Читать книгу We Are Water - Wally Lamb - Страница 10

The sharks and I both arrive at the Cape this first Saturday in September. As I inch over the Sagamore Bridge in this god-awful Labor Day weekend traffic, they’re saying great whites are swimming the coastal waters, heading north. According to the car radio, warning signs are being posted along the oceanside beaches from Chatham to North Truro. North Truro? I reach over and turn up the volume, drowning out the annoying cell phone ring tone that’s playing inside the glove compartment. Everybody’s movin’, everybody’s groovin’, baby. Love shack, baby love shack, bay-ayy-be-ee. “What do you want for a ring tone?” Marissa had asked me that day when she was programming my phone. “Anything,” I’d said. “You pick.” And she picked that awful song I’ve always hated.

It’s not one of the kids calling me; they text me now. Before I left this morning, I deliberated about whether to take the damned cell phone with me or leave it back in Three Rivers. But what if there was an emergency? So I threw it in the glove compartment and locked it. I thought I turned the damn thing off, but I guess not. Ahh, relief. The call has gone to voice mail.

“It’s a little unusual to see them in these cooler Massachusetts waters at this time of year,” the shark expert tells her interviewer, a guy who, for some reason, is calling himself the Mad Hatter. “But the gray seal population’s been on the rise, and we think that’s what’s probably luring them.”

The Mad Hatter chortles. “So you’re saying the problem is that there’s been too much seal sex? Too many pinnipeds puttin’ out?”

“Uh, well …”

The Diane Rehm interview I’d been listening to faded away somewhere between Braintree and Buzzards Bay. Conversely, the Mad Hatter is coming through so loudly and clearly that he might as well be broadcasting from the backseat. “Time now for traffic, news, and weather. And when we come back, we’ll have more with Dr. Tracy Skelly from the Division of Marine Fisheries.”

Despite my initial resistance to the idea, I’m staying rent free at Viveca’s place in North Truro for the month, hoping that a Cape Cod retreat might allow me, after a summer’s worth of drifting and wound licking, to anchor myself. Figure out how to shed my bitterness, forgive myself and others and start over. Orchestrate a reinvention, I guess you’d say. Thirty days has September: it’s a tall order.

My game plan, once I survive this hideous holiday traffic and get settled in, is to eat healthy, cool it on the drinking, exercise. I’ll jog and journal every morning, then bike to the beach for an afternoon swim. After dinner, I’ll read and research—Google phrases like “new professions after 50,” “change career paths.” But with sharks in the water, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing a whole lot of swimming. Of course, there’s always the placid bayside, but what I want is turbulence—bodysurfing along the crest of the five- or six-foot swells and getting roughed up a little by the waves I misjudge—the ones that, instead of carrying me, crack against me. I’ve been hoping the wildness of the water might somehow both cleanse me of my failings as a university psychologist and baptize me as … what?

What do you want to be when you grow up? The adults were always asking me that when I was a kid, and because I liked to draw—reproduce the images in comic books and Mad magazine—I’d say I wanted to be an artist. I’d enjoyed my high school art classes, had gotten good grades for my work. And so I’d entered college with a vague plan to major in art. In my first semester, my Intro to Drawing professor, Dr. Duers, had said during my portfolio review that I had a good sense of composition and a talent worth developing. But the following semester, I’d run up against Professor Edwards, an edgy New York sculptor who was disdainful of having to teach studio art to suburban college kids—who had come out and told us he was only driving up from the city twice a week because of the paycheck. It had crushed me the morning he’d stood over my shoulder, snickered at the still life I was drawing, and walked away without a word. But that same semester, I got an A in an Intro to Psych course I really liked. And so I had put away my sketch pad and gone on to the 200-level psychology classes. And then the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I got a job as a second-shift orderly at the state hospital.

I liked working there. Liked shooting the shit with the patients. Not the ones who were really out of it, but the ones who were in there for shorter-term stays. The “walking wounded,” as the nurses called them. Some of those patients would be admitted in pretty rough shape—straitjacketed and sputtering nonsense, or in such deep depressions that they were almost catatonic. But two or three weeks later, with their equilibrium restored by meds and talk therapy, they’d be discharged back into the world.

The psychiatrists were off-putting. Tooled around the wards like they walked on water. But the psychologists were different. More humane, less in a hurry. “You’re good with the patients,” one of them, Dr. Dow, told me one day. “I’ve noticed.” For him, it was nothing more than a casual observation, but for me—a kid who, up to that point, had never gotten noticed for much of anything—it was huge. On my day off, I drove up to the Placement Office at school and took one of those tests that identifies your strengths, suggests what career paths you should consider. When I got my results back, it said I had scored high on empathy and should consider the helping professions: social work, psychology. And so, at the beginning of my fifth semester, I declared psychology as my major.

