The Silent Wife (3 page)

In the morning, after he's left for work, she gets up, dresses, and takes the dog along the waterfront to Navy Pier. The sun shimmers in a milky haze, casting a net of silver over the lake. The onshore breeze is pungent, scented with the heady marine aromas of motor oil and fish and rotting wood. At this time of day the pier is like a sleeping giant, its pulse slowed and its breath subdued. There are only the locals—the dog walkers and the joggers—to witness the rocking boats, the slapping water, the abandoned air of the carousel and Ferris wheel, the gulls diving for their breakfast. When she turns back toward the city the skyline appears like a vision surging up along the shore, dramatically lit by the rising sun. She came to Chicago as a student more than twenty years ago and felt immediately at home. She lives here not only physically but temperamentally. After the privations of a small town she was thrilled by the soaring buildings,
the crush of people, the lavish variety, and even the dramatic weather. This is where she came of age, forged her identity, learned to thrive as an adult and a professional.

She started her practice the spring she finished school. By then she was living with Todd in a tiny one-bedroom in Lincoln Park. Her first clients were referred by her university contacts, and she saw them in the living room while Todd was at work. Having decided early on, while still an undergrad, that her approach would be eclectic—that she would draw on whatever she had in her repertoire that made the most sense in the situation—she practised active listening, took a Gestalt approach to dream interpretation, and openly challenged self-defeating attitudes and behaviours. She counselled people to ask more of themselves and take charge of their own well-being. She gave them encouragement and positive feedback. During her first year she discovered how to be patient and bring people along at their own pace. Her greatest asset was her genuine friendliness—she liked her clients and gave them the benefit of the doubt, which put them at ease. They spoke well of her to others, and her practice grew.

For nearly a year she skimmed along nicely, getting her stride, developing skills, gaining confidence. And then one day a client of hers—a young man of fifteen who'd been diagnosed as bipolar, a good boy who did well in school and
seemed
perfectly fine—Sebastian was his name—dark hair, dark eyes, curious, engaged, liked to ask rhetorical questions (Why is there something rather than nothing? How can we know anything for sure?)—this client of hers, young Sebastian, was found dead on the pavement underneath the tenth-floor balcony of his apartment,
the apartment where he lived with his parents. When he failed to appear for his regular session she called his home and heard the news from his mother. By the time she found out, he'd been dead for five days.

“Don't blame yourself,” his mother was kind enough to say. But he'd jumped on the very day of their last session. She'd seen him in the morning and he'd ended his life not twelve hours later. What had they talked about? Some small problem he was having with his eyes. He'd been seeing things in his peripheral vision, fleeting things that weren't really there.

That's when she enrolled for additional studies at the Adler School, and that's when she started picking and choosing her clients.

She crosses Gateway Park, passes the time of day with a neighbour, and stops at Caffe Rom for a latte to go. While eating her soft-boiled egg and buttered toast she reads the paper. After breakfast she clears away the dishes and then gets out the file on her first client, code name the judge, a gay male lawyer with a wife and children. The judge has certain things in common with her other clients. He's hit a wall in his life and believes or hopes that psychotherapy will help him. He's made a commitment to himself to see it through. And he doesn't bring to the table more than she can handle. This last point she has determined through a screening process. People with selfdestructive behaviours are referred elsewhere. She doesn't take addicts, for example, whether it's drugs, alcohol, or gambling, and she rejects anyone who has an eating disorder, has been diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic, suffers from chronic
depression, or has thought about or attempted suicide. These are people who should be on medication or in rehab.

Her schedule allows for just two clients a day, before lunch. The clients she ends up with, after screening, tend to be stuck, lost, or insecure, the kind of people who find it hard to know what they want and make decisions based on what is expected of them or what they believe is expected of them. They can be tough on themselves—having internalized the judgments of insensitive parents—and at the same time behave in ways that are irresponsible or inappropriate. On the whole they can't get their priorities straight, fail to create personal boundaries, neglect their own best interests, and see themselves as victims.

