Someone Else's Shoes(96)
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Joel has texted her twice. A long, rambling message informed her that he had told everyone in the office what had been going on and they were trying to work out what to do to make things right. Marina felt awful. Franklin had already cocked up on the Dutch order. She shouldn’t worry. She should call him if she needed anything, anything at all. He hoped she would soon come back to the gym. She was doing great! The second, sent twenty-four hours later, says simply: I miss you. She stares at it several times a day, when she is alone, and her heart gives an erratic thump every time, like an engine trying to jump-start into life.
twenty-nine
Phil cannot sit down. Every time he lands on the little couch he springs back up again as if it’s electrified, as if there is too much in him to be contained by mere furniture. He paces backward and forward around the little room, his words coming in scattergun explosions.
“I mean she pretty much admitted it! Even if it wasn’t an affair she had feelings for him. What am I supposed to do with that? Can you tell me? Because I don’t have an answer. It goes round and round in my head and I don’t have an answer.”
Dr. Kovitz sits, his notepad on his knee, wearing an expression of eternal patience. It makes Phil want to punch him on the nose.
“She didn’t even deny it. She just said her feelings for him weren’t the same as they were for me.”
“What did you take from that?”
Phil looks at him incredulously. “What do you think I took from that? My wife has feelings for another man!”
“I have feelings for plenty of people. It doesn’t mean I’m going to run off with them.”
“Spare me the word games today, please.”
“They’re not word games, Phil. She has told you she isn’t having an affair. And, given you say she’s an honest person, we have to assume she’s telling the truth. She had feelings for another person. You told me in one of our previous sessions that you would actually understand if she went off with someone else.”
“But that was before it was true!”
Phil puts the heels of his hands into his eyes and presses hard so that tiny explosions of dark matter go off behind them, wanting his thoughts to still, wanting it all to stop.
“What has she said to you, Phil? About what she wants to do?”
He sits heavily. “We haven’t talked about it.”
Dr. Kovitz’s eyebrows are raised.
“I mean, not like this. I just—I don’t know what to say to her. I feel like I don’t know her any more.”
“Well, it’s possible you don’t know her any more. We’re all changing. All the time. By your own admission you left your wife to cope with everything alone for a long period of time. That’s going to alter a person. It’s going to alter a marriage.”
Phil crosses his arms around his body and bends over, so that his chest rests on his knees. Some days there is such a pressure in it he feels like he has to suppress it physically.
“Marriage doesn’t stay the same year after year, Phil. You’ve been married a long time. You know this. It’s an organic thing. It changes as both parties change. Perhaps sometimes we need to just—”
“She’s still hiding things from me,” Phil blurts out.
Dr. Kovitz leans back in his chair. “Okay.”
“I called her company two days ago because the builders wanted to know something about the insurance payment and they said—they said she didn’t work there any more.”
There is a long silence.
“She doesn’t want to share anything with me, does she?” Phil lets out a long, defeated sigh. “I count for nothing in her life any more.” Life with Sam was once a reliable thing, the backbone of everything else he ever had to deal with. Now it feels like living with her is a series of small explosions, like he never knows what is coming next.
“Phil,” Dr. Kovitz says gently, “when we’re low, it can be easy to see everything through a prism of negativity. Human beings are remarkably bad at understanding other people’s motivations, even when they know them terribly well. We write all sorts of inaccurate stories in our heads.” Dr. Kovitz steeples his fingers together. “May I suggest an alternative version?”
Phil waits.
“From what you’ve said previously, your wife may well have walked out on her job—a job you said she hated. Or she could have been made redundant. We don’t know. What if the reason she kept that information to herself was that she was simply worried about telling you? What if she was trying to protect herself from that awful conversation, with all its ramifications for the two of you?”
He pauses. “You told me Sam has been very much aware of your mental-health struggles for some time. Have you considered the possibility that by not saying anything she was trying to protect you?”
Phil remembers that when Sam’s phone rang he could always tell if it was her boss from the way she flinched when she saw his name. “So you basically think I should ignore all this. Just pretend like none of it happened.”
“Not at all. I think it’s about time you talked to her.”
thirty
Nisha is so deep in her thoughts that she jumps when Jasmine approaches. She is standing on the little balcony, looking over the dark and twinkling city, Jasmine’s spare dressing-gown wrapped tightly around her against the cold, a cigarette she doesn’t even want to smoke between her lips, as if doing something as awful as smoking at 6 a.m. will reaffirm how awful everything is. Some mornings she feels so far from her son it’s as if a thread, taut between them, connects her heart to his and causes a constant, only just bearable pain. He had sounded so down again last night, so disbelieving when she said she was going to get the shoes, she was, Ray, really, that then she could come get him. He had cut her short when she tried to describe the plan to him. He had done badly in a math test, Dad was still cutting off his money, and his friend Zo? was all over Instagram partying with some girls she knew he couldn’t stand. He sounded so lonely and flat. Yes, he was still taking his meds. No, he wasn’t hungry. No, he wasn’t sleeping. Yes, he knew everything was going to be okay. Whatever. “When are you coming to get me?”