I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.

Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.

She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.

“It?”

“The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.

Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”

At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her mouth and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.

One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.

After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.

When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.

That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.

Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited …

That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”

“Name?” she said, huffily.

“Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”

She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”

And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into tears.

I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.

Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”

“Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”

“Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was …

Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it … I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it … Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?

God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.

I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those matchmaking Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.

“Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message: call me. wanna talk 2 U dude. I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”

“Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”

“I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”

“Hey, I thought I was the shrink. What am I scared of?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”

I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.

“Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she never would have done before.”

“Like what?”

“Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”

“Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really am scared.”

She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”

“And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”

“Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”

“I said I was happy enough,” I reminded her. “Dude.”

But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00 P.M., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? …

Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it had been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over: Mog the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head … Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”

And then this past March my malaise was replaced by panic when Jasmine Negron, one of my clinical practicum supervisees, walked into Muriel Clapp’s office and charged me with sexual harassment. It was one of those Rashomon-like situations. I said/she said.

But you were in her apartment, right?

I was. She was frightened. I gave her a ride home and she asked me in for a drink.

And you accepted.

Not at first. I tried to beg off, but she said would I please come in. The guy she’d broken up with still had the key to her place and wouldn’t give it back. A few nights earlier, she’d gotten home and he was there, sitting on her sofa. He wouldn’t leave.

How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?

Two. And granted, she’d poured them with a heavy hand, but … two.

I had to look away from her. Talk, instead, to my fidgeting hands in my lap. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, Muriel. Look, should I have gone into her apartment? Started drinking with her? No. I admit it was a stupid thing to do. Was I an idiot not to get the hell out of there when she started coming on to me? Hell, yeah. Look her in the eye, I told myself. Say it right to her face. But I’m telling you, Muriel, she came on to me, and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying. It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.

And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.

Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.

Yeah. Much better, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working. The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell …

Don’t! I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid or his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here …

Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? …

Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “staycations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo … Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it. At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”

“And what thing was that?”

“He … molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”

“And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”

“It went on over a couple of years. Until he got caught.”

“And how old is his victim?”

“My granddaughter? She’s eleven. It started when she was eight. But anyway, I write to him, okay? Try to be supportive. But whenever I start one of those letters, I think about what he did and it fills me with rage.”

“Well, that’s an appropriate response. But why in the world would you write him sympathetic letters?”

“Because he’s my son. I love him in spite of—”

“And that’s an inappropriate response. Personally, I think convicted pedophiles should get the death penalty. If my son did what your son did, he’d be dead to me.”

Jesus, the poor guy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Show him a little compassion, will you?

“Yeah, but the thing is—”

“The thing, sir, is that your son did something so vile, so despicable, that it’s unforgivable. You should be focusing your energies on helping your granddaughter, not your piece-of-crap son. Stop being a weenie. He’s earned what he’s getting in there.”

Well, there’s a counseling style for you: bludgeon the patient. I reach over and change the station. But what she’s just told that guy—that he should reject his son—ricochets inside my head and transports me back to that drab, joyless room on the third floor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where my mother lay dying. Where, three or four days before she passed, she and I finally touched on the untouchable subject of Francis Oh, the father who had denied my existence. When I was a kid, from time to time I had asked Mom about him, but she’d told me almost nothing. Had gotten huffy whenever I inquired. How could she tell me what she didn’t know? she’d say. And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I had grown to hate the mysterious Francis Oh. Had decided he wasn’t the only one who could play the rejection game. “Fuck you,” I’d tell him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror—borrowing my own face because I had no idea what his looked like. It was around that time that my friend Brian and I went to the movies to see that movie The Manchurian Candidate. I had sat there squirming, I remember. Imagining that every one of those Chinese brainwashers in Frank Sinatra’s flashbacks was Francis Oh. It had freaked me out to the point that I got up, ran up the aisle and out to the men’s room, and puked up my popcorn and soda. By the time I went back in, I had missed a good fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. “You okay?” Brian whispered. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” I had snapped back. A few days later, I hit upon the idea of being rid of my Chinese surname. I would take my mother’s and my grandparents’ name instead—become Orion Valerio instead of Orion Oh. Rather than telling my mother, I walked down to city hall one day after school and asked in some office about how to do it. But the process was complicated and costly, and I gave up on the idea. Instead, whenever anyone asked about him, I’d say my father died. Had gotten killed in a car accident when my mother was pregnant. I liked telling people that. Killing off the father who wanted no part of me. After a while, I almost came to believe my own lie.

