Chapter 5

Two months later:

"You and Doctor Jamison have talked about your Aunt Ruth?" I was watching Alyssa race through a big maze of stout, hollow tubes hung from the ceiling at Chuck E. Cheese's. I could only see her through the occasional window and a few clear plastic sections in the big, round pipes. The happy screams of young children playing on equipment designed with them in mind made a noisy backdrop to the conversation Laura and I were having but it suited me just fine. The place was comfortable enough for Laura and me to interact, but public enough to give us that little bit of space too.

"Yeah," she said, just loud enough for me to hear over the clamor. "But I don't know what she wants to know about Aunt Ruth and Dad for," she added distractedly. She was watching Alyssa too, mildly concerned that an older girl seemed to be shepherding Alyssa through some of the sections. That Laura's counselor was inquiring about her father was news to me.

"What's that about your father and aunt?" I asked. She turned to look at me blankly.

"What?" she asked.

"You said Doctor Jamison was asking about your Aunt Ruth and your Dad," I replied. She shrugged and shook her head.

"I'm sorry, I was watching our daughter being silly... Mark," she said apologetically. "I don't know why I said that," she said. "She's been asking questions about Aunt Ruth, but we aren't getting anywhere. I'm really kind of tired of talking about her."

"I see," I said. After a long conversation with Doctor Jamison a couple of weeks ago, I was a little more sensitive to things Laura said or did. "Aunt Ruth was your mother's sister, right?" Laura nodded.

"Yeah, Mom and Dad were devastated when Aunt Ruth had her stroke and died," she said.

"Well that's understandable, don't you think?" I asked. "Ruth lived with your parents for a long time, right?" I was trying to pull out some hazy memories from my mind. I didn't know her family that well. We weren't close, though I liked them well enough.

"Uh huh," Laura answered. She stood up and walked a few paces to get a better view to make sure our daughter had emerged from an opaque section of the tubing. Alyssa was a little late getting t the next transparent bit of the hollow pipe if she'd continued running at the same pace as when she'd disappeared. There was no other place for her to go though. I was sure we'd see her in another second or two.

"Your parents were close to Ruth, huh?" I suggested when she came back to stand beside me.

"What? Oh, yes, pretty much," she replied. "When Aunt Ruth's husband died, she moved in with Mom and Dad. That was... huh... twenty five years ago, I guess."

Alyssa came running up with another little girl trailing a step behind. She was Terri, Alyssa said by way of introduction, and she was almost five years old. Terri's parents waved from a nearby table, nodding as Alyssa made to offer Terri a piece of her pizza. Terri had a younger brother and a baby sister it seemed; both were wailing about something and their parent's hands were full.

Laura and I talked for another forty-five minutes while the two little girls laughed and giggled their way through an astonishing amount of pizza. I was trying to figure out who Laura was and where she was coming from in most everything she said. I looked for a hidden meaning in every subject, every conversation. It was tiring and frustrating.

I really wanted to give free rein to my anger at what she'd done, but Doctor Jamison had already told me in unequivocal terms that Laura was suffering, or had suffered--I wasn't quite sure which--from some kind of emotional breakdown. I didn't know what to do or how I should feel anymore. Can you get mad at someone with a mental problem? It seems an awful lot like spanking a baby for wetting a diaper. Neither can control the process and neither is responsible for it happening... right?

Alyssa enjoyed the whole experience at the children's pizza restaurant, especially the part about meeting another youngster near her own age. When we left, she skipped through the parking lot holding on to my and Laura's hands. When we dropped Laura off at her brother's, Alyssa accepted it without the crying and heartbreak it had caused last week--the first time I'd chanced a joint outing.

I'd explained the separation to Alyssa as being similar to making her go to her room when she misbehaved. It was in terms she could understand and made sense to her. She wasn't happy without her mother, but she could deal with it better this way. When she asked what her mommy had done, I told her I didn't tell others what she did to deserve being sent to her room and it was only fair I not tell her about what her mother had done. Alyssa didn't like that, but she let it go surprisingly easily. She fell asleep on the way home.

The next morning, I called Doctor Jamison and asked her if Laura's unexpected connection between her father and her aunt in our conversation could possibly be significant. As before, she said anything that Laura didn't seem to want to address could surely be important. She promised to keep me in the loop with what she discovered with Laura at her next counseling session.

Nine days later:

Doctor Jamison chewed on her lip for a long moment, debating whether to tell me something.

"Mr. Archer, in your first visit, you said neither you nor Laura was a virgin when you got married right?" I shrugged and nodded. I couldn't see how this tied in to Laura's aunt's death in any way. The doctor decided to go for it. She cleared her throat for a second's longer delay.

"Well... Laura DID say to be completely frank with you... I just hope she remembers that when we get together tomorrow," the doctor said. "Uh... Mr. Archer... what would you say if I told you Laura did not, in fact, have two lovers before you?" My face must have shown my confusion.

