Читать книгу A House Interrupted - Maurita Corcoron - Страница 4

Chapter One. The Set Up

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My life took a dramatic, unimaginable turn after a phone call from my husband, fourteen years into our marriage. Before I get to that night, allow me to share with you my personal background and some early life experiences.

I was born and raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb west of Boston, home of Wellesley College for women. The first house I can remember was quite small. But the second house, on Abbott Road, was enormous with three stories, nineteen rooms, five bathrooms, six fireplaces, and a barn. The Wellesley Country Club was at the end of Abbott Road and across the street from Babson College. I spent a great deal of time at the country club while I was growing up, and my father spent every weekend for twenty years on that golf course. We were a large family, and I was the middle child with three sisters—two older, one younger—and a younger brother.

My first significant memories are of my father. I remember sitting on a bicycle at the top of our inclined driveway at our first house on Weston Road. I must have been four or five years old and so short that my feet didn’t quite reach the pedals. My father put me on the bike seat, gave me a little shove, and I pedaled. I ran smack into the garage door, fell over, got up, walked the bike back up the slight incline of our driveway, and my dad put me back on the seat so I could do the same thing over again. I learned to ride a bike in two days. My Dad was firm but gentle with me, encouraging me to try again after I steered the bicycle into the bushes, into the garage, or toppled it on the grass. I remember wanting so badly to be able to ride that bike, for me and for him. From a very early age, I always felt this intense need to get his attention, his approval, his love.

When my parents first bought the house on the hill on Abbott Road, my father called it the “the worst house in the nicest neighborhood.” The previous owners had let it go, and the vines that covered the row of second-story windows gave the house a look of being swallowed. It was so overgrown that that you could barely see the first two floors from the street.

In that neighborhood, we grew up surrounded by affluence in a truly beautiful area. Most of the families had many kids; the family across the street had ten children. My best friends—Nancy Arnot, Pam Pierson and Debbie Babson—all lived within four or five houses of each other on Abbott Road. At least six families on Abbott Road had a doctor as the head of the household.

My early feelings or thoughts of my mother are not as clear. My first real memory of her was some time after we moved to the Abbott road house. After dinner in the evenings, we would get together with the neighborhood kids to play baseball in one of two small neighborhood parks. One night they needed a pitcher and an older boy put me on the mound. When I pitched the first ball, a boy hit a ground ball, it bounced off my toe and into my face, breaking my nose. A big deal was made over it and I remember a day later, sitting in the surgeon’s waiting room, listening to my mother tell another person about my accident. She was animated and I remember a feeling of deep concern for my well-being—not necessarily love, but serious, honest concern. After my nose was reset, my sisters each took me into their classrooms for show and tell. I stood there with two black eyes and a bandage over my nose as the first and second graders stared up at me and listened to my sisters’ version of my accident.

My parents were hardworking. My father was dedicated to his growing insurance business, community service, and his lifelong passion for golf. What time he did seem to spend with us was usually focused on my brother, David, his only son. My mother was equally dedicated to keeping a beautiful home, raising well-rounded children, and pursuing her creative and artistic talents. She enjoyed creative pursuits, taking art classes or cooking classes, and she was always willing to try just about anything new to her.

We were Sunday churchgoers from day one until I went to high school. Because of those early years of Sunday Mass and Sunday School, I have always felt at home in the Catholic Church; however, I never did develop a deep spiritual connection to the Catholic faith. As soon as my parents stopped making Sunday Mass mandatory, I stopped going to church. By the time I left for college, my spiritual foundation was nonexistent.

I have come to learn that my family was quite different from how we must have appeared to onlookers. Inside that big house on the hill, we were strangers to one another, not able to connect with each other on an intimate, openly loving level. My siblings and I certainly had a lot of fun together growing up. Our house was always humming with activity, and I especially remember our high school years full of girlfriends and boyfriends, coming and going. On the outside we were happy and involved with a lot of after school functions, like cheerleading and other sports. But for the most part, we lived on the surface of our emotions, especially toward our parents.