But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been …

She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”

She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office wouldn’t give me an address. She was sympathetic after I began to cry. I had started showing a little by then, and I’m sure she put two and two together. But she stuck to her guns. And so I surrendered to the inevitable. Went home and confessed to Mama and Papa.” The following Saturday, her father drove her to the Saint Catherine of Siena Home for Unwed Mothers, she says, and she spent the remainder of her pregnancy there. Got her high school diploma but had to miss her graduation. “The sisters tried for months to convince me to do what most of the other girls agreed to: hand the baby over to Catholic Charities so that some nice childless couple who had prayed for a baby could adopt you. They accused me of being selfish, but I just kept shaking my head. I wanted to keep you and raise you and that was that.”

She’s flagging, I can see. Exhausted and upset. Should I stop quizzing her? While I’m trying to decide, a nurse enters. “Sorry to interrupt, Maria, but it’s time for your breathing treatment,” she says. Mom nods, gives her a wan smile, and opens her mouth. While Mom is puffing away on the device, I stand. Go over to the window and look out on the parking lot. But what she’s told me has opened up more questions, and when the treatment is over and the nurse leaves, I sit back down again. Take her hand in mine. I remind her about that time we went up to Boston—to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant. “How did you know where to find his father?” I ask her.

“Well, Francis was a smoker,” she says. “Always lit his Viceroys with books of matches that said HENRY OH’S CHINA PARADISE on the cover. During one of the times we were at the motel where he used to take me, I slipped one of those matchbooks in my purse as a souvenir of our love. Like I said, Orion, I was naïve back then. I thought sex and love were one and the same.”

She’d gone to Henry Oh’s China Paradise once before, she says, when she was six or seven months pregnant. “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” …

A look of exasperation had crossed her face when she said that—one I recognized. She had had that same look the day we’d walked up the stairs to Henry Oh’s China Paradise so that she could present me to my grandfather as proof of my existence. Proof that, since his son had not done the right thing by me, the obligation fell on him. He needed to help finance the college education of the boy who, whether my grandfather was happy about it or not, carried his family name. Henry Oh, Francis Oh, Orion Oh: we were linked. He was duty bound. And so I practically had had to run after her that day as she exited the restaurant, her head held high, her hand clutching the check that would allow me to attend Boston University. Mom had been fierce that day, victorious. And even at seventeen, when I was still so ignorant about life and love and the repercussions of sex, I somehow knew that, whatever it had just cost her to get that money, she had done it out of a ferocious, almost feral love for the son she had refused to hand over to adoptive parents. And so—

Jesus god, there it goes again. Love shack, baby, love shack … And suddenly I realize who must be calling me. Annie. It’s two days past when I was supposed to RSVP. Well, if she wants to find out if I’m going to her big gay wedding, she can go to hell because—

OH! JESUS!

Shit, that was close. If I hadn’t just pulled out of my fog and slammed on the brakes, I would have rear-ended that Subaru. That’s all I need right about now: an accident that would have been my fault. My heart’s racing, my palms have broken out in a sweat. Refocus. You want to get there in one piece, don’t you? With my eyes on the road, I feel for the radio knob and twist it counterclockwise. Return to the Mad Hatter and the shark lady.

“Okay then, Doc, so let’s say Jaws comes upon a pod of seals that are chillin’ in the waters off of Chatham. What’s his M.O.?”

“Well, first of all, ‘he’ is likely to be a she. Female great whites tend to be larger and more dominant than males. And as to the shark’s ‘M.O.,’ as you put it, great whites are ambush hunters. So what they do is identify a target and then ram it hard and fast, most likely from beneath because the underbelly is what’s most vulnerable.”

The Mad Hatter snorts. “That’s where we’re all most vulnerable. Right, guys? Under our bellies and above our knees?” An ah-ooga horn sounds, but the shark lady soldiers on.

“Once a shark takes hold, it whips its head from side to side, the better to tear open a large chunk of flesh. That exposes the organs and entrails, which will be ingested as quickly as possible. From what we’ve observed, great whites may travel in small clans, but when they’re on the hunt, they separate.”

“Every shark for himself, right?”

“That’s right. Or herself.”

