The Seven Year Bitch Read online

  “I love you,” Russell said.

  By way of afterglow he brought me a wad of toilet paper and something new: a glass of water.

  “What do you think Shasthi is going to think of the water cooler?” Russell asked.

  “I was just thinking how excited I am to show it to her tomorrow,” I said.

  “I think she’s really going to love it.”

  And then I was too tired to speak.

  The next morning when Shasthi came we showed her the Poland Spring water cooler.

  “Isn’t it great?” I said.

  “Yes, it’s so much better. I have one at home,” she said.

  Russell and I looked at each other in shock. She’d heard us complaining about wasting money on water and she hadn’t mentioned anything. Why hadn’t she spoken up about it? I wondered. She’d left our apartment night after night with its refrigerator full and countertops covered with a small fortune of half-empty bottles of water and she’d smugly returned home to her state-of-the-art water cooler. Maybe I was wrong to help her get pregnant and think about doing things like getting her a cell phone when she wasn’t concerned about me whatsoever.

  Or maybe she just didn’t think it was her place to say anything. I hated the thought of her thinking something like that but maybe it was true. Or maybe what she thought we wasted money on was so vast a list, the water was just a drop in the bucket so to speak. When I was pregnant our doorman had once said to me, “Can I ask you a question? Why do you live here? You could live in a whole house in Westchester for the money you spend for your place.”

  “I could own a whole village in Africa,” I had said, stupidly.

  “But Westchester is just a few stops on the train,” he had said.

  Every time I paid my maintenance, I thought of that conversation.

  “Well we love it,” Russell said, still praising the water cooler.

  I wondered if Shasthi and her husband had made love when they’d gotten theirs.

  13

  This is it,” Russell said, stopping in front of an old door in a cast-iron loft building. We were buzzed in and walked up the three steep flights of stairs to our new shrink’s office. I always hated the way Russell walked up stairs, with his body bent completely over. The man had no core strength whatsoever.

  Corinne, the new shrink who had been recommended by my mother’s shrink, was standing at her door watching us. She had limp curly hair the color of cream of tomato soup and seemed to be wearing some kind of baggy pajamas.

  “Take off your shoes,” she said.

  Russell and I were both wearing two different socks.

  We followed her through the vast loft to the living room area and she directed us to sit on a lumpy old couch that was covered with a blanket. Questionable upholstery was one of my biggest fears for some reason. I never went to those cafés with strange assorted chairs and couches everywhere. I wasn’t one of those people who was phobic about germs, but the idea of sinking into a couch that ten thousand other New Yorkers had sunk into before me didn’t appeal to me at all.

  I sat on one end of the couch and Russell sat as far away from me as he could while still being on the same couch.

  Corinne sat facing us in an armchair covered in a mid-century print, its white stuffing leaking from every seam. Behind her was a ladder that led to a sleeping loft with a neatly made platform bed.

  “Do you live here?” Russell asked, although we both knew the answer.

  “I do,” she said. “I had an office, and I started to ask myself why I was paying all that rent.”

  So we wouldn’t have to see you in your pajamas with your cat on your lap, I wanted to tell her.

  I waited for her to ask if it bothered us that she worked out of her apartment but the question didn’t come.

  “What brings you to therapy today?” she asked instead.

  Russell gave some long-winded answer that included use of the word dovetail. “Your schedule seemed to dovetail quite nicely with our needs at that moment. . . .” I looked at the beautiful worn kilim on the floor with its vibrant blue center and almost ugly brown border. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The blue was made more beautiful by the brown. If I had a rug like that my life would be better, I thought.

  Everywhere in the loft were interesting antiques, run-down and shabby but pleasing. Lamps, armoires, divans, desks. On the surfaces were all things I suddenly felt I needed—just the claw feet from a claw-foot tub or a green glass bud vase. She had a good eye, I thought, something I envied in certain people. If I’d had all those things they’d look like junk and I’d end up taking them all out to the garbage room.

  The walls were hung with framed disturbed-looking children’s art where diplomas might have been. There wasn’t even a single book.

  I heard Russell say the word dovetail for the second time. I could go my whole lifetime without saying the word dovetail and Russell couldn’t go a whole conversation without it.

  I thought about how Russell might look good in someone else’s apartment, but I just wanted to take him out to the garbage room.

  After therapy we were supposed to go to my friend’s apartment to pay a shivah call. Her husband had died after a five-year battle with ALS. I was dreading it, seeing my friend’s grief, seeing his mother there at the shivah of her son.

  I started to think of what I would say to Russell’s mother if he died.

  “Well, now that Russell’s dead I guess I never have to see you again, Ginny.”

  “You never loved my son.”

  “It’s really none of your business who I loved. He hated you and so do I. Now get out.”

  “So how would you describe the tone of your relationship?” Corinne asked.

  “We fight all the time.”

  “Not all the time,” Russell said.

  “Yes, all the time,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  We argued about how much we argued for several minutes.

  “Would you say you’re arguing now?” Corinne asked.

