Should You Leave? by Peter D. Kramer

Author:Peter D. Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

16

Unequivocal Eye

YOU DRESS PLAINLY and greet me quietly. You are unprepossessing. But as you enter my office, I am aware of a critical sensibility. You approve, I think, of the framed photographs on the walls, though you squint at one—you have seen it before and judge it prosaic. When you notice the computer, you back away, as if its presence here, in a room devoted to private encounters, were an affront. When you sit down, you are slow to speak. You need to take in the atmosphere.

In your soft voice, you say that it will be hard for you to tell your story. You have known almost from the start that there were problems in your marriage. Now that you have the chance, you are determined to get a little help in making up your mind about whether to stay on.

Your account is rich. There are many characters; you realize them deftly, with words or facial pantomime. You are a keen observer of your surroundings, and your presentation has a texture that a close reader, a psychoanalyst, could think about for hours. I try to stay tuned to detail, but since I will be called on shortly to advise, for the most part I am listening with the gain turned down, seeking out broad patterns.

• • •

You and Mark married just after high school and then moved from your hometown. No one you see now remembers you apart. It has always been Mark and Sandy. People run the words together, like warm and sunny or, lately, cool and cloudy.

You married because you were soul mates. In class, you were the kids who understood why Emily Dickinson’s work endures. You both agreed with the sentiment about it being dreary to be somebody. Alcohol, which obsessed your schoolmates, had no allure for you. You had seen enough of striving and fighting and drinking in your own families. You held yourselves apart from other kids. Sometimes they frightened you. It was not that anything anyone was likely to do could surprise you, but you had faced enough indignities, and you promised implicitly to protect each other from any more.

You have often since questioned whether shared sensibility—and now you see it more as shared hypersensitivity—is an adequate basis for marriage. Neither of you wanted to compete with others in the workplace. For the usual societal reasons, Mark had the more substantial career, and he resented both the stress of competition on the job and the pressures associated with being a breadwinner. He would come home feeling unappreciated.

Too early in childhood, you had responsibility for your brothers, and you never felt you could do right by them. So you panicked when Mark, who had also been relied on too young, leaned on you in his childish way. You lacked confidence you could make another person feel better. Merely to think of Mark heading home worn out and hungry for affection made your day seem black. When he walked through the door and saw you already drained, he would shrink away.

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