"Mr. Archer, Laura was not technically a virgin in the sense that she didn't have an intact hymen... but Mr. Archer, you were the first man to take her." I sat back, stunned for the first time in our conversation.

"I... I... Doctor, I don't know what to say," I protested. "She sure didn't seem like a virgin that night... darn, she was as ready to... as ready as I was. She wasn't uncomfortably tight or unresponsive or anything like that... I don't understand, Doctor." I finally just gave up.

"Because you were experienced, you led her through the whole process of love making... apparently pretty effortlessly and without noticing her lack," she said softly. "Somehow she got the impression that her being experienced also was something important to you. She'd been using her... uh, I'm going to have to be careful not to embarrass myself here... but... she had "experience" using a dildo and her fingers, but... that's all," she finished. I stared at her blankly.

"But why would she think that... and why hasn't she ever told me?" I asked. "Why in the world would it have made any difference?" It was the doctor's turn to shrug.

"We may never know," she answered, "a chance remark... or the lack of a remark... a gesture... no way to tell. Your wife told me about her lack of experience and she saw some humor in the situation. I think that, while she's forgotten the initial reason, it had some kind of effect on her self-esteem at the start. She brought it up while we were discussing her affair with her..."Mr. Pathetic" guy." The doctor began playing with her notepad.

"The thing is, Laura told me about it quite easily," she said. "Laura wasn't trying to hide that. It wasn't a sensitive matter to her... at least not any longer." She fiddled with her ballpoint for a long moment.

"Mr. Archer, I hope I can tell you this in terms your experience and training has prepared you for." She looked at me closely, trying to read me. She sighed. "In for a penny, in for a pound," she muttered. Taking a deep breath, she laid it out for me.

"I'm all but certain that one of the reasons in taking Mr. Pathetic as a lover, was that Laura was reversing the roles she experienced with you early in your marriage. I've found some indications that Laura was trying to... teach... uh... Brian how to be a better lover, though she wasn't succeeding very well. The role reversal was apparently therapeutic enough for her to rid herself of the underlying cause."

"What was that?" I asked. I knew there was a big frown on my face. Doctor Jamison was trying to be very impersonal with Laura's sexual involvement with Brian Collier but I didn't feel very detached at all.

"I don't know for sure," she answered honestly. "I think it was probably a deeply suppressed resentment at the fact you did guide her through her first sexual experiences. Laura has, in laymen's terms, a little streak of contrariness.

"That seems to be linked in some fashion to her relationship with her father. He seems to have been something of a remote, authoritative figure but also someone she loved as a little girl almost to the point of adulation. I haven't even begun to make any headway there yet." I opened my mouth but the doctor held up her hand to stop me from commenting.

"It's not going to come all at once, Mr. Archer," she admonished. "Some days we may hit... uh... the mother lode, so to speak. Other days we won't have any progress at all. In fact, some of the leads we've already developed may turn out to be false ones. I don't know yet. This just isn't an exact science in any sense of the word," she said firmly.

"But couldn't she have resolved that resentment with me? Couldn't she have mentioned it sometime and work it out with me... together?"

"Oh, goodness, sure she could," Doctor Jamison replied almost cheerfully. "But only if she was consciously aware of it to begin with. Instead, she took an extreme route to get to where she was going... and she was solving some other issues along the way, too. Oh, I see you don't like that word, huh?" She'd seen me wince. "How about "problems," huh? Good, we'll use that"

"Hmmmm, that brings up a good point I've been meaning to raise with you. Ahhhhh, darn it, we only a few more minutes. I'm sorry I couldn't rearrange my next appointment so we'd have more time, but I felt I should speak with you and bring you up to date." She pursed her lips and looked at me while she searched for the words she wanted to use.

"Mr. Archer, things are going to begin getting complicated. It's going to get confusing and you're going to have an especially tough time because I can see you have not yet completely laid aside your anger at what has happened. I understand that... Laura understands it... and I need you to recognize it in yourself too, okay?"

I nodded. I'd already realized I was going to have to suppress some of my own instincts while I explored this idea of Laura having an emotionally disturbing problem. I was willing to do that... but at the same time, I was offended by it. I had tried to search my soul but I could not, to save my life, figure out what I had done to deserve Laura's adultery. Yet it seemed I was doing most of the "bending" here. Still, I had to keep Alyssa's welfare fixed firmly in the center of everything I did. I would keep on down this path for a while longer for her.

"Good, I need you to remember whenever we talk that you are getting the layman's version of what are actually far more complicated issues. You asked me to talk to you on your first visit in terms that an engineer could understand, right? I'm trying to be true to what you asked for and also to Laura's request that I be absolutely forthcoming and candid with you.

