The Last Original Wife: A Novel Read online

Then she was gone.

  Something heavy hung in the air in the next moment as I quickly wondered if Katz would blame me for losing his patient. He did not. Dr. Katz arched one eyebrow and appraised me in bemused suspicion. He could not have cared less.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Shall we?”

  I followed him into his office. I sat in the same chair I had last time and waited for him to find his place in his notes. I still wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of someone having a big fat bulging file containing my feelings and thoughts, but at this point it was still a pretty skinny file and I suppose he needed something in writing so that he didn’t confuse one patient with another. Anyway, I had nothing to say that was so revolutionary. I was certain he had heard my complaint from a very high percentage of women who came to him for help. The difference between them and me was that I wasn’t throwing a fit in the waiting area. No, I had actually done something about it.

  “Now, Mrs. Carter, when I saw you last, you were about to tell me about, let’s see, you called them the Barbies and about a trip to Edinburgh? Let’s see . . . ah! Can you pinpoint any conversation or a specific event that triggered your general disgust with the institution of marriage?”

  “Well, that’s a pretty cold clinical way to put it. I wouldn’t say I am generally disgusted with the institution of marriage. I just think that at a certain point in your life you reassess things.”

  “Like what? Unrealized goals?”

  “Maybe to a point, but for me it’s more like just what in the hell am I doing here?”

  “Do you think you might have unrealistic expectations?”

  I thought about his question for a moment and had a sudden daydream of myself as a young woman, dressed in my wedding gown, leaving the church on Wes’s arm, rose petals swirling all around us in the air. My heart was overflowing with joy for our future. I was also two months’ pregnant with Bertie and had dropped out of college in my last semester to rush to the altar. What was it that caused the first little piece of my heart to die? Was it the overfried eggs he threw in the sink because they had brown spots on the bottom or the fact that I didn’t make the bed the same way his mother did, mitering the corners? Maybe it was because I could never remember to rotate the dinner plates or his underwear so that they all became worn evenly. I was trapped with nowhere to run. So was he.

  “Dr. Katz? It’s a little bit like the chicken and the egg. That question is so old it just doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Then you tell me. What is the question?”

  “Well, there is more than one, but let’s start with this: Are you giving up way more than you’re given to the point that your marriage is so lopsided that it’s obvious to everyone? Has your marriage become absurd? Does he actually care if you’re happy or about even being a part of what makes you happy?”

  “Don’t you think your husband wants you to be happy?”

  “As long as it doesn’t cost him any time, effort, or money. Look, I don’t think he ever thinks about it or views my happiness or any part of it as his responsibility.”

  “Okay. What do you think you gave up that was so unfair?”

  “Dr. Katz? I gave up everything—my own identity, my ambitions, my self-respect, and I very nearly gave up my own brother. My only sibling.”

  “How’s that?”

  I looked at him, trying to decide if I had the desire to continue.

  “Because Wes hates gay men. He would not allow my only brother into our house.”

  “I see. Hopefully, we can resolve that issue in a joint session.”

  “We won’t. There is no solution to it. Wes just is who he is, and nothing short of a miracle is ever going to change that.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Meet Wesley Albert Carter IV

  Six P.M. and boom! I’m in Dr. Jane Saunders’s office, in the chair, ready to spill my guts like a girl. Nice. To say I’ve come here under stress and duress would be the understatement of the year. For my money? You can take all the shrinks in the world and throw them off a bridge. Who sits around all day listening to people carp and whine? People who can’t figure out what else to do with themselves, that’s who. They say, Oh, I’m fascinated by human behavior. Yeah, right. They take other people’s problems and other people’s money and they feel better about themselves. Oh, look! I’m not so screwed up! Oh, look! I’m rich! Please. Just my opinion. On the other hand, I’d been told by some very reputable people who are very high up in the firm that these guys are the best. We’ll see about that.

  The one good thing I can say so far about this psychiatrist or whatever she calls herself, a relationship therapist, is that she’s punctual, which is good because time is a valuable commodity. I really hate to be kept waiting. It makes me nuts. And she’s got great legs, but let’s keep that between us. I’ve got enough trouble as it is. My friend who’s a lawyer says if this doesn’t go right, this business with Les could cost me big-time.

  The doctor came around from behind her desk and took a seat in the chair opposite me.

  “So,” she said, looking at the paperwork in her manila folder, “Mr. Carter?”

  “Please!” I held my hand up and gave her my most charming smile. “Call me Wes,” I said, thinking I’d be more comfortable because then this session, or whatever it’s called, would feel less serious.

  “All right, Wes,” she said, smiling, “then please call me Jane.”

  “All right, Jane, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “And why is that?” she asked.

  “Why?” I felt my neck get hot. It wasn’t exactly a hospitable question, was it? “Well, because I’ve, I mean, we’ve been told that you and your colleague might be able to help my wife and me get things back like they used to be?”

  “Is that what you want, for things to be as they used to be?”

  “Funny question. Just so you know, I’m only here for the marriage. Going back to how things were would be fine with me, but my wife has other ideas.”

  “Go on.”