Sharks. Ambush hunters. Viveca Christophoulos-Shabbas …

Annie met Viveca through her art. She’d had a piece selected for that Whitney Biennial, and at the opening Viveca approached her about exhibiting at her by-appointment-only gallery in Chelsea. But in fairness, I guess I’d started losing my wife to her art long before Lady Bountiful came into the picture …

It was strange how Annie’s career had come about. She couldn’t even say why, not long after our twins were born, she’d begun collecting odds and ends from junk stores, swap shops, and the curbside recycling boxes she passed while out for walks with Andrew and Ariane in their side-by-side stroller. She’d not understood it, that is, until she began creating those found-art shadow boxes. She had had no training as an artist. Something just compelled her to make them, she told me, but she was reluctant to explore with me the nature of that impulse. “Orion, I’m your wife, not one of your patients,” she reminded me once when I tried to tease out her motivation. She made it clear that this was her thing. No trespassing.

Her first pieces were humorous, or so I thought: The Dancing Scissors, The Jell-O Chronicles. One Saturday, I remember, she requested a “mental health” afternoon. The twins had been sick, and except for trips to the pediatrician’s and the pharmacy, Annie had been stuck in the house all week with cranky kids. Could I stay with them for a few hours while she went to a movie, maybe, or down to the mall? I got her coat, gave her a little swat on the rear, and said, “Go.” But by the time she got back home, it was after 8:00 P.M. This was the mid-1980s, before cell phones became ubiquitous; if someone didn’t bother to call in, you stared at the phone, waiting and worrying. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded when she came through the door that night. But she was so jubilant, so energized, that she hardly noticed my day’s worth of aggravation and worry. She had driven to Waterford, she said, intending to go to the Crystal Mall. Instead, spur of the moment, she’d hopped onto I-95 South. En route to no place in particular, she decided to get off at random exits and hunt for whatever awaited her at the dumps and secondhand shops of different shoreline towns. And it had been so worth it! She’d picked up treasures at each: a bolt of lace, a bundle of 1940s movie magazines, some wooden soda crates, a canvas bag brimming with hand puppets. Passing a billboard advertising a going-out-of-business sale at a job lot store in New Rochelle, she’d made a snap decision, signaled, and exited.

“New Rochelle?” I said. “You drove all the way into New York?”

Thank God she had, she said, because she’d struck pay dirt at that Dollar Days. Her purchases included two large bags of deeply discounted miscellany, including a twenty-four-piece box of plastic British Royal Family figurines.

I began complaining about my day with the twins—how Andrew had kept making spit bubbles with his amoxicillin instead of just swallowing it. How Ariane had toddled over to the dirty diaper pail, climbed on, and tipped it over while I was at the door with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—and how mopping up the mess, wet-vacing and disinfecting their bedroom carpet, had taken me the better part of an hour. From now on, we were buying Pampers, I told her. I didn’t care how much they cost. I was hoping to generate a little … what? Sympathy? Remorse, maybe? But Annie just sat there, sifting through her stuff, barely listening. And when I stopped talking, she went into the twins’ room, kissed their foreheads, and then, grabbing her new “treasures,” raced down to the studio I’d fixed up for her in the space between the washer and dryer and the furnace. She was down there for the rest of that night.

What had come over her? Was it OCD—some kind of hoarding disorder, maybe? Some sort of anxiety related to motherhood? If so, she could be treated. We could get her an antidepressant or a tranquilizer to take the edge off a little. But Annie wasn’t accumulating stuff solely for the sake of accumulating it. She was making art out of it, so maybe I should back off. Give her the benefit of the doubt … But could you even call it art? Like I said, it wasn’t like she’d had any formal training. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never even taken an art course in high school. Had never even finished high school. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the tough childhood she’d had. Annie’s childhood: that’s always been another “no trespassing” zone. I know the basics. She lost her mother when she was five years old. Her father had gone off the rails as a result and she’d bounced around in foster care. But Annie’s always skirted the details of her early life. Waiting here in stalled traffic, I can’t help but wonder: has she been more forthcoming with Viveca about her childhood? What does Viveca know?

A cruiser passes me on the shoulder, its lights flashing, its siren not wailing but making loud little belches. There must be an accident up ahead, which would explain why we’ve now almost come to a complete stop. Oh man, I haven’t even gotten as far as Sandwich yet. I’ll be lucky if I get to that rental place before they close for the day—or maybe even for the weekend. And what do I do if I can’t pick up the key to Viveca’s cottage? Break into the place? Start looking for motel “vacancy” signs? And now, adding insult to injury, this little jerk in the Ford Focus has his blinker on and he’s trying to squeeze in between me and the Subaru. Smart move, buddy. Nothing like lane-changing when both lanes are crawling along at about half a mile an hour. Atta boy. Nose right in. Be my guest, you little shit. When did you get your driver’s license? Yesterday? He’s talking a blue streak to his girlfriend, oblivious that his directional signal’s still blinking. To my right is one of those big-ass campers that must get about five or six miles to the gallon. A warning sprawls across the RV’s left side: MAKE WAY FOR MEAN DARLENE! A plump white-haired couple sits up front, eating a snack out of a paper bag. Microwave popcorn, maybe? Their jaws are moving in synch. When I was stuck behind them a quarter of a mile ago, I read their back bumper stickers: LET FREEDOM RING! and DON’T BLAME ME! I VOTED FOR THE HERO AND THE HOTTIE.