  “No,” Russell said.

  “I think you are arguing,” Corinne said.

  This gave us pause. It was almost as if there was nothing else to argue about for a moment. “Well, I guess you win,” Russell said to me bitterly.

  “I always do,” I said.

  “Not always.”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “No, not always.”

  “Yes. Always. Always. Always.”

  “What do you usually argue about?” Corinne asked.

  “I want Russell to be a man,” I said.

  “And what does that mean, to be a man?” she asked.

  “You know what it means,” I said.

  “No, I really don’t. If someone told me to be a woman I wouldn’t know what that meant either.”

  I told her how I had worked on the stroller for an hour before calling Rashid up to fix it and how the baby had crouched on the floor next to Rashid carefully holding Rashid’s flashlight and screwdriver in his tiny hands.

  “So being a man means fixing the stroller,” she said.

  I just stared at her, too emotional from my story to speak.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “So you have a son?”

  “Do you have any children?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “You’re lucky,” Russell said.

  “Why am I lucky?” Corinne asked.

  “He always says that,” I said.

  “I’ve never been married and I don’t have any children.” Whatever small hope I had that she could help us leaked out of me like her chair’s stuffing. I was starting to wonder if there were any married marriage counselors in New York. “Is that important to you?”

  I shrugged unconvincingly.

  “Sometimes my married clients feel it’s helpful that I can offer the single person’s perspective.”

  I had to admit this seemed almost appealing, the single person’s perspective. S
he could remind me how miserable it was to be single and how Russell dovetailed with my need to be married.

  “You can remind me how good it feels to sleep in your own bed,” I said. I tried not to look at her actual bed as I said it.

  “Oh I wouldn’t know about that,” Corinne said. “There’s always a cat on my legs or on my pillow nudging me to lift up the covers.”

  Russell and I just stared in dumbfounded silence.

  “So you argue a lot. Is there anything you agree on?” Corinne asked.

  “Well . . . we just got a new Poland Spring water cooler. We’re trying to do positive things for our marriage,” Russell said. Then he suddenly let out a loud burp. For a minute I thought I was sitting next to the water cooler.

  “Russell!” I said, as if I were saying “Duncan!” But Duncan at sixteen months would have known it was funny or different to let out a burp like that in couples therapy. Russell just sat there with absolutely no idea what he had done wrong.

  “What?” he said.

  “You just burped. God!” I said. At least, I thought, the giant jug head of the water dispenser was filled with water. Russell’s was just filled with air.

  “Who cares?” Russell said.

  “I do,” I said. “And he doesn’t even have the awareness that he’s done it,” I implored Corinne.

  “You do seem a little out of it, Russell,” Corinne said.

  “A little!” I said. I started to shake with tears as Russell leaned all the way over from his side of the couch and pulled tissues from the box for me. “Jesus, I’m sorry I burped,” Russell said.

  We spent the rest of the session arguing about how Russell forced me to become his mother.

  I started to fantasize about Russell’s shivah again. I would say to his mother what she said to me when I’d had my miscarriage: “Oh weh-ell.”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “Oh weh-ell.”

  “It’s not natural for a mother to have to bury her son.”

  “It’s not natural for a mother not to pay for the food and drinks. Why don’t you just get out of my house. No one wants you here.”

  “I want a divorce,” I said. I hadn’t planned to say it, but thinking of Russell’s mother made me do it.

  “Okay,” Corinne said. “Russell?”

  “What?” Russell said like a fool. “I know she wants a divorce because her friend Joy got a divorce. But I’m not giving her a divorce. She can’t have one.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “We can’t afford one.”

  “Why do you think you want to get a divorce?”

  I was crying too hard to speak. I had been angry at Russell since the baby was born. Since the pregnancy, when he’d spent the whole nine months making sure everyone knew he wasn’t the one who wanted it. One man at Lamaze talked about how he had built a totem pole for his son’s room while Russell just talked about how he had never wanted children. “That man is building a totem pole for his baby’s room,” I had told Russell. “What a putz,” was all Russell had to say in return.

  “What does your son think about all this?” Corinne asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What does he have to say about all this fighting?”

  “Nothing!” I said. “He’s only sixteen months old.”

  “Oh, so he doesn’t talk about it?” She genuinely didn’t know the answer to this.

  “He doesn’t talk yet,” I said.

  “Yes he does,” Russell argued.

  “He says ‘cup,’” I said. “But he pronounces it ʽbup.’ And he says ʽup’ for up or down.”

  “He says ‘butterfly’ and ʽpenis,’” Russell said.

  “He says Mama.”

  “And Dada,” Russell interrupted.

  “He says ‘fuck,’” I said angrily.

  “So there seems to be a little competition going on here about who knows more about what your son says.”

  “He says ‘woof-woof’ and ʽEmpire State Building,’ ” Russell said, ignoring what Corinne had just said.

