20. What He Enjoyed
Twenty
What He Enjoyed
Sebastian
My therapist — I’d started seeing one, finally, three weeks into all of this, at Daniel’s quiet suggestion and my own quieter desperation — asked me a question in our fourth session that I hadn’t let myself sit with anywhere else.
“You’ve told me everything Vanessa did,” she said. “The photo, the reporter, the almost-kiss. I haven’t heard you say what you got out of it. Not what she did to you. What you were getting, that you weren’t getting anywhere else.”
I sat with that for the rest of the session in silence, which she let happen without filling it, and I drove home that night turning the question over like a stone I couldn’t put down.
I got, I finally admitted to myself, the specific pleasure of being agreed with.
Vanessa never told me I was wrong. Never made me sit in a silence where I had to reckon with my own choices.
Olivia had always done that — gently, usually, but unmistakably; she’d tell me when a decision was self-serving dressed up as strategic, when I was solving a problem to avoid a feeling instead of address it.
For nine years, that had been one of the things I loved most about her, the fact that she saw me clearly enough to occasionally tell me no.
And somewhere in the exhaustion of building an empire, being seen clearly had started to feel like a burden instead of a gift. Vanessa offered something easier: total, uncomplicated fluency, with none of the friction of actually being known.
I called Olivia the next Thursday and told her this, plainly, because I’d promised myself only true things from now on, even the ones that made me look worse rather than better.
“I need to tell you something, and I need you to just let me say it without responding right away,” I said.
“I liked that Vanessa never challenged me. That’s the actual answer to the question you asked me back in the kitchen, the one I couldn’t answer then.
I didn’t lose sight of you because I stopped loving you.
I lost sight of you because being fully known by you occasionally cost me something, and being flattered by her never did, and I chose the cheaper thing for a year without admitting that’s what I was doing. ”
The silence on the line went on long enough that I thought she might have hung up.
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me since this started,” she said finally, her voice unsteady in a way I hadn’t heard from her in a long time.
“I need you to know how much it costs me to hear that. That you found the thing that made this marriage real — actually seeing me, actually letting me see you — exhausting enough to trade for someone who made you comfortable instead.”
“I know.”
“Do you understand that being easy isn’t the same as being good for you? That I made you better specifically because I wasn’t always easy?”
“I understand that now,” I said. “I think some part of me has always understood it. I just let myself forget it, because forgetting was more comfortable than the alternative, and I had built an entire life where comfort was always available to me if I wanted it badly enough.”
“What’s different now?” she asked. “Not what you’re saying. What’s actually different, structurally, so this doesn’t happen again in five years with someone else’s name attached to it?”
It was, I think, the most important question anyone had asked me that entire year, and I’d been waiting for it without knowing I was waiting.
“I’m in therapy,” I said. “Actual, weekly, uncomfortable therapy, not a one-time gesture to prove something to you. I removed the person. I corrected the record publicly, at real cost, without being asked to. I’m learning to ask instead of decide, slowly, badly, with a lot of mistakes along the way — you’ve watched some of those mistakes happen in real time.
And I’m telling you the truest, least flattering version of what happened instead of the version that makes me easiest to forgive.
That’s what’s different. It’s not fast. I don’t think it’s supposed to be fast.”
Olivia didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be fast either. Thank you for not asking me to pretend it should be.”