The spare bedroom, which serves as her consulting room, comfortably holds a desk, a filing cabinet, and a pair of armchairs that face each other on a six-by-eight-foot antique kilim. Between the chairs is a low table that holds her clipboard and pen, a box of Kleenex, a bottle of water, and two glasses. The judge is wearing his usual dark suit with black oxfords and vivid argyle socks, revealed when he sits down and crosses his legs. He's thirty-eight and has sensuous eyes and lips, set in a long face. Taking her place across from him she asks how he's been keeping since she saw him last, a week ago. He talks about his visit to a leather bar and what happened in the alley out back. He goes into detail, maybe hoping to shock her, but sex between consenting adults is not going to do it, and anyway this isn't the first time he's tried her patience with something like this. He's talking fast, changing direction midstream, reliving it, doing his best to draw her in.

“My pants were down around my ankles—imagine if someone had—oh my God did the garbage stink. I focused on that—the garbage—to slow things down—I had to do
something.
He'd been staring at me in the bar. I'd seen him there before but didn't think—I haven't been to that bar in ages.”

As the story peters out he watches her slyly, eyes glistening, lips slick with saliva. He'd like it if she laughed and said naughty boy, you're a wicked one, but her job does not involve filling in gaps in the conversation or performing social rescues. He waits, and when she doesn't speak he fidgets and looks at his hands. “So,” he says finally. “I'm sorry. I really am. I'm very sorry. I shouldn't have done it.” These are words that he can't say to his wife, so he says them to his therapist.

His pattern is denial followed by indulgence followed by a renewed period of denial. The denial stage is cued by statements such as “I love my family and don't want to hurt them.” The remorse is genuine, but he can no more give up his gay pursuits than forgo the security blanket of his home life. Both play a part in fulfilling his needs, and both are important to his sense of identity. He pretends to himself that his interest in men is a passing phase and doesn't see that abstinence and guilt are ways he has of charging his batteries for a fully loaded thrill. Like many people who cheat, he likes to self-dramatize. He's more of a queen than he knows.

“You be the judge,” she tells him. But he's still a ways from owning up.

Wednesday is cheaters' day. Her next client, Miss Piggy, a coy young woman with chubby cheeks and freckled hands,
maintains that having a lover stimulates her appetites and keeps her marriage alive. According to Miss Piggy her husband suspects nothing and would have no right to complain if he did. It's unclear why Miss Piggy is in therapy or what she expects to get out of it. She differs from the judge in her lack of a nagging conscience and the practical way she goes about things—on Monday and Thursday afternoons between shopping for groceries and picking up the kids from school.

Miss Piggy appears to be less conflicted than the judge, but from Jodi's point of view she's a greater challenge. Her anxiety flows beneath the surface in underground streams, rarely bubbling up or creating a disturbance. Tapping into it and bringing it into her field of awareness is not going to be easy. Whereas the judge is simply an open book, a sensitive man who's landed himself in a pickle. Eventually, with or without Jodi's help, the judge's problem will come to a head and work its way out of his life.

In spite of Miss Piggy's belief that her husband is in the dark, Jodi thinks that he probably has his suspicions. There are always signs, as she well knows. For instance, the cheater is frequently distracted or preoccupied; the cheater dislikes being questioned; inexplicable smells cling to the cheater's hair and clothes. The smells can be anything: incense, mildew, grass. Mouthwash. Who uses mouthwash at the end of the day before coming home to bed? A shower can eliminate telltale body odours, but the soap the cheater uses in the hotel bathroom is going to be different from the brand he uses at home. On top of this there are all the usual clues: the stray red or blond hairs,
lipstick stains, rumpled clothing, furtive phone calls, unexplained absences, mysterious marks on the body … not to mention the curious acquisitions—the fancy key chain or bottle of aftershave—that appear out of nowhere, especially on Valentine's Day.

