Okay, to begin with, let me just get this out of the way: I hate my wife. I’m in Platte now, close to you, in Orange Grove actually because although the surface excuse is that we had a wedding here and it was just easier to sleep here rather than going back and forth to Wiltshire Park, in reality the reason we have spent two nights here is because Persis could not stand being around my family. And though I concede that she had some legitimate gripes given how lightly she sleeps and how crowded with people my…my mom’s house has been, it pains me to have to sleep away from the family that I regret having left for Ecksville. Burt has spent the night at their house, which is the only demand that I insisted upon. That if we could make it a trial run spending the night away from Burt and letting my parents have him, that that would be worth us going to Orange Grove and staying there, ostensibly to get some time alone, but really to get Persis away from my clan, whom I must say have started to irritate me a little too, mostly my mom and the way she really does play fast and loose with time and the way we would like to parent Burt. I’m not saying that I don’t understand what Persis’s gripes are; I just think she is constitutionally incapable of putting those gripes behind her and making peace. It’s as if she takes every opportunity to find fault with my mom and milks it for all it’s worth. This is not a problem with her relationship with my family; this is a problem with her character, and though I don’t assert here that I have nothing to work on, it is this trait that makes it increasingly likely I think that our marriage such as it is will not last another five years. Or maybe another five, but probably not another ten. I keep thinking about exit strategies, and the reality is that I would like to stay in it until I am on my own feet professionally, relying on her only so long as I have to and then s--…absquatulating. And then there’s the question of Burt. I will not leave him. I will either force Persis out of the house (because after all I am the primary caregiver) or I will find a way to purchase a home on the same cul-de-sac so that Burt can simply experience our separation as an expansion of his territory. Of course it would be best to do this while Burt is still young and doesn’t know any better; that way it would just be like, “Oh, so mommy and daddy, who sleep in separate rooms, are now living in different houses and I can just go from one to the other as I please.” I don’t think he would mind that very much, and I imagine he would still get occasional times with the two of us together. Persis says with pride that she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is ambivalent being in a relationship with her, that she deserves to have someone…be married to someone who is excited to be with her, and while I have no quarrel with that statement generically, the reality is that I think she is way overestimating her desirability. You know, she says these things, like she wants more foreplay, that I have never respected her sexually, that I have never taken the time to do what she likes to do; but the reality is that these comments are all based on wishful thinking, negative fantasies about my role in the decline and fall of our sexual relationship that exempt her entirely from what has gone wrong. Anyway, for example, she says she likes playing with food and body paints. And, I mean, call me a stick in the mud, but that just doesn’t appeal to me. I mean, why would I want to lick chocolate off someone’s body when what I really want to do is lick, caress someone’s body. It’s the very shirking, avoidance of direct and intimate contact that I think Persis is incapable of leaving behind. What I’m saying, in other words, is that in some sense, Persis would like nothing more than to deal with nothing other than foods and body paints, avoiding entirely the murky, slimy, and invasive, intimate, vulnerable question of the body itself. I don’t know. I don’t know if I would feel so negatively toward those things if they arose in the context of a sexual relationship that was already freeflowing. But anyway, she paints me as this sexual clod, this selfish masturbatory pornographic and objectifying guy and I just don’t think that’s who I am. Anyway.

I don’t know where all this goes. I was having a fine time until she (this is in Platte; I came down last Wednesday, and she came Thursday) came down, and then it all went to hell; and now she’s leaving today and I’m staying on until Tuesday and I expect that I will have a fine time until I go back home to struggle anew with the shrew that she maintains that she is not. She needs therapy. We need therapy.

My cell phone rings. It is my mom or Bill. I’m going over there this afternoon after I deal with stuff at our rental place, starting the process of upgrading the whole thing. I hope I have some good times with Bill. I despair of having good times with my mom beyond simply expressing to her how grateful I am that she is taking care of Burt so much while I am here and telling her that I love her despite my grumpiness. The grumpiness comes from the fact that I cannot talk to her about my problems with Persis (which after all figure very large, loom very large in my emotional life right now) because she is at the root of them. It is hard even to talk to Bill about those problems. And of course I can’t talk to Persis about the things that irritate me about my mom because she will not only agree with me, but she will use those things, especially the specific incidents as fodder for her great pyre of resentment towards her. So the upshot is that I am basically isolated, abandoned with these very painful feelings of anger and sadness about the relationship between my mother and my wife, and I cannot talk to either of them – two people with whom I am more involved emotionally than anyone else in the world – because they are the sources of the conflict and neither can just listen to me as they might be able to if I were, say, griping about a job.

So that’s the nugget of it: that I am alone with these feelings, these terrible feelings, and can only really air them to Reinhardt, who is helpful, but who is not after all anyone who can do anything to alleviate the problem other than just provide a willing ear and to affirm the pain that I feel, and that no one seems to pay attention to, as a result of the conflict between these two women. Why can’t they just get along?

