Not Easily Broken Read online

  “I didn’t ask for any last names,” Carmen said. “Besides, she’s already here in the room, whether we talk about her or not. We might as well give her a name.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Julie,” Clarice said. “She’s—she was my physical therapist.”

  At this, Carmen’s eyes actually widened ever so slightly. “I see. Mmm-hmm. Dave, can you tell me what it was about Julie you found attractive enough to have an affair with her?”

  Man, she gon’ pull my file somethin’ proper, ain’t she?

  “Well, we didn’t have an affair, not really. I mean, we—”

  “You didn’t have sexual intercourse with her?”

  “No.”

  Dave realized that he, a former coach who’d been in countless locker rooms with adolescent boys, had just been completely embarrassed by this grandmotherly counselor.

  “But you wanted to?”

  “Well, see, I don’t know, you know? I mean, Julie was nice and all—”

  “Nice how?”

  “She liked me, you know? She valued me without wanting to change everything about me.”

  “I see.” Carmen seemed to ponder this for a few seconds, then she turned back to Clarice. Dave breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  “Clarice, I wonder how you’re reacting to what Dave is saying. I hear him saying that Julie was attractive to him because she sort of took him where he was. I wonder if that sounds like anything you and Dave have dealt with before.”

  Clarice’s eyes were still pinned on the carpet. “David has mentioned something like that lately,” she said.

  “And do you expect Dave to change?”

  Clarice crossed her arms in front of her; she looked like she was hugging herself. Dave watched Carmen’s eyes flicker over Clarice’s pose and mannerisms. He had the feeling she was catching everything that went on, both what was spoken and what was remaining unsaid.

  “I don’t know . . . I guess so, in some ways,” Clarice said. “Is that so bad?”

  “I’m not sure,” Carmen said. “All of us need to change something at some point in our lives. The problem is what’s motivating the change. Can you give me an example of something about Dave that you want changed?”

  After a few seconds, Clarice said, “I’ve been encouraging David to think about other career options.”

  Looking at Clarice squirming under Carmen’s scrutiny, Dave almost felt sorry for his wife. It was intimidating having your private thoughts and assumptions dragged out into the light by someone who was a relative stranger. Somehow, when Carmen repeated your feelings back to you, you felt kind of guilty just for having had them. It didn’t matter how accurately she restated them; just hearing them voiced so dispassionately was a lot like looking at yourself naked while standing in front of a full-length mirror under bright fluorescent lights.

  Things went back and forth like this for most of the hour, with Carmen putting first one, then the other under her magnifying glass. Dave had to hand it to her; she didn’t miss much. When you were the object of Carmen McAtee’s scrutiny, you knew she wasn’t going to lay off until she’d heard all she wanted.

  With a few minutes left, she said, “Well, I think we’ve done some good work here today. I want to thank you both for being honest and forthcoming. As you know, I can’t really do much unless you two are willing to work with me as cooperatively as possible.

  “I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of what’s at issue between you. But next time we get together, I’d like to take a look at how you’re presently negotiating or failing to negotiate these differences. And I’d like to give you some homework, all right?”

  Dave and Clarice waited.

  “I want both of you to keep a journal this week. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just a written record of your thoughts and feelings. I’m especially interested in having you write down how you feel after any significant interactions between you, whether they’re positive or negative. Make sense?”

  “You want us to record our fights?” Clarice said.

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” Carmen said, “but yes, among other things, I want to see how you handle conflict as a couple. Conflict is pretty inevitable between human beings living in close quarters; what matters is how it’s handled and resolved—or not resolved. Okay?” Dave nodded, but he wasn’t looking forward to the prospect. He’d never been much of a note-taker or writer in school; trying to untangle his thoughts about disagreements with Clarice enough to put them on paper didn’t exactly sound like his plate of cornbread.

  “Just see Karen when you go out, and she’ll handle all the particulars.” She stood and escorted them to the door. She shook their hands, giving them both that quiet, Buddha-like smile. “Good luck, you two. Hang in there, all right?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Julie considered talking to Bryson about Dave not coming to the out-of-town meet, but then she decided not to bring it up unless her son did. First, she’d never told him Dave was coming, so Bryson wouldn’t be expecting to see him. Second, she couldn’t think of a way to explain Dave’s absence—which, Bryson would eventually realize, was a permanent situation—that sounded plausible without being an outright lie. Finally, every time she started thinking about it, she got so down in the dumps that she could barely function, so she mostly just shuffled the entire matter into a little-used wing of her mind and did her best to leave it there.

  This, of course, was only partially successful. She’d catch herself, even during sessions with patients, remembering the way he’d looked at her, say, after Bryson won a race. Now and then, she’d say something that sounded to her like something Dave might say. She had dreams about him at night; when she woke, she could remember brief impressions of him, but she was always disappointed she never remembered the whole dream. In a way, this seemed a bit symbolic of the entire history of their relationship—“friendship,” she corrected herself.

  She went through whole cycles of guilt and self-justification—often several times an hour. Of course Dave was married; of course his first obligation was to his wife; of course it was the right thing for them to stop seeing each other; of course the things she was thinking about him, if followed to their logical conclusion, constituted a violation of Julie’s standards for herself . . . and Dave’s too, apparently.

