Outtakes from a Marriage (12 page)

J
ULIA
M
ANNING

M
USIC
C
RITIC

V
ILLAGE
V
OICE

But Joe—Joe was into me. He asked Alison about me all the time, and when the play was over, we would invite him to our parties and he would talk to me with his head tilted down a little, glancing up now and then to shoot me a look, and then away. Those puppy-dog eyes! That’s why we called him the Spaniel. His eyes and his loyal, tagalong determination to be with me even though I didn’t really encourage him. Finally one night, during that long July heat wave, I couldn’t get anyone to go out to a club where I thought I might run into Eddie, so I asked Joe. We had a few laughs and a few drinks at the club and then, just when we were heading out the door, Eddie arrived with the redhead. They said hello and walked into the club, and I was about to suggest to Joe that we go back inside when he put his arms around me and kissed me. He backed me up against the building, right there on the corner of Bowery and Fourth Street, right in the middle of that killer heat wave, and he kissed me like he would die if we stopped, and all those obsessive thoughts about Eddie sort of melted away.

We walked back to my place and I remember that the streets were soaked from the spray of unplugged fire extinguishers. A regatta of chicken bones, beer bottles, cigarette butts, and the occasional condom was floating along the gutter, causing us to leap on and off of the curbs. God, the city was filthy back then. It was late—probably around three in the morning—and the sidewalks were crowded with partially clad drunks and preppy college students and noisy transvestites and whores and addicts and teenaged clubgoers. Because the frontier had already been crossed, because we had already kissed and pawed each other for a good fifteen minutes outside the club, Joe kept pulling playfully on my jeans pockets and sliding his hot hands under my T-shirt and across my belly and up over my breasts and we tripped over each other as we made our way east. When we got back to the loft, we forgot all about the heat and didn’t worry about the broken fan in my room, we just threw the dirty clothes off my unmade bed and dove right in.

It was Joe’s urgency that got me. He couldn’t get his clothes off fast enough. At one point his jeans got stuck around one of his ankles and he staggered, groaning and cursing, until he had kicked off one bunched-up denim leg, and then the other. I pulled my T-shirt off over my head, but I left my bra and jeans on, and Joe looked at me for a second and then the bra and jeans were being pulled off. Although the sex didn’t last all that long, the next morning with Beth, and later at my internship, every time I thought of that night, of those brief, steamy moments, my heart literally ached for him. I replayed all of it in my mind, over and over again. Especially when we were ready to sleep, the way he put his arms around me and pulled me in to him, pulled me right up against his warm chest and tucked my hips into his, cradling my breast in his palm.

[
ten
]

I
sat at the kitchen table with my laptop in front of me. I was multitasking—Googling Joe while listening to his phone messages—my fingers poised above the keyboard, the handset of the cordless pressed to my ear.

“To play your messages, press one.”

1.

“Hi, Joe! Laney here. Barbara Walters is interviewing some nominees the Saturday before the awards. She’s having Spacey and Kiefer on and she wants to interview you, too. Call me either way.”

Laney Atwood was Joe’s new publicist. I hadn’t met her yet, and while it was clear from her New York accent that she wasn’t Joe’s girlfriend, it occurred to me that she could have a foulmouthed young assistant who might have crossed paths with Joe somewhere along the way. I typed “Laney Atwood” into the Google search bar and clicked on “Images.”

Just then, Ruby walked into the kitchen and I fumbled with the phone, battering the “off” button with my thumb, and clicked the cover of my laptop closed.

“I think it’s unnatural. I think it’s sick. It’s diseased,” Ruby said, pouring herself a cup of organic coffee.

“What?” I asked. I held the phone below the table, on my lap. “What’s unnatural?”

“Mom!” Ruby spun around so that she was facing me, and I could see that she was holding her cell phone to her ear.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, turning back away from me. “It’s just my mom. She’s trying to be a part of my life by talking to me about my
private
phone conversations.”