My father ‘s business turned out to be a great success, so my parents were able to provide for all my financial needs. They were not, however, available to me on a deep emotional or spiritual level. I felt they never expected anything out of me except to go to college and get married. So that is exactly what I did.

By the time I was a freshman in college, I had started a pattern of allowing whomever I was dating to shape the path of my life. I didn’t realize it then, but I needed a man in my life to define me—I was not worthy enough in my own right. Because I felt pushed aside and was emotionally neglected by my father, I gravitated to men who were both driven and focused (as my father was), but these men were also distant and emotionally uninvolved with me. It was the perfect set up to marry an addict.

I started college with no clear vision for what I wanted to do with my life. I was interested in politics, retail, and journalism, but I had no idea what definite path to choose. I just went about life at that age with little planning, lots of spontaneity, and no thought about what kind of woman I wanted to be. Some people would consider that a free spirit. In retrospect, however, I wasn’t free at all. I had no clue that the very essence of who I was born to be was already slipping away, even at that young age. Unaware of what I wanted or where I was going, I simply moved on.

After finishing my second year at Centenary College for Women in New Jersey, I left the East Coast for the mountain town of Boulder, Colorado, outside of Denver. I wanted to ski, so I transferred to the University of Colorado, even though I didn’t know a soul there.

Boulder in the mid-1970s, had such a bohemian and appealing atmosphere. The temperature warms in midday, never getting too hot or humid. Once the morning clouds clear off the flatirons, the pure blue sky is stunning. I lounged in that mountain setting, studying class schedules and writing letters to girlfriends. It was late August and students at the university milled around The Hill, a quaint business district just off campus. It seemed like everyone was moving a sofa into a new apartment, out of an old house, or onto a roof. On the outdoor terrace by the pool on campus, it was crowded with students sitting in the sunshine and fresh air. I sat alone, excited to be so far from home and enjoying my independence.

I had been at the school for just two days when I met Ben on the deck of the pool. I had found two chairs to set up camp, one for me and one to prop my feet. From across the way I noticed a handsome, dark-haired guy holding a clip board and walking toward me. He was smiling slightly, wearing dark Ray Bans and red lifeguard shorts. He looked like he’d just stepped off the beach, leaving behind the salt water for this student-filled pool in the mountains of Colorado. While he seemed nice enough and was good looking, I wasn’t looking to get involved. It was the furthest thing from my mind.

“Is anyone sitting here?” he asked, putting his hand on the back of the chair that held my feet.

“Yes, there is,” I lied.

“No, there isn’t,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, there is,” I shot back.

“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “And as long as I’ve been watching, no one has sat here with you.” He pulled the chair out from under my feet and sat down right across from me. He was so confident with those Ray Bans covering his eyes.

“ What’s your name?” he asked.

“Wheatsy,” I answered, without explanation. He looked at me with a frown.

“What kind of name is that! Wheatsy?”

I put down the letter I was writing so I could answer him. “When I was little, my sisters couldn’t pronounce my real name, Maurita, so they called me Wheata, which stuck and eventually became Wheatsy.”

“Wheatsy,” he repeated.

“Yes, Wheatsy,” I replied, somewhat annoyed. Why am I defending my name to this stranger?, I thought to myself.

“I’ve just never heard that name before, not even as a nickname.”

“Well, what is your name?” I asked.

“Ben.”

“Ben?” I responded. “What kind of name is that? Ben? I have never heard of that name before.”

“What are you talking about? Ben is a common name,” he said, thinking I was serious. I told him I was just kidding, and we smiled at each other. We continued talking and spent most of the afternoon discussing the East Coast and our majors.

“Why are you carrying a clipboard?” I asked.

“I am filling out medical school applications.” He gave me a quick glance and continued filling out paperwork, and I went back to writing my letters. We sat through the early sunny evening like that, a nineteen-year old girl in a new college town and a New Jersey lifeguard on the prowl.

