Carnegie Hill, page 21
Pepper laughed too. There was something funny about that. Funny and shameful.
Dr. Dixon raised his thin eyebrows as if surprised that their marital skiff had run aground so quickly, but said, “Congratulations. Where did you folks get married?” And they talked about the wedding, about all those pine trees and their friends and family flying in from San Francisco and Chicago and Melbourne and the photos in Town & Country Weddings, though the magazine wasn’t out yet. It was sad to think that their marriage might end before the photos were published. Dr. Riffler hardly even blinked in session, but Dr. Dixon was always fidgeting: adjusting his bronze steampunk glasses, touching his finger to his lips before speaking, and crossing and uncrossing his legs.
Rick asked how many sessions Dr. Dixon thought it would take. He must have realized it was a dumb question before he finished.
“Some couples just come for three or four sessions for a tune-up,” said Dr. Dixon. “I’ve seen great things happen really fast. If you’re open to it, though, I wouldn’t put a cap on it. I have one couple who has come in once a week for ten years, and they are terrifically happy with their marriage.”
“We’ll do whatever,” Rick said. Pepper resented that he answered for her.
Dr. Dixon encouraged them to speak in “I feel” statements and try not to assign blame. Pepper did her best, and no one interrupted her. She glanced out the window as she talked, at an old painted sign, barely legible, on the upper left corner of the tan brick building across the alley. GOVERNMENT BONDS: GUARANTEED RETURNS, it read in a heavy, slab-serif typeface, but the edges were faded, making BONDS: GUARANTEED more prominent. She found the promise vaguely reassuring.
Next came Rick’s no-blame accusations. He opened a note on his phone and read from it. It surprised her that he had prepared something. “I have a very strong sex drive, and I am not getting enough sex. When I ask for it, Pepper belittles me.…”
“Try addressing her, not me,” Dr. Dixon said.
Rick nodded, resolute, and turned to Pepper. “I work very hard, and when I walk in the door at night, I don’t think I’m asking too much for you to look up from your book. Instead I feel a chill as soon as I walk in that tells me I’m not welcome. It’s like … it feels like I’m being punished for cheating when I haven’t.”
He was right: she had been cold toward him. “You must have done something,” Pepper muttered, “or Molly wouldn’t have been camping out in our apartment.”
“Molly was a crazy client of mine,” he explained to Dr. Dixon. “She wanted to see our apartment, and I thought it would be harmless to bring her by. A few months later, we find out through our neighbor that she was going there while we were waiting out our renovation in a rental.”
It annoyed her that he would talk to Dr. Dixon to avoid giving her an explanation. He couldn’t have been as innocent as he pretended, especially because of the condoms in his blazer pocket. But as angry as she was, and as much as she wanted to blurt that out in their session, she was also afraid that the truth was as bad as she feared (i.e., that she had married a sex addict or a sexual predator), and so she let the question stew inside her. Dr. Riffler had suggested that part of her preferred remaining in the dark. “I find your story hard to believe,” she said.
“Can I interrupt?” Dr. Dixon interrupted. “Penelope—or would you prefer Pepper?”
“Penelope is fine.”
“I hear that your trust has been shaken. And Rick, I hear that you are frustrated that you are not being taken at your word. In our time together, I’m hoping we can examine this conflict, to figure out what’s really going on and to see if we can find ways to bring insight to what’s happening.”
She knew they had to talk about Molly. But for now she was content to let Dr. Dixon steer the conversation toward other times she hadn’t trusted someone or hadn’t been trusted, especially as a child or in past relationships. After almost four years of individual therapy with Dr. Riffler, she was practiced at braiding strands of her past into a narrative, and she talked about things Rick already knew: her parents’ secretive divorce and that awful lunch when they warned her that Rick was untrustworthy and told her not to marry him. She was a little bored, still complaining about them. Maybe the secret to therapy wasn’t to reach some miraculous epiphany but simply to rehash the past until you couldn’t stand talking about it anymore.