I honk at the kid in the Ford, and when he looks in his rearview mirror, I point down at his blinker. I can tell he doesn’t get it. Now the girlfriend turns around and looks at me, too. They both shake their heads as if I’ve offended them. On, off, on, off … Should I? Hey, why not? We’ve come to a stop. We’re all just sitting here. I put my Prius in park and get out, go up to his window and tap on it with my wedding ring. I hear the soft clunk of his car door locks. Jesus, what does he think I am? The traffic jam ax murderer?

“Yeah?”

“Your blinker’s on.”

“Is it?” He gives me this look like it’s his inalienable right to drive me crazy. But hey, I’m not about to get into a dustup about it with Junior here. I turn and head back to my car.

He’s a ballbuster, this kid. Lets about a minute go by before he finally turns it off. And when he does, it’s like the relief you feel when one of those ice cream headaches finally begins to subside. The radio’s playing that ominous music from Jaws. “Okay, but let’s separate fact from Hollywood fiction,” the shark lady’s saying. “These animals are carnivores, yes. But they’re not evil manhunters. They hunt and eat to survive, not to kill gratuitously. That better describes our species than theirs.”

“Natural Born Killers,” the Mad Hatter says. “Now there’s a great movie! Woody Harrelson and … Who was the girl? Natalie Portman, right?”

It was Juliette Lewis. One of the students I was seeing at the time—when had that movie come out? 1994? 95?—she kept mentioning how Juliette Lewis and she were half-sisters, and how they looked so much alike, and if I didn’t believe her, I should go see her sister’s new movie, Natural Born Killers. She’d seen it several times herself, she said—had been invited to attend the premiere but couldn’t afford the trip to California. Petra, her name was. She was a nice enough kid, high-strung but high functioning. In the honors program, if I remember correctly. But she was a sad kid who, I began to realize, had no friends. And when I did make a point of going to see the movie, I didn’t observe the slightest resemblance between the two. I eventually diagnosed her with Delusional Disorder, Mixed Type …

“No, seriously, Tracy. You should Netflix it this weekend,” the Mad Hatter advises. Not likely, Tracy says. Tomorrow, she’ll be part of an expedition that’s hoping to locate and tag one or more of the great whites for the purpose of tracking their migratory patterns …

Whatever it was that was compelling Annie to turn her landfill and secondhand shop finds into art, over the next years she created a series of assemblages she called Buckingham Palace Confidential. In Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! Prince Philip and the rest of the royal family sit stiffly at a doll house dinette set while, standing at a toy stove on which sits a blackened toy frying pan, the Queen, wearing a coronet and a polka dot apron, throws up her jointed arms in domestic defeat. In Lady Di Reconsiders, the Princess of Wales, in her famously familiar wedding gown, marries Magic Johnson instead of Charles. Johnson’s in his uniform, as are his ushers, the other members of the 1992 Olympic “dream team.” Diana’s attendants are female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Supergirl. The royal family is in attendance, too, but they’ve turned their backs to the ceremony. So it was art that was driving her, I decided—comic art at that, laced with a little feminist protest. But not dysfunction … And yet, those weird scavenger hunts she was doing on the Saturdays when I was home with the kids? Whenever she came back with a good haul, she’d be wide-eyed, jazzed up, talking a blue streak and fast. What was that? Creative passion? Some kind of mania? I remember worrying that she might be starting to manifest bipolar disorder. But whatever Annie’s behavior did or didn’t indicate, I tried hard to play by her rules, encouraging her without engaging her as to why she was hunting down all this stuff, or what these 3-D collages she was making meant. But not engaging her didn’t mean I wasn’t watching her—trying to understand what was going on with her. Look, she was right: she was my wife, not my patient. I tried not to analyze her, but hey. Bottom line: I was worried about her. I’m a psychologist. I observe, make hypotheses. It’s what we do.

