Dirty Diana

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

—

“We didn’t know what else to try. We both agree that we’re sinking.” Two minutes into therapy and Oliver already looks defeated.

“Is this how you feel, Diana?” Miriam asks.

Oliver and I found Miriam online, typing: best couples therapist, Dallas, into the search bar.

“What if we can’t afford the best one?” he’d asked me.

“We’ll go with like number four or five on the list.”

That was Sunday night, two weeks after the hotel incident. We’d been out to dinner with L’Wren and Kevin, the first time Oliver and I had been together without Emmy around. When we got in the car, tired from a long night of pretending everything was normal between us, Oliver held his head in his hands and neither of us spoke until he said, “My mom suggested we talk to somebody.”

“Your mom ? Oliver.”

He shrugged.

We didn’t fight. We drove home, paid the sitter. We opened my laptop and searched and landed in Miriam’s lap.

Oliver crosses and recrosses his legs on the couch beside me. I’m not sure where to look—at him? At her? Looking at both of them is impossible. I pick Miriam. From the neck down, everything about her is soothing to me—the way her many linen layers drape across her body, her hands resting gently in her lap. But her sharply angled bob and glossy dark-red lipstick suggest someone a little more severe, which confuses me. I scan her office for clues, but I don’t recognize a single book on her shelf, and her hands are clasped in a way that makes it impossible to tell if she’s wearing a wedding band. “Diana?” she repeats.

I clear my throat and rest my eyes on her red-stained lips. “I think our rhythm has been a little off. Yes.”

“Well,” Miriam says. “I want to commend you both for taking such an important step together. So maybe as a place to start, let’s have you take turns and state how you feel around the other person.”

I sneak a peek at Oliver. He looks so vulnerable, staring down at his own hands. It all feels like a performance. We’re sitting on a couch together and not touching, like strangers. This is crazy! He’s my person! I want to scoop him up off the couch and say Let’s get out of here. We don’t belong here, right? I will him to turn and look at me, too, but he doesn’t.

“No accusations or judgments,” Miriam says. “I just want you to tell me how you feel when you’re around each other.”

“Which of us would you like to go first?” Oliver asks.

Miriam smiles. “Since you asked, Oliver, maybe you?”

Oliver lets out a long breath. “Around Diana,” he says, meeting Miriam’s eyes, “I feel unattractive.”

There’s a prickly sweat at my hairline.

“Why is that?” Miriam asks.

“Because Diana doesn’t touch me anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I interject. “I touch you every day.”

“Try to keep it about your feelings, Oliver,” Miriam says. “Try not to accuse.”

“It’s just a fact,” Oliver says, still not looking at me. “We don’t have sex.”

My phone rings in my purse and both their heads snap in my direction. “Sorry. Let me just…It might be Emmy’s school.” I peek at the caller ID. Alicia. Maybe she’s calling to save me. I switch my phone to silent, setting it on the end table beside me. When I look up, all eyes are on me. “It’s not never. We had sex a couple weeks ago.” I realize how not great this sounds as soon as it comes out.

“Diana,” Miriam says, “things said in here can be hard to hear. While it’s important that we avoid accusations, it’s also important that we make space for how the other is feeling.”

“Right,” I say. “Of course.” I no longer want to scoop up Oliver. Instead I imagine walking out on them both and driving away. It’s my fault that Oliver and I rarely have sex. At some point we’d gone from having sex all the time to having it once a week, then once a month. And then sometimes nothing for months at a time.

“Is that how you see it, Diana?” Miriam asks. I panic—I haven’t been listening.

“How could you not?” Oliver asks quietly. “It was supposed to be fun. As soon as she walked through the hotel door, I had an erection. I can’t help it. Just thinking about her naked does that to me. It always has…”

“Oliver…” Why is he doing this? I turn to look at him full-on. “Are we going to talk about everything?” Now I sound prudish about sex. How did this happen? I don’t mind talking about sex. Is it our lack of sex I can’t talk about?

