Ben.
Then the air was empty. Okay was not a reason to stay in the marriage—it wasn’t an answer at all—but Peter had grown tired of the standard shrink lines: Can you say a bit more about that? Can you expand on that a bit? Any further thoughts? Instead, he’d changed tack.
We talked last week about what you might be avoiding and gaining by exploding in anger at Tabitha. We discussed how you may be directing your frustration at her over your inability to control volatility in the currency markets.
—I’m avoiding her. Did I mention what a bitch she’s been lately? Now what? You tell me, doc. Fix me up and send me on my merry fucking way. I have a lot on my mind. Whatever you might be thinking over there in your cushy chair, the market’s still open in Hong Kong.
Peter wasn’t sure what to say. Ben was quite possibly incapable of the empathy necessary to perceive his own behavior from anyone else’s perspective. Ungenerously, Peter wished he’d never walked in the door. But he had. Go to the fundamentals, Peter told himself. What was happening between them in the room was a typically male impasse, which told Peter a great deal about how Ben operated in the world. The tension and opposition they were experiencing during their sessions was likely repeated with variation in most of Ben’s relationships. Ben was trying to push Peter around, intimidating him, challenging him to take his side against his wife. It was an antediluvian form of male bonding Peter particularly disliked.
Ben feared losing his wife, his job (he’d been warned twice for violent outbursts at work), and his money (he took huge risks with each one of his trades, he was playing with Bitcoin, and his wife would probably do a number on his bank account if they were to divorce). But his inability to enter into these legitimate fears, to articulate them as human problems that affected him just as they did, in various forms, everyone else, made the fears unreal. Denied their existence in his mental landscape, they took on fantastic proportion in his subconscious mind. By refusing to admit that his somewhat ordinary fears were real, by pretending nothing was bothering him and the problem was everyone else, Ben allowed himself to remain in an artificially safe, icy space walled off from any genuine emotional response—until the outburst. His distorted perception of his wife as his persecutor fueled his desperation. Nobody behaved all that well when they were just hanging on, isolated and defending an untenable position.
After years of practice, this simple case of what was really just anger management should not have merited another thought beyond the hour. But it did. Peter prided himself on his professionalism, his steady publishing record in the Psychoanalytic Review, and his full roster of patients. As the Saw Mill became the Taconic, Peter entered the oppressive tunnel of greenery that made the drive north on any one of Moses’s parkways numbingly monotonous. With nothing to distract him but the explosive chlorophyll of the freshly leafed-out trees, he mulled over how to bring Ben out of his resistance. The guy wasn’t a sociopath even if he behaved like one. It was time for Peter to humanely state his own frustration with how the sessions were going and use that to break down the resistance Ben had been mounting since his first session. He must try to muster his compassion; it was not a thing he usually had trouble with.
Trying not to think about work, Peter focused on his weekend ahead with the Donnes. The pool, only recently filled for the season, would be unbearably cold. But he would swim. It was a point of pride to enter cold water. He and Alice always made the girls join them for the first swim of the season just as they insisted on entering Maine’s icy waters in August. Avoiding cold water indicated character weakness. Submitting to the anticipated discomfort and then discovering its pleasures was a life lesson worth reinforcing.
William and Wendy Donne’s Revolutionary-era house in Chatham, New York, had been restored with a preservationist’s sensitivity to historic detail. The house’s understated atmosphere had been achieved with the lavish application of cash. Wendy was a psychiatrist—they’d completed their residencies at NYU/Bellevue together, bonding over the rigors of managing the city’s indigent insane. Unlike Alice, who seemed to have withered, Wendy had grown stout over the years. The lustiness suggested by her curvy body appealed to Peter as an expression of her acceptance of pleasure: not just food and wine but theater, concerts, books, travel, and, not least, sex. She and William had what struck Peter as a very healthy sexual relationship, with afternoon romps referred to as naps on the weekends on top of a set biweekly routine. The thought of it made Peter at once envious and fatigued. Wendy was loud—her opinions and laughter dominant in the rowdiest groups—while William was subdued, with the entitled air of the very rich that Peter tolerated only for Wendy’s sake.
The two had married ten days after he’d married Alice; they’d had to curtail their honeymoon in Martinique to be back in time for the three-hundred-guest affair at William’s parents’ estate in Great Barrington. Like his father, William was at Goldman. He didn’t make money for doing his job—his job was to make money. It had never crossed Peter’s mind to go into a field with the singular purpose of moneymaking. But why not? Considering the steady, healthy fees he collected, he wondered what it would be like to have so much more. But he couldn’t allow himself to enter a realm that separated him so starkly from his community-minded upbringing. It would feel like a betrayal of his parents, of his desire to help others, and of what he thought he still believed were his more modest values. Still. It just felt shabby not being filthy rich these days when there had once been such nobility in it.
Peter’s long hours in his ergonomic analyst’s chair had added weight to his frame over the winter; the belly was a distinctive feature of his silhouette. The Donnes were as deliberate about the wine they served as they were inattentive about the food they cooked. It hardly mattered. After a few drinks he would find something or other to eat too much of. He ate like a bear when drunk—as if seeking ballast for the passage through winter’s night. Like most men his age, he gauged his weight by his belt, turning the objective measure of his waist into a mental game that determined his physical worth. Just that morning he’d been forced to settle into a new hole—giving his belt more length—four out from his goal, which had become more of a long-lost ideal. As he drove, he straightened his back to prevent the second fold of belly fat from pressing against the first. He liked to think he could cut back easily enough—after the long weekend. It was summer, after all. Bathing suit season.
The tires hummed obtrusively as he passed over the Croton Reservoir, the red metal scaffolding overhead giving an unfinished, inelegant industrial appearance to the bridge against the lush woods. New York City’s famous raw water. Here it was, right out in the open. The idea that the water for New York City was in an open pool in the woods struck Peter as ridiculous—but then, where would it be if it weren’t here? The reservoir began supplying New York City with water when it was dammed and connected to New York’s first aqueduct in 1842. The tunnel and its tributaries snaked their way beneath the streets of Manhattan, crowded by basements, subway tunnels, foundations, and ancient graves. What a world: a whole metropolis of matter flowing unseen beneath the city, a design with intention.
Rounding what he affectionately recognized as the final curve, Peter soon caught sight of the Donnes’ pretty white clapboard perched on the hill across from a pasture where aged horses and young Hereford steer mingled, grazing. Peter looked forward to the distant lowing of the cattle filtered through the eager racket of birds that, unless it was raining, would wake him at dawn. It was a gift to lay there in the supple bed on linen sheets, the window ajar to the outdoor world, listening to the birds carry on as the light asserted itself. He would doze in this luxurious dawn, as he had for years of biannual visits to the house, until called below by somebody scrambling a mess of eggs, their sulfur-tinged buttery richness passing through the ancient beams to his room high above.
As Peter pulled into the shared driveway of the Donne family compound, the cars parked tight at a snug diagonal, he winced at the prospect of his entrance. He could never quite spit out the names of the various friends and neighbors who lurked around the weekend’s edges, their comings and goings from meals and cocktails unnerving, the group briefly distracted as it recalibrated to accommodate their familiar—but nonetheless unexpected—presences.
Gathering his overnight bag but leaving his tennis racket in the trunk, Peter hoisted the neat half-case of wine up on his shoulder and turned toward the