No. Correction: I was a psychologist. When my license came up for renewal last month, I let the date go by. I go back and forth about whether I should have. But what’s done is done …

It was hard for Annie back then, I know. As the house-bound wife of a busy professional, she carried most of the burden of child care, cleaning, budgeting. She had to grab a little time here and there to work on her art. When I was down there in Pennsylvania with my mother, she hired some older woman to babysit a couple hours a day, and I applauded her for that. Told her it was a good idea. But that turned out to be a fiasco when the sitter forgot to lock the basement door and Andrew tumbled halfway down the stairs. Annie’d had to take him to the emergency room for stitches in his forehead and be grilled by the ER doc as if she were a child abuse suspect. She decided it wasn’t worth it. Told the sitter not to come back. And when I got back, mentioned casually that Thea had come to the funeral, Annie’d reacted like a crazy woman. Like some spark between my ex-girlfriend and me had been reignited when the opposite was true. Seeing Thea again had been like a refresher course in why I’d ended it with her.

I’d have liked to help her out more, but the domestic imbalance was unavoidable. Counseling Services was understaffed, we clinicians seriously overworked. Students who wanted to see one of us had to put their names on a list and then wait for an appointment, sometimes as long as two or three weeks. Besides our caseloads, we counselors supervised the clinical practicums of the predoctoral students, got saddled with committee work, ran groups. In addition to all that, it fell on us to plan and implement Suicide Awareness Week, HIV Prevention Week, Alcohol Awareness Week, and so on. Most weekdays, I left for work before 7:00 A.M.—early morning was the best time to catch up on paperwork—and didn’t get home most nights until six or after. On the weekends, I could help out more. Take the twins to the park, fix a cabinet door or rake leaves, make a Saturday night supper while she went off to scavenge. Saturday was our night for sex, too—a standing appointment unless one or both of the twins was up, or one of us was too exhausted for intimacy. Sometimes an extra hour of sleep seemed sexier than having sex. But weekdays? Forget it. I’d get home and my dinner would be sitting Saran-wrapped on top of the microwave, the twins would be asleep in their cribs, and Annie would be down there, creating her 3-D collages amid the basement noises, one ear cocked toward the baby monitor upstairs …

Okay, here we go. The traffic’s finally started to move again. Passing that camper, I put on my directional signal and jockey myself in front of them. Let Mr. and Mrs. Big-Ass Camper stare at my bumper stickers: DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC, TOO and OBAMA/BIDEN ’08 …

Annie had been creating in basement obscurity for three or four years when I urged her to take a risk and exhibit her Buckingham Palace Confidential assemblages at the annual outdoor art show in Mystic. At first she resisted the idea, arguing that her kind of work wasn’t what those big summertime crowds would be interested in. But I kept nudging her until, reluctantly, she changed her mind and reserved herself a space. All that weekend, people paused, smiled, and snickered at Annie’s creations and then moved on to the “real” art: fruit in a bowl, seascapes. She had priced her pieces modestly—fifty dollars for the smaller assemblages, a hundred for the larger and more elaborate ones. She sold nothing. But to the surprise of many—and to the disgruntlement of the Mystic Art Association’s watercolorists and lighthouse painters—the judge awarded the Best in Show ribbon to Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! What was that guy’s name? The judge? He’d been something of a big-deal artist himself back in the day, I remember Annie telling me. Italian guy, little pencil-thin mustache. He and Annie stayed in touch after she got that Best in Show. He must be dead by now—he was already up there back then—but I bet he’d be pleased to know where Annie’s art has taken her.

Along with the five-hundred-dollar prize money Annie got from the Mystic show, she was offered a one-woman show at the Hygienic Restaurant in New London. The Hygienic had long since stopped serving food, but it had become a kind of retro coffee house—a haven for poets, interpretive dancers, klezmer bands—alternative artists of all kinds, and their equally alternative admirers. Until Annie’s opening, I had never seen such a convergence of pierced, tattooed, and purple-haired people. Annie looked adorable that night in her floral dress and purple leggings, that big bow in her hair. “Oh, thank you so much … You do? Really? Oh, my God,” she’d respond to those who approached her to say that they loved her work or wanted to buy it. I was so proud of her that night—so happy to see her on the receiving end of some artistic appreciation, and almost four hundred dollars in sales. I knew more about psychology than I did about art, but I was becoming convinced that Annie was more talented than she or I had realized.