  And then she tried to figure out exactly what she’d say to Bryson when the day came, as she knew it would, that he asked why Coach never came to his meets anymore. At these moments, she’d ask herself a different series of questions: Why can’t my son have the company of a man who genuinely cares about him, since his own father doesn’t seem to? Why should my weakness and poor judgment deprive Bryson of something he desperately needs to grow up and become a well-adjusted man? Wasn’t there some way to salvage the parts of their relationship that were positive—and Julie could think of many such parts—and insulate themselves from the more doubtful aspects? Why couldn’t Clarice go with Dave to some of Bryson’s meets, for example? Or why couldn’t Dave bring Brock with him? If she and Dave had chaperones, nobody could think they were up to something inappropriate . . . could they?

  Then again, the thought of seeing him and knowing, beyond all doubt, that he could never be to her what she longed for him to be was almost worse than the prospect of never seeing him again. A clean break, she told herself finally, was the best thing for everybody. And then she’d start back at the beginning and run the whole mental obstacle course again.

  Julie had just such a game of emotional ping-pong with herself while driving back from the out-of-town meet. Bryson sat on the other side of the front seat, hardwired into his portable CD player via the headphones she’d gotten him for his last birthday. The Sunday afternoon sun was coming through her windshield for the whole drive. By the time they got home, Julie’s face was locked in a perpetual squinting scowl. She was wishing she hadn’t missed church that morning, which reminded her of Dave. Almost everything reminded her of Dave these day
s. They’d barely walked into the house when her wall phone started chirping at her.

  She picked it up and glanced at the caller ID on the screen, holding the faint, unreasonable hope that it might be Dave. But it was a number she didn’t recognize. She thumbed the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “Julie? This is Brock Houseman.”

  “Oh . . . hi, Brock.” She was pretty sure her disappointment was audible only to herself.

  “Hi. I just wanted to call and see how you’re doing.”

  This caught Julie slightly off guard. “Fine, I guess,” she said. She groped around for some sort of follow-up and finally came up with “How are you?” Not too original, but good enough in a pinch.

  “Oh . . . I’m good. Doing good—yeah. Uh, how’s Bryson?”

  “He’s fine. Actually, we just got back from out of town; he had a swim meet.”

  “Oh yeah? How’d he do?”

  “Really well. He won both his individual events and his relay team won, too. His team placed first overall.”

  “Wow! That’s really great. Impressive.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty proud of him.”

  “Well . . . I guess you must be pretty tired from the drive. I ought to let you go, huh?”

  “Sure, I guess. Nice to hear from you, Brock.”

  “Yeah, well . . . take care, okay?”

  “I sure will.”

  She hung up. Take care. That was the last thing Dave had said to her.

  “Who was that?” Bryson said, strolling into the kitchen. His headphones were still around his neck.

  “Brock. Coach Brock, remember him?”

  “Sure I do. What’d he want?”

  “Wanted to know how you did at the meet. I told him.”

  “Oh yeah? What’d he say?”

  “The only thing a reasonable person could say: you’re an awesome dude.”

  “Whatever, Mom. Was that the only reason he called?”

  Good question, Bryson. Julie wondered how much, if anything, Brock knew about her and Dave. It felt weird even thinking of it that way: her and Dave. It made them sound like an item. But if they were, or had been, what would Brock know about it? And if he did know something, what might he have said to Dave about it? And if he said something to Dave, what might Dave have said in reply? Did Brock know, for example, that they weren’t seeing each other anymore? Did he know why? The thought embarrassed her, then began to intrigue her . . . just a little.

  “No, he pretty much just wanted to know how the meet went.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Bryson donned his headphones again and went back toward his room.

  Clarice sat at her desk at home, fiddling with her rather expensive pen, her chin propped in her hand. Her elbow rested on a sheet of creamy vellum from the box holding more of the same, which she’d purchased earlier that week, along with the pen, as an incentive to making and keeping a journal, per the instructions of Carmen McAtee, PhD. She stared at nothing in particular and tried to harness her disorganized, indistinct thoughts.

  She’d never guessed she might actually feel worse after a counseling session than she did before. But somehow, after they left Carmen’s office that first time, the reality of actually being in marriage counseling bore down on her in a way she was entirely unprepared for. Marriage counseling—the phrase hung in her mind like a sign crafted of black neon, if there could be such a thing, floating like an accusation above everything she did, said, or thought about.

  True, she’d made the suggestion that put them there in the first place. But her uneasy mind wouldn’t let it go at that. She worried and teased at it, turning the whole history of the problem over and over until it was as ratty and soiled and creased as a Sunday crossword puzzle that you couldn’t finish but couldn’t throw away.

  The thing that especially stung her was Carmen’s accusation—maybe it was a suggestion, but in Clarice’s memory it rankled like an accusation—that maybe, just maybe, part of the problem with David was really a problem with her. At her best moments, Clarice knew, of course, that what she’d said herself was true: there was enough blame to go around. But then she started pondering the implications, especially the hard things she might have to admit or agree to. She began to feel the roots of resentment creeping under the foundation of her resolve.