At least he does his best to be discreet and as a rule does not advance on her friends, although there have been times. There was a couple they used to be chummy with, people they met on vacation in the Caribbean and bonded with over margaritas and snorkelling lessons. The couple ran a business selling prefab cottages, and Todd had nothing but contempt for this. Nonetheless, for several winters running they made a point of meeting up with this couple at designated resorts. She suspected that Todd and Sheila had something going on but put it out of her mind until the afternoon they disappeared from the poolside and reappeared a while later looking like cats who had lapped up a big bowl of cream. This alone she might have overlooked, but then there were the subtle displacements in Todd's swimming trunks and the dab of something gelatinous glistening in his chest hair.

And yet, none of this matters. It simply doesn't matter that time and time again he gives the game away, because he knows and she knows that he's a cheater, and he knows that she knows, but the point is that the pretense, the all-important pretense must be maintained, the illusion that everything is fine and nothing is the matter. As long as the facts are not openly declared, as long as he talks to her in euphemisms and circumlocutions, as long as things are functioning smoothly and a surface
calm prevails, they can go on living their lives, it being a known fact that a life well lived amounts to a series of compromises based on the acceptance of those around you with their individual needs and idiosyncrasies, which can't always be tailored to one's liking or constrained to fit conservative social norms. People live their lives, express themselves, and pursue fulfillment in their own ways and in their own time. They are going to make mistakes, exercise poor judgment and bad timing, take wrong turns, develop hurtful habits, and go off on tangents. If she learned anything in school she learned this, courtesy of Albert Ellis, father of the cognitive-behavioural paradigm shift in psychotherapy. Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.

Cheaters prosper; many of them do. And even if they don't they are not going to change, because, as a rule, people don't change—not without strong motivation and sustained effort. Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely think of adjusting their behaviour, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse. A cheater remains a cheater in the same way that an optimist remains an optimist. An optimist is a person who says, after being run over by a drunk driver and having both legs mangled and mortgaging the house to pay the hospital bills: “I was lucky. I could have
been killed.” To an optimist that kind of statement makes sense. To a cheater it makes sense to be living a double life and talking out of both sides of your mouth at the same time.

In asserting that people don't change, what she means is that they don't change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying. Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were. She used to be a nice person, nice through and through, but she can't make that claim anymore. There was the time she tossed his cell phone into the lake, complete with the message from the female caller who addressed him as “Wolfie.” The time she put his boxers in the wash with a load of colours. The many times she's seen to it that he misplaces things. She is not proud of these misdemeanors. She would like to think that she's above this kind of behaviour, that she accepts him for who he is, that she's not one of those women who feel they are owed something by their men after going into it with open eyes, but she counts her own transgressions as slight compared with the liberties that he freely takes.

Having shown Miss Piggy out, she proceeds to the gym on a lower level of the condominium, where she lifts weights and cycles 10K. Following a lunch of leftover cold vegetables with mayonnaise, she takes a shower and dresses for a round of errands. Before leaving she writes out instructions for Klara, who comes in to clean on Wednesday afternoons. Daily routine is the great balm that keeps her spirits up and holds her life together, warding off the existential fright that can take you by ambush any time you're dithering or at a loss, reminding you of the magnitude of the void you are sitting on. Keeping busy is the middle-class
way—a practical way and a good way. She enjoys the busywork of scheduling clients, running her household, and keeping herself fit and groomed. She likes things orderly and predictable and feels secure when her time is mapped out well in advance. It's a pleasure to flip through her daybook and see what she has to look forward to: spa visits, hair appointments, medical checkups, Pilates sessions. She attends nearly all the events organized by her professional association and signs up for classes in anything that interests her. Evenings, when she isn't cooking for Todd, she has dinner with friends. And then there are the two extended vacations—one in summer and one in winter—that she and Todd always enjoy together.