We Are Water

She nodded emphatically, no trace of ambivalence whatsoever.

“Then let me talk to Muriel. Maybe she can do some juggling in the department and finagle me a leave of absence. There’s got to be plenty of sublets in Manhattan, right?”

She folded her arms against her chest. “And what would you do all day long while I was working? Hang around some tiny little studio apartment? I know you, Orion. You’d go stir-crazy.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. “Because I’d never be resourceful enough to get up and leave the apartment. Go out and engage with one of the most exciting cities in the world. I’d probably just sit around, watching soap operas and twiddling my thumbs.”

I smiled when I said it, but Annie looked exasperated. For one thing, she said, Viveca had already offered her a room in her apartment, rent free. What was she supposed to do? Tell her that her husband would be moving in, too? And more importantly, she wanted to be able to immerse herself in her work without having to keep to a schedule, or even look at a clock if she didn’t want to. “But how could I do that if I knew you were waiting around for me to quit for the day?” She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. “Sweetie, this is such a great opportunity for me. It would be for one year, not a lifetime. And we’d still see each other every weekend. I’d like to think we have a strong enough marriage to handle that.”

I smiled. “Just for a year, huh? With weekend furloughs?” She nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s try it.”

If she was preparing for a show or had to hobnob with some wealthy art patron who was in town for the weekend, the only day she could spare me was Sunday. I’d drive down to New Haven and meet her at the train station. We’d walk over to the green, grab some lunch at Claire’s or the Mermaid Bar. Compare notes about the kids—which one of us had heard from which, which of the three we were worried about that week. (More often than not, it was our wild card, Marissa. Or Andrew, who by then had entered the military and was facing the possibility of deployment.) We’d spend a couple of hours together, then head back to Union Station. Stand together out on the platform and, when the train came into view, hug each other, kiss good-bye. Then she’d board the Acela or the Metroliner and ride away. And as her one-year New York experiment turned into a year and a half after a couple of big purchases courtesy of viveca c, those kisses became pecks, the hugs became perfunctory. “My part-time wife” I’d started calling her, at first in jest, then in jest-with-an-edge. Later still, I hurled the term at her in outright anger.

Looking back, I’m amazed at how much in denial I was about her and Viveca. Yeah, I’d get worried from time to time, but what I thought was that maybe she’d gotten involved with some other guy. I’d imagine him, worry about him, even sometimes picture her walking hand in hand with him—some artist or musician type, some lanky younger guy with a porkpie hat and a couple of days’ worth of stubble. But the only time I confronted her about another man, she got huffy—said that it was all about her work and that my insecurity was my problem, not hers. And hey, whenever I called her? She was almost always there where she was supposed to be—at her studio or at night at Viveca’s. Once when I called and Viveca answered, she said, “You know, Orrin, one of these days you and I will have to meet in person.” I let it go that she’d gotten my name wrong, and that we’d already met several years back at the Biennial opening. “I’d like that, too,” I said. I went down to visit Annie at the apartment two or three times, but each time it was when Viveca was out of town for the weekend. I still don’t know when they made the switch from roommates to lovers. Annie’s told me it happened over time, that their affair wasn’t “premeditated.” I believe her. Interesting, though, the way she’d put it. As if it was a crime. Which it was, in a way: the murder of our marriage.

Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true. How many times had I suggested that to one of the undergrads sitting across from me in my office? Some self-deluding young woman who was trying to convince herself that a boyfriend’s having smacked her around was a one-time thing; some young guy’s assertion that, although sex with other guys excited him, he wasn’t really gay. “Put your hand out,” I’d tell these students. “Now bring it closer. Now closer still.” And when their hands were a half inch from their noses, I’d ask them to describe what they saw. “It’s blurry,” they’d say, and I’d suggest that sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked. And that when wishful thinking trumped the reality we might otherwise be able to see more clearly and manage, we were setting ourselves up for a rude awakening … Psychologist, heal thyself. Little by little, I began to withdraw my own hand from my face, as it were. Began to face the fact that Annie and I no longer were together. That she had defected.

The showdown came one Sunday afternoon when, in the middle of an argument we were having about her absenteeism, I said, “Do you even want to be married to me anymore?” We were in our kitchen. I was at the stove, making dinner—frying up eggplant on one burner, simmering marinara on another. Annie was at the table, going through two weeks’ worth of accumulated mail. Of course I do, I wanted to hear her say, but what she said, instead, was that she wasn’t sure anymore. That she was confused.

“Confused?” I picked up the frying pan and slammed it back down against the burner. The noise made her jump. “Well, if you’re confused, how the hell do you think I feel?” At this stage of our crumbling marriage, our battle roles had reversed themselves. Annie had always been the one who yelled and banged things when we argued; I was the one who spoke softly and civilly, maintaining the upper hand. Now I was the shouter, the slammer. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. Stood and walked out of the room, out of our house, and down the road. I stood at the window, watching her go. That was my rude awakening.