“Would you like to have dinner with me this weekend?” he asked as he stood up.

I didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, I would,” I said. What’s a girl to lose having dinner with an attractive man possibly headed for medical school? Nothing. It seemed so at the time. Eventually, though, I nearly lost everything.

Two days later we went on our first date. Classes had not yet started, so each of our schedules was open. We had made plans for dinner. I remember feeling excited and a little nervous. He picked me up at my dorm room and we got into the bucket seats of his light blue Oldsmobile Starfire and drove into downtown Boulder for dinner at the Walrus Restaurant. It was a popular spot but not typical college fare. We had a nice time and we talked a lot about his family, my family, growing up, and how we came to be in Boulder. He was a senior, and I was a third year transfer student.

After dinner, he drove me up to scenic Flagstaff Mountain, just west of downtown Boulder where the flat plains meet the first foothills of the Rockies. Ben parked on the side of the road, and we got out for a while, taking in the spectacular view of downtown. I remember thinking it was so beautiful looking down on Boulder and the lights below and how lucky I was to be there. Then we stopped at Chautauqua Park on the way down from the mountain. Toward the end of the evening, Ben tried several times to do more than just kiss me—I had to keep brushing him off and telling him no. He eventually dropped me off at my dorm room and we kissed good night.

From that night forward, we were pretty much inseparable. We certainly liked each other, but I do not think that either of us at the time thought, This is the one. I liked him and thought we had a lot in common: we were both from the East Coast, we both loved to ski and swim, and we both liked the outdoors.

For the next eight years, we pursued one another around the country with me doing most of the chasing. We dated that first year while we were in college. Then, when Ben graduated from CU, I moved back East, where he went to medical school and I went to work in the hotel industry after a brief stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Ben attended St. George’s University School of Medicine in the British West Indies. We dated on and off during those years, both of us living elsewhere and experiencing what the world had to offer us. He was deeply invested in medical school, the ensuing internship, and then his residency. Putting my life on hold for those years while he had little or no time for a relationship, didn’t make sense to me. So we started seeing other people.

It was while I worked as a concierge in the lobby at the historic Parker House in downtown Boston that I met Keith Knudsen, one of the original Doobie Brothers. I recognized some of his fellow band members from my album covers, but I did not know who Keith was. He introduced himself to me at my desk and we chatted for a few minutes. Quite unexpectedly, he invited me to their concert at the Cape. He seemed very sweet and down to earth, so I said “yes.” I gave him directions to my apartment and as he walked away, I asked him what he did. With a smile, he quietly said, “I’m a drummer and I do some vocals.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage to say.

I was living in Brookline, a town outside of Boston at the time. I lived in a three bedroom apartment on the third floor of a house in a working class section of town. It was a great place, very nice and clean. I lived with one of my college roommates from Centenary and another girl who was a graduate student at Boston University. Keith picked me up that night in a limo and we drove all the way to the Cape—just the two of us. The band was touring for their “Minute by Minute” album. I was so nervous and excited that night.

On the way to the concert we made small talk, then I picked up one of the Minute by Minute albums that he had on the seat next to him and asked, “So, which one of you guys are related? Which ones are the brothers?”

He smiled and said, “None of us are related. There are no real brothers in the group.”

“Oh, wow, I didn’t know that,” I said. Then I took out the album insert and pointed to it and said, “I have never really understood why you would put a picture of a piece of burning trash on this sleeve. What is the significance of that?”

Keith looked at me for a second, threw his head back, and laughed—not in a mean way, but in a gentle, funny way. “Maurita, that’s not a trash bag, that’s a doobie, a joint. That’s where the name the Doobie Brothers comes from.”

“Oh,” I laughed right along with him because I had no idea.