  He says “apple-apple” for pineapple, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

  “Well, Izzy, I think you have to start making a list of reasons why you want a divorce from Russell. Since you say you can’t get a divorce, we have to find ways to make your situation more livable.” What was it with these shrinks and their lists? I thought. “Because it seems the only thing you’re not arguing about these days is the fact that you can’t get a divorce. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to stop now.”

  I sat on the couch feeling a lot worse than I had forty-five minutes before. And because Russell had wasted all our time blathering and dovetailing and burping, the session had been useless.

  I wiped my eyes and threw the tissues in the antique red fire bucket Corinne had for a wastepaper basket.

  “What exactly are we supposed to achieve here?” I asked, too harshly.

  “Well, we’ll talk about that at our next session.”

  “I like your kilim,” I managed, putting my boots back on.

  “Which one? Oh yes, I found that one on Franklin Street. I go out walking early every morning, and I find great things on the street.”

  New York, I thought, was divided into people who found great things on the street and people who never did. In the past, whenever I found anything on the street and brought it home there was always gum on it or it reeked of dog piss and out it would go to the garbage room. I suddenly felt like going home and putting my clothes in the laundry hamper and taking a shower.

  “Where are you two going now? I often suggest that couples go out to lunch together after leaving here, sit and talk for a little while.”

  “We’re going to a shivah,” I said. It seemed fitting that while other couples clinked glasses at the nearby Odeon or Walker’s or Bubby’s, we had a shivah to go to.

  When we got to the shivah I started to cry. There was my friend Michelle looking blown apart as if she were made of the same dirt that was covering her husband. It felt wrong taking the elevator up to their loft because I knew they had just put in the elevator at huge expense to accommodate her husband’s wheelchair. It felt wrong putting my coat on his electric keyboard and using the new handicap bathroom with the hospital shower. Pushed against their austere wooden bed, which I had always found particularly romantic for some reason, was a metal hospital one. Everywhere you looked there was equipment.

  I had imagined Russell’s shivah a thousand times but never quite like this. It was so strange that Michelle would never see what her husband would look like old. She never even got to see him have gray hair. When you married someone you expected to get to see them with gray hair.

  I was the one there with a husband, yet I was jealous of Michelle’s grief, like a woman in Chanel couture jealous of another woman’s rags. Each tear seemed like something I would never have, like Harry Winston diamonds. I wanted to feel grief because I wanted to be sure I had felt love.

  I watched married couples linking arms. But suddenly the act of walking over to my husband and putting my hand in his seemed impossible. I could no sooner touch Russell than I could walk over and touch one of the other men there. He wasn’t mine in the same way he had once been. For just a moment, I longed to cling to him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was no way I could make this marriage work. I rushed back to that bed and sat on the edge of it crying for myself and for Duncan and for the second child I would never have. Then I went back out to the living room, crowded with mourners, to tell Russell we were really through.

  “What else do we agree on beside Poland Spring?” I asked instead as he ate a corned beef sandwich from a tray catered by Zabar’s like a wild pig.

  “Duncan,” he said. “We both love Duncan.”

  That isn’t enough, I thought.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “How can you say that after that therapy session?” I said. “You never do anything with Duncan. Most families sit
down to a family dinner. You eat at your desk every night. Or you take writers to dinner.”

  I watched a good-looking man across the room lovingly take the hand of his slightly pug-faced wife and stroke her wedding ring. Tears filled my eyes again.

  “I do things,” he said.

  “What do you do?” I asked. “You don’t know how to open the stroller. You took him to swimming once and lost his bathing suit and yours.”

  “I change him,” Russell said. “I change his diaper every day.”

  “So you change him,” I said.

  “I like to change him. I know you’re not going to believe me, but I love to be the one to change his diaper. I love the smell of his poop,” he said.

  “Really?” I said, astonished. I had never told him I felt the same way. “I love it too,” I said. “I want to dab it on my pulse points.”

  “I wish you would,” he said.

  Maybe that small thing was enough to hold us together, I thought.

  “So there,” Russell said, like Humphrey Bogart. “We’ll always have poop.” And the moment was ruined.

  14

  The next day Russell went on a business trip to a book fair in Jamaica, and I did an incredible thing—I rented my own locker at the gym. For $180 I had my own apartment in Manhattan, even if it was only one square foot. Virginia Woolf had never been more right! Number 205 belonged only to me.

  I just slammed my credit card down and said, “I’ll take it, but I have to be able to reach it. If I can’t reach it, I don’t want it, the deal’s off.”

  The man behind the desk said I had my choice of anything without a lock on it and I scoured the locker room until I found it, number 205, just above eye level and mine for the taking. I had a sixth sense for real estate. It might not have been a garret in Paris with skylights and a bidet, but at that moment it felt like one. It might not have been a Hamptons beach house, but it was to me. I slapped my lock on it.

  I called Joy in LA.

  “You wouldn’t have had to leave Harry if you’d gotten a locker,” I said.

  “A locker?” she said. “You mean like at the gym.”

  “That’s right!” I said. “I just rented my own locker. I’m telling you, you should have had a locker.”