“Why else are we here?” Oliver sounds more than annoyed, he’s angry. I hardly recognize his tone.

“Fine,” I snap. “Yes, we have less sex. I got tired of pretending that I liked it.”

The words sizzle in the air. No one speaks.

“Have you ever told Oliver what you do like?” asks Miriam.

“No. She hasn’t,” Oliver says.

I wait for Miriam to tell Oliver that he shouldn’t answer for me. Instead she asks him a follow-up question. “Is that something you’d like to know?”

So that was how it was going to be. I should have known that Oliver would be treated like the good guy. Everyone loves Oliver. But shouldn’t he know what I like? Shouldn’t he be trying to figure it out the same way I’ve always tried to figure out what brings him pleasure?

As quickly as this idea comes to me, my resolve to be angry at everyone in this room but myself evaporates. This residue left behind is shame. It’s my fault for not showing him. For not talking to him. But that’s not what Oliver and I do. We never have. And the sex is not bad, it’s just…sex.

Oliver shifts in his chair. “I’d like to know,” the anger has left his voice, “if Diana knows what it feels like to reach for someone and have them slip away.”

My heart sinks. Oliver is the good guy.

“I’ve adored Diana from the moment I met her. She knows that.”

After a long silence, Miriam speaks. “I’m going to give you two some homework before we meet next week.” I’m already thinking about how to get out of coming back. “I want you to look each other in the eye, in a quiet place, and share a secret. You should each take a turn sharing and listening. And I want you both to receive that secret with love.”

—

When we get in the elevator, I reach for Oliver’s damp hand. I don’t mind that it’s sweaty, I just want to hold it. “What was that ?” I ask, dramatically. I hope that he’ll laugh it off with me. “That was insane, right?”

“Which part?” he asks quietly. When he doesn’t look at me, it’s like a slap in the face. I realize what’s happening in there isn’t incomprehensible to any of us. We all seem to be agreeing we’re in real trouble.

At home, I replay the therapy session over and over, rewriting it in my head. There’s a revised version where I don’t say anything at all—Ishare zero grievances about our sex life or Oliver not knowing what I like. This version feels sickeningly familiar, so I discard it. I know there’s a better, more honest version where we tell each other everything. But when I try to write it, I get stuck. Maybe, I admit, that’s what Miriam is getting at with her homework—Oliver and I have to figure out this part together.

When we’re both in bed and the lights are off, I ask Oliver, “Should we try it?”

“The homework?” He obviously has been thinking about it too. This is good. Maybe therapy will help. We’ll go back and this time I’ll be there with an open mind. We’ll get everything out in the open. Disassemble it all and put it back together.

“Want me to go first?” I ask.

“Sure.” His voice sounds small in the dark. I reach over to turn on the light just as my phone rings with Alicia’s call. I still haven’t returned her missed call from therapy. I make a mental note to call her on my way to work tomorrow and switch on the bedside lamp.

“My secret…” I reach for the tape recorder now stashed in my nightstand drawer. “I want to play you something, okay?”

“Like a song?”

“No…Something I recorded. A woman talking. Remember how I talked about the recordings I made? And used in my drawings?”

Oliver is looking right at me, really focused on me, and it feels nice. “In Santa Fe? You never really talk about that time in your life. I have to admit I’ve been curious.”

I never expected a weird little book of my paintings to sell like crazy, but when I met Oliver, I was so deflated by not making much progress on the second book, and the first book had had such a small print run and short life, I didn’t tell him much about what I was working on. Then we started working together at his father’s firm and I liked fitting into his life. He was safe and steady and I wanted to be that for him too. Besides, when I did show him an old portfolio, I saw the way he skimmed over the nudes and stopped to admire a half-assed sketch of mountains I’d done.

“Would you like to hear some? Of a recording?”

“Sure.”

I press play on Jess’s tape. I study Oliver’s face while he listens.