Ruby grabbed a carton of soy milk from the fridge and carried it out of the room with her coffee, saying into the phone, “That’s a cult, not a religion. It’s like Kabbalah…with Jesus. I told him that.”

I sat for a moment. Joe had taken Sammy to his gym. There was a young trainer there who watched Sammy while Joe worked out, and it had become a Sunday-morning tradition that Sammy loved. They went to the gym, and then out to breakfast at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen where Joe had been eating Sunday breakfast for years. I listened now to make sure that they weren’t back early, and I listened for Ruby, but all I could hear was the faint sound of yoga music coming from her room.

I silently tapped out Joe’s number on the phone, my heart pounding.

I hit the number 1 and had to listen to Laney’s message again.

I saved the message and waited for the next.

Joe. Jake. Tomorrow? Eight o’clock workout? Gimme a beep.

The next message was hers.

Hi, baby. Callin’ you back. Bye.

I played it again. Then again. I listened for subtleties in her voice, for subtexts. Clues.

Hi, baby. Callin’ you back. Bye.

Who?

I opened the computer and found that the screen was covered with tiny jpegs of Laney Atwood. I clicked on the first one and waited for the enlarged photograph to appear. And there it was. A middle-aged woman dressed in black, standing, wineglass in hand, next to Julia Roberts. The caption read, “PR agent Laney Atwood, from the Atwood/Neilson Agency, and Julia Roberts,
Leominster Square
premiere.” I clicked on the other images and saw Laney posing with Ben Affleck and Sarah Jessica Parker and Cuba Gooding Jr. Then I clicked on a photo with the caption “Laney Atwood, Lizbeth Neilson, partners in the Atwood/Neilson Agency, at the Tribeca Film Festival.”

Lizbeth Neilson? She was younger than Laney, and younger than me. But still, not quite right for the part. Too urban looking. There was no way the woman in this photo had a Southern accent. I realized that I had attached a soft-focus image to the voice in my head. A beautiful girl/woman who wore yellow printed minidresses and pigtails. It was Elly May Clampett, or Jessica Simpson, fresh and sweet and naive (despite the potty mouth). I could see Lizbeth’s dour cynicism even in the still on-screen image. Why go
out
for dour cynicism when you can have it at home?

I typed “Joe Ferraro” into the Google search bar, and I spent the better part of the next hour reading about Joe, revisiting all his film roles, scrutinizing photos of him—sometimes with me, sometimes without—taken over the past ten years. There we were at the premiere of
Gangs of New York,
at a
Star Wars
screening with little Ruby, and at various awards dinners. There was Joe’s weird haircut that he had gotten for his part in
Rum Runners,
and there I was in my favorite Donna Karan dress—the one that covered my post-pregnancy fat after Sammy. Joe with Hillary Clinton at a benefit. Joe jogging on a beach in Nevis. Joe and me backstage at the U2 concert last summer…

I started Googling scenarios like “Joe Ferraro mysterious woman” and “Joe Ferraro hotel,” but these searches got me nowhere, so I just scrolled through the pages with Joe Ferraro in boldface type.

It occurred to me that I was stalking my own husband.

I listened for any sounds coming from the rest of the apartment, then I dialed Joe’s number again.

I am out of my friggin’ mind,
I thought. That’s what my dad would have said. Out. Of. Your. Friggin’. Mind.

I hung up. On impulse, I dialed Dr. James. Dr. Benjamin James. I had never called him Benjamin, or Ben. Always Dr. James. Beth and Alison called him Dr. Boyfriend. To me it was only funny once, but they kept calling him that, even after I had stopped seeing him.

I expected Dr. James’s voice mail to answer, especially with this being a Sunday morning, so when I heard his actual voice instead, I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Hello?” he said again.

“Dr. James? It’s Julia Ferraro.”

“Well! Hello!” he said. He sounded surprised, but in a good way.

“What are you doing in the office on Sunday?” I stammered.

“Taking care of some paperwork. Why are you calling me on a Sunday?” he asked.

“I’m having a kind of…situation. With Joe. Could I possibly come in to see you?”