We had a great time that night and the evening ended very late with a goodnight kiss at my apartment door. That began an almost two year on-again, off-again relationship. I had grown up with money, but nothing like this lifestyle of private planes, limousines, and luxury hotels. We were both honest that first night; he explained he was separated from his wife and in the beginning process of divorce, but he was also seeing other people. I told him about Ben and him being in medical school, so we both just took the relationship as it came. I had no illusions about where my relationship with Keith would end up, so I just went along with it. I saw him pretty much anytime he was near the East Coast. He would leave me a ticket at the counter at Logan Airport, and I would fly off to be with him on tour—sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for as long as five days. I went with him to Philadelphia, New York, Connecticut, Cape Cod, Montreal, and Nova Scotia. I even flew a couple of times on the Doobie Liner, as they called their private plane with their familiar logo was on its tail.

I enjoyed the attention and excitement for a while, and when Keith said he had fallen in love with the woman with whom I believe eventually became his second wife, I was sad, of course, but happy to have had such a great time while it lasted. My pattern of finding comfort in the shadows of unavailable men continued with Keith, and what a shadow that was.

Moreover, there is something about me that addicts are attracted to and something about me that makes me attracted to addicts. My father was distant, and addicts are typically distant. This emotional disconnect is what I was familiar and comfortable with. It is no accident that I would someday marry someone who steered away from intimacy. And it is no accident that I got involved with Keith, who would someday battle his own addictive demons.

I didn’t see Keith Knudsen again until the summer before Ben’s disclosure to me about his sex addiction. The Doobie Brothers were touring again and playing in Myrtle Beach. I took Ben, our oldest daughter, Ella, and my nephew to the concert. Keith invited us backstage after the concert. It was great to see him again. He looked happy and healthy and gave the kids signed t-shirts and drumsticks. Ben took the kids back out on the field, and I sat down with Keith for a few minutes. He was happily remarried, and he had been in recovery for eight years. That was news to me; when I dated him I did not realize that he was an addict. We got up and gave each other a hug and that was it. I never saw him again.

Then, in February of 2005, Ben was watching CNN and learned that Keith had died of complications due to chronic pneumonia. It was a difficult loss for me as I had always hoped to talk face to face with him again—but this time as two people in recovery.

Eventually, Ben and I got back together, better than before. That was during his three year-long residency in Baltimore. The weather had already gotten cold that year as I was preparing to go north to Wellesley for the Thanksgiving holiday.

“I have something for you,” Ben told me. It was almost midnight. I had just gotten home from working the evening shift at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore where I was an assistant front office manager, and I still had to pack for an early morning flight.

I sat down next to Ben and looked at him and said, “What is it?”

In his hand, he held a small, velvet ring box. He handed it to me to open. I opened it and it was an engagement ring.

I asked, “Is this an engagement ring? Are we getting married?”

He said, “Yeah, I want to marry you, but I haven’t really thought about when.”

I was a bit shocked. I was happy that he gave me a ring, but I was a little confused about the lack of a proposal or planning. I put the ring on my finger and thought, Ok—now I am engaged.

I didn’t realize then, only later, that he never actually asked me to marry him. He offered me jewelry, which I accepted, but he never said the words, Will you marry me? We did not discuss wedding plans for a year or so. For his third year of residency, Ben chose a hospital in Rochester, New York. As a woman engaged to a doctor, I finally felt comfortable telling my parents that this time when we moved, we would be living together. My father vowed to cease speaking to me on religious grounds, and while my mother continued to take my phone calls, they were short, one-sided conversations.

“He’ll never marry you,” she’d say. Or, “He’s using you,” and “You’re living in sin and he’s Jewish. When he gets what he wants from you, he will dump you for a Jewish girl.”

This was a stressful and painful period for me. For the first time in my life, my father was not just a phone call away, the one consistent, constant in my life—distant perhaps, but certainly constant. He literally would not speak to me as long as I was living with Ben. My mother almost always ended our conversations by beating me down, telling me I was a fool. She never believed he would marry me.

After two years with no wedding plans on the horizon, I played the only card I had left to play. Over dinner in downtown Rochester, I laid out an ultimatum.

“Either we set a date or I’m out of here,” I told him.