"I'm not saying you aren't smart enough to understand the myriad of crosscurrents and conflicting emotions in the human mind, Mr. Archer. It's just that you don't have any training in my field. I, although I think of myself as smart too, don't have a clue what uh... vectors... and force... and gravity and... stuff like that really means, okay?

"You do know what they are. It's part of your daily life. Your mind can get around those things while mine can't really. See what I mean? On the other hand, you probably have been sitting there thinking of sharing a simple definition of a "vector," haven't you?

"I bet you could gin up one in just a few seconds more that would give me a definition my mind can process and use, couldn't you? But would that simple explanation be something the technicians and engineers working for you could use? No... I didn't think so. Do you see what I'm trying to do and why some things might not ever become totally clear?"

I sniffed expressively, and showed Doctor Jamison a wry grin.

"Okay, Doc," I said, "you saved yourself with that last little bit, you know that don't you?"

"Young man," she replied with a serene smile, "why do you think you're paying me the big bucks?"

Three weeks later:

"Honey, I think you need to do it. You've said yourself you and the doctor haven't made any progress for weeks now, right?"

I could have kicked myself. I hadn't intended to use the affectionate term. It just sneaked out while I was trying to coax Laura into something she didn't want to do. Somehow, talking her into accepting a form of treatment she really didn't want to do had become my job too. I think the expression is "grin and bear it." I did, but I didn't have to like it.

Laura glanced up at me as we walked side by side across the grassy park. She was chewing her lip and had a worried expression on her pretty face. We were walking close together, but not touching.

"But it feels like such an... an invasion," she complained. I didn't like the petulant tone of her voice. For the first time in many months, I caught her by the wrist and pulled her around to face me directly. Her face flushed immediately. I knew my woman; she was excited by the first contact. The casual move meant more to her than it did me; I needed to make sure I wasn't misleading her. I looked around and found a picnic table under a tall cottonwood a short distance away. Releasing her wrist, I gestured toward the inviting shade under the tree.

"Look, Laura," I said as convincingly as I could, "you say Doctor Jamison and you agree you're not making any progress on discovering your reasons for... doing what you did, right?" She nodded.

We reached the table. Laura sat on the bench seat and I straddled it, facing her. It was a good fifteen degrees cooler here in the shade. Texas is hot in the summer, period.

"Then don't you think we need to get this whole thing jumpstarted? Shouldn't we agree to use anything we can to get the process going again?" Laura looked out over the park with a troubled look. The wide expanse of thick grass, dotted with small clumps of trees here and there, was almost deserted at noon on a weekday. We had all the privacy we could wish for.

"I know," Laura said after a long pause, "but it seems like putting me in a trance and digging around in my mind is so... so... dirty that I don't know if I can do it. Please understand... hon--Mark, I just don't think it'll do any good."

"How can you know that?" I demanded. Laura winced at my tone and expression. She shook her head in protest.

"I just don't believe there's anything it will help," she replied defensively. "She and I can talk a lot more. I don't mind that. I'm being as open with her as I can, Mark." I was silent for a long while.

Laura was being stubborn, unreasonably so. I'd had a long telephone conversation with Doctor Jamison in which she asked me to press Laura to accept psychiatric hypnotherapy as hard as I could. She sensed there was something Laura was unconsciously keeping buried deep behind layers of concealment and denial. The doctor thought if she could bring whatever was troubling Laura up to the conscious level, Laura would be able to deal with it effectively.

The doctor was sure there were a series of repressed memories--some hated experiences, or a bitter disappointment lurking somewhere beneath the surface. She said bringing them to the forefront so Laura's conscious mind would have to deal with them was the key to a resolution of her problems. I wasn't as optimistic, but it seemed to be a logical step to me. Assuming Laura wasn't being deliberately and consciously evasive, I was intrigued at what she might be hiding.

"Laura," I said slowly, carefully, "I'm trying as hard as I can to be supportive in all this counseling and stuff. It's very, very difficult for me to do that if you aren't doing everything you can to explain to me why you had a goddamned six-month affair with that--." I had to take a deep breath and stifle an anger that wasn't very far beneath the surface whenever I focused about her unfaithfulness. I tried again.

"I have to know why you made such an investment of your time and energy in your lover at my and Alyssa's expense," I told her. "Laura, if you leave it as it is, I won't ever have any kind of finality to this whole thing. What you will leave me with is a gnawing feeling that I've been had... that you picked some minor trouble from our past and built it up into an excuse to have sex with a man outside our marriage.

"That won't cut it, Laura. Even if I was willing to set my humiliation and pain aside, that feeling... that doubt... would ruin us later down the line. But we aren't ever going to get to that point, honey, because I am not willing to ignore the dishonor and pain, Laura. If you don't take this next step, you're choosing to end the marriage, honey."