Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“That’s right,” I said. “When it comes to you I’m a sexist. So how did you arrive at your number?”

“Well, the first three months we did it every day. And I remember doing it twice a day at least three times. So that’s ninety-three.”

“And the two times in high school.”

“Right. Ninety-five.”

“Why don’t we call it a hundred?” I proposed.

Gene’s energy ebbed. He didn’t really want to continue. He dropped eye contact. “Well … That’s not …”

“Okay. Ninety-five,” I said. “Go on,” I prodded.

He sighed. “I have to guess for the next year.”

“You mean, until Cathy got pregnant with Pete?”

“Right. Best I could do was a steady decline. You know? Four times a week for a month, then three, then two, then once a week for the rest of the year.” He brushed his thick eyebrows with the thumb and ring finger of his right hand; his dark eyes stared moodily into space.

“So, that’s what? Sixteen the first month?”

“It’s a total of sixty-two until she’s pregnant.” Gene’s voice descended and his body sagged in the chair.

“What’s the total?”

“One hundred and fifty-seven by my senior year at college.” His enervated tone had no humor, or hope.

“And then?”

Gene rubbed his eyebrows faster, lowering his chin, until his eyes and mouth were shielded by the palm of his hand. He sighed again.

“And then? Pete is six and a half, right, so that’s—”

He cut me off, testily. “Maybe once a month. That’s a little optimistic, but we did have one week in Florida …” he trailed off.

“So that’s twelve times six and a half—”

“No.” Gene’s hand dropped. He sat up, turning to the Venetian blinds. “I’m lying. Maybe once every two months. Maybe.” His chin tightened as if to keep his mouth from trembling. “Thirty-nine. Six and a half years. Maybe thirty-nine. Probably more like thirty-five.”

“What’s the total?”

“One hundred and ninety-six.”

A grim silence followed. I was keenly aware of the absurdity of our accounting, nevertheless his despair crept into me, distorting the objective silliness of our research. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t we forgetting the nine months she was pregnant?”

Gene shook his head. “No,” he said, in more of a groan than speech. “We didn’t do it while she was pregnant.”

“Not once?”

“No. Not after we knew for sure.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t — I mean, she let me once, but … She hated it, so … I mean she was pregnant. I didn’t want to force her to have sex with me.”

“As opposed to now?”

Gene glanced at me; then away, mumbling, “What?”

“You force her to have sex now?”

“Practically.” He grunted.

“Do you really mean — force?”

“No, I don’t force her, of course not.” Extreme irritation. “I whine. I complain. Day after day I bring it up until it gets too embarrassing and she has to let me. It takes about two weeks.”

“She never initiates sex?”

To admit this was too shameful for words. He nodded slightly, shifted further from me, eyes drifting to the carpet.

“Have you ever stopped asking for sex and waited—”

Again he cut me off impatiently, as if I were slow-witted. “Yeah! I tried that. I stopped asking. Five weeks later, I started begging again.”

“What do you mean, begging?”

Dragging the ashamed, muddy river of their intimate relations to find the body of reality took five sessions. Typically, his summary was a distortion. He didn’t beg or whine; he nagged, throwing numbers at her. “It’s been a week, honey,” was the sweet nothing he whispered in her ear. Catching her undressing for bed, emerging from a bath, bent over the stove, Gene would hug her awkwardly, probably groping a little (although I couldn’t get him to admit that) and ask for sex regardless of the situation’s romantic deficiency or impracticality.

It was clear, even from Gene’s presumably prejudiced testimony, that Cathy felt her life consisted of dreary work done in isolation. True, she didn’t have a job, Pete was in school every day until three, Gene helped with the boy’s care, and the cleaning woman came twice a week to do the heavy work; but that left five days of making beds, scraping dried jam from the floor, gathering the endless toys Gene bought and Pete scattered; and the shopping, cooking, making play dates, picking up and dropping off, went on without a break. To add to her woes, she was a stranger to the neighborhood. The mothers of Pete’s new schoolmates had a six-year head start sharing the trials and hilarity of raising their kids. They were friendly to Cathy on the surface, not truly intimate. From her point of view — Gene himself saw this — his work gave him an absorbing task and instant comrades. She could fit in neither with the mothers who worked nor the mothers who stayed home: the first group had no time for her, and she felt condescended to; the second had their schedules and friendships formed long before she arrived.

In their family life she craved privacy. Gene’s arrival home was the signal for her to disappear. Rarely did they do things as a threesome. Gene played with Pete on the computer or in the yard. Cathy went off by herself — to read on the bed, or take a bath, or go shopping — anything to be away from what must have seemed like a prison to her.

Gene did not describe Cathy’s life in exactly these terms, yet he came close to them. He was far from being unsympathetic to her. The reverse was true: he felt guilty. What he did not see (and I was sure must be the case) was that when Cathy rejected him sexually, she was probably rejecting what he had come to represent in her life: a series of dreary, lonely and unsatisfying tasks that were reincarnated each day.

Why didn’t she work?

With the repetition typical of therapy (retracing old ground with firmer and firmer steps) three more months’ worth of sessions were required to push through the vines of Gene’s guilt and confusion, hurt and anger, until Cathy’s passive self-defeating attitude and behavior were clearly revealed. She had failed to graduate college because of the unplanned pregnancy. She had intended to go on to medical school. The options available to her — secretarial, finishing her education, clerking in a store — she thought demeaning or too difficult to accomplish, considering where they lived and Pete’s schedule. Besides, she didn’t know if she wanted to become a doctor anymore. She felt too old to start now and yet she wasn’t interested in anything else. Just as her lack of friends in their new location was a false complaint (Cathy had been the same depressed, passionless wife back in Massachusetts), so was the complaint of not having a vocation. She made no serious attempt to discover or pursue one. I knew what Gene believed she really felt. It was time to probe this wound.

“You don’t think she loves you?”

Gene nodded. He believed she blamed him for the unplanned pregnancy, blamed him for her choice not to abort, blamed him that her college fantasy of womanhood and marriage was a poor match with the reality. In short, her spoiled life was his fault.

During lulls, for six sessions in a row, I asked, “You don’t think Cathy loves you?”

“I don’t care if she loves me,” Gene said on my sixth try, and with that answer pushed us onto a new path.

“You don’t!” I was glad at this novelty. I exaggerated my shock.

“No.”

“Oh come on. You’re telling me you don’t care if your wife loves you?”

“No.”

“You’ve said many times that it hurts you.”

“I was lying.”

“You don’t care at all?”

“No,” Gene insisted, petulant and stubborn. Since I changed my method, he often chose to resist me in the style of an adolescent. I was pleased by his pugnacious attitude — we were moving out of childhood at last.