refused to face the incongruity between the energetic potency of his love for the girls and his subdued affection for Alice. It was an uneasy truth made mentally palatable by the enduring value of loyalty and gratitude. Years of married coexistence had been cruel. His regard for her, the place she occupied in his thoughts, had been dulled by his belief that he thoroughly knew her. Peter could no longer see his wife clearly any more than he could see himself. He’d given up trying. Bored with Alice, bored with himself, it was only the girls that elicited a fierce longing in him.
The twins’ departure for college nine months prior had left him isolated with Alice, and now that they’d landed prestigious internships in Berkeley, they wouldn’t even be home for the summer. The winter months had been lifeless; he felt as though he were trying to breathe underwater in a toxic, oxygen-starved dead zone. Their best friends, the Donnes and the Darlings, were busy the way people were always busy these days. He and Alice attempted to make a routine of dates—movies, Chinatown, Jackson Heights for Indian food—but they struggled to sustain a conversation for more than fifteen minutes. He periodically swore to himself he’d stop looking at his phone when she was speaking, but there was vitality and excitement in the warm little device. His phone assured him he was alive. The virtual social connections he involved himself in, those communicated through photographs and one-liners, news and opinion, contained the real materiality of his and others’ lives. He needed this rich substrate to sustain him beyond Alice’s remote musings about work, what she was reading, or, for the past week, Maebelle.
To avoid conflict they’d become brittle and overly polite. It was a blow when Alice set up an office-bedroom in Bette’s vacated room. The separate beds were the inescapable physical evidence of the state of their crippled marriage. They joked about the Lucy and Ricky arrangement, but he felt a hypocrite. How could he maintain a viable position in relation to patients struggling with their own marriages and long-term relationships? The truth of the situation humiliated him.
Peter hesitated to admit the sensual pleasures of gaining solo command of the sixty-inch-wide queen mattress. The freedom reminded him of being in his first apartment when, like all doctors in residence, he’d endured an erratic schedule. The bed in that studio apartment, the same one on Bleecker Street he later shared with Alice for three short years, had served as a haven from the brutality of his psychiatric residency at Bellevue Hospital. The quality of his sleep on that bed, pre-Alice, had been close to a sacred coma of oblivion. Twenty-three years later his solo bed in their shared apartment was once again his escape.
Too bad his sleep was so disturbed that all he had left of the sort of rest he’d experienced in those days was nostalgia. Each night, after expending the oblivion gifted to him by the booze he’d consumed, he’d wake at the pointless hour of 2 AM. After failing to return to oblivion, he’d concede to the inevitable, first opening Twitter and then the New York Times, Slate, Instagram, and finally long-form political pieces in the New Yorker when things got very bad. His brain alive with outrage at the messy world, he’d eventually turn off the phone and try again for sleep. But he couldn’t lock himself in alone with his spiraling worries behind eyes forced closed for long. Without fully admitting it to himself, he feared he’d begun to doubt the utility of talk therapy; the imperfect bed was his best refuge from what he suspected was a looming moral failure at the core of his existence.
Google Maps had him arriving at 8:03 PM. Settling into another two hours in the car, Peter recalled his last session of the day. It had not gone well. Ben, a currency trader with what most psychiatrists would have diagnosed as intermittent explosive disorder (IED), had appeared in his office for the first time three months prior. He was there at his wife’s insistence—a common but still less-than-ideal premise for treatment. Ben’s resistance, already a formidable challenge in any course of therapy, was blended with explicit resentment directed at his wife and Peter as the instruments of his punishment.
What Peter couldn’t quite sort out—and he should have been able to without any trouble—was how to circumvent the man’s defenses. His directive as a therapist was to enter into the patient’s psychic reality and then move gently along the route to positive change—allowing them, always, the lead. It should have been straightforward: outbursts of anger were frequently maladaptive reactions to fear and stress.
Ben had begun his session that afternoon with a complaint.
I can’t believe I’m pissing away my time here. Again. The market’s on a bender today. My position’s totally gummed up. Business as usual.
Is something particularly bothering you about being here today? Peter replied. You’ve chosen to come—in fact, you’ve chosen to be on time for every one of our sessions.
Don’t do late. Never have. You know, I’m just one of those people who’s never late. Why are people late? Tabitha. She’s late. Always fussing over something. I’ll be damned if I let her make me late. I go right on ahead without. That gets her out the door.
What would happen if you were late—say, for an appointment here?
Hell if I know. Waste of money. How is that relevant? I just said I’m never late. Never.
You just said you feel you’re losing money by coming here. So perhaps in the larger calculus you’d be better off coming late. But you don’t. Peter wasn’t at all certain where he was going with this, but there it was. It was always safe to keep a session in the present.
Damn straight I’m losing money. Every minute. And I don’t mean your damn fee. That’s nothing. Like I said, the market’s junked up. Christ. And where am I? Here. Talking to a shrink. Now that’s funny. Meanwhile, my assistant’s handling thirty peak accounts. Asia’s fucking off the rails today, and my positions there are more vulnerable than I’d like. You know what I mean?
Peter ignored the question as well as the insult regarding the insignificance of his fee. The closest he’d come to concerning himself with the value of the yen over the South Korean won over the Malaysian ringgit was for a fourth-grade social studies project. The best part of it had been drawing and coloring in the flags with his Lyra Aquarelle set.
Have you recently discussed how you feel about coming here with Tabitha?
She won’t. I’ve told you that. It’s either this or divorce court, and I’ll be damned if I’ll have my book split in two. Fuck-you money. Gives that expression a new meaning. Whatever the number is, that’s the only way I’m out. What I’d give for a proper prenup right about now. What I was thinking I have no idea.
You’ve said you want to stay married, and in fact you’ve said you love Tabitha. There are other reasons to stay with her.
Fine. So?
Can you come up with other reasons for staying in your marriage? Set the money aside for a moment.
The guy was the opposite of most of the unhappily married patients he saw. They bemoaned their sexless, emotionally empty, anxiety-inducing relationships but were too delicate to admit that the real reason they wanted to avoid divorce was to protect their assets. It was funny how people lied to themselves. He supposed the mercenary impulse had its limits—even in New York.
Ben, on the other hand, was terrified his wife would leave him, but he could never admit he wanted her to stay for anything other than financial reasons. As far as Peter could see, the two had developed a comfortably familiar pattern of mutual complaint; it was what passed for a relationship in many marriages that outlasted a decade. If the routine trades across foreign currencies sustained Ben with a comforting familiarity as much as his relationship with his wife did, Bitcoin was his sexy fantasy mistress and just as unattainable. So Ben fumed as the value of the highly volatile cryptocurrency flashed on computer screens across the globe with the unpredictability of a much-too-pretty, pouty twentysomething.
Ben had jeopardized his easy marital arrangement by screaming at his wife too often about the state of the summer house or the market or the traffic or the noise coming from the apartment above. But Peter suspected the real trouble was that he’d jeopardized his financial future by playing the cryptocurrency game when nobody quite knew how. The idea of financial ruin stimulated Peter’s interest