All Is Not Forgotten(32)

“What did you want him to say? What did you need from him?”

Silence. Thinking.

“If you could go back in time and rewrite that scene in the car, what would Bob have done? Start from the beginning—he gets in the car and…”

And he looks at my face and then at my clothes, at the blood still all over me. And he doesn’t look around nervously to see if anyone has noticed us. He doesn’t care.

“He just sees you and he knows what you need. You don’t even have to tell him. So he does what?”

He … he takes my face in his hands and he … Charlotte closed her eyes then, placing her own hands on her face. She became emotional.

“What, Charlotte? What does he say?”

He tells me it’s all right. That my baby girl is going to get through this.

“No. That’s not what he says. Dr. Baird said that at the hospital. Think harder, Charlotte. What does he say as he looks at you, sees you, and holds your face in his hands?”

I don’t know.

“Yes, you do. You called him for a reason. Take a breath and let it out. Go back to that night. It’s just you and me here now. No one else will ever know what Bob says to you in that car. You’re safe here, Charlotte. Just let it come out. He’s holding your face, looking into your eyes. What does he say?”

He says I love you.

“No, Charlotte. He says that all the time. You’re not being honest. You know what he says to you.”

Charlotte was crying. You are probably surprised to learn this. It was not the first time she had let herself go in our sessions. Remember that I was the only person who knew about her affair with Bob. I had fought very hard for her trust, and I had become a safe place for her to hide her secrets, and her tears.

“You know what he says, don’t you?”

She nodded. Then she took a breath and opened her eyes. The tears stopped and she spoke calmly. He takes my face in his hands. He doesn’t care who can see us. He looks into my eyes, and he says, “This is not your fault.”

“Yes.” I said. “That’s right. Bob is the person who gives you what you need when the others can’t. He fills in the gaps. He doesn’t judge your past. He has no vested interest in you being one Charlotte and not the other. You’re not raising his children. You’re not his wife. Your past will never reflect poorly upon him.”

I always felt like I could tell him anything and that he would just love me more. He used to tell me that I was just a victim of my stepfather. That my mother was a desperate, selfish girl who never grew up. She did what she had to do to survive.

“And this made you feel better about yourself?”

Yes. And then he would f*ck me and leave and I would wash him off me before my husband came home.

“And then you felt bad about being with him.”

Of course. Whatever he did to make me feel better about my past was always replaced with feeling bad about my present. And then I would miss him until he came back.

This is what we do. We do not want to change. In our natural core, in our guts, we want to feel the way we did as children. More strands of spun sugar that need to be woven in.

But that night in the car, he didn’t make me feel better. He didn’t know what I needed. We talked about all those things, about the logistics. Maybe he told me he loved me, how relieved he was that Jenny was okay. I don’t even know. I had stopped listening to him as the seam kept pulling apart. I could feel it, you know? That thread just giving way, and then finally I just came undone. I know I started to cry and pull at him, at his coat and his shirt. I reached my hand between his thighs. I needed him to do something.… I didn’t even know what I wanted exactly.

“It sounds like you wanted to have some kind of sexual contact with him.”

Yes, maybe. Anything.

“So you could feel different from how you were feeling.”

Yes.

“Like a drug. You’ve said that before. That he was like a drug for you.”

Yes. I wanted him to change the way I felt inside. Like a drug. That’s right. But he just pushed my hand away and looked at me like I was some sort of deviant. Like I was depraved. “What are you doing?” he said. “We need to have some respect for the situation.” He went on and on. How could I want sex hours after what we had witnessed? I felt like this wall just slid down between us. Our connection was broken, and he was looking at me the way I saw myself when I thought about my past. It was humiliating.

This was tremendous progress. We went on to discuss this event in the car, and how Charlotte had been using Bob to feel better about her past, but then to feel worse again. An upper, then a downer—always leaving her in the same place. The upper lost its potency while the downer grew stronger. She started to need more of the upper, exchanging sex for his love, his acceptance. She would ask him about the things his wife wouldn’t do, or things he’d seen on the Internet. Bob had a large appetite. Charlotte did not climax with Bob, if you recall. Yet she was preoccupied with thoughts of having sex with him. The sex got her the words, that was the piece she didn’t understand until weeks into our work. Like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. They did not get any satisfaction from the bell. But the bell meant that there would be food. And they were very hungry for food.

But on that night, Bob did not have the right words. For the first time, the drug was totally impotent, and Charlotte went home soaked not only in her daughter’s blood but also in her own self-loathing and humiliation. It was here that we were interrupted by the arrival of the blue Civic.