The office of Harvey Greene, BPsych

Recently

The shrink set down his clipboard. Thomas noticed his surreptitious glance at the clock; they had about twenty minutes left.

Forty minutes he’d been babbling to the psych and Thomas remained wimpy and clueless, barely a dent made in his story. Great. He imagined himself on the video recording from the CCTV camera, sitting like a has-been scarecrow on the brown couch, mouth opening and closing mutely, the time code rolling along and absolutely fuck-all else happening.

‘So Elsie had grown unhappy, quite early in your marriage,’ Harvey said.

The psychologist was merely reflecting Thomas’s own narrative, but having it read back to him so matter-of-factly made him feel defensive. Had he really failed so swiftly in his marriage to satisfy his wife? Was that how it summed up?

‘She wasn’t “unhappy”,’ Thomas said, ‘we had a nice house and enough money and a whole life ahead of us . . .’ He looked again at the clock, and for the sake of brevity finished, ‘She thought she was a bad housewife. A bad wife. The miscarriage, and all that.’

‘The miscarriage, yes. And it sounds like she was bored, too. Dare I say lonely?’

The muscles in Thomas’s jaw worked. ‘All right. She was unhappy. And yeah, maybe lonely, too. Although she met with other ladies in the community, I don’t reckon she ever clicked with them. Not like she thought she should. But then she became increasingly worried about the lady next door. Distracted, like she didn’t know quite what was what anymore.’

‘Aida. The pregnant one, who disappeared.’

Thomas met his gaze. ‘Yes.’

‘That must have weighed heavily on you – knowing that despite how hard you tried, your wife wasn’t content.’

He decided that given he had already spent the best part of two hundred dollars, there was no pride to be lost in concurring. What the shrink said was true – Elsie’s nebulous, inexplicable dissatisfaction that first year or so of their marriage had weighed on his mind. He had felt impotent, incapable.

‘Less of a man?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Thomas said.

‘This is good, Thomas, because I’m sensing something here, and I wonder if you can see it too.’ Harvey settled his elbows on his knees. ‘Indulge me for a moment. I’m just thinking aloud. When your life began with Elsie, you – and her, from the sounds of it – had expected a certain something. Satisfaction, contentment: good old marital bliss. Don’t we all? I mean, isn’t that the social ideal we’re all sold? And you both felt those enjoyable senses of accomplishment, I don’t think you can deny that. But then came the loss of the pregnancy, and the disappointment and grief that heightened both of your growing sense of . . . well, impotence – that’s a good word.’

Thomas could not conceive of an instance when impotence and good should ever appear in the same sentence.

The psychologist suddenly switched track. ‘How did you feel when you were given your diagnosis?’

Thomas didn’t have to tarry over the question. ‘Scared stiff, to be honest.’ Thomas had asked the doctor not to pull any punches, and the doctor hadn’t. She had delivered the news of his impending demise kindly and bluntly, and it was both hideous and also, a finality. That was that. Now it came down to one man, facing off with the finish line, left with the choice of what kind of a man he would be when he crossed it. He was confronting the pointy end of the stick, no doubt about it. But what was he going to leave behind? And how would his conscience be when he got there?

‘Is there a chance that you haven’t told Elsie about the cancer because it feels like that same helplessness? That there’s nothing you can do to change it, to stop her from feeling miserable?’

‘Feeling miserable because of me.’ Thomas was surprised at how easily it came to him, an effortless mental light bulb. Strike me down with a feather, he thought. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to do that to her again.’

‘But, Thomas, you’ve been married for more than fifty years. Happily married. That particular sense of unease for Elsie – it ended, didn’t it?’

Pain was chewing itself into Thomas’s hips; shoots of numbness and prickles ribboned up and down his legs. With embarrassing difficulty, he humped his bony arse forward on the couch cushions, readying himself to stand.

‘She cheered up, yes,’ he said. Despite his discomfort he managed a smile at the memories that came flooding in. ‘She cheered right up and was happy again.’

‘Because that’s when things changed, for you and Elsie, didn’t they?’

Thomas looked at the shrink. ‘Yes. Things changed for me and Elsie then. Things changed lot.’