I smiled to reassure her. “Now you do. Lie there for a minute and let me take a few guesses. If I’m right, maybe you’ll feel better about starting. Okay?”
The way she nodded her head and looked at me, eyes puffy and red from crying, face wet with tears, and more tears appearing to be on the way, reminded me of a little girl in distress. It smote my heart. I never felt so protective of another patient, not even Genevieve Broussard. Now there’s a woman who made a mess of her life.
Thinking about Gen for a moment, I said, “I can promise you, Vanessa, you can’t possibly have made more of a mess of your life than some of my patients.”
I remained seated in front of her. I picked up my pen and pad. They weren’t really necessary because I make an audio recording of all my sessions, but the pad and paper convey authority and competence and patients need these in order to have confidence in their therapist.
“You’re single and working. Twenty-three years old, already graduated from college, and working means you probably don’t live with your parents. You dress well and obviously visit a high quality salon to have your skin, hair and nails treated at least every other week. You’re here with a man’s credit card. And you’re wearing earrings, a necklace, and a fairly large ring. All the pieces match, are formed with a golden clove hitch in the center, and are set with a good-sized diamond within the knot. Clearly custom made and expensive. And a clove hitch is one of the primary sailing knots. I don’t know what kind of car you drive, but I’ll bet it’s expensive.
“Obviously you have a relationship, maybe even live, with a man named Aaron Wilson. From the company’s name, I assume he’s also your employer and pays well enough for you to support yourself in a lavish fashion. He owns a yacht, on which the two of you spend a great deal of time unless your tan comes from the salon. He may have been born a rich kid, but there really aren’t many of those around. More likely he’s a lot older than you and has worked years to achieve his success. And despite this seeming good fortune, you’re HERE, distressed enough to weep and sob heavily.
“Based on these assumptions, I can see two possibilities, one or both of which may be true. First, despite his apparent generosity, you now think Mr. Wilson an inferior companion. I would have to guess the reasons. Abuse? Forcing you into sexual practices that you find distasteful? You’ve decided he’s too old? Too fat? Too crude? Second, or perhaps more accurately, a direct corollary to the first, you’ve embarked on an affair. Perhaps you’re in love with this new sexual partner? Or, possibly, you have some kind of urge, maybe you’ve had the urge for a long time, which this new partner satisfies. Either way, you feel in imminent danger of losing Mr. Wilson’s financial support, perhaps? I don’t intend to paint you in mercenary colors, but we all have to eat and I suspect that having lived large you would find it difficult to merely survive alone and on a teacher’s salary. In any case, either your fear or your guilt or both has created, or more likely raised, anxiety within you to an intolerable level. Am I in the ballpark?”
Vanessa’s eyes weren’t exceptionally large, but they opened wider and wider as I spoke. When I stopped, she answered. “Dead on about the man and money. But wrong about most of the rest of the stuff. I don’t find Aaron inferior. He’s twice my age, but for an older guy he’s pretty fit. And he’s kind and generous and spends time with me. I’d probably marry him if he asked me. But he’s already been married once and it turned out really bad, so I expect he’s done with that.”
She paused and hung her head. “But you were kinda right about me having an affair, I think.”
That perplexed me and I frowned. “How would you define having an affair?”
She shrugged. “If I had sex with another man, that’d be having an affair.”
I sat back. “I think I see. You’ve had sex with another woman, not a man, so you think it might not ‘count’ as having an affair. Is that right?”
She nodded. I continued. “Well, let’s say you performed oral sex on another man. Would you call that an affair?”
She cringed and her voice trembled. “I don’t know.”
I tried to sound cold and clinical. I had to cut through this delusional and pedantic bullshit if I was going to help her, and I wanted to help her very much. “So, to be clear, you think that in order to call having any form of sex with another person an affair, that other person has to be a man and then only if he sticks his penis inside your vagina. What about your anus? Would that count?”
Vanessa sat up. “Are you making fun of me?”
I remained calm. “By no means. I’m simply trying to understand how YOU define terms. And while we’re on the subject, how do you think Mr. Wilson would define the phrase ‘having an affair’?”
She cast her eyes down again and wouldn’t meet my gaze. I continued. “Then don’t let’s quibble about definitions. It is commonly accepted that the phrase ‘having an affair’ means performing any sexual act with anybody else other than your spouse or committed partner. Probably kissing and groping doesn’t actually meet this definition, but the other party would still feel betrayed and believe that you had broken trust and that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Do you feel as if you’ve broken Aaron Wilson’s trust? Of course, if you don’t, then you don’t really have a problem and you can go home from here and tell him all about it.”
The way she shrunk back from me told me the answer I already knew, so I continued. “Honesty and trust. It’s hard to separate the two. But if you’re honest with yourself, you can admit that you’ve broken Aaron’s trust and now you fear the consequences of him discovering that. Yes?”
She whimpered and reached for another tissue. She lay back down and the tears began again. “So let’s examine why you had an affair. You say that you would marry Aaron if he asked you. Nevertheless, you felt it necessary to have sex with another woman. Yes?”
She gave me a weak, “Yes.”
“You know, when telling a story, most people like to proceed in chronological order. Why don’t you start at the beginning? Close your eyes, relax, and tell me about your childhood.”
She sighed and started. “We weren’t poor. We had a house and a car that didn’t break down often. My dad was never out of work. But mom always bitched and complained about money. Nothing was ever good enough.”
“Did your mother work?”
“Yes. She worked the day shift at the big bread factory in Port City. Dad was an assistant manager at Beauchamp Hardware. We lived in a subdivision about two miles from the hardware store and dad walked to work. Mom took the car. I only remember it breaking down twice and oh my God was there hell to pay. You’d have thought dad had done something to it on purpose just to cause her inconvenience.”
“Would you describe her behavior toward your father as abusive?”
“Shit. She abused everybody. The neighbors wouldn’t even look at her when she was in the yard. She only talked to her family and not all of them. I don’t remember a kind word coming out of her mouth, only complaints and accusations.”