“Then, we’ll set a date,” he said casually, between bites of his steak. “How is May or June?”

“Too far away. How’s November?” I asked. “We can have the ceremony the day before Thanksgiving and then everyone can just stay for dinner the following day.”

“Fine, sounds good,” he said.

Even with minimal wedding plans, there was still disappointment. That was the year Boston got socked in two days before Thanksgiving with a huge snow storm, stranding some of my family and friends. That left only Ben’s creepy friends from Ocean City, his and my immediate families, and one of his doctor friends who served as his best man. At this point, I had this feeling of just wanting to get this wedding over with.

After a quick ceremony in the lobby of the Strathallan Hotel in Rochester, New York, by a justice of the peace who wore cowboy boots under his robe, we were officially and legally married. A month later, I was pregnant with Ella, and a month after that we had a quasi-honeymoon where we went skiing for a week in Aspen, Colorado. Ben, for some reason, invited his father along. Absurd is the only word I can think of to describe that trip. I had morning sickness all day long and the hotel room had just one bed. Ben’s father slept on a pullout sofa bed in the same room. I had no privacy.

We packed what belongings we’d amassed together in Rochester and moved to the coast of South Carolina to start our family. This was July of 1984. My parents were pleased that the globetrotting had stopped and we were settling down and having children.

Ben joined a busy medical practice on the south end of the beach and I jumped in to setting up our first house and caring for our baby daughter. We had four children over the next six years which became my full time occupation, and happily so. Ben eventually opened his own practice and brought in his first associate. His practice took off like wildfire, taking away our financial worries and allowing us a few luxuries. We would eventually hire a live-in nanny, a weekly housekeeper, and a landscaper, and we owned three cars.

I ran the books, and over the period of several successful years it became clear that we could afford something I have always dreamed of: a house on the beach. Although Ben is well known in town as being a successful physician, on the beach it is another story. There he is best known for his long swims—a mile a day—when the water is warm enough.

“You going to start swimming soon, Doc?” the locals regularly ask him in the latter months of spring. Even the bank tellers at the drive-thru window ask, “Hey Maurita, is your husband in the water yet?” He swam directly in front of our house, near the Surfside Pier, to a restaurant on the beach called the Conch Café, and then ran back on the sand. To some in town, when they see Ben swimming, it is a sign that summer has officially started. His patients seem to like the fact that their doctor practices what he preaches—exercising and taking good care of his body.

After a couple of months of looking at properties up and down the coast, our realtor showed us a faded white box on stilts, just a thousand square feet, nestled into the beach background. It was already furnished with an eclectic array of castoff furniture, comfortable and welcoming.

I loved this little beach house and moved the family over for weekends and off season months any chance we could get. We rented it out for the summer months as we needed the rental income. I always felt a sigh of relief and peace as I drove up into that little driveway. Even though our main home was just five minutes away, the minute I walked up the grey, weather-beaten staircase, I felt that we were away on vacation. The beach house, the little slice of sand dunes, and the magnificent, unobstructed view of the ocean was a tremendous gift, one that I never took for granted. I felt as though I had become a part of this house, and it had become a part of me. Together, we faced the ocean from the same vantage point, and we victoriously weathered the storms.

Unfortunately, our financial success had come at a price. Ben’s work and on-call schedule left him no real time for his growing family and me. At times, I felt like a single mother. I had been given the gift of financial security, but I had no one to share it with. We were both so busy living our lives we never invested any time to maintain and develop our emotional connections or respond to each other on an intimate level. I thought our sex life was good, considering the demands on the both of us. When I was even eight and a half months pregnant, he was all over me. Some women complained that their husbands won’t touch them during pregnancy. Not mine. That’s one of the reasons I never suspected his involvement with other women.

Still, during the times we did spend together, I sometimes felt that something was not quite right. I felt in my gut that he was running from something. Ben was the type of person for whom professional success wasn’t enough. He had to always push himself further than his friends were willing to push. He had to run further, row harder, bungee jump higher (or backwards!)—anything to prove himself or be the center of attention.

