everything else rested, ringing in an emergency, and afterwards interminable months, years perhaps, of what Dr. Lichtman called “our work” but which was really just an excruciating excavation of myself with an array of blunt instruments while she sat by in a worn leather chair, feet on the ottoman, occasionally noting something on the legal pad she kept balanced on her knees for moments when I clawed up out of the hole, face blackened and hands scratched, clutching a little nugget of self-knowledge.
So instead I went on as before, only not as before, because now I felt a creeping shame and disgust with myself. In the presence of others—especially S, to whom I was of course closest—the feeling was most acute, while alone I could forget it a little bit, or at least ignore it. In bed at night I recoiled to the farthest edge, and sometimes when S and I passed each other in the hall I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes, and when he called my name from another room I had to exert a certain force, a strong pressure, to goad myself to answer. When he confronted me I shrugged and told him it was my work, and when he did not press me on the subject, laying off as he always did, as I had taught him to do, giving me a wider and wider berth, I secretly grew angry at him, frustrated that he did not notice how dire the circumstances were, how awful I was feeling, angry at him and perhaps even disgusted. Yes, disgusted, Your Honor, I didn’t save it only for myself, for not noticing that for all these years he had been living with someone who had made a life’s work of duplicity. Everything about him began to annoy me. The way he whistled in the bathroom, and moved his lips as he read the paper, the way he had to ruin every nice moment by pointing its niceness out. When I was not aggravated with him I was angry at myself, angry and full of guilt for causing so much grief to this man for whom happiness, or at the very least gladness, came easily, who had a talent for putting strangers at ease and drawing them over to his side so that people naturally went out of their way to do him favors, but whose Achilles’ heel was his poor judgment, proof being that he had willfully roped himself to me, a person who was always falling through the ice, who had the opposite effect on others, immediately making them raise their hackles, as if they sensed that their shins might be kicked.
And then one evening he came home late. It was raining out and he was soaking wet, his hair plastered down. He came into the kitchen still wearing the dripping coat and shoes muddy from the park. I was reading the paper as I always do in the evening, and he stood above me showering droplets on the pages. He had a terrible look on his face, and at first I thought he had been through something awful, a near-fatal accident, or seen a death on the subway tracks. He said, Do you remember that plant? I couldn’t imagine what he was trying to get at, soaking wet like that, with shining eyes. The ficus? I said. Yes, he said, the ficus. You took more interest in that plant’s health than you have taken in me for years, he said. I was taken aback. He sniffed and wiped the water from his face. I can’t remember the last time you asked me how I felt about something, about anything that might matter. Instinctively I went to reach for him, but he pulled away. You’re lost in your own world, Nadia, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. And I don’t think you give a damn about reaching me. I feel more alone with you than I feel with anyone else, even just walking by myself down the street. Can you imagine how that