couples counseling gone awry |
Mediation is the not-quite-enough-but-could-be-worse, the art of what you can live with. But there are no mediators for this heart, no person to teach me to accept less than I want, no acceptable compromise between what you give and what I have already got. Even the counselor sees that the distance from me to you and back again is not traversable, the path blocked by boulders of resentment (my hand on hers, in her) and barriers of regrets (your tense late-night frights at the unwelcome phone calls, your lover silent when I lift the receiver). He says to breathe and let go, the counselor does, that to start over we have to let go, that you are not going to get anywhere if you keep bringing this up, words encompassing us both but eyes glaring at me sick of my obstructions and obfuscations. It was a revenge fuck, it was a pity fuck, it was a how-did-this-happen-to-us and how-did-we-let-things-get-this-far fuck, or so she says, and why won’t you understand that though I did it to hurt you, it hurt me more, wailing now with manufactured anguish, playing to the counselor for all that she is worth, the lying bitch, her tears accompanied by heaving tits in the hopes of stirring up his sympathy and my jealousy. Then he says a lot of things about trust and forgiveness and openness, says them because we pay him – and what a waste of money that is – for it (this the last-ditch effort a bout of better-than-expected make-up sex had me agreeing to) and not because he thinks they will help since our problems are beyond the scope of what he is used to dealing with. I am sure that he does believe in his god of mediation, in the curative power of counseling, and our intractable marriage is an exception, an outlier of bitterness and hatred, which cannot threaten the foundation of his therapeutic worldview. Or maybe even then I give us too much credit, our problems perhaps boring and routine, unfixable in exactly the same way as his upcoming 2 o’clock appointment. He shows up day after day going through the steps, and what he sees in me, in her, is what he sees in every couple that walks into his office. And maybe while he sits there leaning back in the chair spouting the gospel of give-and-take his mind is miles away, thinking of his wife (or what I assume is his wife, the red-headed looker in the gilt-framed family portrait on his desk, surrounded by two equally enchanting moppets that are testament to a happier life – or at least a better attempt at faking it) and what she is preparing for dinner, or the sex they had last night, or his graduate student piece on the side. That angers me into silence. For the next seventeen minutes I say nothing, counting them down on the small grandfather clock (what a pretentious affectation, but then again I expected no less from this prick, and of course she chose him, he came highly recommended although none of the couples ended up staying together so really, how good could he be), taking perverse satisfaction in her increasing agitation and in the knowledge that the divorce papers were signed, sealed and about to be served, the courier more likely than not already downstairs. |