Her modesty about her accomplishments and her natural shyness were a big part of her charm that night at the Hygienic. Annie’s brother Donald and his wife Mimsy had taken the twins for the night—their first sleepover. I’d snuck a bottle of champagne and a half-dozen chocolate-covered strawberries in the fridge before Annie and I left for the opening, and when we got home, we got into bed, drank, ate, and made love. “Good god, I’m crazy about you,” I declared after we were both spent and sweaty. “Love you, too,” she murmured back. If you had told me that night that, two decades later, Annie would leave me for a woman, I would have thought you were crazy … Agnello: that was that judge’s name. Mr. Agnello … Had there been signs all along that she might be bisexual? Cues that I’d missed right from the beginning? …

Annie’s Hygienic show caught the interest of a Connecticut magazine features writer who drove out to our house and interviewed Annie about her work. She’d brought along a photographer, so there was a photo shoot, too. I was happy for Annie. One door kept opening onto another door, and she deserved that. And I guess this was crass of me, but the fact that people had actually begun paying her for her work somehow, in my mind, legitimized her efforts. This was a career, not an emotional disorder. I should stop playing psych detective and just relax. Celebrate her accomplishments instead of stewing about her creative process. She worked so hard and with such dedication down there in our basement, to the soundtrack of the furnace’s drone and the washing machine’s agitation. Good for her!

But until that Connecticut magazine article came out, I hadn’t realized the extent to which agitation fueled Annie’s art. Eventually it dawned on me that her “no trespassing” rule had been my escape hatch, too. I’d been allowed the luxury of assuming that The Dancing Scissors, The Cowgirls’ Revolt, and Buckingham Palace Confidential were playful. Satirical. Proof that my intense and sometimes morose wife had a lighter side, too. But in “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” the writer said that my wife’s compositions emerged from “the blast furnace of her pent-up rage.” That they were “howls of protest against a suffocating middle-class domesticity” and the many ways in which society “tethers women to the mundane.” The mundane? Had Annie been referring to Rice-A-Roni or me? Was Diana’s rejection of Charles in favor of Magic Johnson metaphorical? The UPS driver who made deliveries to our house was a good-looking young black guy. Reggie, his name was. Someone she knew from way back, she said. Twice I’d gotten home from work a little early and found the two of them chatting at the front door. I couldn’t quite imagine that she’d cheat on me, but was I being naïve? The scientist in me advised objectivity, but the husband in me had just been put on alert.

“Good article, don’t you think?” I said, when I looked up from Connecticut magazine to her. I was hoping she’d say she’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. Instead, she said, “Pretty good. It’s weird to see yourself in a magazine, though. I feel … exposed, I guess.”

“Well, isn’t that what artists want? Exposure?”

She shrugged.

“Good picture of you.”

She made a face. “I wish my hair didn’t look so flat,” she said. “I can’t believe that, on the one day I was having my picture taken for a magazine, our hair dryer died.”

“Yeah, well … It’s interesting what it says about your work.”

No response.

“I mean, who knew you were so angry?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Orion. Maybe someone who was bothering to pay attention.” She walked out of the room.

I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, got up, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. For a minute or more, I watched her yank towels out of the washing machine and slam them into the dryer. “You know something?” I said. “I don’t exactly appreciate you projecting your own marital shortcomings onto me.”

She turned and faced me, furious. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Speak English, not psychology.”

“Okay. Sure. Somebody in this marriage hasn’t been paying much attention to the other person, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”

“Oh, right. You’re just the perfect husband, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m the imperfect husband. But I think you’ve got it ass-backward as far as who’s been ignoring who.”

“Oh, really? Gee, Dr. Oh, I’m so sorry for ‘projecting,’ as you put it. And for having a career of my own.”

It was April. I had just done our taxes. “Yeah, speaking of careers, you know how much I contributed to our income this past year? Sixty-two grand. And you know how much you made? A whopping seven hundred dollars. So I think you’d better thank your lucky stars instead of bitching about my career.”

“Oh, you’re right as usual, Dr. Oh. Thanks so much for throwing that in my face and helping me see the light.” And with that, she lifted the lid of our top-loading washing machine and slammed it down. Lifted it again and slammed it. Lifted, slammed. Thanks in part to “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” we had just entered the thrust-and-parry phase of our marriage.

