Divorce

The waiting room was closet-size, four feet by five, approximately. There was a small magazine rack and two chairs. A stream of classical music ran down from a speaker in the ceiling. The narrow dimensions of the waiting room reminded the Doctor of a confession booth; though he had never been to confession before. His wife had asked him to go with her to marriage counseling about ten years ago. Rose agreed to see the Doctor’s church-recommended psychiatrist, but later she complained that the psychiatrist was biased in favor of their separation. The results of every one of the marriage tests said divorce was inevitable. They never went to marriage counseling again.

The Doctor was greeted by his new psychiatrist in a cold, offhand manner. He stepped out of the closet-sized waiting room and into a slightly larger office. Her office was on the fifty-eighth floor of a Chicago building. In between five or six other high-rise buildings, the view offered cut-up rectangles of blue sky. The sun reflected off the buildings. Three or four spotted plants clung to the window ledge.

“Take a seat,” she said.

Nervously, the Doctor lowered himself onto the peeling leather couch. Not knowing where to put his hands, he reached for a Kleenex and began to blow his nose.

With a grey notebook in her lap, she took down the Doctor’s information.

“Are you sick?” She asked.

“No, Ma’am.”

“Call me Dr. Levy.” After turning her notebook to a fresh page, she said, “My girlfriend told me about what happened in the massage studio.”

“Yes . . . I feel horrible.” The Doctor’s posture on the leather couch was rigid. He held his back from sinking in, and this was causing some tension in his face.

“Tell me what’s going on with you, Salem?”

“Well, my wife is sick with a degenerative disease . . .”

Dr. Levy looked up at him. She had small, penetrating eyes.

The Doctor continued, “I realized that I couldn’t take care of my wife anymore. So we hired someone who could lift her out of bed and wash her in the mornings . . .”

After the Doctor finished the story, he wiped his neck with a handkerchief. The sweat was bleeding through his collar.

Dr. Levy jotted a few final notes. “Do you know anything about the theory of adolescence, Salem?”

“Other than that my children are in their adolescence . . . I know what they go through, I think.”

“And what can you tell me about what they’re going through?”

“My son seems to be doing fine. My daughter on the other hand has some problems. Too many friends.”

“What do you think happens during adolescence?”

“I’m not exactly sure. It’s the period of teenage independence, isn’t it?”

“That’s correct. During the period of adolescence a healthy teenager will undergo a basic change in attitude. The mark of adolescence is a strong opposition to dependency on the mother and father. Perhaps you can see some of this behavior in your children. After listening to you describe your marriage, Dr. Bashar, I’m led to believe that you too are undergoing some of these changes. You may have never fully outgrown your adolescence.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m talking about an unconscious teenage rebellion against your wife/mother.”

“Unconscious teenage rebellion? Up until now I’ve done everything for her. I don’t understand. I’ve done everything to please my wife.”

“Including cheating on her?”

“But that was a mistake. You can tell I’m not—”

“How can you say that you’ve done everything for your wife, when before, you just told me you didn’t think you loved her.”

“No, I don’t love her.”

“Then, how can you be a loyal husband?”

“Because I’ve stayed with Rose for almost twenty-five years.”

“Exactly my point about the theory of adolescence. You still haven’t broken away from your dependence on your mother/wife. If you had developed your adolescent independence, then you would’ve divorced your wife a long time ago. You would have broken off the marriage when you first realized things weren’t working out. But instead, you stayed in a dependency because it mirrored your dependency on your mother.”

“This may be too Freudian for me to handle!”

“You have to admit Freud changed our view of human relationships. He is hard to ignore—especially in your case.”

“I don’t know.”

“Salem, if you want, you can walk out the door right now, I won’t charge you a dime. All I’m telling you is that you haven’t been loyal to your wife. And you haven’t been faithful to her. Because of your dependency, you may think you have. But you haven’t. You’ve been lying to her for nearly two decades. If you truly cared about your wife, then you would’ve gotten out of this marriage a long time ago.”

