The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez

Author:Sigrid Nunez [Nunez, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

He was kind. He took the pen and the piece of paper I slid across his table without looking up. The other two men looked patiently on. He handed the piece of paper back. Of course, I recognized it.

Love, Mick XXX.

Part Three

Solange, who suffered agonies of guilt over being “such a terrible burden,” liked to remind me that had it not been for her, I would never have met my first husband, who was working at one of the hospitals where she was a patient. In fact, we all used to say that I had married Jeremy because, given Solange’s situation, we needed a psychiatrist in the family. We were joking, of course. But when Jeremy and I were getting divorced, he took to saying it often, unjoking, until it became “the only reason you married me.” And in that extreme moment, when I was having such a hard time remembering why on earth I had married a man with whom I had nothing in common, who was not really my type, and who was so obviously incapable of making me (or, as I sometimes insisted, any woman) happy, I quit arguing and accepted the possibility that this ridiculous reason had been there all along. After all, I certainly was desperate when I became engaged to Jeremy. Solange was at her worst then, and I had never felt more overburdened and in need of help. And, as will become clear, I had other reasons for feeling wretched.

Look at me: married and divorced in the same paragraph—dispensed with Husband One in a few lines! And yet we were together for five years. He is the father of my daughter. In the way of many exes, he has come to hold but a small place in my thoughts. I almost never remember Jeremy, and were it not for Zoe I might know nothing about him today. For the sake of nostalgia, I bring to the surface one magical week in Rome, my shameless pride in his medical degree, and the sweetness of shared joy as we fussed together over our newborn.

I will add that in fact Jeremy never was much help with Solange. She is not my patient, he would say. I cannot make decisions as if I were her doctor just because I happen to be a relative. Not that he was much help as a relative, either. Over the years Solange has had many doctors, some good, some bad, but the only relative she has had throughout this ordeal has been me. She has had many kinds of therapy, from analysis to electroconvulsive treatments (the latter at least temporarily effective, the former not at all), and though we cannot know for sure, it seems the worst may be behind us. As I write this, Solange has gone almost ten years without needing to be hospitalized (before that, it was at least once every two years), and for this we give thanks to a certain Dr. Well (nice name for a doctor) and increasingly effective drugs.

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