  I thought about it for a minute and realized being here with Jane could be very uncomfortable and I didn’t like the hot seat. I was the one who put other people in the hot seat. I didn’t like to tell strangers what I was thinking. If I’d learned anything in all my years in corporate America, it was that showing all your cards was a bad idea. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too sure what Les had in mind in terms of changes she had been looking for from me and the kids. But I’d come here to see this silly therapist, hadn’t I? I was trying to fix things, wasn’t I? I wasn’t such a terrible husband. Still, I decided to dump the blame where it belonged.

  “Well, my wife ran off and left me this past summer. And she’s pretty much the main caretaker for our granddaughter, so our daughter was very upset.” I waited for Jane to ask me why Les left, and when she didn’t, it seemed that I was supposed to supply some kind of an explanation. “She said she’d had it with us.”

  “I see. Was there any particular reason, a specific incident that led to her, as you say, running off? A disagreement?”

  “Well, I guess you might say she thinks our daughter takes advantage of her.”

  “Do you think your daughter takes advantage of your wife?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in certain situations on certain occasions. Maybe.”

  “Do you have other children?”

  “Yeah, a son. He’s been over there in Kathmandu riding elephants with the hippies. Don’t get me started on him. Anyway, she’s been annoyed with me ever since we got back from Edinburgh a few months ago.”

  “Go on.”

  “See, we were traveling with this buddy of mine, Harold Stovall, and his new wife, Cornelia.”

  “And is Cornelia a friend of your wife?”

  “No. Well, actually, I wouldn’t say they’re not friends, but Danette, who is Harold’s ex-wife, was, well, is still Les’s best friend. But let me tell you, Cornelia’s a beautiful girl. I mean a stunner.”
I smiled then thinking about the sheen of Cornelia’s thick copper hair and those perfectly white teeth of hers. And did her curtains match her sofa? And she had these adorable freckles. Were they everywhere? Harold was a lucky man. The dog.

  “I see. Younger?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d put Cornelia’s age somewhere around thirty-two? Maybe thirty-three.”

  “How old is your friend Harold?”

  “Harold’s my age. Sixty-three.”

  “And your wife?”

  “I married a younger woman too. Ha-ha.” Jane’s facial expression did not budge one inch. This head doctor was a humorless bitch. I could already see that too. “She’s fifty-eight.”

  “Do you think the dramatic age difference made your wife uneasy?”

  Oh, I could see where this was headed. Yeah, boy. Unless I said Harold was a total hog from hell for divorcing Danette and marrying a girl from his firm, then I was a hell hog too. I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to debate the obvious. Jane’s question was my cue to remind her of how it goes in, let’s say, mature marriages.

  “Look, Jane. These things happen every day. People get married, they raise a family, the kids leave home and when that happens? They take a hard look at each other, really see each other for the first time in decades, and guess what? They don’t like what they see. You know? That beautiful girl you married is now postmenopausal, things are drooping left and right, she’s a little thick around the middle, and she’s turned into a harpy.”

  I watched as Jane Saunders shifted around in her seat.

  “A harpy?”

  “Yeah, you know. Her life doesn’t suit her anymore. But you’ve got this secretary or colleague, and this girl is young and vibrant and practically a pulsating life force. She’s gorgeous and she hangs on your every word and by golly, she thinks you’re a god! Yes! A god! You’re Zeus hurling lightning bolts from the sky!”

  “Zeus?”

  “Yeah, Zeus! But! When you come home at night, there’s the old ball and chain, wrung out from doing nothing, pissed because you’re late and you forgot to call, and your dinner is in the oven so dried out that it’s basically inedible. And after you choke your way through another miserable meal of boneless, skinless chicken and mushy broccoli with fake butter and fake salt because your doctor said you should watch your pressure, there she is, asking you to go take out the garbage or change the lightbulbs. I don’t have to paint you a bloody picture, do I? This is what you do for a living! Right?”

  “Right. I’ve got it. Tell me about your trip to Edinburgh. What happened there?”

  I cleared my throat and tried to refocus.

  “Well, it was unfortunate. I mean, what happened really shouldn’t have happened. And then the whole situation snowballed into this terrible misunderstanding. I felt bad for Les. I really did.”

  This was a lie. The truth was that, at the time, I was furious with Les because her stupid accident almost ruined the two days of golf I was supposed to have with Harold. Jane was quiet, waiting for me to continue. I really didn’t feel like getting into this because the sequence of events probably wasn’t going to showcase my most appealing qualities, but what choice did I have? And what did I really care what this ice cube Jane thought anyway? I was simply going to tell her our story, listen to her advice, and be on my merry way.

  “She fell into an open manhole and cracked her arm. I was walking a little ahead of her with Cornelia and Harold, and Cornelia was going on about how much she loves the Dallas Cowboys. So I’m listening to her and thinking, Wow, this girl really knows her stats! The next thing I know we’re back at the hotel and Les isn’t with us. So I wait and wait and finally I think, What happened here? So I retrace my steps back to the restaurant where we’d just had a huge lunch. When I get there, there’s my wife being loaded into an ambulance like a hundred pounds of potatoes. Apparently she knocked herself out when she fell. She had a concussion. And she was kinda bloody. She cut her head and cracked her arm and she lost some teeth, but we have a good dental plan so they were able to fix her up once we got home.”