“Uh…well. Let me see,” he said.

I was dying. I really wouldn’t have blamed him if he had said no.

“I have a cancellation Friday. Ten o’clock?”

“Okay,” I said.
Okay.

My gynecologist was the one who first sent me to see Dr. James. This was when Sammy was about eighteen months old. I had been having crushing anxiety and consecutive nights of insomnia ever since I weaned the baby, and when I called my doctor for a Valium refill, she referred me instead to Dr. Benjamin James. His office was on the ground floor of a gray prewar apartment building on Eighty-sixth Street, just off Central Park West. On that first Tuesday, when I told the doorman who I was there to see, he nodded politely and pointed down the hall to his left. I recall now that I sort of mumbled my thanks and then scuttled off with a strained smile, my head tilted up as if I was studying the ceiling tiles. I sensed that the doorman sized up all of Dr. James’s visitors to see which were more visibly unbalanced, and this idea, for some reason, made me move down the hall like a crazy woman trying to appear sane. I had never been to a shrink before. I was incredibly nervous and was really only going in the hopes that the doctor would prescribe me something so that I could sleep. I got to the end of the hall, found Dr. James’s door, and gave the buzzer next to it a hesitant tap. After a short pause, I was buzzed into a waiting area that held six empty chairs and two flat baskets filled with magazines.

The kids and I were at a stage, at that point, that required us to roost, frequently, in one waiting room or another. Ruby had broken her wrist playing soccer that past fall and Sammy had recurrent ear infections. Ruby’s mild asthma was not yet under control and she had just had braces put on her teeth. Even Joe’s old cat, Clover, was sick. She had cancer. The orthodontist, allergist, pediatrician, orthopedist, physical therapist, dentist, and veterinarian were all haphazardly recurring destinations scribbled in my daily planner, and I spent many long hours corralled in their holding areas, looking at my watch, tending to my children, and leafing through magazines.

The magazines in Dr. James’s office were superior to those found in most of the other reception rooms. I noticed this at once. Unlike the glossy parenting magazines that issued shaming edicts (
End Homework Hassles! Lose That Tummy NOW! No More Clutter!
) from the paste-colored laminate tabletops of the other waiting areas, Dr. James’s magazines had articles about Islam and Darfur and God and Tony Blair. There was nothing else in the small windowless waiting room, just the good magazines and hard chairs. Not a clock, nor a table. Just the chairs, set facing one another. Two groups of three. At precisely twelve o’clock on that first day, and on many, many Tuesdays afterward, Dr. James opened his door and invited me into his office.

Like I said, I had never been in therapy before, and in the beginning it was hard to figure out what to talk about. But as the weeks went by, I was comforted by Dr. James’s kind, intelligent manner and his keen, alert attention to every word that came out of my mouth, his eyes staying on my eyes when I gazed off and then remaining on them when I looked back at him. I told him about my mother’s death and my father’s nightly drinking and the times that Neil and I awoke in an empty house and my fear of bridges and my first kiss and first fuck and my lonely semester abroad. I told him about how I learned, through my aunt, that Mom had been with a Navy buddy of Dad’s that night she died. They were killed in a car crash—both drunk—and nobody knew why they were together in her old VW. We talked about how Dad and I lost Neil to Christ, after he quit alcohol and drugs and married an Evangelical Wisconsinite who disapproved of us both, and how I missed having a mother more than ever once I had my own children. We reviewed my stint as the breadwinning girlfriend/wife of a nonworking actor and the hesitation and misgivings I initially had about marrying Joe. Eventually, the well began to run dry and there wasn’t much left to discuss—my depression had more or less cleared, but still I didn’t want to terminate my sessions with Dr. James. I was in love with him.