The summer of 1997 was when everything crashed in one cataclysmic moment, changing the reality I knew. The integral pieces of our lives shattered, and we spent the next ten years trying to mend our hearts and our marriage.

It began to unravel during a family trip to La Jolla, California, where Ben’s cousin, Jeff, was getting married on the beach. Ben was an usher, and our youngest daughter, Olivia, was flower girl. What should have been a nice family vacation instead started the downward spiral of our marriage.

The wedding was straight out of a fairy tale. Jeff and his bride were married on the beautiful cliff at Pillbox Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of La Jolla. They pledged their lives to one another and everyone clapped and celebrated with them. It was a beautiful, joyful scene.

Ben looked handsome in his tuxedo, but he always looks handsome when he’s dressed up. As the wife of a physician, I’d been to my share of black-tie fundraisers and cocktail parties. I have spent some of those evenings in a gown, on the arm of my attractive husband in his striking tuxedo.

But I was not on his arm at the ceremony, because I was not in the wedding party. Instead, Ben escorted a buxom, long-legged brunette. He seemed to be very pleased to be partnered with a pretty, young woman. She was, in fact, married and had three young children and a nice, good-looking husband. I didn’t give her much thought as she had a beautiful family of her own. Plus, she wore way too much make-up—something my husband had always declared a turn off.

The evening of the wedding, before the reception started, we went back to Jeff’s house to change clothes and relax for a few moments before the party started. Ben had been drinking and smoking pot all afternoon. I remember standing with some people in the yard taking photographs when Ben popped his head out of the upstairs bedroom window with a lost look on his face.

“Honey,” he hollered out toward the gathering below, “come help me.”

I looked up and raised my voice so he could hear. “What is it?” I asked.

“I need help. Can you come up here?”

I headed upstairs. When I walked into the bedroom, he was trying to change his trousers. In his inebriated state, he could not get his legs into his pants.

“You’ve got to save me,” he said. “That bridesmaid—she’s

out to get me. She’s giving me the eye,” and then he pointed to one of his eyes.

“You’re wasted right now.” I told him. “Do you realize that? It’s embarrassing.”

“Ah, c’mon, honey. I’m just having some fun. Don’t be such a drag.”

I left him there in the upstairs bedroom and returned to the party, determined not to let his ridiculous behavior ruin a wonderful evening.

The next afternoon we all gathered at Jeff and Cathy’s house again, this time for a brunch-style meal where the bride and groom would open their wedding gifts. Our four kids were running about the house, playing with the other kids. Every once in a while they’d tear through the living room where the adults had gathered for the gift reception. Lo and behold, there sat my husband next to the woman who had been the bridesmaid the night before. It was noon, and they were already drinking and giggling with each other.

“Ben,” I said two or three times, trying to get his attention. “Can I talk to you for a second out on the porch?”

“Sure,” he said.

Once outside, I asked him in a hushed whisper, “What the hell are you doing? You’re drunk and stoned already and you’re making a fool out of yourself with that bridesmaid from yesterday. What do you think you are doing, acting like that?”

“You’re overreacting and paranoid,” he said. “Nothing is going on.”

He turned and walked back into the room as if it was his day and his party. He slid right back down in his seat next to the bridesmaid. I watched them through a window from the porch as they giggled and whispered into each other ‘s ears. I was too humiliated and angry to return to the party.

When the two of them stood up and started heading for the stairs, my heart started pounding. There they were, wading through friends and family—including their own children—and heading upstairs for God knows what. I followed them and halfway up the staircase, I stopped them.

I did not want to cause a scene so my voice was very low, but very deliberate. I said it directly to my husband—I could have cared less what that bridesmaid had to say.

“Where do you think you are going?” I hissed.

“We’re just going into the bathroom to get high,” Ben answered.

“Oh, no you’re not,” I said. “We are leaving. Now. Let’s go.”