You wouldn’t know it, but a week ago I experienced an epiphany of sorts, that is changing the way I encounter conflict in my life. I was…I’ll tell you the digest version because the whole thing is…well, let me just begin and see where it takes me. I was standing in a Chinese restaurant in Riverdale on Sunday morning, holding Burt, waiting for our number to be called so that Persis and Burt and my sister Laila and I could sit down and have dim sum. And there was a great deal of tension coming to bear on me, because everyone had his or her own agenda, and like this weekend I seemed to be in the middle of it all. Persis who (and get this: that weekend was similar to this in that Burt and I went up to Riverdale early to spend some time with my sister before Persis came up the next day, and sure enough, when she arrived the whole thing went to shit…or perhaps not so extreme because she and my sister get along a little better than she and my mom do. But they next day the tension was thick enough that you could…you know…and we had taken the bus from the hotel to the restaurant at my request, insistence, and Persis all the while was nervous that we would arrive late and not beat the crowds and have an intolerable wait, and so the fact that the bus did not come as quickly as we would have liked was something that Persis brought up again and again and again and again (you cannot imagine this woman’s capacity to beat a dead horse until it looks like ground beef) until eventually I stopped responding to her because my sister was there too and my family hates the kind of endless repetition of regret and blame (and when applicable, physical discomfort) that Persis seems to indulge in as a hobby. And so when we got there there was indeed a line, and of course Persis was both happy (gloating, happy that she could twist the screw in a little deeper at every opportunity) and frustrated that she was not able to sit down and eat and that we had not in fact beaten the rush (though in fact we had, as she herself realized, when five minutes later the line got about three times as long as it was when we arrived). And I was holding Burt in this restaurant and he was watching the food go by on the carts and doubtless wondering why he couldn’t have any, and I was hungry, and Laila was at least being civil about the delay that taking the bus rather than driving created, sitting in a corner reading past New York Times. And I felt a great deal of pressure. I was feeling intensely anxious just waiting there and I was holding Burt and rocking back and forth and I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift up and away from the situation and I realized as I stood there rocking and feeling this pressure that everything I was responding to was external to me and that I could, in contrast to what I always do in such situations, simply relax my body and view these negative stimuli as outside of me and ultimately powerless to hurt me. This is a little bit of condensation, and not as…well, poetic…as the moment felt, but it really did initiate a change in my response to interpersonal stress that I have been trying to implement in the last week. And it has not always worked: I still get angry, and I still express it in sometimes forceful and…unpleasant ways, but it has actually made me more able to say things that I need to say in order to clear my head. But what I am focusing on in those moments is relaxing my body, and as kooky as it might sound, I am increasingly aware that the reflexive tension that rushes in to my body when I a--…when I encounter conflict or stress…that somehow that is responsible for my outbursts, my letting the situation carry me away, or at least that it is intimately correlated to it, because I find that when… Like last night, Persis and I were having a conversation that involved at numerous points her telling me and my telling her what we were discontented by in the relationship. And as she was talking to me, I was constantly reminding myself to relax my shoulders, my neck, my jaw. And as a result, I began to be able to see the anger, the reaction to her words forming in me and to instead to respond to her from a position of understanding, even while holding my own perspective as valid. So it wasn’t like a war between her perspective and mine. It was her simply articulating her discontent, which of course, involved me, and which was often hard and sad to hear, but which I was not letting get to me and make me angry as it might have two weeks ago. I don’t know if this will ultimately be good for our relationship because it will make me more likely to say those things – to realize when I am tensing up and withholding truth from her – that will not heal things.



But it does make me more able to see, I think, our situation with a greater amount of…I probably shouldn’t say objectivity…but at least understanding and compassion. But that, again, doesn’t mean sacrificing my own perspective, which I think she would like me to do. I think she sees the whole thing as a war, and that she must trump and disarm my perspective with her own. Thus every time I try and tell her what I am feeling about something that is not working out, she counters with, “And I feel that…,” and this makes me feel like she has disregarded what I have said in order to defend herself against it by rolling out her own perspective in which I am not performing properly.




I don’t know. The more I think about, reflect on our relationship, the less hope I have for it to change; and she gets mad at me about my resignation, but I really don’t see in her any willingness to or likelihood of change. Perhaps I need to change too. But one might also say that the guy who is in psychoanalysis four times a week, is trying harder to change that the one who…well than she is.

We went to a wedding, as I said, this last wedding, and I was amazed, distressed by the stultifying conversation that Persis seems very gifted at getting herself into. I have never spent so much time being so bored by someone who is ostensibly having professional conversations with lawyers, and judges. I am generally interested in people’s work, in the nuts and bolts and the conversations that go on, but for Persis, it’s almost as if she doesn’t know how to have a conversation that has a core of humanity, and instead is always talking about these professional things that she’s doing and getting on the radar screen of whomever she’s talking to.


My eyes are closing. I fell asleep twice on the freeway the other day, and when I pulled off for my exit, I pulled over and left the engine on and closed my eyes and unexpectedly drifted off for forty-five minutes. I don’t know why I’m so tired; I seem to be getting enough sleep; more I think then...

How was I going to finish that sentence…?

More sleep I think than I have been getting in Ecksville. But still eleven [a.m.], twelve rolls around and I can’t keep my eyes open. that’s a drag.

(Picking my nose.)

I am conscious, of course, of my laxity with respect to my notes to you. I am still hung up on the…

How was I going to finish that sentence; I drifted off.

I am still hung up on the…

Now I just drifted off and thought of my dentist whom I’m going to see tomorrow.

Uch. I hate this feeling, where after every concerted action, you just drift off.

Anyway. What now?

A big pause as I drift off again. Perhaps I will call it quits.

But I think I can finish that other sentence by saying that I am still hung up on both the fact that my friends are reading and also that you are not, and that I cannot be completely open with what I say. And that on the other hand…you’re probably busy with something, other things, and this is probably what…I drifted off again there…

Anyway…you get the idea…ambivalent about writing [to you]. And right now just about everything else.