Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

But now thirty seconds had gone by and Helen hadn’t heard him say anything or even make some kind of immature, derisive sighing sound, as he usually did; and when she opened her eyes again and looked at him, what she saw, to her astonishment, was her husband wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I mean Jesus. I would love to see other people.”

Which could only be followed by a momentous silence; but since silence was anathema to Dr. Becket, on the grounds that silence might belong to anyone but vapid professional jargon was something that could bear her own distinctive stamp, she said to him, “Stay with that.”

“Not anybody in particular,” he went on. “In fact, a stranger would be best. I would like to wake up tomorrow next to someone who has no idea who I am. I would like to look out the window and not recognize anything. I would like to look in the fucking mirror ,” he said with a truly inappropriate laugh, “and see other people. I mean, I cannot be the only person who feels that way. Are you seriously telling me that you don’t feel that way too?”

It wasn’t clear which of them he was speaking to; he was staring at the carpet, tears hanging from his nose, and stressing certain words with a kind of karate-chop motion of his hands.

“Helen, what are you feeling right now?” Dr. Becket said.

Ben was right, she thought; it was all an act, the gray-haired old fake maintained an air of smug control even though she had no better idea what the hell was happening in front of her than either of her patients did. “A lot of things,” Helen said, trying to laugh. “I guess mostly that that is the longest I have heard him talk at one stretch in like a month.”

“Because it’s all so unsurprising ,” Ben said, very much as if he hadn’t heard anyone else’s voice. “I’m scared of it. I’m scared of every single element of my day. Every meal I eat, every client I see, every time I get into or out of the car. It all frightens the shit out of me. Have you ever been so bored by yourself that you are literally terrified? That is what it’s like for me every day. That is what it’s like for me sitting here, right now, right this second. It’s like a fucking death sentence, coming back to that house every night. I mean, no offense.”

“No offense ?” Helen said.

“It’s not that Helen herself is especially boring, I don’t mean that, or that some other woman might be more or less boring. It’s the situation. It’s the setup. It’s not you per se.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” Helen said, her heart pounding.

“Every day is a day wasted, and you know you only get so many of them and no more, and if anybody uses the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ right now I swear to God I am coming back here with a gun and shooting this place up like Columbine. It is an existential crisis. Every day is unique and zero-sum and when it is over you will never get it back, and in spite of that, in spite of that , when every day begins I know for a fact that I have lived it before, I have lived the day to come already. And yet I’m scared of dying. What kind of fucking sense does that make? I don’t think I am too good for it all, by the way. In fact I am probably not good enough for it, if you want to think of it like that. I am bored to near panic by my home and my work and my wife and my daughter. Think that makes me feel superior? But once you see how rote and lifeless it all is, you can’t just unsee it, that’s the thing. I even got Parnell across the street to write me a prescription for Lexapro, did you know that?” He finally looked up at Helen, whose hand was over her mouth, as if miming for him what she wanted him to do, to stop talking, to turn back. “Of course you didn’t know that, how would you know that. Anyway, I took it for two months, and you know what? It didn’t make the slightest fucking difference in how I feel about anything. And I’m glad.”

Helen stole a glance at Becket, who was sitting forward with her fingers steepled under her weak chin. She could not have looked more pleased with herself.

“Something’s got to give,” Ben said. He sounded tired all of a sudden, as if the act of denouncing his wife and child and the whole life they had led together had taken a lot out of him. Poor baby, Helen thought hatefully. “Something’s got to happen . It is hard to get outside yourself. It’s hard to get outside the boundaries of who you are. Why is that so hard? But the pressure just builds up until there’s some kind of combustion, I guess, and if it doesn’t kill you then maybe it throws you clear of everything, of who you are. Well, either way. I suppose that’s how it works.”

He sat back into the couch, the same couch where his wife sat, and within half a minute he had disappeared again, his face had resolved into the same zombie cast Helen had been looking at for a year now, two years maybe, without ever really guessing what was going on behind it.

“I know it may seem painful,” Becket said, “but I think we have really, really given ourselves something to build on here tonight.”

He drove them back home, because it was his car, even though she was newly afraid he would just run them into a tree or a lamppost if he saw the opportunity. In fact, she kind of wondered why he didn’t. When they reached the top of the hill and came in view of their house, where every light was burning, he broke the silence by saying gently, “Can we at least agree that we are never going back to that heinous cunt’s little office again?”

“Absolutely,” Helen said. The end of Date Night.

The darkness made the thin ranks of trees at the end of their property line — this early in the spring, you could still see right through them to the back of the water treatment plant — look deep as a forest. He walked ahead of her through the vestibule and turned left into the kitchen to pull the cork out of the bourbon. Sara was in her room with the door closed; her light was still on and the tapping of her keyboard faintly audible, which meant either that she was doing homework or that she was not. Helen wanted to go in but knew she probably couldn’t look into her daughter’s face just then without crying; so she stood there in the hallway, her shoulder against the wall beside the door, and listened to the inscrutable tap of the keys. Back in the living room, she heard the television click on.

She knew what the right thing to do was. Dismantle it together: help him find a new place, work out the money, sign whatever needed to be signed, put on a united front for poor Sara, who’d already had two parents abandon her, after all. But for once in her life Helen didn’t want to do it. Why should she make even this easy for him? She’d made everything easy for him for eighteen years, and he repaid her by making an explosive, weepy public display of his horror at the very sight of her. Screw the right thing. If he hated her so much, if life with her was such a death sentence, then let’s see him be a man about it, for once, and devise his own escape.

SHE DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG. Every June, a new crop of summer associates arrived at Ben’s law firm in the city for their strange audition. They were given a modicum of real work, though everyone knew and even joked about the fact that this was an extended bait and switch and that if they were lucky enough to be hired full-time they would then be worked as remorselessly as rented mules. It was really an audition for the lifestyle, for their receptivity to perks. They came from Harvard and Michigan and Stanford; they were young and obedient and performed simple tasks in a sportsmanlike way and were then sent out into the night with free passes and the account number of a car service and a sense of coming into their inheritance as dauphins of privilege.