  She’d tried to put something down in her journal about that. She wanted to write about how she’d been raised to be completely self-reliant and self-confident; that in the world she was trained to know, no greater value existed than the ability to identify a worthy goal and dedicate yourself to achieving it, no matter the cost. She wanted to say something about how David’s soft, self-effacing manner frustrated her. She wanted to put on paper some words that could explain how disappointed she was that the dashing, handsome, idealistic young man she’d married had allowed himself to settle for running a small company that wasn’t growing or expanding, and he seemed fine with that. She wanted to talk about the ways she thought her husband was ignoring his potential as a leader for the community. She wished she could find some way to express her suspicions that for all David’s talk about supporting her and admiring her and loving her, what he was really doing was creating a subtle pressure to cause her to finally give in, get pregnant, and settle into a life that was less than the uncompromising adventure she’d always dreamed of.

  But when she tried to put ideas like these on paper, the picture that emerged was not one she was happy contemplating. She imagined Carmen reading her journal and then peering at her in that calm, saintly way, like somebody’s great-aunt, and repeating the content back to her in a manner that made Clarice sound like a cross between Leona Helmsley and Evilene from The Wiz.

  She wasn’t that bad, was she? She was willing to listen to David. She at least wanted to want him, even if she hadn’t actually made the mind-to-body migration with the whole physical aspect of their relationship. Surely Carmen would understand that, wouldn’t she?

  What Clarice needed was to write herself a letter explaining all this. Maybe that was it. Maybe if she just spoke to herself, without thinking so much about how all this was going to sound to somebody else, she could break the deadlock within her own mind and get things moving.

  Moving toward what?

  She put this question out of her mind; that was an answer that would have to come later. For now, it was enough that she was picking up the pen and starting to write.

  Dave drove up to the office. He went inside and grabbed the handful of pink “While You Were Out” notes the office manager held toward him.

  “Anything good in here, Alma?”

  The office manager shrugged and kept making keystrokes on her computer.

  Dave went back to his desk. He slid his chair out and put his feet up on the desk before sorting the message slips like a hand of cards. And then his eyes fell on the name of the top slip: Mrs. Clark. No. It couldn’t be. He looked at the number the caller had left and groaned. Clarice’s mother. He sorted through the rest of the slips and found that three of the five were from his mother-in-law.

  I don’t need this today.

  But Dave knew she’d keep calling until she talked to him. She’d call him at home at three in the morning if she had to. That woman was about as hardheaded as anybody Dave had ever met. Even Clarice didn’t come close.

  He took a deep breath and reached for the phone on his desk. He punched in the number, praying she’d be out getting her hair done—or maybe having major surgery.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Clark, this is—”

  “I know who it is, and I know what you’re doing, even if my daughter’s too blind to see it. I’m telling you, boy, you better leave that little white heifer alone if you know anything about what’s good for you.”

  Dave had expected her to be talking smack; this was even worse. “Now, Mrs. Clark, nothing’s—”

  “Don’t even start with me, boy. I haven’t lived as long as I have to believe every honey-mouth story some m
an thinks up. I’m telling you, I know what you fixing to do, and I’ll make sure Clarice takes care of it the right way if I have to come down there myself.”

  “All right then, thanks. Glad you called.” He hung up the phone with Mrs. Clark still talking.

  “I gotta go, Alma. Making some sales calls.” He scooted back from his desk and started for the door. Alma gave him a distracted wave.

  He needed some time to just . . . be. Maybe he’d drive to a few of the buildings where All-Pro had contracts, just to drop in on the building managers and see how things were going.

  Dave let the pickup coast through the morning traffic and tried to clear his thoughts. Clarice’s mother couldn’t have picked a worse time to start in on him. Tomorrow was their next appointment with Carmen McAtee, and Dave wished he wasn’t dreading it so much. A few times this week, he’d tried to start a conversation with Clarice about some of the things that were on his mind, but somehow he couldn’t summon the energy. Then, he thought about trying to write down some stuff in the journal he was supposed to be keeping. But when he sat down with a pen, he couldn’t get beyond the opening sentences: “Thought about talking to Clarice about stuff. Couldn’t think what to say.” And that was it. And now, on top of being discouraged, he was mad.

  He wondered how Bryson was doing. He kept thinking Julie might call, just to update him, you know? Nothing serious, no talk about either of them, just telling him about Bryson’s latest meet, how he was doing in school, that kind of thing. That would be enough, wouldn’t it? He told himself he didn’t need anything beyond that and tried to ignore the voice that kept suggesting he was kidding himself about that, too.

  Bryson . . . Dave really wanted to know how he did at the meet. His phone was lying on the front seat, right beside his hand.

  Why shouldn’t I call? Everybody else in the world seems to know what I ought to be doing; why shouldn’t I decide one or two things for myself?

  Before the voice could talk him out of it, he pulled into a parking lot and hit the speed dial button that he knew would still take him directly to Julie’s cell phone. She answered on the second ring.