And then their time was up.
“Marriage lasts a long time,” Dr. Dixon said in conclusion, “and questions of trust and fidelity come up again and again in almost every coupling. Rick, given Penelope’s history, I can’t stress enough how essential it will be to be one hundred percent honest with her. And Penelope, your struggle will be to stay receptive to Rick’s honesty. I believe you can learn to trust him.”
He probably said that to all the couples who walked through his door.
“I want that very much,” Pepper said.
Dr. Dixon gave them homework. Every night before they fell asleep, they would each say three things they appreciated about the other person, and one thing the other person had done that day that disappointed them. Pepper liked the idea of being forced to talk about their relationship every night—she couldn’t imagine her parents doing that.
“I’ve counseled couples for a long time,” Dr. Dixon said, “and I can usually tell from the first session when it’s too late to save a marriage. But I have a lot of hope for your relationship.”
The words were heartening to hear, whether or not they were true. After months of worrying that she shouldn’t have married Rick, she wanted hope.
They stood. She had the urge to kiss Rick, to show him how much she wanted to make their marriage work, but she waited until they reached the elevators to give him a peck on the cheek.
“Thanks, babe,” he said, avoiding her gaze. It hurt that he didn’t kiss her back.
* * *
“Has it gotten any easier to be honest about disappointment?” Dr. Dixon asked at the start of their fourth session, after they settled into their chairs and reviewed their homework.
“It isn’t always easy,” Rick replied, “but I think it’s good for us.”
Pepper had thought the homework would get more complicated as the sessions went on, but each week, the assignment was to keep doing the “three appreciations and a disappointment” every night—which felt remedial. They had done the exercise faithfully, even if both of them always tied on a disclaimer, like “I felt this when we texted today and I’m not feeling it anymore…” or “I really don’t have anything substantial to say, but…” Still, the conversations were helping. For example, she’d always hated texting, tapping out messages letter by letter, and was irritated when Rick volleyed five or six messages in a row: a photo of his lunch, a reminder of when he’d be home, a “thinking of u” and sometimes an emoji without context, maybe a cat with its tongue out or a dropsical smiley face. But after hearing how hurt he felt when she ignored them, she made a special effort to respond. And he sent fewer of them. Also, he stopped pushing to make love every night, which left her the space to ask for it.
At first she waited to talk until their nightly check-in, mainly so that she would have something to say, but after a while, she started telling him in the moment. And through the alchemy of shared honesty, she began to look forward to his homecoming each night.
In the sessions they still evaded the Molly question. Dr. Dixon insisted that they would talk more about Molly, but that it would be more helpful to explore his unmet need for validation. “Sometimes when one person in a relationship wants more sex than the other person does, we read that as a plea for more intimacy,” Dr. Dixon said. “Sometimes, it means two people are wired differently, and that’s a different conversation.” He had a way of speaking that seemed profound but didn’t quite land, which annoyed her. Another thing that annoyed her: she got the feeling that their therapist was siding with Rick.
“I think we might be wired differently,” Rick said. “Just speaking hypothetically, what’s the conversation if that’s the case?”
Maybe we need to fix your wiring, Pepper didn’t say.
“I can’t answer that for you,” said Dr. Dixon, “but I will say this: Hollywood leads us to believe that only one kind of marriage can work, and I’m not just talking about monogamy, which is what appears to be on the table right now. Couples are expected to be having regular sex throughout their lives, but this is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of marriage. I’ve seen happy couples who stopped having sex, and they’re doing just fine. Hollywood puts a lot of pressure on couples, and part of what we’re doing in this room is creating a unique vision for your marriage together.”
Despite all the verbal foliage Dr. Dixon planted around it, Pepper understood this to be a conversation about open marriages. Now she was sure he was taking Rick’s side. He had led them here, hadn’t he?
Dr. Dixon nodded at Rick. “Why don’t you ask Penelope for what you want?”
