of overprotective parents.”

And it came back to me:
It’s like how people don’t let their kids play outside anymore. The paranoia. This woman I know—

“Her husband knows, though,” I said. “And they’re separated.”

“No.”

“James, my God. This is very serious.”

We were in the kitchen, sitting opposite each other at the table. It was a Saturday, but Walt wasn’t home; he’d gone into work for a few hours. James said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Really, it’s serious? You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I’m here when the woman I love is five hundred miles away? We’re figuring things out.”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course you are.”

“It’s a really hard situation.”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you thinking if we sell the property you’ll use your share of the proceeds so the two of you can . . . set up house together or something?”

“Asked Rebecca, making a huge leap.”

I stood up and crossed the room. I faced him again. “How many?”

“Two.”

“Gender?”

“Both boys.”

“Like Sammy and Luke.”

“Like Sammy and Luke. She hasn’t decided,” he added.

“Whether or not to leave him.”

He nodded.

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “The self-evident truth. You want her to make a declaration of independence.”

• • •

Among my patients, I’d seen three women with children go all the way from an unhappy marriage to a divorce, and of the three it was the one who’d had another man waiting who’d had the hardest time. She’d been in treatment for a couple of years before she met her lover, unhappy in her marriage, unable to enjoy her children, and then she encountered this man at a party, fell into an idealizing affair, and her depression lifted. She mistook her rapture for a guarantee of a beautiful future life, believing that as long as she made sure to put her foot down firmly on each stepping stone in the path before her—the mediation stepping stone, the careful coparenting stepping stone, the family therapy stepping stone—then all would be well.

She didn’t count on how her guilt would knock her over at every step. Insidiously, by preventing her from enjoying anything. She didn’t like the party her friends threw for her first post-separation birthday; she hated the apartment she rented for herself and her children.

Her mood worsened and gave way to major depression. She started Zoloft, got a little better, got worse again. Eventually her lover broke it off with her, saying he wanted light in his life and her heart had become too heavy. She was devastated and suffered acutely, lost weight and couldn’t sleep, but it was only after all of this—after she had, in effect, paid—that she began to report she was feeling better.

I wondered about Celia. What breaking her marriage would mean to her. And what it would mean to James. And what it would mean to their relationship.

On Sunday my brothers and I arranged to meet at a café in Palo Alto to discuss selling the house. By then James had told Robert and Ryan about Celia, and when Robert wasn’t there at the appointed time I wondered if he was registering a protest about James’s rela
tionship. He was outraged and had told me so at length on the phone the night before.

Ryan, on the other hand, was overjoyed. “I’m so happy for you,” he said to James. “So happy. I know there are things to work out, but it’s amazing that you finally found her. I mean, I don’t believe in
the
right person, but I knew you’d find
a
right person. And she sounds so good for you.”

James looked around and lowered his voice. “It may be weird of me to say this, but the sex is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It’s astounding.”

“One of the best kinds,” Ryan said with a smile.

“I’d have thought
the
best.”

“Well, there’s also sacred.”

“Yeah, I guess. Which is proof enough—I’d never have let you get away with that in the past. Believe it or not, I was about to say ‘she completes me.’ ”

“Do you have a picture?”

James opened his wallet and pulled out a photo that appeared to have been edited hastily with a pair of dull scissors. Celia was in a brightly lit outdoor place, smiling. She looked, in comparison to the video image, peaceful. On her right, a child’s hand reached up and grasped the hem of her shirt. On her left was the outer eighth of a man’s body. Both had been cut out of the picture. Her hair was much shorter than it was now, a no-nonsense crop with bangs that covered her forehead, which in my memory had been furrowed.

“She’s pretty,” Ryan said. “I like her shoulders.”

“Right?” James exclaimed.

At that moment, Robert rapped on the outside of the café window as he hurried by.

“Here we go,” James muttered.

The bell over the door jingled, and Robert squeezed between the
crowded tables to reach us. He plunked into the chair next to mine and said, “Halloween errands, sorry.”

“Such a busy bee,” James said.

“What?” Robert said with a glare. “Better change your tune if you’re going to shack up with someone who has kids. This is the kind of thing you have to do all the time.”

“Maybe it’s the kind of thing I like to do.”

“Yeah, trying to find a giant remote-control spider two days before Halloween is so much fun.”

“We’re glad you’re here,” Ryan said, reaching over and giving Robert’s arm a pat. “It’s totally hectic out there today. I passed a costume place and it was jammed. What are the boys going as?”

Robert rolled his eyes. “Jen had this great plan to get empty ice cream tubs at Baskin-Robbins and decorate them to look like jars of peanut butter and jelly. Which the boys would then wear. But I’m sorry to say they’re going in store-bought X-Men costumes.”

“Guys,” I said, leaning forward. “Should we get started? I think we’ve all had individual conversations with James and each other, but it would be good to talk it through as a group. As a foursome instead of several twosomes.”

We all looked at James, and he shrugged. “I’m not sure there’s anything to talk about. I need the dough. I’m sorry.”