Later, when the meal I’d made was starting to go cold, she came back. We sat in silence across the table from each other. Chewed, swallowed. Each bite I took landed like a stone against my stomach. “Look, if you’re confused, then go see someone,” I finally said. “Or maybe we can go together like we did that other time. I can make some calls, get a referral to a good marriage counselor and we can—”

“I am seeing someone,” she said. “Romantically, I mean, not professionally.” I stared at her, a forkful of food poised in front of my mouth. “I still love you, Orion,” she told me in tears. “I always will. But I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”

That someone else, she said, was Viveca.

“Viveca? … Viveca?”

Annie had gone with me to see that movie, I remember—Natural Born Killers. It was my idea, not hers. And about ten minutes into it, when Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson began murdering people in a bar for the fun of it, she took hold of my arm and whispered that she needed to leave. “It’s satire,” I’d whispered back. “Cartoon violence. Don’t take it so literally.” But she let go of my arm, stood, and walked out of the multiplex. Walked around the mall until the film was over. I finally found her sitting at a table outside of Au Bon Pain, cardboard coffee cup in front of her, looking sad and lost. Was she thinking of leaving me even back then? Wrestling with her attraction to women, maybe, or suffering because of my insensitivity? There was that lesbian friend of hers who visited us one time—that woman Priscilla. She and Annie had waitressed together back when Annie was in her teens. They’d been close, she said, and for a fleeting moment I wondered how close. But I’d dismissed it. Because even if they had been intimate, it was no big deal. Some kids experiment at that age. It’s how they figure out who they are … No, I should have been more in touch with her feelings and her fears. Should have gotten up and left the movie with her that afternoon—been less of a therapist trying to fathom my patient Petra’s psyche and more of a husband taking care of my wife. But no, I’d stayed, had sat through a film that, frankly, sickened me, too. Well, what does it matter at this point? The divorce is final. Their wedding invitations are already out. Mine, ripped in half, is in the second, smaller duffel bag I packed last night—the one filled with the stuff I’ve taken along for the little oceanside ceremony I’m planning to have once I get to North Truro. Or maybe I should say if I get there. I don’t think we’ve moved a mile in the last fifteen minutes. Well, so what, dude? It’s not like you’re going to be late for work. You’re unemployed, remember?

My “early retirement” from the university was an exhausted surrender, not an admission that Jasmine Negron’s version of what had happened that night was accurate. Instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to a colleague they’d known and worked with for years, Muriel and her cohorts had gotten behind a doctoral student who’d received a lukewarm evaluation from me the semester before. Once upon a time, Muriel and I had been friends. Lunch pals. We’d served together on committees, carpooled to conferences. We two and our spouses had seen each other socially during those early years. But after she was named director, things changed. She informed her counselors of her intent to create a “paper trail” about everything that transpired in our department, then generated a maddening number of forms and reports. And she expected all this additional paperwork to be completed on time, not a day or two late, no matter how much our caseloads had swelled because of the policy changes she had put into place. She was a stickler about those deadlines—a pain in the ass about them—and a strictly-by-the-book administrator who expected the rest of us to recast ourselves in her image, irrespective of our own treatment styles and philosophies. She intimidated the younger members of the department, many of whom sought me out about how to deal with her demands and criticisms. And because I’d gone to bat for some of them, Muriel pulled me into her office one afternoon and accused me of undermining her authority and encouraging others to do the same. She and I had butted heads on a number of occasions and on a number of issues. And so, when Jasmine filed her complaint, Muriel appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate: Blanche, Bev, and Marsha, feminists all, none of whom could be considered my ally. Beyond a shadow of a doubt? Innocent until proven guilty? Not with that gang of four. Muriel went to Dean Javitz and argued that my behavior had undermined the integrity of the entire Counseling Services program.

Word got around. People took sides, and the numbers were lopsided against me. My one supporter was Dick Holloway, a holdover from the department’s “good ole boy” days when men had run the show. Muriel tolerated Dick because she knew she’d outlast him, but he’d told me on more than one occasion that he was “sticking around” for the pleasure of being a thorn in her side. I’d never liked Dick, and when he stuck his head inside my office one morning to offer his support—“I hear the dykes are trying to cut you off at the knees, but hang tough” was the way he’d put it—it was small comfort. As for the other members of our department, some of whom I’d counted among my friends, they began nodding uncomfortably and looking away when we passed each other in the hall. A lot of the women in our department started giving me dirty looks. One lunchtime, I walked into the staff lounge and four women stopped their conversation, stood, and walked out in solidarity against me. It had hurt like a kick to the nuts.