“Because I don’t think it’s okay to want what I want,” he said, interrupting a study of his fingernails with the occasional glance at Pepper.
“I agree,” Pepper said, crossing her arms and tightening the cross of her legs until she felt twisted like a rope.
“A desire is different than a demand,” Dr. Dixon said. He peered at Pepper over the top of his glasses. “Penelope, it’s important that this be a safe space for you both to work out how to forge a marriage that fulfills both of you. Just because we talk about something in here doesn’t mean either of you have to agree to it. It’s important to be able to express your desires to each other and be open to the possibility that those desires won’t be met. Rick, do you want to say more about what you want?”
“Pepper…” Rick stared at the floor as if it were painful to meet her eyes. “I don’t want to do this if you don’t want to, babe, but I feel really frustrated when you don’t want to have sex with me. I don’t want an open relationship. What I want is…” He looked at her. “I want it to be just us, and I will really try to keep it that way, but I want to know that I could be forgiven if I slip up.”
“So you want an open relationship,” Pepper said.
“I don’t want permission,” Rick said, “I want forgiveness.”
“You want forgiveness in advance. Which is permission.”
“I want forgiveness if it happens, but I don’t want it to happen.”
She couldn’t hide her anger. Had he proposed couple’s therapy to legitimize having sex with other women? Back when Pepper was working in magazine publishing, a spacey production manager named Cassidy had been in an open relationship with her husband. They “played together” and “played separately,” and if Pepper was interested in exploring any of her fantasies, Cassidy wanted to know. Pepper wasn’t morally opposed to an open relationship; she just got sick at the thought of being in one.
Dr. Dixon looked at Pepper. “Penelope, I can hear that Rick’s request is upsetting to you. Do you want to say more about what you’re feeling?”
“I’m feeling betrayed. By you, Dr. Dixon. It’s like you’re trying to convince me to agree to an open relationship. Like, oh, ‘Let’s just fuck other people and then all our problems will be solved.’ I mean, why did you even bring it up?”
“I’m not trying to convince you to agree to anything, Penelope. I’m merely surfacing what Rick has been trying to talk about since we started our work together, so that you can talk about it together, explicitly. I’ve noticed you adopt a sarcastic tone that has a way of ending conversations. Our work here is about starting conversations and seeing them through to resolution.”
“So I’m the villain here, because I don’t want my husband to cheat on me?” She was beginning to cry, and she looked out the window to compose herself. The BONDS: GUARANTEED sign felt like a big fat lie.
“No one here is a villain,” said Dr. Dixon.
“Do we have to use the word ‘cheat?’” Rick asked. “It’s sounds mean.”
“Maybe that’s because cheating is mean.” Pepper pulled at the hem of her skirt to make it cover more of her legs. “Have you ever thought that maybe you don’t ‘need’ as much sex as you think you do? I mean, doesn’t your whole sex drive boil down to wanting more women to admire you? No, let me rephrase that: Doesn’t your whole life boil down to wanting more women to admire you?” She knew she was being cruel, but it seemed idiotic to talk about an open relationship when he hadn’t worked through his issues.
Rick gave her an anguished look.
Dr. Dixon sucked his lips into his mouth. “Rick, tell Penelope how that makes you feel.”
“It hurts,” he said.
“Penelope, I can sense how much anger you’re feeling about Rick’s desire for more forgiveness in your relationship,” Dr. Dixon said in the gentlest, most infuriating tone. “It’s important to be able to express your anger with each other. Can you be specific about which of Rick’s behaviors have hurt you and why?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t fucking do this right now,” she said. She looked Rick in the eye. “This whole drama played out with Molly—she lived in our apartment!—and you wouldn’t have even told me about her if you could have gotten away with it. And the more I think about it, the more I’m sure you fucked her. So I really don’t want to broach the subject of an open marriage, or what hurts me or doesn’t hurt me, until I know exactly what you did.” She felt exhilarated for standing up for herself, for approaching a secret that could undo their marriage and flinging the door wide open.