He gave the bridesmaid a little shrug, we collected the kids and we left the party. I was devastated. Alarm bells were going off in my head, and I knew then that something was horribly wrong between us. I wrote off some of Ben’s behavior to the alcohol, pot, and his need to blow off steam after months of long hours at the hospital and office. But there was plenty of serious doubt left over. I was still upset the next morning when we went for a long run on the beach at Torrey Pines. I could not stop crying. My journal entry surrounding this day follows.

July 10, 1997

…Ben acted so embarrassing and humiliating with a cosmetically altered mother of three—in front of his own parents and sister and me, not to mention his own four children. For the first time in my life I was truly disgusted with him and wanted nothing to do with him. The pain he causes me now is greater than the joy he brings me.

On our flight home from California we were sitting together in first class and our kids were safely out of earshot in coach. Something had snapped deep in my soul. I told Ben that he had two weeks to find himself a serious therapist and get help or he had to move out of the house. I do not know where I came up with the two weeks. It seemed a reasonable amount of time for him to find someone and commit to working on himself. I also think I was trying to buy myself some time too—to be comfortable with the ultimatum I had just issued.

The ultimatum appeared to sink in, because Ben immediately started seeing a therapist, Harold Brown, Jr. His credentials were impressive; he is a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Masters Addictions Counselor, and a Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist. After Ben’s session with Harold, describing the events of his behavior at the wedding, this therapist scheduled a joint session to discuss general issues surrounding our marriage, the wedding, and a course of action for the coming months.

I readily agreed to go although I was feeling very nervous being in a therapist’s office. I sat down next to Ben on the therapist’s green leather couch. Harold got right to the point and started asking me a series of questions. “Maurita, I want you to answer the following questions for me with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. I just ask that you answer as honestly as you can.”

“OK,” I said. But I remember thinking that my husband’s therapist looked so young. What the hell is he going to know about life and what is going on in our marriage?

Even at thirty-five, Harold looked like he was in his late twenties, as if he’d just walked off the beach with a surfboard under his arm. His eyes were a piercing blue, and he looked as if he’d just shaken the sand from his hair.

“Do you trust your husband with credit cards or your family checkbook and finances?”

“No,” I answered.

“Do you trust your husband when he calls you and tells you where he is or who he is with?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you trust your husband alone, when you are not around or out of town?”

“No.”

“Do you trust your husband to watch out for your kids when you are not around?”

“No.”

“Do you think your husband has cheated on you?”

“No.”

“Are you happy with the way things are going in your marriage?”

“No.”

The questions went on for a while, and the number of times that I said “no” over the next few moments started to echo in my mind. Later, Harold’s questions lingered in my head when Ben and I went to dinner. We waited for a table at a restaurant called Collector ‘s Café.

“I’m glad this is your problem and not mine. I’d be fine never seeing that guy again,” I said to Ben about Harold. Little did I know that many, many sessions were ahead for both of us.

At Ben’s next session, Harold dropped a bomb on him. He said Ben had to leave town immediately and enter strict in-patient treatment. He said Ben was out of control and needed immediate, serious help. He didn’t even want Ben to return home to pack his bags. He said he’d prefer me to drop a bag of essentials by the office. He wanted to put Ben on a plane that night! Yikes, I thought to myself, this sounded really drastic. But Harold was the expert, and he felt it was necessary. At the time, I didn’t know everything Ben and Harold knew.

Harold had recommended that Ben attend Sierra Tucson for his in-patient treatment, but after doing some research on his own,

Ben instead chose the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Ben later told me that he knew the time had come. The jig was up, and Harold helped him see that he needed help.

A few days later, I put Ben on a plane to Kansas, not knowing what was going to happen next. He packed for a two week stay. We thought that was how long it would take to figure out what was wrong with him, then he could come back home and work on himself here in town. I immediately began avoiding people and friends as much as possible, as I would be asked the inevitable question, “Where is Ben?” I told everyone he was in Connecticut to spend time with his sister. I settled in with the kids and waited to hear from Ben.

A House Interrupted

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