I stood back and admired his body. I tried not to look too impressed, but he was gorgeous. Those muscled valleys where his stomach dipped down into his hips. I could tell by the way his jeans hung that he was naked underneath. He reached for me, but I pinned his arms to his sides. “Don’t,” I told him again. Then I pulled off my shirt and unclasped my bra and let him watch as I took it off. His eyes went wide and he reached for me again, but I shook my head. I told him, “I’m going to take your clothes off. We’re going to suck each other and fuck each other for the first time and then I’m going to leave.”

As the recording continues, Oliver shifts beside me. His forehead creases and his eyes widen. I stop the recording halfway through. “What do you think?”

“What is it exactly?”

“Just a woman. Talking about sex.”

“Do you want me…for us to be more like…”

“No.” That good feeling slips away. “This isn’t about us. It’s just about…Things I was trying to figure out. Am trying to figure out. Maybe a new project.”

“Sorry, Diana. But I think about art like something you could look at. Like a sculpture. Or your paintings. I love what you paint, I always have.”

“Right.” He means the mountains and the flowers. “And you know I made paintings from recordings like these?”

“You know me, Diana, a lot of art goes right over my head. This is…I didn’t expect it to be so porny, I guess?”

My cheeks flush. “It’s just a woman speaking. About her very normal longing.”

“Depends on what you consider normal, I guess.”

My stomach drops, and with it, my voice. It falls somewhere deep and I can’t pull it up. I switch off the light so he can’t read my face.

“Diana. You just said this isn’t about us. This person you recorded has nothing to do with us. How did you get her to tell you all that, anyway?”

“Never mind,” I say. “It was a long time ago.”

“I’m glad you shared that with me.” I can tell he’s just trying to do the assignment now. Receive that secret with love. “I’ll listen to more if you want me to.” I can’t imagine playing more for him. It would only make me feel worse.

“That’s okay. Why don’t you just tell me your secret?”

“Right. Mine. Sure.” Oliver sighs. He’s going to tell me about the time he snuck into the movies when he was eleven and pretended not to know better. Or about cheating his way through tenth-grade French. His secrets are PG-13 at best, and I already know most of them. But I can’t deny he seems nervous to tell me this one.

“Okay.” He looks away from me, up at the ceiling. “Diana?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m worried I’m falling out of love with you.”

“Oh.”

It’s all I can think to say. My mouth is dry, my voice in my throat, my heartbeat in my ears.

We lie together in the dark for what feels like hours until finally I say, “I think I hear Emmy,” and get out of bed to check on her. Really, I sit outside our bedroom door until I hear Oliver’s breathing turn to snoring.

With my heart still racing, I get up and take my phone to the kitchen to plug in to charge, then I wander down the hall to the guest room, now clean and emptied. I shut the door tight and find myself in the guest bathroom, running the shower. Inside, I let the water run hot and muffle the sound of my sobs. Our ground somehow got even shakier. I used to know exactly what to say and how to make Oliver love me. How to recover from a hurt and make up from a fight. How to make us both feel better and loved and happy. How did we get here?

I wrap a towel around me. I don’t want to be in this room anymore, so I stand in the hallway and dry myself off, careful not to make too much noise. I’m tired, but I don’t know where to go next, so I slide to the floor and sit for a while. Jasper’s photograph is opposite me, leaning in its latest spot against the wall, still waiting to be hung. I wish I could recognize the town, the horse, any detail that might suggest I’d been there before, but none of it is familiar.

My phone rings from the kitchen and I hurry to answer it before it wakes anyone. It’s Alicia calling, for the third time today.

“Hey. Everything okay?”

“Sorry to keep calling.” Her voice is shaky.

“No, tell me—”

“He’s gone.”

My heart drops to my feet. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.” She sniffs. “What a fucker!”

“Alicia.”

“What? Now I have to miss him all the time.”

“I should have come sooner.”

“I said goodbye for both of us. He knew. But you’re coming now?”

“I’ll be on the very first flight I can find.”