Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

I stopped going out. There’d been two deaths, and I feared another. My spirit, which once was enthused by Berlin, now became moribund. Nathaniel came to me one afternoon with a letter from Magnolia College, an all-women’s school in Virginia. He’d made the final list for a professor’s position and they had requested he come for an interview. He’d neglected to tell me he’d even applied.

“Do you still want us to go with you?”

“Of course. If this job really happens, I will be able to provide some security for us, and for Alchemy.”

“I still won’t marry you.”

“I never expect that you will.”

While we waited for Magnolia’s answer, I spent hours in my studio exhaling little drawings, reading, or just perched on my balcony dreaming into the Berlin sky. One evening I spied a woman, who must have been squatting, in a vacant building across the divide on the east side of the Wall. I tried to get her attention by turning on a spotlight above my head on the balcony, to psychically warn her that the East German police were coming to make one of their sweeps, looking for wall jumpers. She disappeared. I wondered if I’d reached her or if they’d caught her.

The next evening, I spotted a body zigging and zagging across the death strip. It was the woman I had seen the night before. The tower lights flashed. Orders echoed. I screamed, leaning far over the iron balcony. A barrage of gunfire. Howls of pain. She fell. Beside her — a baby. Its cries echoed across the Wall. I had to rescue them.

Moses and Jay both sensed the flammability of their situation yet seemed incapable of defusing it. Teumer’s letter did nothing to alleviate the tension. Jay deflected Moses’s entreaties to stay at their house, even if in separate rooms. Jay packed some items and went back to Geri’s. Moses, forlorn and furious, remained alone in the house.

Teumer’s letter, instead of extinguishing Moses’s desire to see him, heightened it — he must meet the man behind that letter, the man who was half him. Moses asked Jay to go with him over an extended Presidents Day weekend. He hoped with her by his side he’d have the courage to confront Teumer and they could begin to repair all that had gone haywire with their life. Jay said only, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go together.”

She did agree to see Butterworth for couple’s “almost conventional” therapy. They met in his office. Butterworth, sensing Jay’s hesitation, said, “Let me hear why you’re here, Jay.”

Jay recited Moses’s failings — and hers, too — not only of the last few days but the last few years. Moses shrank in his seat. Objectively, he understood the stresses on her — living with his illness, his heavier-by-the-day parental baggage and its aftereffects, her reasons for advising Alchemy to shield him from the psychic torpedoes launched in the letter — but he believed Jay had never adjusted her Livability Quotient to their new realities, and his outburst on the day of the opening unbalanced their tenuous equilibrium. When his time came to respond, he could only muster clichés — I’m sorry. I can change. We need to communicate better.

The session resolved nothing. Jay refused to return to their home. He offered to go to a hotel. No, she said, as if solitary confinement to the house was part of his punishment.

Before their third session in a week, Jay asked to speak with Butterworth alone. Moses waited in the outer office. When Butterworth summoned him and he entered, Jay averted eye contact — her eyes and nose were visibly red. Butterworth addressed them. “There are two reasons couples start counseling. One is to stay together. The other is to break up amicably. You are in phase two. I don’t practice that kind of couple’s counseling. I suggest you see someone else. I’ll give you some recommendations.”

Moses turned toward Jay; she blew her nose. “Who determined we are in phase two?”

“I did.” Jay dabbed her eyes with new tissues, her body shrinking into a protective pose. “I don’t know what I want. But it’s not this. I need space.”

“You’ve been saying we drifted too far apart. Now you need more space?”

“Moses, I can’t outargue you, but I need time and space to think. To not feel guilty.”

“I don’t like it, but okay. I do understand why you didn’t want me to see the letter. Parts of it anyway. I don’t blame you.”

“Yes, parts of it,” she spat out caustically. She heard her tone, stopped, and took a sip of water from a paper cup. “You’re angry. I’m angry. You’re disappointed in me and I’m disappointed in you. Everything we had that was good, great really, feels spoiled.” She leaned back and sighed. “I want to go now so you have time to talk to Ben yourself.”

“Are you going home?”

She shook her head.

“Call you later?”

“Okay.”

She left.

After a multiminute stare-off between Moses and Butterworth, Moses declared, “I want my pre-2001 life back.”

“That kind of wishful thinking is a prescription for a never-ending encore of suffering.”

“I want to stop this ache. I want to be happy. Not undermine my happiness. I can’t give up yet.”

Butterworth shrugged his muscular shoulders. “It’s your choice.”

“Do you believe Jay and I are in phase two?”

“The other day I asked you to try to understand why she advised Alchemy not to give you the letter, and I asked her to assume your position in regard to her fling with Alchemy. Neither of you could do it. My experience tells me when both people are trying to assert their rightness over attempting to understand, the road back is closed.”

Moses changed the subject. “I’m scared of seeing Teumer, but I’m going. He could spurn me again. I have to take that chance.”

Butterworth pressed his hands against his matted hair as if he were squeezing it dry. “That might help with your future. It’s my opinion that it will not help with Jay. I’ve tried to guide you to a route that would free you from the self-imposed prison of a past that colored your present and colors your future. I failed. It’s time we reevaluate our situation.”

“What does that mean? I’m going to see Teumer. It’s not my fault they didn’t give me the letter.”

“No. Maybe. Had you acted sooner or differently, neither of them would have had to make that choice.”

“That’s damn harsh. You said it would be a slow process.”

“Yes. One must decide if time is being wasted. I’m not abandoning you now. In due time we’ll take stock. If need be, I can help you transition to a more traditional therapist.”

“Are you tossing me out because of Alchemy? Because it’s a conflict? Did Alchemy tell you about the letter before?”

“That’s confidential. Besides, I’m not tossing you out. I’m suggesting options. I’ve never discussed your therapy with him. That would be grounds for malpractice.”

Moses limply left the office. At home, in each corner and crevice, he missed the presence of Jay. If she were there, if things had been the way they used to be, they would have laughed about his shrink getting ready to “fire” him.

In the following weeks, they e-mailed almost daily, but Jay avoided a face-to-face meeting. She cursed herself for being so selfish, but sometimes selfishness is a prerequisite for self-preservation. While Moses was out teaching, she picked up any necessary items. An actress friend of hers away on a shoot offered her a three-month house-sit, which she accepted.

Four days before Moses was to leave for Rio, Jay proposed to meet him at his every-six-months appointment with Dr. Fielding. Fielding revealed reassuring blood test results and announced that Moses had now passed the seven-year marker, which indicated that long-term survival was more and more possible, but that testing remained necessary — probably forever. Moses clasped Jay’s hand. She didn’t resist. He asked if she wanted to grab coffee or a bite. She demurred. She was meeting clients in less than an hour. They walked wordlessly to the Cedars parking lot. Jay stopped, waded in place. “I’m, um, over there.” Her chin pointed toward the left corner of the lot. “So, see you. Good luck with, you know, him. I hope you get what you need.”