The Doctor looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“It’s time to grow up, Salem. You may think that I’m being harsh with you. And I admit—I don’t give much leeway to my patients—I have a ‘Dr. Phil’ approach.”

“What can I do?”

“You can tell your wife the truth. Ask for a divorce. She doesn’t deserve to be lied to anymore.”

The drive up north

On a Saturday morning at the end of September, the Doctor and his wife took a long drive up north to attend a wedding of their mutual friends. Over the cornfields, a hazy sun rose into the sky and a dim, pewter light covered the plains. Every twenty miles or so, they passed wooded areas and rest stops with streaks of grayish-violet in the branches. Rose asked her husband to shut the window because she was feeling a chill. The Doctor couldn’t understand how she could possibly be feeling a chill on such a mild, autumn day.

He closed the window; but now it felt stuffy inside. He turned on the air-conditioning. But again, his wife complained about being cold.

“What do you want me to do?” The Doctor said sarcastically. “You’re always cold.”

“I know I am,” she replied.

The Doctor was thinking about the sessions with his psychologist . . . “You’re stuck in an unconscious teenage rebellion.” Was it true? Is that why he stayed with her so long? Dr. Levy’s analysis sounded a bit too “psychological”. Her confidence in summing up his life in a single sentence bothered him slightly. He knew that his relationship to Rose was more complicated than that. But Dr. Levy did help him to understand that he had been lying to his wife for all these years.

“Honey, I’ve been lying to you. I’ve been lying to me. To everyone.” But he couldn’t say it. Not yet.

Rose stared out of the window, thinking about her artwork. Last week Dora had put a small easel in her bedroom. It wasn’t even a real artist’s easel like the one she had downstairs. It was a children’s easel.

She couldn’t paint in her art studio anymore. Walking downstairs was treacherous. She could barely walk, let alone use stairs. And the canvases were too big for her. Her legs grew tired from standing; her hands began to shake. With the children’s easel, she was hoping that maybe she could paint something smaller. “Have Dora bring up a chair from the basement,” she made a mental note to herself.

As the drive continued, the Doctor looked out the windows at the haystacks and brush pastures along the way, imagining the breezy atmosphere, mournfully. Rose needed to stop at a gas station to use the bathroom. Every time they had to stop, the wheelchair needed to be taken out of the trunk and reassembled. “Unconscious teenage rebellion,” he said to himself as he pushed her toward the bathrooms.

The Encounter

“I want a divorce,” the Doctor said to his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. He took his eyes off the road to register his wife’s reaction.

There was a placid melancholy on her face. The reaction was subtle, barely noticeable. And what emotion he thought he glimpsed in his wife’s expression was now gone. The lines on her face were disappearing. Her cheeks were becoming as flaccid as those of an eighty year old woman’s.

He pictured her as a mime, with her face painted white. She was tense, mute, rebellious. Like a deaf and dumb child. His eyes darted from the road to her face, the road to her face, and back again . . .

His thoughts were racing, “I’ve wanted to say this to you for the last ten years. But then we had children. And after the children, you became sick.”

The Doctor’s head was flooded with confusion. Her silence was making him uncomfortable. But she couldn’t say anything—she couldn’t talk.

“This has been the hardest decision in my life . . . Rose . . . I can’t live with you anymore. I need to be honest with myself and that means being honest with you. It’s not fair to either one of us anymore. I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, all I know is that this has been extremely hard for me. Maybe if I still loved you, Rose, it would be easier for me to take care of you. But I’m not at peace with myself in this marriage and my feelings aren’t there anymore. It’s like I’m an actor putting on show for everyone else. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you. You’re probably going to hate me for awhile. Please Rose, forgive me. I’ve given this decision a lot of thought. I’ve been talking to a psychologist . . .”

His voice was exhausted. Once more he looked at his wife to see her reaction—upset, confused, alarmed?

Her body was slouched into the passenger door, her face leaning against the window, her eyes lightly shut. The medication sometimes put her to sleep. He wondered how long she had been sleeping, and whether he would have to tell her again tomorrow . . .

The window came down. A gust of cool air ran into the car. His forehead was sweating—he needed some air.

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