  The truth was that Les looked like one of those witches from Macbeth; her mouth was disgusting to look at, all swollen and everything with snaggleteeth. I could hardly eat on the plane ride home, not that it was a gourmet meal or anything like that. But it was free and I was hungry. Still, my gut wrenched to look at her.

  “Gosh. So what happened then?”

  “Well, we went to the hospital and thank God they had an orthopedic doctor and a pretty good plastic surgeon over there. They set her arm, sewed up her head, and kept her overnight, which of course nearly ruined my plans completely.”

  “And what were your plans?”

  “To play the Old Course at St. Andrews with Harold! Why else would you go to Edinburgh? To buy a kilt? I had only wanted to do this all my life, but Les has to go fall in an open manhole and break her arm! But once I saw she was okay and was in good hands, I figured why not go hit the ball, right?”

  “You couldn’t play another day?”

  “Are you kidding me? I had that tee time set up for two years!”

  “What happened to her teeth? Would you like a drink of water, Wes?”

  I realized I was yelling. Normally I yelled whenever I felt like it and who cared, but now I felt like Dr. Hotsy Totsy thought I had a temper and bad manners to boot. I could see it in her face. She was judging me. I tried to redeem myself with a little backpedaling. And why I was trying to redeem myself to this witch is anybody’s guess.

  “Sure, that would be nice. Thank you. They fixed up her teeth with temps. But she wasn’t eating anything she was so black and blue—lips out to here.” I gestured, hoping she’d see some humor in it, but she didn’t. She handed me a glass of fizzy water, which I don’t like because the bubbles give me indigestion. Despite that little factoid about my esophagus, I took a sip to be polite and smiled at her. “Look, Jane, surely you can understand why I was conflicted.” Had she never heard of the Old Course at St. Andrews? Did she live under a rock? I mean, come on!

  “Okay. And how do you think Les felt?”

  “Well, we had a pretty terrible fight about everything. Les claimed her accident never would have happened if I had been walking with her instead of racing ahead to hear what Cornelia was saying.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  “No! Wait a minute. Look, I wasn’t racing anywhere. She was lollygagging around, stopping, looking in windows, taking pictures of everything in sight with her silly new phone. She wasn’t watching where she was going. It wasn’t like I pushed her or something.”

  Jane made a note and looked up at me, slack jawed. I thought she might have accidentally swallowed a hidden piece of Nicorette gum or something and I’d have to jump up and give her the Heimlich, but, thank God, she took a deep breath and finally closed her mouth, writing furiously on her tablet. Now what was that all about? Did she think I was a wife beater? Wait a minute!

  “Look, I’m not a bad guy.”

  “I’m not here to pass judgment, Wes. Does your wife think you’re a bad guy?”

  “She never said it in those exact words, but I know she thinks it. All she kept saying over and over was, How could you leave me like that in a hospital in a foreign country when I didn’t know a single soul? I guess it doesn’t sound so good, but if you’d been there, you’d understand. Cornelia went and sat with her, which infuriated her. Go figure that one out.”

  “Hmmm,” Jane said and made some more notes.

  “I mean, Cornelia could’ve been shopping or sightseeing. I think it was pretty nice of her to give up her time for Les.”

  “Okay, let’s move on a little, to some other areas. How would you characterize your intimate life with your wife?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Would you say it’s robust? Not what it used to be? Nonexistent?”

  What? I was now supposed to discuss my sex life like this Jane was a medical doctor? The back of my
neck broke a sweat.

  “Look, it’s weird for me to comment on that to a stranger. Let’s just say I don’t have any problems in that department.”

  The silence hung between us then like something thick and awful, something you wouldn’t want to touch. Something you would have a hard time trying to penetrate. I was plenty uncomfortable.

  “Okay, look,” I said, “we’ve been married for nearly thirty years. Things don’t happen as often as they used to, and the fireworks in the bedroom pose no danger to humanity, that’s for sure.” That was a clever way to put it, I told myself. But did this bitch smile? Hell no!

  “But you considered your marriage to be a good one up until this incident in Edinburgh? And then, of course, her unexpected departure?”

  “Unexpected departure. Humph. That’s one way to sugarcoat it. Listen, I’m the last one out of all my friends who still has his original wife.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Shouldn’t that tell her something?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! That I still love her?”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Of course I do! Why would she walk out on me? Was it her hormones?”

  “Not at her age. At least it would be unusual if it was. Anyway, we can talk about that next time because our session is ending.”

  “Next time? You think I’m coming back here again? I mean, I have work. I’m a very busy man. I was hoping that you’d listen to my side of the story and give me some advice and we’d call it a day!”

  “I see. Well, Wes, here’s my advice. I think you’re here to save your marriage, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, if you think you can save your marriage without any help from me or someone in my profession, then all right. But I can tell you from experience, you do not yet have an impartial view of your marriage. You have to come to a place where you can see things from Les’s point of view and then you can begin to repair the damage. That takes time.”

  I thought about what she said for a split second and then decided it was total bullshit. One hundred percent total bullshit.