After an airless silence, Dr. Dixon said, “I hear that this is a crucial piece for you, Penelope. Tell Rick what you need from him.”
“Rick,” she said, trying to even out her breath, “I need you to tell me what happened with Molly.”
Fidgeting with something in his pocket, Rick looked at her. His gaze was painful to bear. “You’re right. Molly wasn’t a client. She found me on Facebook.”
She felt as if the room had become a vacuum, sucking her apart, disintegrating every limb, organ, and droplet of blood. She had known this about Molly and believed herself paranoid for suspecting him.
“I think the fact that I was getting married turned her on,” Rick continued. “We flirted for days, just a constant stream of chatting. It seemed harmless, and she worshiped me. And I felt like the wedding was pushing us apart—”
“It’s not the wedding’s fault,” Pepper snapped.
“You’re right,” he said, nodding, mussing his hair with both hands. “I wanted to have an affair. Not because I didn’t love you. It was just some black desire in me that I couldn’t shake. When I was a kid, all my friends were having sex, and no girl would touch me. I thought I was disgusting, and I never got over that feeling. I used to feel better by going out to a bar and having sex with a stranger, and when I met you, I thought I didn’t need that anymore. But then I did. Or I thought I did. I know this isn’t an excuse, but it seemed less bad to me because we weren’t married yet. I really want to be faithful to you, Pepper. I really, really do. And I can. I didn’t have sex with her, and I don’t want to do it with anyone else.”
It was bad, though not quite as bad in context. They were both working through their childhood scars. His were more destructive than hers, but she could make sense of them.
“So what did you do?” she managed to ask. “I think I need to know.”
“We met for lunch, and we agreed to have sex like it was a business deal,” Rick said, and again Pepper felt sick and wished she hadn’t asked. “I wanted to get a hotel room, but she insisted on our apartment. I know that should have been a red flag, but I wanted so much to get it over with, I didn’t see it.”
This isn’t about how crazy she was—it’s about how crazy you are! She stopped herself from saying it, because she didn’t want Dr. Dixon to silence her.
“You called with some wedding emergency,” he said, “and it came out that the contractors had left the apartment for the day, and of course I wouldn’t have done it in our bed—well, our bedroom wasn’t done yet, but you get the point—but I thought we could do it on my grungy old couch that we were going to get rid of anyway, and we kissed, and we took our clothes off.…”
Pepper almost retched. She remembered that day: the bridesmaid dresses didn’t fit anyone, and she had asked Rick to meet her at the atelier with the list of measurements. The thing was, she remembered him arriving with the wedding binder a few minutes later. She remembered being grateful that her superhero fiancé had dropped everything to come to her rescue. How had he fucked Molly, or whatever they did, without bending time?
“I’ll stop,” he said, looking fearful as he met her eyes. “We didn’t go through with it; that’s all you have to know.”
She didn’t want him telling her what she did not have to know. “Please finish. Tell me everything.”
He nodded. “It was taking me a while to get hard.”
She looked at Dr. Dixon to keep from imagining Rick shuttling a hand over his dick in front of a naked Molly.
“After a minute she said she wanted me to unlock the door. She had a fantasy about you walking in on us having sex, and then she would get to rescue me from the disgrace by marrying me. When she said that, I knew she was sick, and that I was just as sick, maybe worse. I saw that I was betraying you in the worst way, and I hated myself for it. I kicked her out.”
“And that’s when she started texting you?”
He nodded.
“So you didn’t give her the key to our apartment?” she asked.
“Definitely not. She stole it when she came over, I think. I realized that she was breaking into our apartment when we moved back in, and that’s why we changed the locks. I don’t see how she could have come over more than a few times—I mean, the contractors never mentioned her, and we were there pretty often, too.”
She saw the connection between the missing wedding cake, books, and perfume and Molly’s presence in their apartment. She felt retroactively exposed. But maybe Birdie had exaggerated.