Even my two best friends in the department, Marina and Dennis, began to distance themselves. Look, counseling students all day? You really care about these kids. You root for their mental health and try to promote it, but it’s hard, imperfect work. You worry about the ones who are in the worst shape, and at the end of the day, you can’t always shut it off like a faucet. So there’s this informal support system. When it’s after hours and you can’t stop hearing a patient’s voice or seeing the kid’s tortured face? You can begin to doubt yourself. So you call a colleague you can trust with whatever vulnerability you’re wrestling with. You have them listen to what’s bothering you and maybe offer a suggestion or two, a little perspective. Seek out a little counseling from another counselor. Dennis, Marina, and I had done that for one another. Had helped each other out like that for years. For years.

“Look, Orion, I sympathize with you. I really do,” Marina said when I stopped her and Dennis out in the parking lot one afternoon to ask for their support. “But I’m between a rock and a hard place with this one, okay? Because I’m your friend, yes, but I’m a woman, too. And I’ve been on the receiving end of unwanted—”

I put my hand up to stop her and turned to Dennis. “What about you? Because I’m telling you, this thing is a witch hunt. Was I dumb enough to give the girl a ride home when she came into my office that night like a damsel in distress? I was! Was I stupid enough to say yes when she invited me in for a drink? God, yes! But goddamnit, Dennis, she’s rewritten history. Because it just did not happen the way she’s claiming it did.”

He stood there, nodding sadly.

“So you believe me?”

“I do.”

“Then are you willing to—”

“Personally, I’m with you. But professionally? I’ve got to remain neutral on this one, Orion. I’ve got to be Switzerland.”

“Yeah? Really? Then screw you, Switzerland,” I said. I turned back to Marina. “And screw you, too, if you think you’re the one who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

“But Orion, the thing is—”

Rather than listen to their lame excuses, I turned my back on them and stormed off in the direction of my car. Looked over my shoulder and saw them both standing there, staring at me. The problem was, I couldn’t find my goddamned car. Kept walking back and forth from row to row, on the verge of tears and thinking, Shit! On top of everything else, someone’s stolen my fucking car? Eventually, it hit me that the Prius was in the shop being serviced. That I’d driven to work that day in a loaner. A red Saturn. I found it, kicked the bumper, unlocked it. Driving out of the parking lot, I looked over at the two of them, still standing there, talking. Justifying their reasons, no doubt, for not having my back the way I would have had either of theirs, no questions asked.

The following week, in the midst of my attempts to defend myself at humiliating meetings with the dean, the school’s at-large ethics panel, and lawyers representing the university and the union I belonged to, Seamus McAvoy, a twenty-year-old engineering major with a history of clinical depression, died on my watch. A sweet kid who carried his illness around like a backpack full of rocks, Seamus had been my counselee for four semesters. I’d had to cancel our previous appointment because of one of the aforementioned ethics meetings, but I have a vivid memory of our last appointment.

So you feel you’re pulling out of the quicksand then? He’d told me more than once that his depression felt like being stuck hopelessly in quicksand.

Yeah. I think I’m finally getting over Daria. I joined Facebook? And me and this poly-sci major named Kim have been messaging back and forth. She might be potential girlfriend material. His posture wasn’t slumpy for a change. His hygiene and coloring had improved. For forty-five minutes, he sat there pumping his right leg up and down as if, now that he was feeling better, he was waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off so he could run out of my office and reengage in life.

There was a debriefing, as there is whenever there’s a suicide—a departmental review of Seamus’s case. These meetings are meant to be supportive of both the therapist who’d been treating the victim and the department as a whole. Suicide is hard on all of us, no matter whose patient it is. Several of my colleagues, including some of the ones who’d been shunning me, commiserated. Even Muriel, who was running the meeting, looked right at me when she said how much easier our jobs would be if we psychologists all had crystal balls. She and Dean Javitz had talked to Seamus’s parents, she said, and from the sound of it, they weren’t holding the department or the university responsible. “No inquiry, no malpractice charges, thank goodness,” she said. But absolved or not, I couldn’t forgive myself for having been so goddamned distracted by the Jasmine mess that I had missed the red flag Seamus had waved that morning. When a potentially suicidal patient exhibits rapid improvement—becomes suddenly energized—what it can mean is that he’s finally arrived at a plan that will free him permanently from his unbearable gloom. But I hadn’t probed that possibility. I’d accepted Seamus’s emergence from his emotional “quicksand” at face value. The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.

I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.

That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.

“But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?

Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.

I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers … Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield … No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.

My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.

The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”

Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, I didn’t know how to fill up my days. That first Monday, I sat and stared at the morning TV shows, did the Times crossword, did my laundry. At noon, I drove over to the mall for lunch and human contact. Bought a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.

I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.

After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been Annie’s doing. “Shabby chic,” she called it.