I didn’t exactly “fall” in love with him the way I had fallen in love with Joe. Instead, my feelings for Dr. James came to me in tiny allotments. Tiny measured doses. An encouraging word here, an understanding look there, each flitting connection touching me like a drop of precipitation so small that I hardly took any notice until one day I found myself drenched in a sort of relentless fascination—a heavy, almost mournful longing for the man who sat opposite me every Tuesday for precisely fifty minutes. Dr. James would ask me about my week: Was I writing? Was I communicating with Joe better? And I would give him a general summary of my days and nights, but all the while I was imagining Dr. James and me rapturously intertwined on the couch…on the floor…sprawled across his desk, the files of his other patients knocked hastily aside. What was it that I found so alluring about Dr. James? Had I seen him walking down the street, a complete stranger, I wouldn’t have taken a second glance. Somehow, something happened in the “analytic space” that transformed Dr. James from an average-looking, nice middle-aged doctor into a demigod of unfathomable sexual potential. One day, in the middle of one of these sessions, in a fit of desire so intense that I thought a steamy aura of sexual heat might be visible in the air surrounding me, I had finally blurted out, “I…I…think I have a…crush on you.”

Dr. James smiled casually and responded, “Oh, well, thanks.”

I sat dumbfounded for several minutes and then said, “That’s all?” To which he replied, “Well, it’s very common to develop these feelings for a therapist. It’s a normal part of the psychotherapeutic process.”

I stammered, “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve had other patients who have told you…that they’re in love with you?”

“Yes. Of course,” he responded, matter-of-factly, as if I had asked him if he was in the habit of brushing his teeth each morning, or breathing air.

Ever since that session, I started to have a good, hard look at the patients who left Dr. James’s office before me, and who waited for him when I left. The majority of his patients were women. Most were older than me, but one very attractive blond couldn’t possibly have been twenty. I wondered if each of these patients blew into his office the way I did, tempestuous and unstrung with longing, and I imagined Dr. James holding fast in his large leather chair like a ship’s captain who has lashed himself to the mast in a raging storm.

Transference is what they call it. It’s supposed to be normal. It’s not the therapist you desire, it’s one of your parents. All I can say in my defense is that I was under a lot of stress at the time. The crying spells and insomnia and anxiety. Plus, Joe was never around. He was in L.A. doing that mob film. Then he was in Toronto doing something else….

I sent Dr. James a present once. I rushed to Bergdorf ’s one cold December night when Joe unexpectedly arrived home early from the holiday party for the cast and crew. I told him that I wanted to do some last-minute Christmas shopping now that he was home to watch the kids, and when he said, “Yeah? And just who might you be shopping for?” in a half-drunk, flirty voice, I responded, “Oh, somebody,” with a suggestive smile, and he had accompanied me to the door with explicit details about a certain tennis racket that was being held for him at a pro shop in Midtown. I didn’t go to the pro shop, but instead spent the following two hours agonizing over what to purchase for Dr. James. A patient, dignified older salesclerk walked me around suggesting ties, scarves, and cuff links for the “colleague” I told him I was shopping for, and finally he opened a long, thin sterling box and tilted it up so that I could behold the enclosed “writing instrument” that he said had been masterfully designed in Switzerland. It was a sleek, streamlined, black pen with subtle platinum details, but it wasn’t until the clerk actually removed it and pressed it to a piece of ivory stationery that I was swayed. The tip floated across the page in the salesman’s delicate cursive, leaving a trail of shiny resin that looked as opulent and rich as oil. He carefully wrapped the box in gold tissue under my watchful eye, and the next day I sent it anonymously from a mailbox near Sammy’s speech therapy class, so that it wouldn’t bear the postal code of my neighborhood. The following Tuesday, Dr. James held the pen in his hand during my session, and I pretended not to notice it. At one point he pressed the bottom of it to his lower lip in a show of thought, just for a fleeting moment, just touched it there, making a tiny impression in that soft area at the center of his lower lip, and then he moved it back to rest upon my file on his lap. I wondered if Dr. James was gauging all his patients’ reactions to the pen, and I allowed myself to gaze at it impassively while he jotted notes in my file about a lonely Christmas memory from my childhood. “Lovely,” I imagined him writing, “her eyes, her lips, the way she crosses and uncrosses her legs…”