The Confession Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pleasure. Her fingers toyed with the Wilders’ invitation.
    “The party’s not for weeks, it says. Why do they send it so early?”
    “So everyone can make their plans, I guess.”
    “No,” she said. “It’s because they want their party to dominate the summer. The event of the season. You know how they are.”
    “Barbara Wilder has always been nice to me.”
    “That’s because you’re a man.”
    She put the invitation aside.
    “Have you eaten?” I asked.
    “Not yet.”
    “Let’s go out then.”
    “Let me change first.”
    “You don’t have to change. You look fine.”
    “No,” she insisted. “Just give me a minute.”
    I walked out to the car to get her luggage. I dallied for a while. Outside the weather was idyllic. The air hung utterly still and the light danced in a breathless way across the grass, giving you the sensation of something just out of reach. Elizabeth and I met on the tennis court, as I may have mentioned. She was a divorcée, good looking, self-sufficient. In those early days, we would talk about depth psychology. About Freud and Jung and Otto Rank. About the attraction of opposites, the yin and the yang. About the exploration of the darkness and the individuation of the soul.
    I glanced around at the house, and all that we had, and at the picture of us, just married, that hung on the wall.
    A good-looking couple, people said about us. Or so I imagined.
    Swank.
    Professional people with intelligence and ambition. Maybe not so much intelligence, though, at least not on my part. Otherwise I would not risk our future the way I did. I could blame my childhood, I suppose. Or Elizabeth. Or the pace of modem living, as the magazines liked to say. I could blame the television, too, and cell phones, and methyl chloride in the bay. The truth was, there were patterns in people’s lives, things that happened over and over. I’d seen it in the people I treated, in the criminals as well as the normal folks, so-called. Little changed those patterns. They were like waveforms, the fundamental energy of the person.
    Inside I found Elizabeth in the den, on the phone. Her blouse was untucked. She stood with her back to me, very still. She laughed more lustily than usual. Then something all but imperceptible changed in her stance. She had sensed my presence.
    She got off the phone.
    “Who was that?”
    “Fran.”
    Fran was an old friend of hers, a loud and busty woman with whom she’d had a falling out some time back. They were competitive, the two of them, and I was surprised to hear them back in touch.
    “What’s she up to?”
    “Not much. She wants to get together and tell me about her newest fling.”
    “I thought you were angry with her.”
    “Not so much.”
    Elizabeth smiled but I sensed her aloofness and felt again the confusing emotions that dominated our marriage lately. I would want her, then I wouldn’t. My feelings were complicated. Desire intermingled with flashes of anger—and the sense of something about to end.
    I watched her change clothes. Something more demure—black slacks and a gray blouse, open at the collar—but she kept the pearls.
    “How was the conference?” I asked.
    “Not so bad.”
    “No bloody noses? Fights in the parking lots?”
    “Not this time.”
    In the old days, it had been the Jungians against the Freudians, and both sides against the followers of B. F. Skinner. Those who saw personality rooted in the soul against those who believed it was a matter of social conditioning. Nowadays they had all fallen to the background and the field was dominated by researchers and statisticians—in short, by the genetic determinists—who believed everything we did, who we are, how we behaved, was all determined by biochemistry, which in turn had its roots in the genetic code.
    “So they’ve discovered civility.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s a shame.”
    I was trying to be funny, the way we were with each other sometimes, frothy and tart.
    “It’s a bit of a