Over the next several days, each of us accused the other of myriad slights and failures, large and small. The fighting exhausted us both, and our lives were already pretty exhausting. She began giving me the single-syllable treatment. “Good day today?” “Yup.” “Want to get a sitter this weekend? Go see a movie or something?” “Nah.” In the midst of that uneasy near-silence, I reread that Connecticut magazine article and came upon a couple of paragraphs I’d missed the first time. She’d told the reporter that, once upon a time, another artist had lived on the grounds of the house where we lived—a black laborer who’d taken up painting—and that she’d discovered one of his “compositions” that had been left behind. I knew the one she was talking about: a crazy-looking circus scene we’d found when we were cleaning out the attic. To my mind, it was strictly amateur, not to mention a little freaky-looking, and I’d wanted to throw it out along with the other junk up there. But Annie had said not to. It had “spoken to her,” she told that reporter, which was news to me, and when she set up her studio in the basement, she’d brought it down there for inspiration. (Oh, she’d set up that work space? So much for the work I’d done for her down there.) In the article, she said she might even have “seen” this would-be artist, who was long dead by the time we moved in. Had seen him twice, in fact. Once out back in the yard—a big, muscular guy in overalls looking up at her as she stood at one of the upstairs windows—and another time down in her studio. Both times, she said, he’d looked right at her, nodded, and then faded away. It hadn’t scared her to see him, she said; it had reassured her. Oh great, I remember thinking. Now she was seeing ghosts? Then how come I’d never heard about this? No, I figured, she wasn’t seeing people that weren’t there, except maybe in a dream she’d had. More likely, she had told the writer that because, hey, who doesn’t love a good ghost story? It wasn’t like Annie to fabricate stuff like that, but since she’d become an artist, she’d exhibited all kinds of new behaviors. And so I didn’t challenge her on it. “Annie Oh’s Angry Art” had already caused problems for us. I let it drop.

I finally got us a referral to a marriage counselor, despite Annie’s suspicion that the deck would be stacked in my favor because she’d be the only person in the room who wasn’t a therapist. I hired us a sitter for Tuesday evenings. (Katie had been my student coordinator for Date Rape Awareness Week.) And so for the next several weeks, Annie and I drove to Glastonbury to see Suzanne in her office full of philodendrons and ferns and hand-thrown clay pots that she had made, glazed, and fired in her wood-stoked kiln. She gave us one of those pots at the end of our first session—an imperfect one. A piece had broken off and been glued back on. “My point is this,” Suzanne said, passing her finger over the crack. “This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.”

“How was tango class tonight?” Katie would ask when we returned home from our marriage counseling sessions. I’d invented our tango lessons so that I didn’t have to tell her we were trying to fix our marriage.

“Great. How were the kids?”

“Super good! They’re such cuties. And you know, I think it’s super cool that you guys are learning the tango. I wish my parents weren’t such fuddy-duddies about stuff like that. Get out of their comfort zone? Forget it. They’d rather just sit there watching TV.”

Whether or not we were doing the tango up there in Glastonbury, we were definitely out of our comfort zone. But it was worth it. We did repair things. For quite a while, actually. Becoming less accusatory of each other lessened the tension. We practiced better teamwork with the twins and the house stuff, better listening skills, worked on more open communication. Hey, I’m a psychologist; it’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of these strategies. But knowing how to advise others in dealing with their shit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to tackle your own without having to check in with a third party once a week. And besides, my patients range in age from eighteen to about twenty-one, twenty-two. Their relationships are more about managing the drama than maintaining a marriage. Suzanne likened the latter to servicing a car you love and want to last. Listen to the engine, rotate the tires, check the oil. Things got better for us intimacy-wise, too. I became more patient. She became more communicative about what she wanted. She had more orgasms than she’d ever had before, and damn if I didn’t enjoy giving them to her … I mean, it wasn’t happily ever after, not by any stretch. She was still distant sometimes, both in our bed and out of it, and I still overdid it sometimes, work schedule-wise. But it definitely got better. Our “tango lessons” went from once a week to once a month, and then to once every three months. Marriage as car maintenance: I was a little put off by the metaphor at first, but as it turned out, Suzanne knew her stuff. Things were much better for Annie and me. And then she got pregnant again and they weren’t …

“Their skin is covered with small toothlike scales, so they’d be virtually unaware that they’re being embedded,” Dr. Skelly is telling the Mad Hatter. “These tags use satellite technology, so that lets us—”

“Like a GPS system?” the Mad Hatter asks.

“Uh-huh. Pretty much. If we get lucky and the tags stay embedded, we should be able to track the animals’ migratory behavior. Which would be fantastic! In other parts of the world, great whites have been tracked successfully, so there’s a good deal known about their migration patterns. But that’s not the case here in the northern Atlantic. Great whites in these waters have always been a bit of a mystery.”

“Well, Dr. Tracy Skelly, thanks for a fascinating discussion. And good luck tracking those great whites. Time once again to check on news, weather, and traffic. But stay tuned, fellas, because when we … two of the self-described ‘guidettes’ who will … in MTV’s latest … Jersey Shore, debuting next …” Mercifully, the Mad Hatter is finally fading away.